Tony Macaluso – Procrustean Procrastinator

Filled with serviceable folk melodies and cut through with the type of good-time humor one usually only finds among longtime friends, Tony Macaluso’s Procrustean Procrastinator is about as pleasant as folk music gets these days. Borrowing the languid pace of country and applying it to his jaunty, often humorous acoustic ditties, Macaluso’s is in no hurry to ape the bombastic neo-protest songs of Bruce Springsteen or Steve Earle. Just as importantly, you get the impression that Macaluso would be a lot more fun to have a beer with.

On tracks like “My Dog is Black and White” and the touching “Mike U., Ed Maffucci and Me,” Macaluso is content to use humor and light-as-air melodies to carry his songs. Similar are the equally successful “Sweet Florida Sunshine” and the countrified and hungover “Broken White Line Blues,” which are so molassesy and smooth, they certainly could not have been written north of the Mason-Dixon.

The album’s more dreary numbers, especially “La Forza Del Destino,” which falls prey to a laborious melody and a belabored rhyme scheme, can often come off as whiny when not imbued with Macaluso’s jokey charisma. More effective, but equally dark, is album’s title track. Set against a noir-ish horn and upright bass, the song nestles somewhere between the comic territory carved out by Tenacious D and a significantly less appealing slacker gloom.

Macaluso picks it up again on the restless road jam “Prodigal Son” and the anti-materialist “Please.” When he sticks to what he does best, Macaluso has a knack for detailing his generation’s particularly rootless existence, a talent he happens to share with, well, every great folk singer ever. While some may be put off by the slightly grating slacker pride Macaluso espouses, there’s little to be argued with Macaluso’s success at what he does. Those put off by the glibness of lines like “The person who came up with ‘Buyer Beware’ was bleeding…from the rectum” (from “Please”) should steer clear of this album. They wouldn’t be fun to have a beer with anyway.

Lali Puna – I Thought I Was Over That: Rare, Remixed and B-Sides

Releasing a B-sides or remix record is usually the province of a stalled mid-career band looking add a few dollars to the price of a self-congratulatory greatest-hits collection. Electro pixie-princess Valerie Trebeljahr, herself a German radio producer and frontwoman of Lali Puna, must realize the audacity of releasing a B-sides collection after only three full-length albums. Let’s hope mainstream rock doesn’t follow Lali Puna’s lead and thrust The Essential Nickelback: 2001-2005 on us.

What makes this collection different – and what makes it palatable for even Lali Puna newcomers – is a set of remixes by and for the type of underground producers capable of generating more hipster cachet than a truckload full of studded belts. Remixing its own hepcat rivals on “The Dream of Evan and Chan,” originally written by Jimmy Tamborello of The Postal Service and Dntel and Death Cab for Cutie/The Postal Service’s Ben Gibbard, Lali Puna seems to be consciously inserting itself into the center of all things cool and throbbingly electronic. Tamborello’s remix of Lali Puna’s “Faking the Books” proves that this Lali’s hero-worship is mutual. With an admiring Tamborello at the helm, the title track from Lali’s last and most successful record takes on the type of soaring melodic drive last seen in electronic music on The Postal Service’s Give Up.

There is no shortage of experimentation here. Flowchart’s remix of “Fast Forward” gyrates and contorts a vocal sample until it sounds like a stomped-on Speak and Spell. Sixtoo’s version of “Small Things” is hellbent on turning the song into a spiraling and ambient fractal. On “Past Machine,” one of the album’s two previously unreleased tracks by Lali Puna, originally written for the late maestro John Peel, the band manages to come off as thrillingly urgent as Radiohead did circa 2000.

Lali Puna’s success is proof that, yes, there are certain areas of culture in which Europe stills leads the world. So what if Germans love the music of David Hasselhoff? In Ibiza, they’ve got chillout music to coax your serotonin levels back into the black. And the health care is great over there. Truth is, many folks in mainland Europe are still hip enough to live in a post-hacienda, post-Massive Attack, post-Kid A world where electronic music still has an avant-garde appeal. Bold enough to remix themselves and others, Lali Puna’s artists seem to be leading the way toward our next post-ism.

Rock Plaza Central – The World Was Hell to Us

It’s stunning the wide array of moods that can be captured in the deceptively simple style of primitive folk music. Iron & Wine’s take on it is haunting, even chilling; Gillian Welch’s soars with dynamic vocal harmonies and intricate melody. Toronto’s Rock Plaza Central is another animal entirely, though the basic pieces are the same: a handful of acoustic instruments in a homemade production sound. The World Was Hell to Us is a charming, eccentric, and frequently annoying album, but it’s consistently original in every way. It won’t do to say simply that RPC frontman Chris Eaton is a demon spawn of Sam Beam and John Flansburgh, because there’s something more to it than that.

What is certain is that he brings the concept of irritainment to the paleo-folk world. He sings in a cracked voice (vaguely reminiscent of Wally Pleasant’s, oddly enough) over tried-and-true folk melodies on some songs. On others, it’s a deconstructed, minimalist structures, as on “Fuckup,” a two-minute jam that declares in joyful call-and-response, “All of my relationships I’ve fucked up in all the right ways.” Eaton’s voice probably undermines his music at least as often as it enhances its exuberant wackiness, but it’s part of the package: RPC wouldn’t be what it is without it. However, “Dear Don, There are Two Eight O’Clocks in the Course of a Day,” the album’s closing number, is revelatory for its lack of vocals because highlights the very genuine, unironic elegance of Eaton’s music writing. It’s a simple guitar and mandolin melody with some faint piano in the background and a distant trumpet, and it’s an irrefutably pretty piece of songwriting. It’s also a fitting bookend with the first song, “A Town at the Bottom of the Ocean,” which is a sweet ode to the idea of escape (“We’ll build a town at the bottom of the ocean, and we’ll keep out all the people who don’t like us”).

The World Was Hell to Us is a decidedly unslick take on what the bounds of primitive folk can contain. It turns out they can contain plenty.

Sleater-Kinney – The Woods

If, and this is a big if, Sleater-Kinney was to never release another album, the artists’ place as rock legends would be firmly cemented with The Woods as the capstone. For a punk-rock/riot-grrl trio from the Pacific Northwest, the album is ambitious as it is daring, and it’s the most refreshing piece of new music released thus far into 2005.

Looking over the S-K discography, from the self-titled debut on Chainsaw records to the overtly political and uncharateristically pop outing One Beat, Sleater-Kinney records, while not formulaic, have always been raw. This is, after all, a punk band, and one of the best ones of the past decade at that. But all that seems like child’s play when put up against any of the 10 songs on the latest long player.

Opening with dirgy “The Fox,” right off the bat it’s apparent the trio means business. Vocalist Corin Tucker hasn’t sounded this desperate since 1996’s Call the Doctor, while drummer Janet Weiss pounds away like a madwomen, sneaking in fills in the narrowest of spaces, and lead guitarist Carrie Brownstein goes avant-rad on her guitar, filling up the notoriously rhythm happy sound with a psychedelic punch.

“What’s Mine is Yours” is a deliriously good, almost too good to be true, number with Tucker and Brownstein’s point/counterpoint vocals taking turns on the verse and choruses. The big suprise, however, comes 3/4 of the way through, when the song is flipped on its head with a…guitar solo? This isn’t your older sister’s Sleater-Kinney. This is S-K v.2005: leaner, meaner and once again, mind-blowingly inventive.

The whole albums tone harkens back to 1999’s The Hot Rock, dark and brooding and slightly experimental (courtesy of producer Dave Fridmann, manning the boards for the band for the first time). “Jumpers” is sung from the perspective of a suicide, while “Entertain” takes aim at cheap pop-culture and derivative rock bands. Album closers “Let’s Call it Love” and “Night Life” show just how far the band has come since its early days; gone are the two-minute songs, replaced by seven-minute jams bleeding into what might be the best song since Dig Me Out’s “Jenny.”

To say this is a good album would be an understatement. And they don’t get much better than this.

Felipe and Forte – Shaggy Black

It has been said that given an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, that they would eventually type the entire works of Shakespeare. The corollary to this is given an infinite number of musicians playing an infinite number of instruments for an infinite amount of time, you would eventually record the ultimate album. Unfortunately for us, Felipe and Forte are only two people (Dino Felipe of Christmas Decorations and Beautiful Skin and Nick Forte of Old Bombs, Finesse, and Runway), playing a finite number of instruments and not spending nearly enough time in the studio. The result is Shaggy Black, an album of scathing, electronic savagery.

While the liner notes specify instruments such as guitars and synths, they are not so much played as used as sound generators that are sampled, looped, and processed. Then they are cut and pasted on top of other looped and processed samples, sometimes in a seemingly random order with no regard as to how it will sound. The disc is broken down into 11 tracks, each one containing its own unique blend of frenzied blips and bleeps, feedback and fuzz, and whatever other electronic weirdness Felipe and Forte feel like assaulting us with.

Some tracks could be construed as a war between man and machine, as you can hear some guitar notes, drums and cymbals, and an occasional keyboard sound amid the powerful, scorching electronics. The track that comes closest to being tuneful is “Anteater,” since it contains a recognizable, although fuzzy, guitar loop with some tinkling keyboards sprinkled in on top of what sounds like live drumming. It slowly builds to an unsettling mix but stops just short of being a loud chaotic mess, which can’t be said for most of the other tracks. In fact, the other tracks are anything but tuneful and include the sounds of an electric guitar being tortured and the sound of pigs dying among a clatter of radio static and blistering fuzz.

Felipe and Forte eschew conventional musical wisdom on Shaggy Black. Instead of chord progressions, tempo changes, time signatures, and harmonies, you will find electronically manipulated instruments and samples formed into daunting, schizophrenic soundscapes.

A Northern Chorus – Bitter Hands Resign

There are quite a few of those types of bands that remind you of a slow burn back through the atmosphere that it gets hard keeping up who is who. Many of the more popular bands seem to have the formula down just right. Although the formula works and sounds pretty, it becomes a bit redundant and a bore to listen to. A Northern Chorus is another one of those slow-burner bands. Yet, on Bitter Hands Resign, the band steps it up a notch and brings dimensions to each song on the album that raise the bar for these space-rock-ish bands.

Instead of overpowering us with orchestral space-rock, the band gives us more of an earthly equivalent lush sound. This is not to say that ANC’s music will put anyone to sleep as the approach is more of a soothing one than a sleepy one. For instance, on opener “The Shepard and the Chauffeur” we get half a minute of ambient-ish Eno-like strumming of a guitar then swirling guitars kickstart the album in such a dramatic way that leads to hushed vocals with exquisite lyrics (“You’d always said that you’d never let yourself become an accessory to mediocrity”). And indeed, there’s not an ounce of mediocrity in this album.

Bitter Hands Resign has eight songs that average around six minutes. Even though I looked, I could not find a filler song or a moment that bored me. The album captures emotional moments made stronger with added instrumentation of cello and organ. On “Costa Del Sol,” a seven-minute scorcher, the cello is subtly present, as are the vocals singing, “As sure as bitter hands resign, the past will be seen in new light.” The combination between the lyrics and epic-sounding tone of the band struck an emotional nerve with me, a first among bands that would be ANC’s peers.

Emotions are a big theme throughout the album; whether it be hope, death, despair, or love, ANC makes even the most heartbreaking deaths sound ok because of the life that preceded it. For instance, the album closes out with another heartwrencher, “Winterize,” which is an amazing ode about Elliott Smith (“Pockets full of spent bullets, old train tickets, and pictures of sun that couldn’t warm up those winter eyes”).

Bitter Hands Resign is an elegant album from a band with a vision to create new possibilities from an already complex formula of carefully orchestrated (pun intended) rock. I should also note that the album packaging is amazing, featuring what seems to be early 20th-century drawings for each song. It fits the theme and atmosphere of the album perfectly.

The Konks – S/T

I receive a ton of stuff from Bomp! Records, which is cool because it is good to be familar with a label. You know what the label generaly does, you have a good idea of its consistancy, and you can gage the overall quality level of an album more acurately. However, writing review after review of stuff that I am not into is becoming really tiresome.

Bomp! tends to stick with super lo-fi recording, and a good portion of the label’s line up plays retro rock ‘n roll or garage rock. There is nothing wrong with this per se, but the label and its respective bands have yet to impress me.

The Konks are yet another deluge into retro garage rock, complete with simple, catchy guitar licks and the oh-so lo-fi production values. For the most part, they are right on par with what the label has done in the past, but they aren’t doing much for me. The high point of the album is actually a cover. The band does a pretty decent rendition of Aerosmith’s “Let the Music Do the Talking,” which is actually kind of surprisng because I pretty much loathe Aerosmith.

I guess if you have been into what Bomp! has put out in the past, The Konks play on the same field as all those bands, so you will probably be into this. Bomp! has certainly carved a niche for itself, but I just can’t buy into it.

PAK – Motel

If there’s a more dead-on 21st century successor to the mantle of D. Boon than the frenetic Brooklyn-based trio PAK, let them speak now or forever hold their peace. On an eight-song platter that sometimes feels more like a late-night studio session freak-out fueled by LSD and cigarette smoke than a calculated recording of free-form jazz-punk explosions, the group nails all the requisite Minutemen poses and then some: the fluidity of expression, the angular deliveries, the funky asides, the almost-literal bursts of inspiration, the undercurrent of joy cut with a focused kind of rage. But to call Motel an exercise in Minuteman-worship is as reductive as calling Double Nickels on the Dime just a good punk-rock record. PAK’s got a whole lot of tricks up its sleeves, and, for the better part of the band’s engrossing Ra Sounds outing, it manages to constantly shift the record’s tone through a prism that references everyone from Ornette Coleman and John Zorn to atmospheric post-rockers like Do Make Say Think and the larger-than-life horror show of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. (Museum and Tin Hat Trio violinist Carla Kihlstedt guests herein.)

PAK doesn’t take much time to get things boiling and hits listeners right off the bat with the epileptic grooves of tracks of “You Like it Like That,” the jagged, descending riffs and staccato, “I/can/feel/it/can/you?” delivery of “Heatwave” or the rumbling “Jam Jel Treatment.” The record’s first four songs, in fact, feel like a rolling series of bursting noises and furiously paced time signatures that do back flips and then swing 180s at the drop of a dime. It’s hard to tell where one massive cluster of notes ends and the next skittering pattern of drums, bass, and guitar begins. Even in the midst of substantial tracks like “Jam Jel Treatment,” which runs nearly four minutes, the whole band is likely to submit to the force of a blistering and unanticipated scorcher of a guitar solo rather than follow through on what early bridges might suggest is the track’s musical theme. This isn’t music for hard-line linear thinkers.

It’s also in moments like this that PAK seems to be playing with the same ground rules as British post-punkers Giddy Motors, who make no bones about their drive to blur the lines between angular jazz stylings and the fury of American pressure-cooker post-punk. Here, though, the jazz elements are cranked up much louder, with three horn players — alto and baritone saxophonist Ross Bonadonna, trumpeter Tim Byrnes, and tenor saxophonist Stephen Gauci — leading the invigorating and borderline-intoxicating sonic parade. Elsewhere, like on the tight refrains and regimented but funky measures of “The Higher the Elevation the Lesser the Vegetation,” Kihlstedt’s violin is indispensable. On “Every Body Likes You” — a nearly 10-minute mass of wonderfully mangled bridges nailed down to tape at what sounds, at times, like warp speed — it’s an extended mock-rock guitar solo or the blurted-out voices of guitarist Ron Anderson and bassist Jesse Krakow that hide the hooks. On “Zugzwang,” it’s the tickling of piano keys or the way drummer Keith Abrams trades in his pummeling but decidedly light-footed beats for a more plodding and pounding kind of thunder.

Then, just when you think you’ve got PAK figured out, comes the closing monster “Bienvenue a L’Hotel Plastique.” From square one, it feels more sobering than its predecessors, a slowly unfolding post-rock exercise in the Don Caballero tradition that builds around a haunting, gradually sped-up guitar figure and some incredibly nimble and understated percussion. Three and a half minutes into the 10-minute track, the figure gives way to a couple of PAK signatures — the rapid-fire succession of intermingled guitar and bass notes, the Ornette Coleman blaring of horns — but the thrust of it remains elsewhere, in that repeating guitar figure you can never seem to shake. (About six and a half minutes in, when it seems like PAK has wandered onto other horizons, the figure gets inverted and truncated and pushed right back to the fore.) It’s hard to think of one track, presented on its own merits, from a record this year that so encapsulates a band’s songwriting chops and its potential. For that alone, this Motel worth visiting for a night.

Scylla and Charybdis – A Product: They Avoid Transactions EP

In response to all of the bands tweaking 80s pop culture references into song/album titles and band names, I introduce Scylla and Charybdis, a band name garnered from Greek mythology (and no, there won’t be any further explanation given here – get on a computer and Google it, lemmings). The band’s got a lot of positive things packed into A Product: They Avoid Transactions; from complicated, jazzy drumming to active ‘walking’ basslines and various guitar dynamics, this is one lively five-song EP.

“Fond Memories (The Bitch Just Won’t Die)” is actually *GASP* danceable, with its crazy bassline and stutter-stepping drum beats. The first verse is a screamed, angst-y bit, though the song lightens up via some legit multi-part singing on the chorus. “6 A.M. Desert Drive” is a funky instrumental with a few rhythmic twists and turns. “And at This Moment, it Became Apparent to Me” opens on screaming melded with a laid-back guitar lull and an all-over-the-place rhythm section; in time, the guitars and screaming get louder, a calliope-esque bass-driven theme takes over, a ton of quick-lick drum bits back more yelling over a sedated guitar part. This song serves at the album’s epic, sounding like a jazz-focused take on City of Caterpillar. “Please Dim the Lights” sounds like a time-condensed combination of “6 A.M.” and “”And at This Moment…,” though the band redeems with “Redundant Fears and What Has Come to Be,” which meanders back and forth between dainty passages and blasts of balls-out rock.

As far as first releases go, A Product: They Avoid Transactions is a solid EP. Scylla and Charybdis’ ability to smoothly glide through rhythm changes gives these songs an impressive air. The performances are good as well, though the vocal songs seems to work better than the instrumental stuff (even if the ‘vocals’ are just background yelling or screaming). Five songs of worthwhile music and the inspiration to study up on Greek mythology – what could be better than that?

The Sames – You are the Sames

With an opening cut that begins like Autolux and segues into a sound that mixes Polvo and Superchunk, the new album You are the Sames welcomes you into its world of indie-rock splendor. It’s familiar but still fresh, invigorated but not overcome by its influences.

The Sames come to us from Durham, NC, so it’s not entirely surprising to hear echoes of Superchunk and Polvo in their sound – Superchunk in the form of its pop sensibilities coupled with driving energy, Polvo in the form of its slithery bass lines and odd note couplings. Usually bands out of the Triangle area originate in Chapel Hill, though, so it’s something of a surprise to hear of an album like this coming from Durham.

That opening track, “Heart Pine,” sets the bar pretty high. Its verses combine a steady, on-the-beat, choppy guitar with a background guitar that wails and churns like its being played by Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine. If you remember how the Lilys album In the Presence of Nothing took great liberties with that sound, you’ll probably find that the Sames have now taken the Lilys and put more rock into it. That same guitar work shows up on other tracks, too, such as “In Liberty Lights,” the beginning of “Butterfly,” and “Downtown” (to a lesser degree).

The rhythm section gets quite a workout on some of these tracks, too, providing a punch that can be lacking in other releases of this kind. For all the other similarities in approach, you never heard the Boo Radleys let loose quite the way the Sames do on “Honorary Wilmingtonian,” “Heart Pine,” and “Downtown.” “Downtown” sounds fairly ordinary and predictable at first, but it has an edge to it by the time it gets to its bridge. There, things get quiet – a steady tom-then-snare beat and a quirky guitar line – before the lead guitar goes off into a riff worthy of Cor-Crane Secret. Yes: the guitar has that sound of being cheap, untuned, and perhaps untuneable, but that’s the idea. I can’t help but wonder whether the lyrics “I wanna take you downtown / Even though there’s no downtown” refer to Durham. Durham might have more of a music scene if it actually had a downtown to speak of (if you’ve been there, I think you’ll know what I mean).

“Bomb Scare” maintains a pretty basic, mid-tempo pace while the guitars blare away in the background. It sounds almost funny to hear someone sing “I’ll meet you outside of the gym,” as though the song were just a pedestrian recounting of a day’s events, and lines like “Don’t be so dramatic” do nothing to counter this sentiment. Elsewhere, the lyrics also mention “lonely, tortured killer bees,” so I guess we’re meant to focus more on the music than the words. That’s fine by me.

“Butterfly” has a jerky rhythm and some Devo-like background synths, but it really comes together near the end. It pauses, with only a keyboard note to be heard, before it builds back into an Oneida-like finish. At 1:48, it’s the most succinct track here. “Like a Song (Really)” comes close – 1:59 – but it sounds a little more like a hastily put together add-on. Its lyrics, again prosaic, feature such lines as “Now we’re here / Now we’re gone / Like the end / Like a song” (I think) and “I saw an ice-cream truck on fire.” At least the latter delivers some imaginative imagery.

This album has a lot to recommend it, and it stands a chance of getting some real attention (or at least some college-radio airplay). I hope it doesn’t go to the band members’ heads, though, to hear that some people consider them the brightest light in the Durham music scene.

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