Pierced Arrows are old people.  Well, relatively anyway.  They’re an Oregon based husband and wife duo, and they’re well in to their fifties, playing music longer than most of us have been alive.  Fred and Toody Cole, joined in this state by Kelly Halliburton on drums, are a garage rock staple.  In a previous incarnation, the Coles were Dead Moon.  Dead Moon released a massive 16 alums before disbanding, and now with Halliburton, they released their sophomore effort for their new group, Pierced Arrows, on Vice records.

Descending Shadows plays like the moldy, dingy, basement of a hoarder.   There is so little room to focus and bring light in to the space that the listener feels somewhat audibly assaulted afterwards. But isn’t that just rock and roll?

Fred’s voice is as grimy and rough as they come.  He cracks and squeaks and pushes every word to its limit.  This is especially true in the track “Buried Alive.”  The track is packed with screaming, greasy, guttural guitar riffs and lyrics that have something to do with robots.  The rest of the album continues like this – not all songs being about robots however.

Primitive fury and cacophony abound, Pierced Arrows deliver exactly what Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder stated in a personal endorsement: “Straight-no-chaser rock ‘n’ roll – not just righteous, but right.”

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Fixing the Charts by Everybody Was In The French Resistance…Now! is an Eddie Argos Art Brut concept band.  Helping Eddie is Dyan Valdes of the Blood Arm, who does her part in both playing the synthesizer and softly rounding out the pliant vocal soundscape. Together, their creation is a tootling rush of trumpets and hand claps backed up by lambent guitar lines that fizz through historical and witty lyrics.Eddie’s and Dyan’s voices are straightforward and sometimes dead-pan.  However, their frill-less singing forms a foundation that supports the sound heavy melody accompanying them without crossing into an over minimalist delivery.  “G.I.R.L.F.R.E.N (You Know I’ve Got A)” is a funny but pervasive response to Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” that earned it playback with my repeat function.  “Creque’s Allies,” the album’s opener, left me disappointed at first – it felt self-aware and smarmy, like a Wes Anderson film without insight.  After a few listens, though, the cadence and cool vocal delivery penetrated my first impression, which finally warmed me to the album.  Fixing the Charts’ downside is that it ‘ difficult to listen to more than four songs in a row. The singers’ voices make the songs feel repetitive and the constant witticisms and allusions to other songs quickly grow old.

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Gritty doesn’t begin to describe B. Dolan’s to-the-point narrative about post-9/11 desperation in the Big Apple.  Back that up with a rapid fire, low-end beat, and you’ve got a solid response to Jay-Z’s glitzy panorama of New York.  B. Dolan’s LP Fallen House, Sunken City drops early next week – be sure to give it a listen!

B. Dolan – “Leaving New York”

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

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Ever the wise-ass, Donald Glover, rap alias Childish Gambino, is much more than a rapper.  Having started his career as a start-up comedian, and now accelerating it on the cast of NBC’s Community, Gambino  exhibits a bit of his comical, theatrical, and musical talent on the mixtape.  His work as a writer (30 Rock, Comedy Central Presents) has rendered him a clever lyricist, capable of producing such Wayne-esque rhymes as “I f**k a girl named Kira, nightly.”  While the production quality and over-the-top delivery will prevent the listener from taking the tracks too seriously, Gambino’s rap ambition is admirable.  He is above all an actor/comedian who has finally made enough money to pursue rap as a hobby, but not an additional source of income.  The resulting work is eclectic (sampling Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear), lyrically satisfying, and at times reminiscent of FOTC’s Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenocerous.

Childish Gambino–My Girls (My Girls)

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

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All hail and rejoice! Everybody’s favorite canadian posé, Broken Social Scene, has arrived in a golden chariot of a free mp3, to pass judgement on the waiting masses. “World Sick,” the latest rustling from the BSS moniker, is a good study of the band’s varied aural history. Pulling atmospheric sounds from Feel Good Lost, warm production from You Forgot it in People, and wide-open spaces from their self-titled album, “World Sick” promises a familiar but exciting future for their upcoming Forgiveness Rock Record.

Go here to download it. You’ll have to enter your email address, but in my case, Leslie Feist already emails me every other day*, so it wasn’t a big deal.

*Sorry Ms. Feist. I hope you don’t mind me appropriating my monster crush on you for a bit of good humor.

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Artists like Rockie have a soft spot in our hearts.  They are the rappers with small, but dedicated, fan-bases of young hipsters who would like nothing better than to burn you a copy to bump in your mom’s Camry.  In addition, Rockie is a bit of a hometown hero–if your hometown happens to be somewhere in the predominantly-black south suburbs of Chicago.  In his premier CD, the rapper is true to himself and his surroundings; he appeals to the lower middle class kid who doesn’t own a gun or sell drugs, but knows someone that does.  Lyrically sound and well-swaggered, Rockie is the type of artist that is probably well-founded in his belief that he could get signed if only his CD landed in the lap of the proper executive.

Rockie Fresh – I’m Fly

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

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Caribou – Odessa

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The Helium Tapes, a powerful rock and roll trio with extensive gigging experience in the St. Louis area, go tight-rope walking with safety net and corded harness on their second and latest release, Ghost Wave, which features heavy, multifaceted rock music coloring in and out of dirgy lines.  The group, who recently downsized to a trio after the recording of the album, buzz and churn out pop-rock spins with a dare-devil vocal mistress cooing woebegones over canyons of her personal history.

Thematically, Ghost Wave wears its organ on its tie-dyed sleeve. The band isn’t afraid to wrestle with death, as some of the songs concern the suicide of a friend and the death of a band member’s father. But instead of simply lamenting, Marshall is able to coax her and her bandmates’ troubles into verse, spreading them over the cosmos with ghostly billows of delay resonating in her wake. Guitarist Tim Lohmann flexes his effects pedals and forearm muscles to good use throughout the album, offering sitar sounds and warm patches of fuzz in the melodic moments not occupied by Marshall’s musings. These two elements play out best on album opener “Falling Behind,” as right-to-left stereo synths give way to a star-bound melody backed by a cubby hole of warm jammy psychedelia.

Although two albums into their recording career, the band still sounds somewhat young, feeling its way emotionally through the piecemeal songwriting process rather than laboring over it. This gives the album a lightness of mood, despite the band preferring to wrap itself in dark swirls. The Tapes seem to be having so much fun executing their sound they’ve created that a brooding style is hardly possible. For fans of the band, though, this is likely a draw for their live show, wherein the grooves and glitter come to life – Marshall can playfully work the stage, and the audience there to catch her if she falls.

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If I had to pick a mascot for indie in the oughties (note to self: pitch Indie in the Oughties to PBS as a new Ken Burns documentary), Joanna Newsom would be in the final 4. With a voice that can quickly separate the hip wheat from the lame chaff, a quirky instrument—which also happens to be the logo for a hip foreign beer—and name-dropping opportunities like Steve Albini (10 points!) and Jim O’Rourke (10 points!), the psych-folk (high score!) songstress has one hell of a stacked deck.

But forget all that. Listen to Joanna’s newest song, and make a note in your planner ten years from now (because I know you have a decade-at-a-glance). I’ll probably be saying the exact same thing about indie in the ’10s.

Listen to it at Drag City (the stream is in the top-right corner of the page).

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Absorbing all ocean metaphors between the 60s and the late 90s, surf rock has long been the medium of summer fun. But in the last decade of DIY spectacles splashing up an ocean-like internet arena, listeners fervently watched innumerable bands take the plunge into a larger online medium that mostly sounds like disorder. Of late it’s been either wipe-out, wash up deserted, get caught in riptides of messiah-like hype or judgmental dissent, or ride the wave long enough to finally earn high marks on their out-of-ten-scorecards and still see modest digital sustenance, see for example Animal Collective/Grizzly Bear/Vampire Weekend. Watching these bands be tested against mega waves of reception is like wondering which kid is going to go first in Lord of the Flies. But here’s Surfer Blood, a lightning rod through the cutthroat internet canonization of 00s indie. Astro Coast is a skillful and patient balancing act calmly recalling an anthology of pop, new-wave, and underground influences and then deftly rerouting it to listeners lost between Pandora and Pitchfork.

Surfer Blood – “Floating Vibes”

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Despite being written in the brig-like dorms of Florida USA Universities, Astro Coast bears significantly few marks of the College Try, an epithet made irrelevant by songwriter and singer John Paul Pitts, whose vast array of wise-beyond-his-20-or-so-years hooks smoothly break thumping rock-steady waves in carefully groomed skin of reverb that repels instead of attracts the sticky humidity in which his glow-rock classmates are steeped, see for example “Best Coast/Wavves.”  Boyishly confident without a pubescent shrill, vocal melodies efficiently lilt their way around each song’s path-finding sharp-corner turns, such as in the elegantly riffed “Floating Vibes.” Stomping out the first guitar thrusts of this first track, mega waves are nothing with Surfer Blood’s cool approach. “If you’re moving out to the west/then you better learn how to surf…/I swear that ocean, it’d swallow you fully/And it might have to follow you home.” Save sometimes Surfer Blood’s coy insider-joke tones, “Take it Easy,” “Harmonix” “Twin Peaks,” “Fast Jabroni” etc., are sobering and trustworthy as twin guitars cleverly navigate these as well as Astro Coast’s more shadowy, idiosyncratic routes like “Anchorage” and “Slow Jabroni,” which both ultimately converge on the same brilliant silver lining.

Recently signing on to Canine Records, Surfer Blood now has the sponsorship to illustrate their uniquely idealistic thesis that channels rather than possesses entire decades of fun: warm nostalgia for 60s anthems (including surf-rock), caustic post-punk, heartfelt twee, anxious garage, corky afrobeat, and the brainy verve of Phoenix-like synthesis.

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