Drag City

Cats & Dogs

gwen — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

I did not see Star Wars until I was nineteen years old. I was even older the first time I saw Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist. In both cases, I hated them. And in both cases, I was told by the films' loyal fans that, when they'd watched these movies at X years old, the scares or the special effects “were really great for their time.” To which I would invariably respond, “I did not experience them at said age in 'their time'; I did so now, as a discerning adult—and I didn't like them. So there.”

Coming of age as a curious young lady during the era of grunge and heroin chic meant that music doubled as both a skeleton key and a gateway drug. With one artist, I could unlock a multitude of doors. Through those doors I found (and get hooked to) progressively grittier, more ferocious music. It's odd, then, that all of those never led me to the sloppy smack-soaked noise rock of Royal Trux. Oh sure, I was aware of them then, but I'm always aware of something; I've got my feelers out in all sorts of directions at all times. But awareness is not the same as appreciation, and it is certainly not the same as fandom.

Had I fully immersed myself in Royal Trux back then, in the same way that I did with other bands of that time, I might get a nice, warm, tingly, nostalgic feeling in my chest when cranking up this year's re-issue of their 1993 album, Cats & Dogs. As it is, though, I just feel kinda bummed.

Please don't misunderstand me. It's not that Royal Trux didn't make worthwhile music; they did. In fact, the eleven tracks that comprise Cats & Dogs embody the many qualities I value in music: swirling screechy guitars, passion that's at once bratty and indolent, and a well-honed messy agility that could easily be confused with slapdash noise.

Royal Trux was formed in Washington, D.C., by Neil Michael Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema, shortly before the demise of their previous group, the Jon Spencer-fronted noise punk band Pussy Galore. In 1989 the duo's first single, “Hero Zero,” was also the first release from notorious Chicago experimental indie label Drag City. In his AllMusic.com biography of Royal Trux, writer John Dougan aptly characterized the duo as a “dissonant junkie nightmare.”

Cats & Dogs was the turning point from extreme to, if not sonorous, at least more tolerable. It's loud and scratchy and, as stated previously, was first released in 1993. But see, there's the rub. Unfortunately for Royal Trux, it sounds like it was released in 1993—at the height of heroin chic. It's kind of a soundtrack to smack. Both Hagerty and Herrema were unabashed junkies. Vocally, they remind me of two very drunk people who have decided to sing a duet together, but the booze is slowing down their response times so that one voice is always lagging behind the other.

Unless your idea of a good time is fully immersing yourself in waves of sound that could only stem from an early '90s heroin high, this is pretty much nostalgia listening only.

Written by: M. Brianna Stallings, October 18th 2010

Balf Quarry

admin — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:23:00 +0000

By Magik Markers

Drag City

Magik Markers will never have the fame to reflect their talent, which is a shame and says more about the music industry than their ability to create fine music. One could classify Magik Markers’ sound as noise rock, but only a few tracks on their latest album Balf Quarry would live up to that label.

Influence from Sonic Youth and other No Wave bands are apparent on tracks like “Risperdal” and “State Numbers,” where it sounds more like spoken word poetry over a cornucopia of sounds created both instrumentally and experimentally. Other tracks, however, show that the duo doesn’t limit themselves to such abstractness, but rather have the ability to create complex melodies, some more apparent than others. “Don’t Talk in Your Sleep,” for example, pairs hearty blues chords, drum machine beats and a slight echoing funk vamp all working together to accompany strong female vocals delivering a warning to all potential cheaters out there. Later in the album, as Elisa Ambrogio’s voice softens from the beginning of the album’s more raucous tracks, a downright twang can be detected in the guitars in “Ohio R./Live/Hoosier.”

The album is nicely capped off with “Shells,” a ten minute strain of dark yet harmoniously hymnal-like sounds eventually evolving into lyric support after the four minute mark. What follows is a true testament to Ambrogio’s vocal ability perfectly paired with Pete Nolan’s mastery of making experimental sounds pleasing to the ear. The track is an adequate representation of the album because of its sonar spectrum. Many songs lack traditional structure, making listening more of a challenge, but one thing Magik Markers have is the power to keep you engaged.

This isn’t an album to play while you’re cleaning the bathroom. You’d be ruining a perfect opportunity to give the album the attention it demands. Rather, put it on, sit down, and let yourself be guided. Balf Quarry is a fully complete album demonstrating that sometimes good music is hard to listen to, but the reward at the end is twice as much. It turns listening from passive to active in one tickle of the distortion key.

Written by: Sara Custer, October 7th 2009

The Freak of Araby

admin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:47:00 +0000

By Sir Richard Bishop

Drag City

The Freak of Araby reminds me of my ten days in Turkey last year, touring around with an Istanbul native who is also one of my dearest friends, crammed into whizzing taxicabs and smoky pubs in which pseudo-mariachi bands crowded around our tables to encourage merriment. At midnight, we would stalk the city’s all-night, open-air diners in search of kebab and twice-baked potatoes. When something local wasn’t playing over the loudspeakers, it was a Turkish Shakira on a flat screen TV, showing a surprising amount of skin. East meets West, and in that context, I really preferred the former.

Sir Richard Bishop is an electric guitar master, and with his ensemble cast on bass and a variety of drums, his latest album is part homage, part bold move forward. Roughly half of the songs on The Freak of Araby are covers, though one would have to have a fairly well-rounded knowledge of Middle Eastern and North African music to distinguish between the remakes and the originals. Half-Lebanese, but of Detroit origins, Bishop has released a number of solo albums but is also well known for his previous near-three decades with Sun City Girls.

Bishop is at once a gypsy and a contained, methodical musician. While a six-minute song like “Sidi Mansour” takes time to devolve into its own little jam session, tracks like “Barbary” clock in under three minutes and never deviate from a predetermined end point. The album’s cover art—a lounging woman with one breast fully exposed—leaves a bit to be desired, but maybe you’re the type to buy a digital copy of the album anyway. This one is worth the purchase.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, August 10th 2009

My Electric Family

admin — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:48:00 +0000

By Bachelorette

Drag City

Bachelorette is the electronic dream pop project of New Zealander Annabel Alpers. Her record, My Electric Family, is beautifully orchestrated and takes inspiration from its title to explore the lusher, melodic side of electronic music inhabited by the likes of Tortoise, Caribou, Asobi Seksu, and Lali Puna.

The album’s opener, “Instructions for Insomniacs,” showcases Alpers’ layered instrumentation and vocals, with verdant harmonies pushed forward with a loping snare beat and accented with a lap steel guitar. “Her Rotating Head,” a number just asking to be remixed as a dance track with a deeper bass line, directly embraces familiar feminist themes of women’s body image and media exploitation as sex objects with lyrics like, “She likes it that way, she’s programmed to say, ‘objectify me, degrade and revile me.’” These sensibilities set Bachelorette apart from her electronic contemporaries, who often prefer to hide their political sensibilities behind layers of feedback, effects, and laptop generated bleeps.

Alpers embraces and pokes fun at the technology she uses to create her art. During the opening lines of “Technology Boy,” Alpers sings, “Technology boy intends to live his life as a machine, but then his humanness experiences humanitarian resentment.” Alpers’ lyrics are clever and critical without being cynical or biting, making My Electric Family a fun and refreshing listen. She brings in a variety of collaborators to add instrumentation, including the Royal New Zealand Air Force Brass Band to play on “Dream Sequence.” The songs embrace a variety of pop styles, but the overall feeling of the album is engagingly upbeat. With each song contributing to the flow of the album—while also standing alone as a gem of glittering pop—My Electric Family deserves a place among the year’s best indie-pop records.

Written by: Eleanor Whitney, June 24th 2009

Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle

admin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:46:00 +0000

By Bill Callahan

Drag City

I once happened upon a Callahan show at Boston’s MFA with friends who are seasoned fans of the Smog oeuvre. In town to promote Woke on a Whaleheart, my pals were far less surprised than I when a very average looking, middle-aged man took the stage to sing existential songs about meadows, dark skies, anniversaries, and water wells in his unmistakable deep baritone.

On Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, the lo-fi Jandek admirer continues his tradition of half-speaking his otherwise emotional lyrics, backed by lovely orchestral chords. For as unimpressive as that might sound, it is the opposite. No one but Callahan can sound modest and sincere when employing phrases like “jaunty as a bee” or explaining, “I started telling a story without knowing the end.” His contemporaries would sound like awkward poseurs at best. But here, when he says, “I ended up in search of ordinary things,” it’s ol’ Bill just doing what he does best.

Most of the new tracks maintain the form Smog fans have come to know and love, though a few offer surprises. “My Friend” is the kind of song that shows Callahan’s progression as an artist whose preferred instruments used to be misshapen or broken. Showing influences of his experimental past, the song is cohesive, winding, and building on itself through strange chord progressions and lyrics about “sweet desire and soft thoughts.”

“All Thoughts Are Prey to Some Beast,” on the other hand, is not so much a song as a three-minute experimental drone, and a bit out of place. “Faith/Void,” however, rebalances and ends the album with calm clarity. At nearly ten minutes, it is the perfect track for agnostics or the religiously weary among us, as Callahan simply croons, over and over, “It’s time to put God away.” At no point does it feel repetitive, even if that’s exactly what it is.

Whoever made the term “singer-songwriter” sound derogatory never listened to anything in the Callahan canon. Shame on that unwise critic.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, April 27th 2009

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea

admin — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:56:00 +0000

By Silver Jews

Drag City

The Silver Jews are one of those bands shuffling around in the back of the club, the members sort of trading places with each other, not sure which one should settle behind the front man, who takes the stage. After years of members fading in and out, most notably the former founders of the band Pavement, the newest released from the Silver Jews features the only always-constant member David Berman, and this time his wife (a vocalist and bassist) Cassie Berman.

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea doesn’t live up to its predecessors, but it does provide new lo-fi tunes from a man who has been hailed as a hero by many indie slacker, young men whose minds are filled with unanswered questions about our existence here on Earth. For a soul-searching young woman myself, one who has a deep-seated need to drive west and sometimes south while wearing flannel and cowgirl boots, Berman’s mellow style and yearning lyrics have long resonated with me.

Bright Flight, which came on the heels of Berman’s suicide attempt in 2001, felt aching in a way that also helped me know things would be okay. That same year, my life was in constant flux, if less painful; but he came out of it alive, didn’t he? On Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, there is a calmness of a man married, settled, in a way. And now, I am settled too. This album is best suited for folks who love AM radio and couples who make music. There aren’t any particular stand out tracks, but I love complete albums, and this is one for the background, where the Silver Jew-types seem most comfortable anyway.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, August 6th 2008