SALON

Murray Jason

Friday, Mar 28, 2003 6:48 PM UTC

Robert Pollard & Tobin Sprout

New records by Guided by Voices mastermind Robert Pollard and by Tobin Sprout explore the varied ways of '60s psychedelia.

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The sixth solo album by the prolific Robert Pollard — founder of Guided by Voices — may be the most difficult listening of his 20-year career. There’s nothing particularly abrasive on the disc. Rather, it’s difficult to perceive the thread that ties it together or to discern the architecture of its songs.

“Motel of Fools” begins with a medieval, a capella songlet that fades to silence before lo-fi electronics fade in, joined by acoustic guitars and minimalist drums. On “The Spanish Hammer,” ’60s acid-psychedelia merges with a cassette sample from Pollard’s old heavy metal band, Anacrusis. Odder still are recordings of a baby and drunken parties, and a half-speed fragment from another Pollard release, interspersed among identifiable tracks.

Pollard’s “Motel of Fools,” like Julian Cope’s “Droolian” and “Skellington” records from the early ’90s, is great stuff — if you’re up for the challenge.

In sharp contrast stands the very accessible “Lost Planets & Phantom Voices,” by Pollard’s longtime friend and collaborator, Tobin Sprout. His first solo full-length in four years borrows heavily from ’60s and ’70s Britpop and San Francisco psychedelia.

“Doctor #8″ is a novella of a song, whose economy of words brings to mind author Martin Amis: “Doctor #5 has his feet in the spray/ Doctor #6 has to work all day/ Doctor #7 has to sleep alone/ With Doctor #8.” “Catch The Sun” suffuses the air with a meek-tempered joy, and on “Let Go of My Beautiful Balloon,” Sprout recreates the desperate hopefulness of the 1968 Genesis single “Silent Sun” as he croons “In Somewhere there are people who won’t hurt me/ Floating gently, ever flying, smiling back at me.”

Links:
Pollard “Motel of Fools” is out now on Fading Captain/ Recordhead. Sprout’s “Lost Planets & Phantom Voices” is out now on Luna Music.

Audio:

Thursday, Jan 23, 2003 12:02 AM UTC

Luna: “Close Cover Before Striking”

Besides outstanding Stones and Kraftwerk remakes, Luna's seven-song CD offers some of their best new material in years.

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Luna
“Close Cover Before Striking”
Out now on Jetset

New Zealand-born Dean Wareham started the band Luna in the early ’90s after leaving the pioneering slo-core trio Galaxie 500. Initially something of an indie rock supergroup, with members from the Feelies and the Chills, Luna have shifted their lineup across eight albums. The membership seems to have settled for now. In 2002, with Wareham as the sole founding member, Luna put out two wonderful records: the full-length “Romantica” and now the seven-song “Close Cover Before Striking.”

The most recent collection was recorded and produced by the band, and includes five originals and two covers. The short album feels fully realized — immediate and raw all at once — just as rock ought to be. The high-energy opener “Astronaut” is a modern love song, sparkling with Wareham’s playful and poetic lyrics: “I wear a styling moustache/ You wear a frozen smile/ We’ll run like Tamil Tigers/ We’ll drink the poison bile.”

On Luna’s version of the Rolling Stones’ 1981 “Waiting on a Friend” Wareham’s bewitching voice reveals levels of poignancy obscured in the original. The other remake is a guitar-pop interpretation of “Neon Lights” by the classic German electronic group Kraftwerk. “Teenage Lightning” provides Luna’s quirky, country-pop take on the sorts of growing pains Alex Chilton sang about in his classic Big Star song “13,” while tinges of Steely Dan chord changes and jazzy Pink Floyd-esque numbers round out this collection of delicate, powerful and pop-perfect tunes.

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Friday, Nov 15, 2002 1:48 PM UTC

Woodbine: “Woodbine”

The U.K. trio's beautiful, hallucinatory pop songs are the stuff the most fascinating, strangest dreams are made of.

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Woodbine:

Woodbine
“Woodbine”
Out now on Domino Records

Birmingham, U.K., trio Woodbine, whose heritage traces from London Punjabi-rock act Cornershop and Blackpool punk band the Membranes, took a drug-addled three years between signing with Domino and delivering a first single. But their self-titled debut L.P. followed quickly, thanks in part to some production help from Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty of Royal Trux (aka Adam and Eve)– who never met the band but still enjoyed free rein in remixing Woodbine’s quirky, hallucinatory songs.

Juxtaposing the familiar with the impossible, this album is as surrealistic as it is sublime. Woodbine employ softly shaken maracas, a randomly hit woodblock and a heavily processed tambourine to create the percussive foundations of their songs. Searing noise-guitars confront singer Susan Dillane’s angelic vocals. Goats and tropical birds float in and out of a laugh-track dreamscape, and tinkling bells mingle with wah-wah peddle and fuzz bass.

Woodbine have found themselves likened to a hodgepodge of artists, among them Saint Etienne, Opal, Spiritualized, and Nick Drake — and this release has critics scrambling for comfortable handholds again. But while they indulge in the occasional cunning musical quotation (“Complete Control” humorously references Jim Beattie’s “Adventures in Stereo”), Woodbine are that rare band that takes its cue from no one and defines a unique nexus of beauty with utter strangeness.

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Friday, Oct 18, 2002 6:49 PM UTC

Love Life: “Here Is Night, Brothers …”

Baltimore's art-goth quartet Love Life's second album teeters on the brink of dark, twisted operatic rock and full-blown demonic surrealism.

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Love Life:

Love Life
“Here Is Night, Brothers, Here The Birds Burn”
Out now on Jagjaguwar

The art-goth quartet known as Love Life began in 1998 when two former members of Ann Arbor’s notoriously anti-pop Jaks — iconoclastic vocalist Katrina Ford and guitarist/organist Sean Antanaitis, now married — relocated to Baltimore. They got together with bassist Anthony Scott Malat and drummer Dave Bergander one gloomy night, and entered into a covenant to make uncompromisingly creative music. The “alternative music” status quo be damned … and scorched in hellfire.

Love Life are “goth” by dint of their heaviness and atonal darkness. But the connection with that easy-to-parody genre is at best superficial. Their music teeters between chaos and structure, between beauty and horror. Within the funereal catharsis of the songs on their second LP, led by Ford’s girl-Satan vocals, you might discern traces of the Sugarcubes and Joy Division in addition to the Birthday Party and Bauhaus.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of “Here Is Night, Brothers, Here the Birds Burn” is the outright emotional power the band manifest with so little technical adornment. On the track “V” (its slow beginning is not unlike the Beatles’ “She’s So Heavy”) multitracked demonic vocals, floor-shaking bass, and insanely intense drumming lead up to a horn-centered big-band blast of alien surrealism.

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Monday, Oct 14, 2002 9:46 PM UTC

The Soft Boys: “Nextdoorland”

Twenty-two years after their classic LP "Underwater Moonlight," the Brit-pop quartet around Robyn Hitchock are as sardonic, romantic and multilayered as ever and even take a jab at Bush's war on terror.

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The Soft Boys:

The Soft Boys
“Nextdoorland”
Out now on Matador/Beggars Group

The comeback album from the Soft Boys — 22 years after their classic LP “Underwater Moonlight” — reveals the quartet as sardonic, romantic and multilayered as ever. This should come as no surprise to followers of songwriter Robyn Hitchock, who, as a solo artist in the intervening years, has been putting out evolving versions of his singularly off-center take on the world.

In the late ’70s, the Soft Boys chose to cut against the grain of the nascent U.K. punk zeitgeist, developing instead a highly melodic but penetrating sort of music informed by the Byrds, John Lennon, Syd Barret and Captain Beefheart. Hitchcock’s songwriting shunned the raw aggression of early punk in favor of subtle expressions of animalistic emotion and dreamlike imagery.

Likewise, “Nextdoorland” assembles layers of musical references and sly puns into songs that are little worlds under glass. The chimerical riff at the center of “Sudden Town” sounds from one angle like the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride,” and from another like Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel.” On “Pulse of My Heart,” Hitchcock pursues a favorite theme of his, entomological imagery, as he croons, “Her wings are folded/ in her chrysalis/ but you can wake her/ with an all-night kiss.” But they also offer some political lampooning. The song “Strings” is a jab at the Bush administration’s war on terror with the singalong lines “Evil is the new enemy, evil is the new bad.”

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Monday, Sep 16, 2002 9:53 PM UTC

Music preview: Spoon

On "Kill the Moonlight," the Austin, Texas, band Spoon play minimalist rock that's too driving and danceable to be "art rock" yet too eccentric to be anything but. Listen in.

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Music preview: Spoon

Spoon
“Kill the Moonlight”
Out now on Merge Records

Spoon, founded by Britt Daniel (vocals, guitar) and Jim Eno (drums) 10 years ago, approach rock from an elemental perspective. Together, they create a stripped-down sound by pushing the drums way out in front and employing guitars and keyboards as percussive instruments. Meanwhile, Daniel’s disarming, almost offhanded vocals belie a threatening intensity in his words, the juxtaposition leading to a delicious tension. As with last year’s LP, “Girls Can Tell,” Spoon recorded the new album in Jim Eno’s home studio — an appropriate environment for their retro-minimalism.

On “Kill The Moonlight,” Spoon deliver 35 minutes of music too driving to be called art rock, yet too eccentric to be anything but. Their choice of cover art is taken from a series of stills by artist Kristin Oppenheim, whose new video installation “Numbers” is currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The image of opened arms, either reaching down or in free fall, is both beautiful and morbid.

Spoon play with such tension throughout the album. On “Small Stakes” (in which Daniel reveals his preference for white-boy soul singer Har Mar Superstar over indie-rock darlings the White Stripes) uses a keyboard-centered intro that just won’t stop, becoming nearly excruciating in its refusal to settle down into a rock song.

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