Indie and Lo-Fi music reviews

Fat Possum is noted for pushing the envelope by finding musicians that sit on the fringe of the blues. Bob Log III is one of those on the extreme outer edge mixing blues with punk with the emphasis on punk. Bob Log III plays slide guitar, drums, vocals and wrote all of the songs. His dad Bob Log Jr. pitches in on Kazoo while "Pancake" supplies the backup vocals. The tunes have a certain sameness to them resulting in, what seems like anyway, one long 35 minute jam. What's here what appeal to traditional blues fans or even those not so traditional but it is interesting listening nonetheless.

You won't find any artist out there like Bob Log. If you have ever seen the movie deliverance you will remember the famous "dueling banjos" scene. Rumours are going around that the little weird lookin country critter boy who plays the banjo is none other than Bob Log in his early teens trying to crack the hollywood bigtime. So ugly that he is forced to wear a helmet for marketing aesthetics now. I'll tell you right now. This is a lie. If Bob log III was really playing the banjo that day all those campers (including/especially reynolds) would have burst into hot hot flames then and there. Bob log would have ripped them a wider one than any hillbilly hick ever could.

This album Kicks. If you ever get to see Bob live then do it. After seeing him live twice now I feel like Ive actually achieved something in my life.

This is his most commercial release thus far and if you like something thats strange but makes you wanna wiggle, then I recommend this album. I only pray he keeps touring.

S.H -Perth WA

This is a CD you'l want to play over and over again. while his first two Cds are Rather Indesipherable, on this album Log removes the distortion from his vocals. This lets you enjoy his lyrics. Plus, with such sexually explicit and just plain crude lyrics how can you not like this guy? Plus his slide playing sounds great. He shows what an amazing slide player he actually is. Song's like "Bubble Strut" and "Make You Say Wow!" are definite vocal highlights. Log Shows how fast he can actually play on "Slide Guitar ride Junior", Lays out a nice Drunken Groove On "Drunk Stripper", and Seamlessly shifts rythems on "F-Hole Parade". Plus he has some great Lyrics on "Boob Scotch" and "Wag Your tail like a dog in Back of a Truck". This is definatly on of my most played albums.

I'd like to start out this review by saying that the One AM Radio is just one guy singing. Basically, he has little talent besides his beautiful voice. I saw him a few nights ago with Owen, The Quiet Life, William Elliot Whitmore, The Snake the Cross the Crown and he was an absolute disgrace compared to the other EXTREMELY talented bands (check out the quiet life and the snake the cross if you like some harder indie rock...whitmore if you like bluegrass, owen if you love acoustic). He had a computer with him that played his produced background music. He played a few chords on his guitar and then turned the volume up and down. He has a great voice- I will give him that- but DO NOT waste your money on a concert to see him. I would have easily said the concert was one of the best ever..but I can't because The One AM Radio serisouly brought down the quality of the show. If you listen to his live music with your eyes closed then it is a little better b/c you can't see the extreme lack of talent present with a laptop and guitar that is barely played. Basically, he makes a great studio album (best song- Buried Below, catchy and similiar to Death Cab with a Mike Kinsella style voice) but is a horrible performer.

This album is fantastic, and despite previous comments, hrishikesh is quite captivating live. It is not his fault if he gets improperly booked in a larger venue containing plenty of impatient the snake the cross the crown fans who aren't familiar with his music.

The album is not only for fans of indie/singer songwriters with mellow electronic / ambient production. Anyone can appreciate this album.

...i'll still expect to be listening to this album. This music is like a warm sweater, and every time I listen to it I find something else I like about it. It's meaningful music that never becomes overly sentimental. The kind of cd that sits well next to Kings of Convenience's "Quiet is the new loud" and REM's "Automatic for the People." You will not regret buying this album.

Pavement always released excellent EPs, full of bonus songs that aimed to please their fans. "Cut Your Hair," however, was the weakest of these EPs, an irony as the single was the band's big cross over hit. The extra two songs are decent, lo-fi Pavement songs that represent "Slanted and Enchanted" at it's laziness, as opposed to the indie pop of "Crooked Rain." The cover of REM's Camera builds rather nicely, and Malkmus sings with feeling. "Stare," however, doesn't go anywhere and is one of the bands weakest songs. If you like the single, you're much better off getting the album which contains more songs in a similar vein. If you like the band and want to get into their EPs, check out any other release aside from this one.

i'm the first to review this. how cool is that? anyway, back to the subject at hand. this is one of the coolest songs i've ever heard. i truly love it. it is one of my all time favorites. you should really get the cd. i promise you that you will love as much as i do.

i thought i was the only one whos even heard of the show, but i guess not.... its rad how theyve got locals and stuff... the only thing wrong is a few tracks lag on.... but pacifica blues and taken by surprise....rock

A compilation of "live on the air" recordings from two Portland, Oregon radio stations. The compiler sees these bands as retaining the original spirit of punk rock. Be that the case or not, the last song -- Soul Junk's "Sweet to my Soul" -- is one of the best songs I have heard in the past 12 months. Much better than the studio version. The rest of the songs are pretty okay too.

Buzzing, staticky voices open the "Everything Is" EP, followed by a staticky, buzzing drum solo. Neutral Milk Hotel is in fine form here, with frontman Jeff Mangum providing his usual hallucinatory innocence to the offbeat songs and catchy, fuzzy music.

The "Everything Is" single is a solid, swirling song with a weird spoken intro. It's also insanely catchy by Neutral Milk Hotel's standards, enough to make you bounce in your seat. A slower, rippling song follows in "Snow Song Pt. 1" and the bouncy, unexceptional "Tuesday Night." Perhaps strangest and most striking is the eerie "Aunt Eggma Blowtorch" is basically an experimental collage of music and recorded sounds.

Neutral Milk Hotel is known for its low-fi sound, and that's definitely present here. It's rough and unpolished (anyone else hear Mangum coughing into the mike?), which makes its quality all the more striking. Mangum's high-pitched voice sounds full and solid in this outing, without the reedy quality he had in "Avery Island."

Mangum's sweetly psychedelic lyrics are as striking as ever ("As children draped in flowers form a chain/They sing a song with jelly jars and bird calls/As night falls into dust and it's day again"), and the fuzz guitar and rapid-fire percussion are pretty solid. And in "Aunt Eggma Blowtorch," things get even weirder. It was recorded when Mangum was only seventeen, and so this is just a bunch of sounds patched together. There's a food blender, vocal samples, somebody singing, his sister playing piano, accordian, and strange sonic waves.

It's hardly the best introduction for someone new to Neutral Milk Hotel, but "Everything Is" is a solid EP of this brilliantly oddball band's bits and pieces. People who love bucking musical conventions will adore this.

This is a rerelase of the "Everything Is" single from 1994, plus one bonus track, "Tuesday Moon." Although the depth of Neutral Milk Hotel's two full-lengths hasn't really been developed yet, there's some very accomplished songwriting here, and some rather nice lyrics ("Won't you stay awhile? We can close the door and sleep all day"). The best track by far is the warm, fuzzed-out, lo-fi title track, which is clearly the product of the same collective as early Olivia Tremor Control tracks like "Beneath the Climb" and "Fireplace", although a bit more melodically sophisticated. Weirdly, though, Jeff Mangum doesn't really sound like himself on most of these tracks. You can hear the roots of his distinctive vocal style on "Everything Is", but he has something akin to a California surfer accent on "Snow Song Pt. 1", and "Tuesday Moon" sounds more like the crazier side of Of Montreal ("Coquelicot", for example) than anything else. "Aunt Eggma Blowtorch" is not a song but a bedroom sound collage in true, self-indulgent-but-fun Elephant 6 fashion. Crying babies, vocal samples, out-of-tune piano noodling and random assorted noises combine into an entertaining, if a bit pointless, composition.

All in all, this is a very nice collection, although I wouldn't recommend it as anyone's first Neutral Milk Hotel purchase. And it is a bit overpriced...Still, it's essential for any NMH fan who wants to see where the band was coming from.

in my opinion, this here is the best of the ajax/3 beads of sweat compilations. the most consistent by far, it also contains more "instant-classic-type" tracks. there's this one song, "the last day of jimi hendrix's life" which is soooo beautiful and heartbreaking...granted, there's nothing that quite equals "no i can't" or "historiograph" from (is it?) bitter melon farm, but all in all, it's a stronger collection.

This is a CD for someone who is already a Mountain Goats fan. More casual listeners would be better served by getting Sweden, 9 Black Poppies, or Full Force Galesburg. As a compilation of rarities, it is obviously rough and doesn't hang together like a typical Mountain Goats CD. That said, there are some great songs on this CD, from the opening song, "Golden Boy," which are about peanuts, to "Going to Port Washington," "The Anglo-Saxons", and "Noticifer Birmingham." Many of these songs are just Darnielle having a lot of fun. Sometimes, like on "Golden Boy", the results are amazing. Sometimes it only reminds you of how good he can be when he gets more serious. Overall, a good CD and a must-have for Mountain Goats fans.

This is the long-awaited final singles/rarities compilation from the Mountain Goats camp, released at long last by the label Three Beads of Sweat (along with reissues of the first two comps. released on Ajax).

Like the other two singles comps. this album has low and (incredibly) high points. Some of the best Mountain Goats songs ever recorded were on tapes or 7"s so these collections are a joy. Naturally though, when you have 31 songs on an album some of them are bound to be less than remarkable. Overall, it's a fantastic CD thanks in part to songs like "Golden Boy", "The Anglo-Saxons", and "Stars Around Her".

Any devoted fan will love this CD, however if you're just hearing Mountain Goats for the first time then I'd suggest picking up "Full Force Galesburg" (my favorite Mountain Goats release), "The Coroner's Gambit", or "Isopanisad Radio Hour".

My only real complaint is that the boys at Ajax didn't even distribute the songs between the 3 comps. 31 songs is quite a lot, even for me... so some of them probably could've been added to the first comp (a mere 23 tracks).

God Bless You, Mr. Darnielle.

Prepare yourself for hyper elvis lesbian sun sessions punk rock. This blistering, bluesy debut from Searcy, Arkansas finest trio Draws from the riot grrrl punk of the Kill Rock Stars label (on which their debut full-length came out a couple weeks ago) and the stripped down rocking blues of 1950s Memphis, the Gossip rip through the four tunes on this album with soul to spare. The only blame I can allocate to this sparking piece of work is its length: at a little under seven minutes...

If you dig riot grrl, rockabilly, or anything girly that just plain rocks, you'd love The Gossip. This fine little ensemble consists of Beth (vocals and stage stompin,) Nathan (guitars,) and Kathy (drums)...all rad little rockers from Olympia, producing a totally dancable swingy type sound that even your mom can appreciate. The Gossip's amazing ground shattering, belly rooted vocals and catchy riffs will rock your socks. If you like to play air guitar and dance around in front of the mirror, this should be your soundtrack.

smog really means bill callahan, who is a weird sort of guy who writes songs about his emotions and other things he likes. this is one of his first albums and i happen to like it a good deal. at first i thought it was kind of silly, but then i listened to it some more and still thought it was silly but liked it a lot better too. plus i like the title and the cover and everything.

Julius Caesar was my point of entry to the music of Bill Callahan. Chan Marshall (who moonlights as Cat Power), on her record par excellence What Would The Community Think, covered Callahan's song Bathysphere, upon listening to which it was my firm (and perhaps foolhardy) resolution to go out an album - any album - by the guy. This I did, my record of choice being Julius Caesar (though "choice" is perhaps the wrong word to use here, given that the aforementioned was the only Smog album in the shop).

My first experience of Julius Caesar was somewhat bewildering - I wondered how someone who had written a song of such claustrophobic melancholy as that in which Bathysphere is drenched could make a record that on first listening seemed to be a farrago of smart-arsed tomfoolery. I soon learnt, however, that blithely making such an assumption had been the easy way out. On scraping away the veneer of snide wordplay and toppling the daunting sonic barrier that the evidently budget recording had erected around the record, I began to fully realise Callahan's gift as a songwriter and the strange and terrible power that his music with which his music would eventually grip my heart.

The journey began with Chosen One (which, it could be argued, is possibly the record's most accessible piece) and continued by way of the eerily suffocating Stalled On The Tracks and the heart-on-sleeve simplicity of Golden, finally reaching its conclusion with my realisation that, goodness me, while I Am Star Wars! and When The Power Goes Out might be arrant musical pranks, they were nonetheless fine songs. I in fact should to like to take this opportunity to heartily exhort God to bless Mr Callahan for, by gum, he has a sense of humour that is a welcome blessing in today's world of pretentious artistes and that has survived seemingly intact from the early days of Julius Caesar until the present (q.v. his hilarious explanation of Knock, Knock's cover art - featuring a fierce-looking feline against a background of lightning - as designed to appeal to his teenage audience).

While Julius Caesar may for me lack the jaw-dropping emotional clout of such works as The Doctor Came At Dawn, Kicking A Couple Around or Red Apple Falls, it is yet an album that I treasure and into which I delve time and again. I have yet to find a record that so deftly admixes witty cynicism with brittle, uneasy melancholy.

Bill Callahan is a genius. You will not like Julius Caesar at first. I promise. Why? Well, at first it just seems annoying. You feel like asking yourself what the hell this guy was thinking when he made this. You had better have some tolerance for lo-fi. From all that I've heard, Callahan recorded this album at home on a four-track, and it sounds like it. But once you get used to that (unless you love lo-fi, like me) you find some songs that are just wonderful. Callahan is one of the unspoken poets of our generation.

Having listened to vols 1 & 2 of the series lots and this one somewhat less, I have to say that this is definitely a step down. There are some good moments: The airy floating sounds of Booth & Bad Angel's "Fall in Love With Me" is good as is Gonzalo Rubalcaba's instrumental version of "Imagine", but much of the rest of the CD doesn't leap out at me. I don't feel like I'm hearing something new and unique here like I did with vols 1 & 2. I've wavered between 3 and 4 stars for this, and what I'd really like to give is 3 1/2 stars, but I'll aim low.

I have bought all the Rare on the Air series. This one is the best. the cowboy junkies version of state trooper is worth the price alone

Maybe it's not quite rocket science, but "Science Faire" is an interesting compilation for any fans of the Apples in Stereo. Compiled out of EPs and singles that the band created during the early 90s, it's rough and unpolished, but has a certain exuberant charm.

Fun percussion and a driving riff start off the fun "Tidal Wave," before the dense fuzz-rock of "Motorcar" and "Not the Same," and the rural pop sound of "Turncoat Indian." And some songs like "Running in Circles just exude fun and enthusiasm, with a simple dancey melody and some heavy instrumental layers. But only "Hypnotic Suggestion's" twisting electric riffs hint at the less conventional possibilities that lie under all the fuzz and hooks.

Usually there is a reason why songs are released in these compilations -- often they're not so good. The Apples in Stereo don't fall prey to that, although there isn't really a standout track here -- they're all pleasant, but none will make listeners shriek "wow!" and hit the repeat button. It's the sound of a brilliant young band still finding its way, and producing some pleasant tunes along the way.

A sense of infectious fun goes through all the songs. "Tidal Wave" is basically about splashing in puddles -- "Splish splash in a pool of puddle/don't trip up on a tidal wave - /you'll crash in a murky muddle." Sounds like the sort of fun, childlike song a hobbit would sing. With many bands it would sound trite, but it doesn't here.

Musically the Apples in Stereo show that they're not quite mature yet. The vocals are muffled under the music, rather than being balanced out with the instrumentation. And the fun sound is similarly muffled by the sometimes murky sound of the music, like "Motorcar" and "Haley" -- although I can't tell if the distractingly off-kilter riffs in "Haley" are meant to be that way.

Despite being not yet musically mature, "Science Faire" is a fun, slightly wild album by a band that has gone on to fulfill the promise they've shown here. A pleasant early work by the Apples in Stereo.

This music sounds like what I sometimes have heard in my dreams. When waking, jangly catchy guitar-heavy riffs mix with a blurrier background that sounds submerged. I don't know what this says about my subconscious, but Robert Schneider and pals 1993-5 must have heard similar sounds of fuzz and reverb. This is primitive music, as if what you'd tape from a garage band down the block, but it's magic. Extra credit for fitting the title to the cover photo--band as if the Audio-Visual Club 10th grade yearbook 1974. The majority of the songs survive their ramshackle arrangements and limited production; tracks 1-10 and 13 stick to you as if recalled from years ago when you hear them.

A slight drawback is that this CD may start to sound like one long rave-up. Best not to play it all straight through. If you're a fan of Fun Trick, be warned that this is low-budget. The tempo does slacken towards the end, even though these songs sound weaker as well as subdued. If you like their debut LP, however, Fun Trick Noisemaker, the earlier versions of many of its best tunes can be found here. They lack the polish given their second incarnation, but they make up for it with an energy that the later versions sometimes coat over with a glossier finish.

At this pre-LP stage, Apples' singles and EPs were raw and restless and at the band's creative best, I think. True, they lacked finesse, but make up for it with determination. This comes sadly before the band de-volved into RS and more of a backup set of musicians that he would dominate as Apples became more fey, Beatlesque, and baroque- meets- bubblegum as they fittingly wrote TV themes. Fun Trick does have strong moments, and power-pop fans would favor it over Science Faire, but those needing a subtly diverse array of influences blended and pureed--here Nuggets-meets Notorious Byrd Bros-meets Eno on Tiger Mountain and Warm Jets-meets early demos by the Undertones or the Crazy Rhythm debut by the Feelies--however small a group this sub-culture of us this may be, this is our music.

Robert Schneider was a wiry guy living with a lot of cats in a dank basement apartment in Denver when his band recorded these songs. They were then just The Apples, and when they were forced to change it, I hoped they'd become The Robert Apples, because everyone called him that. Anyways, buy this album.