Let’s start with the basics. tUnE-yArDs isn’t that obscure. Pitchfork, for what it’s worth, ranked Garbus’ debut effort, BiRd-BrAiNs, as the 44th-best album of 2009, which is no small honor. BiRd-BrAiNs was released on the Marriage label, shared by notable acts such as Dirty Projectors and YACHT. She’s now signed on to the UK independent label 4AD, which she shares with the likes of The Big Pink, TV on the Radio, and Bon Iver.

Bon Iver forms a particularly relevant comparison. Like Bon Iver, tUnE-yArDs’ first album was recorded in a makeshift home-studio with whatever was at hand…which was comprised mostly of Garbus’ ukulele. Interviews with Garbus suggest that she owned significantly less gear at the time of BiRd-BrAiNs‘ recording than she tours with now, meaning that what she’s got onstage is more than what she recorded the album with. The album was mixed with free-for-download software on her home computer. This makes the album super-lo-fi, most likely with one mic for just about everything. This style is important in terms of Garbus’ expression, insofar as the album was more a catalog of her life, a journal of how she felt, than a studio album. Garbus herself calls it a ‘living history.’ Live, tUnE-yArDs reminds me more of Professor Murder, with the live band’s sparse melody section and prolific drumming. Like Professor Murder, tUnE-yArDs has multiple drumkits on stage, and often as many as three people banging on them at once, forming a very rhythm-oriented sound. Also like PM, the bass guitar sits pretty far forward in the mix (it’s half the melody section), and the mildly-distorted bass sound really fills a lot of space. Garbus’ voice sails over it all, with an unabashed, sustain-filled tone.

Bottom line? If you love the ukulele, and can take some real lo-fi, please grab BiRd-BrAiNs for a listen this summer. At least a couple of songs should speak to you. If you hated Bon Iver and can’t stand Professor Murder, a police officer who stopped me recently gave me a rave review of a recent Staind show he was at, so you could probably check that out.

It isn’t simply the turn towards hard-core rock that has me rattled. It’s that she abandoned what made her special, and worth listening to: The Organ. Without it, she looses the soulfulness that makes her hard-core rockin’ so damn sexy, its distinctiveness in a world of blonde country stars with cookie-cutter verse chorus repeat bridge banality. With Grace Potter and the Nocternals, the band’s latest effort, the B-3 largely fades into the back. Its sound varies. Alternating from choir accompanist to circus master, the Hammond has lost is soul in Ms. Potter’s latest album.  For all those who crave the unnerving, reverb-saturated, rock grind that drove tracks such as  “Treat Me Right”, “Ragged Company”, and “Sweet Hands” on Nothing but the Water, the reality will soon set in that Gracie likes to shake it, and the B-3 hides what all the men in the 9:30 club want to see.

Ms. Potter played many of her new songs, returning briefly to NBTW for brilliant renditions of “Sweet hands” and “2:22”.  She remains a force to be reckoned with on-stage, even if her voice sounds constrained at times. Slipping her shoes back on after a raunchy opening set she remarks, “ I don’t care what anybody thinks, I’m putting then back on ‘cuz they make my butt look like candy. See?” turning her back to the audience and accentuating what could never be even intentionally obscured. Just as her new songs feature a smart lyrical compactness, her on-stage banter maintains a sharp and witty character. Popper eggs her on. “Take it off,” she taunts.  Potter retorts, “talk about womanizing ourselves” as the band plunges into “Ah Mary”, the crowd-pleasing political scorcher about America.

Her new songs however, offer little of the sound that first attracted me to Potter’s music. They are marred by backup vocal tracks that dilute the sheer power of her voice. She rarely lets loose, with outtros comprising loud guitar rock and the occasional Potter shriek instead of the heart melting blues notes she used to hold for miles.  Electrifying guitar solos replace jazzy organ jams. “Tiny Light” showcases her vocal talents at moments, but they become lost in the country-pop choruses. The organ finally breaks through in earnest in “Only Love” a Bonnie Raitt styled throwback about heartbreak and love. It’s truly one of the more enjoyable tracks on the album; the chorus has a jazzy fullness, delivered with a guttural emotion missing from many of the country-tinged offerings.

The single “Medicine” represents some of the best elements of Ms. Potters revamped sound, most notably her songwriting and thumping classic rock guitar lines.  The song describes a seductive “policy woman” who pulls the narrator’s lover away. The seductive intruder has “the medicine”, but our storyteller steals “her bag of rattling bones” and “magic stones” en route to securing “the medicine”.  Our storyteller gets herself a pair of “mojo hands”, ending the song proclaiming, “I got the medicine that everybody wants.”  The phrases are bright and sexy, there’s a sense of achievement in Potter’s voice that mimics the song’s lyrical theme.  Missing from the album is the bands one-of a kind rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” as featured in Tim Burton’s Almost Alice. I’m not sure what prompted this decision, but I regard it as a significant oversight that reeks of big-label money-sucking tactics. The band’s cover is magnificent. Live, it’s spectacular. Popper bangs out the iconic baseline with an addictive coolness and suave that sets the tone for Ms. Potters picture-perfect vocals.

The album is overall quite good. Ms. Potter’s vocals soar on several of the tracks, revealing how truly talented she is. The album seems to be an attempt to channel the electricity and vibrancy of the band’s live work into a studio album. On this level, they have succeeded spectacularly; the album simply rocks from start to finish.  But I can’t help longing for the soulful organ rock that first attracted me to Gracie. It’s there; It’s just in the background now.  Just like her concerts, the album is chocked full of erotic grunts, ohhs and ahhs, sensual reminders of watching Ms. Potter perform live.

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals leaves me asking one question. Where has Gracie gone?  I know she’s still there somewhere, waiting to break loose live in the nation’s most prominent music clubs. The new album however seems to pander to a different crowed. In front of me was a group of high school girls. “They don’t get it,” my concert neighbor, a long time Potter fan remarked about the bands music and the girls. They may not get the old stuff, the music that first seduced me; music that made Grace a tiny light on the otherwise marginal roots-rock throwback scene. However, they do get the new Grace, the Hollywood Records Grace with harmonized back up vocals and mainstream normalcy.  They get it because they are used to it, and GPN puts it right in their laps, no work needed.

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals: B

Live Concert: A

Soft Black – The Earth is Black

Since starting this music video log column, I have gotten several emails from bands and filmmakers wanting their videos posted, this one is one of the best.

T.A.T.U. – Sparks

Would you have expected anything less from the Russian pop duo?

Ólafur Arnalds – Hægt, kemur ljósið

A brilliant animated video, which wonderfully encapsulates the music of this fabulous new Icelandic composer.

Memoryhouse – Lately

I dont really know what’s going on, but whatever it is, I like it.

-Doug Ray

When I met Kyle Swartzwelder, he was hosting open mic night at the Burlap and Bean, a coffee shop outside of Philadelphia that knows its coffee and knows its music. That evening, Kyle informed me that he was going to have to find a real job. Music simply isn’t enough to support him. Anyone who heard Swartzwelder play his folk ballads that night, however, might disagree with that assessment. Though music might not pay the bills at the moment, Swartzwelder is certainly a promising young craftsman and songwriter. His self-titled 2008 debut album deserves further investigation.

Swartzwelder performs an uncomplicated country tinged folk. His ballad Julianne, a song expressing the joys of new love, best exemplifies the songwriter’s genius. He does not mess around with complicated lyrics or deep metaphors. Rather, his beautiful voice expresses his longing. Ever repeat the name of the girl you love to yourself to hear the sound of it on your own lips? That’s the chorus of this song—longing repetition that instantly touches the listen. The song ends with a usual and welcome flourish for the album. In the only true guitar solo of the project, Kyle plugs in the electric and rips out an Allman Brothers sounding guitar solo.

Often Swartzwelder’s best work emerges when he leans toward the country twang. 6x1x1 begins as a slow quizzical ballad and really tears at the heartstrings when Andy Keenan joins in with is still guitar. His guitar feels like the ebb and flow of a storyteller, an appropriate touch for the tradition that Swartzwelder continues. The songwriter himself juxtaposed brooding and fearful verses with the hopeful chorus.

Earlier in the album, The Way Things Should Be brings Swartzwelder furthest toward country. The song shines as a beacon of light for those mixed up in their own heads. Like most of his songs, a woman plays a prominent role. Unlike in most of the songs, however, I am unable to determine whether the woman is a real character in his life or some eventual but not yet present salvation. The odd touch of this song lies in its foresight. From a desperate standpoint, Swartzwelder manages to pound out a country folk romp celebrating his eventual mental recovery.

Swartzwelder ends with a cordial farewell reminding us Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine. He is too kind in this assessment. After such a beautiful album, the task of going separate ways is not easy for the listener. His pleasant, yet powerful, voice stays with us, pleading to loves come and gone. Letting him return to his way, perhaps to get a job, doesn’t appeal to us listeners that have fallen for Swartzwelder’s charm.

6x1x1 by Kyle Swartzwelder

-Dan Engelberg

-Doug Ray

-Doug Ray

The webs are aflitter with talk of the new M.I.A music video, “Born Free,” and all MTHFL has to say is “bravo, m’lady.”

I think I have found the second candidate for the “futurevisions” series.

Treading a tender line between blatant outraged social commentary and dark science-fiction future-drama, this artist has made something that feels uncomfortably close to the truth, and yet remarkably and violently foreign. The tune is great, sampling a late 70′s punk song by a band called Suicide. Some people are saying this plays special significance to those who lived through that era of music and can remember the time and place that song came out. I cannot be counted among those poeple, so I cannot attest to this fact. i suggest you read more about that if you are interested.

So what is this video about? That is up to you readers to tell. I cannot pinpoint where the message of this video begins and ends, but it is clear that it orbits certain large themes: the abuse of Civil Liberties, bigotry, the inhumanity of war and violence, perhaps even hints of the Southpark-induced rash of “ginger” bashing that has ravaged our country of late. Aside, I suggest you look into some of the atrocious bullying that has come as a result of Parker and Stone’s seemingly benign redhead joke.

Needless to say this is a “sign of our times” video, and I think they hit this nail on its big, red, freckly, head. (too soon?)

-Bradley Gee

Phil Elverum is an undisputed, but still relatively obscure master of the American underground. Elverum first made waves when he was still known as The Microphones, in the early 2000s; his 2001 album, The Glow Pt. 2 especially gained him a following for its unusual and varied sonic texture, its naturalism and its range of tape hiss and hum among softly strummed songs and whaling static and feedback. Elverum wondered at his solitary and unique position under the stars and among rocks and trees.

Elverum is a musician both interested in intense documentation and dissemination (e.g. Elverum’s own record label, P.W. Elverum & Sun, and his detailed liner notes, complete with clippings footnotes and illustrations) and his own privacy—he usually tours solo, and he sort of famously lived in solitude in arctic Norway in 2002-3. This concern between public and private selves, and between interiority and exteriority illustrates itself best on his muddled and brilliant 2005 album, No Flashlight.

But years on, Elverum, now in his early thirties, has progressed and matured in his production and lyricism without losing the austere, concerned and articulate poetry of his music.

Black Wooden is an installment of UK’s Southern Records’ “Latitudes” series, limited edition and artful works from diverse artists like Grails, Sir Richard Bishop and Ariel’s Pink Haunted Graffiti. The five-song EP reflects and closely follows Elverum’s recent full length, Wind’s Poem, a swirling mix of pseudo-Black Metal, keyboards and quiet meditation on mortality and impermanence. Itself an excellent record, Wind’s Poem is a bit daunting in its immensity.

Black Wooden seems to distill some of the themes explored, but makes them more immediately digestible; it’s just Elverum with an acoustic guitar. It’s inclusion of some of Mount Eerie’s unreleased but classic tracks will delight most fanatics. To the new listener the music might be similarly appealing; Elverum’s unaffected voice seems downright religious on songs like “Marriage” and “Mount Eerie Revealed”. Elverum’s attention to the outside world and his real seriousness as an artist is something lacking in a lot of modern independent music, which has major difficulties being serious, even for a second.

It is a bit of a purist/fan-centered record, so beginners might be better looking toward Mount Eerie’s other recent releases, Lost Wisdom or Dawn.

-Charles Thaxton

In between unbelievably perfect renditions of crushing tracks like ´Bleed’, ‘Pravus’, ‘Electric Red’ and a number of golden oldies, we are treated on bits and pieces of interviews and documentary-type footage. In these segments you become more acquainted with the band and their touring life, which in itself is quite interesting. However, when you are expecting a continuous liveshow, this format might be annoying. Especially for these people the DVD comes with an audio CD enabling you to listen to the live songs uninterruptedly.

The live images and the documentary bits are the main ingredient of this product, but every self-respecting band cannot afford not to include bonus material. So especially for us greedy consumers the music video of ‘Bleed’ and its making of are included as well as two features in which the guitar roadie tells us something about the guitars and Thomas Haake tells us a bit about his kit. All in all ‘Alive’ is a highly entertaining high-quality product, but who would have expected anything else from these mathmetal perfectionists?

-John Beaulieu