Indie and Lo-Fi music reviews

Cynics? Reprobates? All that and ironic too. There is nothing like throwing back a few (hundred) beer and seeing the Teasers live, with the exception of playing poker long into the night with Satan is Real Again cranked. This album has some of the wittiest lyrics ever with a good dose of social commentary thrown in the mix. The music is raw and strangely reminiscent of the Clash running headlong into Hank Williams Sr. while Tom Waits reports the brutal events. Don't even bother if you like Clint Black or Mariah Carey, but if a Whiskey voiced hillbilly punk band from Scotland is what you have in mind, then you should have bought this album years ago.

In a world where everything is polished with syrup and schlock- it's ironic that this caustic, drunken, rural punk is a breath of fresh air. The songs are so damned catchy and direct- The Country Teasers stand to influence a whole generation of musicians like the Pixies of yore. I cannot get enough of the sauntering disregard.
Go Teasers Go!

What do you get when you get a bunch of drunk Scottish guys who rip off riffs from the Fall and Joy Division and throw them into their anti-P.C. country music? You get this masterpiece of drunken hilarity. But besides being funny and offensive, they are actually great songwriters. Saying they are witty is way too much of an understatement. The riffs may not be totally original, but the delivery definitely is. After you've heard it more times and don't focus on the lyrical content and take the songs in as a whole, you will see them for the sloppy wonders that they are.
There really is no other band like the Country Teasers, and you gotta love a band that wants to smash down the P.C. walls and make it okay to make fun of everything again. Everything they have recorded is great, but this is their master work. I can't say enough good things about it.
If you are P.C., like slick productions, and bands who don't miss a note, the Country Teasers are not for you.

Secret Square is the type of band you admire for their ambition and uncompromising sense of individuality. This album is very conceptual and quirky in the traditional Elephant Six way, full of strange chords, exotic instruments, and (like Olivia Tremor Control) an everchanging pace and tempo. This record is a bit harder to get into than any OTC CDs, and especially more complex and edgier than anything by the sunnier, poppier labelmates The Apple in Stereo. However, if you are an experienced E6er, looking for something even riskier and more raw than OTC, Secret Square is certainly a band to check out.

beautiful music somewhere between Sonic Youth, Stereolab and the rest of the Elephant 6. There is a mixture of melancholia, indescribable almost samba-tropical esque, and strange ezperimental tones on the album;;;these all within the simple indie rock lo-fi style. Very little drums, when they are around they add to the odd effect. Very transcendantal, very beautiful overall... the stream-of-conciousness lyrics, almost banjo-like lead guitars, and spaceage sounds add to the psychadelic effect. The lo-fi 8-track/4-track production gives it that raw, unpolished moment of inspiration while dosed up on mind expanding drugs feel that marks their fellow counterparts Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power and The Gerbils; not to mention the headstarters of the lo-fi genre, Guided By Voices. Probably the most beautiful thing in the Elephant 6 collective, even while lacking the wild near-cartoonish sound experiments that made Olivia Tremor Control so unique....this is becuz the songs have this lush, spaced-out stellar sound ala Sonic Youth and Stereolab and My Bloody Valentine that makes you wanna cry. If this is your first ticket into the Elephant 6 collective, get Olivia Tremor Control (amazing beyond recognition), Neutral Milk Hotel (warped archaic mixture of dream-drenched folk and haunting old timey instruments), Beuhlah (layered pretty alternative music/Beatles-style pop music with a Beckish twist)and the collection of mostly song-oriented but still entertaining Elf Power THe Gerbils etc. Theses bands are truly in a world all their own, a planet marked by lo-fi production/tearworthy melodies/eerie sound explorations. A spectral dive worth taking. Furthermore, I don't feel like writing individual reviews for each of these artists, so just look into it.

A unique sound, slow and heartfelt. Maria Christopher has an amazing voice.

this album is great for anyone that likes chill music with female vocals. this is definitely one of the sexiest albums ever recorded, up there whith lovage's "music to make love to your old lady by". fans of portishead, mogwai, papa m, will oldham, ISIS, gy!be, sigur ros (or any melancholy music,really) will eat this up. great brook valley is my favourite track, with the neil young cover, danger bird, coming in second.

Beauty cannot begin to describe this album. It's the kind of album that makes you want to lay around, but at the same time it can make you want to get busy. Maria Christopher adds so much to this album. Her sensual yet realistically beautiful vocals make the cd, but without them, it would retain it's beauty. Not to say it would be better without them. Easy Trigger is a kind of song you would hear walking into a smoke filled club as you see your soul-mate at the bar. The Lone Mariachi holds a sense of funkiness, along with a playful modern Spanish bassline. Those are two of my favorite tracks, but the album is all in all one of the best purchases I've made in the indie rock/shoegazing category. Even if you're not into indie or shoegazing, this album will blow your mind.

Slanted and Enchanted is quite possibly Pavement's finest accomplishment. Trigger Cut is one of the highlights, a nice little lo-fi indie pop song. And Sue Me Jack and So Stark are just as entertaining. This is Pavement's best single... and their singles are just as reliable as their albums. Buy it.

i bought this cd for "suemejack". up in your face funk pop. clearly one of their best b-sides. it could have easily been an a-side. that song alone is worth the six bucks. "trigger cut" and "skyscraper" aren't too shabby either.

b/c they are so creative. This disc is one of their first. It is from the MBV/Sonic Youth school of bands, but they really had their own thing going. More melodic than Sonic and not as dreamy as MBV, the Swirlies are actually catchier than both. This is lo-fi stuff but the sound is not ... and thin like some bands. "Tall Ships" is an amazing song and worth the price alone. It's punctuated by loud bursts of gtr., and great dynamics. The bass is fat! The one way I can describe the whole album is to say it sounds like they are on a rollercoaster and at any moment they can get derailed...like the songs are barely being held together. This is good! Buy.

Hold up, why are there currently only two reviews for this album? Oh, the insanity! Surely and hopefully, many more appreciate "What to Do About Them".

I must say "Tall Ships" is one of the best songs I know of, period. The guitar riff is just insane. "Chris R." is also pretty catchy with swirly guitars and sweet vocals.

The Swirlies is one of the coolest bands I know of, and their music is very worthy of adding to anyone's music collection. Some really great shoegazers, indeed.

I'm not someone who normally likes indy pop... i can't stand the magnetic fields, belle & sebastian, velocity girl, etc. In fact, I pretty much can't stand the swirlies' other albums. but I LOOOVE this album! Whenever I put it on people want to know what it is, have me copy it, etc. It's got hooks man, and no drone. Damm it's nice.

If you enjoy a great pop song or simply enjoy the chase then this disc will provide you with satisfaction on both scores.
Cope seems to have admirers and detractors in equal number but let's not quibble about the mans talent, he is still out there attempting to produce Stonehenge from a pebble,one of rock's last great alchemists.This is certainly better than some of his output and deserves more attention.

Cope's amusing-memoirs 'Head On/Repossessed' capture the period where The Teardrop Explodes imploded & Cope retreated to Tamworth for part-time hermitdom with wife Dorian. This is the place from where he dealt with the disintegration of both audience/band, the onslaught of epic acid-consumption & a focus on certain kinds of singers: Tim Buckley, Astral-Van, Nick Drake, Alexander'Skip'Spence & Syd Barrett (WSYM was recorded in Cambridge for that "Syd vibe"- while the cover alone for follow-up 'Fried' would get Julian labelled a "Syd."). Amid all this chaos Julian was on a fast-track to cultdom (admittidly by default) & produced this classic debut (which was slated by the UK music-press at the time- like Robert Smith, there seemed to be a notion that if you hadn't done an "Ian Curtis" you were a pseud...).

WSYM remains tight-pop-psychedelia, Cope playing with producer Stephen Lovell (lead guitar) & Teardrops-drummer (now forklift driver) Gary Dwyer (with the odd guest-apperance from Kate St John & ex-Teardrop Ronnie Francois). Like Nineties-classic 'Jehovahkill' the essential three-piece make-up of the band really seems to work here. Cope was in thrall to 'Nuggets'-style psychedlia and here makes a much more natural version of what XTC did with their Dukes of Stratosphear-project. Imagine an amphtetamine-driven Strawberry Alarm Clock, or The Modern Lovers original line-up if they relocated to Cambridge on a diet of Soft Machine...

This was before Cope explored his more cult/avant-sides (see Rite, Queen Mother, Brain Donor, Droolian)& he was still writing those killer english-pop-songs. & here there are eleven of them...'Bandy's First Jump', as Teardrops' single 'Passionate Friend' is about Cope's "relationship" with Ian McCulloch's sister (which contributed to their falling-out). Copey is almost embracing his self-destruction, "dancing on my fire-escape," then, "spinning around like a Catherine wheel/Put your head inside where I make my meal/Ready or not for a love-affair with an old coke-stove & a wheelchair"!!! A Teardrops-cast-off 'Metranil Vavin' (turned up on 1990-compilation 'Everybody Wants to Shag...')is much more 'White Album' here - drifting off into a piano-spacey ending where someone intones, "...oh that's nice!"

'Strasbourg' is another 2-min-plus pop-classic with some killer-lines ("If I were France and you were Germany, what an alliance that would be"!) & the chorus of choruses. Well that's until we get to the oboe-driven joys of 'An Elegant Chaos', which has that famous verse many took the...out of - it's easily up there with classic English-pop songs by The Kinks, XTC & Madness. Even better is one of my all-time fave Cope-songs, 'Quizmaster'- a fairground-ride on speed with odd lyrics like "Oh, I must have been murdered during the night- someone painted around me at dawn," Cope plumping for love & not being as self-immolating as some thought, "But when it comes time to reach out and give/I may be a corpse, but I know what I'm giving/So don't over-reach yourself unless you're prepared to fall down a mountainside of anger..."

WSYM turns bleak with 'Kolly Kibber's Birthday' (the title nods to the opening chapter of 'Brighton Rock'), which is driven by a Suicide-style drum-machine (minimal) & droning-post-punk guitars (with an odd Eastern-souding refrain). "My life is a delicate balance- the distance between town A and town B...smiling at such naivete...My heart's chemical incendiary's..."- imagine the Teardrops minus the horns and it's much darker: "My war is a Pyrrhic victory/My mind aghast tears like a circular saw/Crown Prince indifference comes marching in..." There are even nods back to melancholy centred around Liverpool and "Junior school." Single 'Sunshine Playroom' opts for some 'Smile'-style sounds as Cope delivers a gorgeous casio-driven pop-song - it sounds like Brian Wilson on ecstasy, "The sun in her hair/The sun in her eyes/There's something that makes me want to go back..." The mood shifts again, 'Head Hang Low' sounding like Joy Division playing a track by Caravan, or Soft Machine fronted by Scott Walker (Cope was still a Scott-head at this point):"all is lost in bright-confusion...You may sit alone like me, but please don't sit alone like me/My world's very beautiful today..."

The album drifts off into comic-psych-jazz with 'Pussyface', which is another older Teardrops-era song (known as 'Sex(Pussyface)'- it's the least track here, but kinda makes sense alongside psych of the era like The Cure's 'Dressing Up' or Siouxsie & the Banshees 'Swimming Horses.' Hit-single (in a perfect parallel-universe)'Greatness & Perfection' is up next and is easily up there with Cope's best pop-songs - e.g. Reward, Treason, Passionate Friend, Jellypop Perky Jean, I'm Not Losing Sleep, Trampolene. A campfire-devotional song with a killer-bridge ("and who are you to give my life so much meaning/I can't stand so much meaning/Hold my hand, cos I'm not healing- I need to find a way ahead...")Finally the album concludes on the English comedown 'Lunatic & Fire-Pistol', Cope's vocals drifting alongside his Robert Wyatt-style organ (think 'Rock Bottom')as Kate St John adds some pastoral-evoking oboe - finally the song shifts into a bleak psych-out meets post-punk movement...

WSYM and its companion 'Fried' (also 1984) standout in Cope's vast-canon; added to that it has great sleeve-photography from Anton Corbijn (Joy Division, Depeche Mode, U2) showing Julian in his Scottesque-phase! A highlight of the 1980s and one that people should know more...

The two most influential albums of my teenage years in the 80's were XTC's Black Sea and Julian Cope's World Shut Your Mouth. Though the lyrics don't make much sense to anyone (unless you're Julian Cope himself) they paint wonderfully chaotic pictures. And the music! You've never heard an album quite like this.

~Everyone~ (who has decent musical taste) that I have ever turned on to this record has absolutely loved it. Also, my favorite stanza from this record seems to get everybody else's attention too. Who could resist....

People I see
just remind me of mooing like a cow in the grass
And that's not to say
That there's anything wrong with being a cow anyway
But people are people
With the added advantage of the spoken word
I'm getting on fine
But I feel more of a man when I get with the herd.

-from Elegant Chaos

Philadelphia's Overlord strikes again, this time with its most comprehensive effort to date. Drawing from a variety of sources, songwriter George Pasles applies his "advanced degree in the inevitable" to the reverb-pop of alt, surf, new wave, and more; eschews "faith-based" paradigms about love and loss in favor of the scientific method; and likens rejection to 20th century pogroms in Eastern Europe. Equal parts jangly and crashing, Pasles laments with a preference for melody and hooks, but his signature bass lines and vocal harmonies stand out amongst all the trebly guitars.

This disc is good, groin-grabbingly good. It's got the kind of high quality mope rock that all of the flavor-of-the-month dandies of the indie scene wish they muster during their guest appearances on "the O.C." and "MTV College TV News." It's got bass, it's got cacophony contrasted against big harmonies that manage to be catchy without being dumbed down. As a means of comparison, Overlord sounds kind of like the Magnetic Fields or the Smiths, but definitely distinct. For me, the highlights are "warm body" (which I heard on NPR's Open Mic thing) and "landlubber," but I could listen to the whole disc, which is way more than I can say about a lot of cd's I've bought lately. Anyway, get into Overlord before they get snatched by some big label and sell out and start having guest spots from Ben Folds. This disc rocks (and I don't even feel self-conscious saying that)!

This is the album where Portastatic officially became Mac McCaughan's "first" band and no longer a side-project, and it shows. Portastatic's first 3 CD releases were either very lowfi or experimental. And although I really liked all 3, it is nice to hear a Portastatic album that is "full-band". There are some definite stand-out tracks here (namely Oh Come Down, In the Lines, Chesapeake, Noisy Night). But seriously, is there ever a bad song on a McCaughan release? He's so consistent that he's actually been criticized for it. In my opinion, this is the best CD he has made this decade. So quit being cheap & pick this up.

The production in Good News is backed off. There are layers, but very rarely too polised guitars dominate the mix. It's more intricate but the intricacy seems to come from a mosaic of simply-toned sounds. The guitars are scratchy or acoustic, the vocals are thin and sort of lispy. Unless they're screamed, and then they're just thin. The only thing that jumps way out in the mix is that dominant bass drum - used sparingly throughout the whole disc - that kicks in about halfway through the first track. Lots of other instruments (real musical instruments like horns and strings, as opposed to synth or found sounds) fill in the gaps left by Modest Mouse's usual thin sound.
All this jumble creates rhythm but that rhythm only goes so far. It's not rocky and it's not dancy. It's just musical. It goes well under what seems to be the main focus, the melody. And the melodies are good, fairly catchy without being annoyingly poppy.
All this, working well with the fact that the songs are consistently good and paced well over the course of the album, make it a pretty good listen overall. And while I might not like it more than The Moon and Antarctica, I certainly see it as easier to get all the way through in one sitting.
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hummit.blogspot.com

This is a good album if you are able to put it in the right context. Each of Modest Mouse's albums have some sort of concept behind them, and most are influenced by a certain 3 letter drug that was popular in the 60's.

This album's concept is one that every person must go through, that of coming to terms and accepting the fact that you are going to die. Isaac Brock has written the story of a man who was told that he did not have much longer to live if he were to continue his life of excess; and the man decided to continue his life and die when his time came. I liked this, because everybody dies and it seems wrong to change doing the things you love to just live a little longer. In Samurai philosophy, people like that are cowards.

I liked this album, even though most "die-hard" MM fans refuse it, a lot like Metallica. It is good, however, and people should just be more open minded and less stubborn.

Great music. Edgy and original.
Not for the casual music lover but this is well worth your time and money.

I'm not much of a fan of her 2 latest pop albums, but wcse is just great pop, not saccharine, just great. You can definitely appreciate exile in guyville and this album as well.

Liz Phair's whitechocolatespaceegg is a fun and catchy album. More produced than her two previous albums, but still a classic collection. Some of the gems on the album include: What makes you happy (loved it first time i heard it!) polyester bride, big tall man, and ride. Liz is an amazing songwriter, and her lyrics do not disappointment on this particular album. lyrics like, "I'm sleeping in the girls room, i'm sleeping in the sky, i'm sleeping in the water, i'm sleeping in the girls room tonight" What i like about this album it was the right transiton that Liz needed in her career, yes the sound is more slicker and predictable but every artist needs to grow and not write about the same thing all the time because the prevoius formula was successful. Whitechocolatespaceegg is worth checking out, keep rocking Liz!

I think Anna's cd is interesting because her songs Breathe2(am), and In The Rough. (GO Anna!)