Free Album(s) of the Day: Eyes

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Levi Fuller

The band Eyes, sadly no longer with us, was a psych-kraut-groove-freakout project led by the multi-talented singer/songwriter/saxophonist Scott Pinkmountain (also of P.A.F., Scott Pinkmountain and the Golden Bolts of Tone, Pink Mountain, and probably myriad other projects). Pinkmountain is an unstoppable force of artistic generation and creative energy, and Eyes was a thrilling example of that energy: layers of drums, guitars, and organs, fronted by Pinkmountain conducting, hollering, and blowing his sax, splitting the difference between James Chance and Fela Kuti. I feel very privileged to have seen them live, in an intimate, brain-melting performance at the Josephine.

As mentioned above, Eyes is no longer active, but they recently released their second album, Dust, available for free on Bandcamp. You can grab their first album, A Candle in the Crown of Dawn, while you’re there. Either – or both – would make for a great burst of spastic, soulful noise to kick your week off.

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Show Tonight: Shannon Stephens at Empty Sea Studios

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Levi Fuller

If you’re a fan of quiet acoustic music – and of actually being able to hear what’s going on at a live performance of such music – you should absolutely head over to Empty Sea Studios tonight.

I was very excited when I first heard about Empty Sea*, which bills itself as an intimate listening venue for acoustic music – the paucity of such venues being the one weak point in Seattle’s otherwise thriving, fulfilling music scene. Shannon Stephens‘s music (heard on Ball of Wax 21) is the perfect fit for a venue like this: warm, lush, sparse, and inviting. I really wish I could go to the show tonight, but longstanding plans are keeping me from it. If you don’t have plans, I would suggest buying tickets right now, if they’re still available.

*So excited, in fact, that I’m playing there next Friday with Tomo Nakayama and Blog of Wax‘s Louis O’Callaghan, but that’s another story.

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Webelos: “Hansel and Gretel”

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Levi Fuller

Our friends Webelos (as heard on Ball of Wax volumes 10, 18, and 21) have a new record coming out. You can listen to it here, then head to the Sunset on February 27th to celebrate its release. I’m sure I’ll be writing a proper review of the album at some point in the near future, but for now I wanted to share this lovely (and ever-so-slightly, incredibly tastefully NSFW) video for their song “Hansel and Gretel,” which was premiered on Ball of Wax 21 and is on the new album.

I love that in this age of super-duper-high-tech everything, stop-motion animation is making a comeback. Sure, it’s mostly via digital media rather than film, but who cares? The results are as herky-jerkily charming and often hilarious, at least in the hands of Webelos’ Jim Smith, as any piece animated in-camera on a Bolex. Please take (less than) 3 minutes to enjoy this “psychosexual drama featuring a bewildered Hansel and Gretel battling finger puppets, fish heads, and a swarm of blood thirsty ants.”

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Back in MY Day: The Physical World

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Indie Rooney

Mr. Indie RooneyRemember the physical world? You know, before the iNTeRNeTz0rz? Back when you had to hunt for specific ink-stained pieces of ground-up trees to get little bits of misinformation regarding HUGELY IMPORTANT but obscure MUSICAL BANDS, and you had to buy stamps and lick them and get tongue-cuts and scribble on checks to order $16 pieces of plastic to put in physically imposing electronic devices that you would then sit in front of — having committed an uninterrupted block of time to this — while sound came out? And you tried to imagine what gods could walk among us and create such awesome sounds with their amazing brains, brains that could also convince powerful people to pay large sums of money to record said sounds and encode them to said bits of plastic. And you didn’t know much about the who or how or what of what you were experiencing, so it was exciting and mysterious and that was half the fun?

Me neither, I’m not really that old. But I’ve heard about it! Boy does that sound better than myspace, and the friendfaces and various whatnots, where you get up-to-the-minute reports on what your 1,872,388 favorite artists have typed into their cellphones today (it’s not very interesting), and every second of their last recording session has been captured on digital video so you can look at it on your own cellphone while simultaneously reading the Wikipedia article on how far the mic was placed from the kickdrum on Led Zeppelin IV while also downloading songs from the band you just heard about ten seconds ago on some blog (and will probably never play) along with the latest Beatles box set (why yes, it is re-re-re-mastered.. now you can really hear their money) and you’re on the bus and why are you able to do this on the bus?!!?

Bah! There’s just no mystery anymore. It’s like first setting eyes on that beautiful person across the room, and then humping them four seconds later. Which I guess is what those rock stars were doing back then. But see? On Behind the Music they appear totally regretful.

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Album Review: The Savings and Loan – Today I Need Light

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Jon Rooney

The Savings and Loan – Today I Need Light
(2011; Song, By Toad)

Scotland’s The Savings and Loan serve a heavy duty blend of dour drunkenness, religious dread, and spartan arrangements on their debut, Today I Need Light. Stark and intimate like vintage Leonard Cohen setting Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape to music, Today I Need Light is refreshingly free of the brand of self-satisfied sentimentalism often found in downtempo acoustic folk pop.  On the opening track, “Swallows,” the band strums a sparse dirge, borrows part of a lyric from Dylan’s “If You See Her, Say Hello” (“Sun down, orange moon . . .”), and sets a bleak, weighty tone for the rest of the album.  The gripping “Catholic Boys in the Rain” is a dire cowboy song, exuding some kind of terrible realization blunted by resignation, like Mickey Rourke’s character riding the elevator down at the end of Angel Heart.  “Pale Water,” included on Ball of Wax volume 23, layers electric guitar drone beneath lines like “We came for the ruins/We stayed for the sun and the water.”  “The Star of County Down” borrows the frame of an Irish folk song (coincidentally played by Cahalen Morrison and Eli West as “Kingsfold” on that same volume of Ball of Wax) then lures that form away from the comfort of a pub or a campfire down into a fierce den filled with all sorts of feverish anxiety.  Only the final minute of “Her Window” offers the listener any emotional quarter, with a pretty, major chord refrain of “I know just as well as you/That we both got work to do” atop strings, piano, tambourine and acoustic guitar.

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Check Out This Song: Man Rockwell – “OEHG and OJ”

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Levi Fuller

Norman Baker is a tough guy to pin down. He’s got his solo thing (as heard on Ball of Wax 19), which is all finger-picked acoustic and hushed vocals, and quite nice. He’s got Particle Gods (as heard on Volume 22), which is kind of hip-hoppy instrumental stuff. And apparently he’s also in a reggae band. Anyway, I’m always glad to hear what he’s been up to, so as soon as he e-mailed me a couple tracks from his rock band, Man Rockwell, I listened to them. I think I had heard of this band before, and I have to admit that the name probably turned me off or at least led me to believe I knew what they had to offer and I wasn’t interested. Knowing Norman was involved was enough to pique my interest, and I’m glad it was piqued. At least on the two songs Norman sent me (one of which will be on Ball of Wax 23), the sounds are much subtler and more sophisticated than I might have expected from such a goofily-named outfit. The band has a keen sense of dynamics and a sonic palette not too far off from a lot of the minimalist indie rock I loved in the ’90s. “Faux Hawk” will appear on Volume 23, but here’s the other song Norman sent me, the mysteriously-titled “OEHG and OJ”:

Man Rockwell – OEHG and OJ

Both of these songs – along with several others – will appear on the band’s album Opposite Day, set to be released on April Fool’s Day of this year.

Be sure to catch Man Rockwell at the Ball of Wax 23 release show, tomorrow night at the Sunset.

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Album Review: The Way It Is – Music Is My Boyfriend

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Levi Fuller

The Way It Is – Music Is My Boyfriend (EP)
(2011, self-released)
(Purchase or stream at Bandcamp)

Michael Sanchez may not be the most prolific musician out there, but he is a polymathic talent whose work – whether in music, film, or comedy – never ceases to amaze and impress me. We first met in the back room at 2nd Ave. Pizza when his band The New Death Show (a two-piece with DW Burnam on drums and a CD player on backing tracks – heard on Ball of Wax volumes 3 and 8) played a show with some band or other of mine. It was clear he had an ear for melody and a voice that could sing whatever the hell he wanted, combined with an appetite for musical and sonic experimentation. Not long after (or possibly before) The New Death Show disbanded, he began writing and performing solo as The Way It Is (heard on Ball of Wax volumes 2, 4, 6, 16, 18, and 19). His 2006 full-length album Be Still My Beating is a classic in my house that I still go back to regularly. It’s sad to me that most of Seattle has no idea what it lost the day Michael moved to Chicago.

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Ball of Wax Volume 23

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Levi Fuller

As mentioned before, we are celebrating the release of the 23rd volume of Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly this Wednesday at the Sunset Tavern. (Facebook event here, if you’re into that sort of thing – oh, and while I’m at it, the BoW Facebook page is right here.) Should be a great time, with performances from five bands and a free copy of the CD at the door. Here’s the Volume 23 track list, just to pique your interest:

Erik Neumann – Constellations
The Brian Michael Roff Catastrophe – Symbols
Jose Bold – Hey Land
Sip’s Odyssey – Devils In The Details
Seth Howard – Pass The Baton
The Savings and Loan – Pale Water
The Magic of Multiples – Scared Little Doggy
Tied to the Branches – A Sword
The Coug – Every Bee, A Sun
Great Unwashed Luminaries – Poppies For Armistice
The Bore Tide – Stay Zero
Trips and Falls – This Is All Going to End Badly
Cahalen Morrison and Eli West – Kingsfold
Christina Antipa – Duck and Cover
Levi Fuller – You Know
Man Rockwell – Faux Hawk
Ainara LeGardon – We Once Wished
Fox and the Law – Awake

That’s a lot of good stuff! If you can’t make it out to the show, you can buy yourself a copy right now.

Posted in Ball of Wax, Live Music | 2 Comments

Album Review: The Lido Venice

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Louis O'Callaghan

The Lido VeniceThe Lido Venice – Songs Written around the Campfire in the Belly of a Whale (EP – 2004 ECA Records)

[Note: this review is part of the Bad at Listening series.]

At that same previously-written-about Missoula show, the Lido Venice played after me and before TIAPOASL. Digging out my tour diary from the time (which I thought I burned . . . damn you archive.org), I can check my barely-remembered recollections against partially-remembered ones: this band was from Boston, they were young kids (16-19 years old) on tour for not the first time, and they exuded the confidence of somewhat older kids who had done this kind of thing for years. I spent some time talking to Sam the bassist and found him exceptionally sober for a 16 year-old on tour in a rock band.

I remember the band being all screamy hardcore when they played, but this 4-song EP says otherwise . . . either my memory’s off or their set diverged from this track list. The EP is melodic post-punk with (I suspect) some jazz influence and a bit of emo around the edges, with one semi-acoustic song — “Dancing Our Duress (a Pas De Deux)” — and nothing particularly screamy. The melodies and the recordings are great, there are some good hooks and the guitar work is inventive — particularly on “Medic!,” where two guitars panned hard left and right do nice things into one’s headphones. The lyrics are abstract poetry, a bit more intellectual than you might expect in pop songs, and hard to follow. I found the words written out online and still can’t decode what’s going on there.

Overall the EP shows great promise for the full-length that might have followed, but didn’t. Apparently the Lido Venice have been inactive since perhaps 2006, so it’s fair to say they’re of the past. They still have a myspace page up though, where you can listen to “Dancing Our Duress.” Ben Potrykus (guitar) is now in the band Girlfriends. Sam Potrykus (bass) appears to run a Boston area music blog and newsletter. I can’t quite figure out what the rest of them are doing musically, if anything.

As I’m sure we’ll see a lot in this series, that’s how it goes with bands.

Posted in Album Reviews, Bad at Listening, Recorded Music | 2 Comments

Album Review: Bill Horist – Covalent Lodge

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Levi Fuller

Bill Horist – Covalent Lodge
(North Pole Records, 2010)
(Purchase or stream at Bandcamp)

Bill Horist is something of an institution here in Seattle. A musician’s musician known primarily for his madcap electric guitar experimentation, he has played in more bands than anyone I can think of (from more well known acts such as Master Musicians of Bukkake and Kinski to jazz/noise skronk-peddlers like Ghidra), and his solo performances – wherein he attaches strange things to his electric guitar and pulls even stranger sounds out of it – are the stuff of legend. The fact that Bill doesn’t have a Wikipedia page pretty much delegitimizes that entire enterprise in my eyes.

Covalent Lodge, though, is something very different from this man who has made experimentation his very air and water: An experiment – and an incredibly successful one – in accessibility; in warm, acoustic sounds and moderate volumes. Over more than a year of tracking, working with some of the finest musicians in a town bursting with fine musicians (Matt Chamberlain, Climax Golden Twins, Eyvind Kang, Lori Goldston, Paul Rucker, and many more), Horist has created an incredibly inviting album that is an absolute joy to listen to. (Songs from these sessions that do not appear on the final album are on Ball of Wax volumes 3 and 8.)

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