Though originally from Virginia, Kelsey recently graduated from the University of Georgia with a cavalcade of neat degrees. She's written for other sites like Wide Open Country, Half Past, Seeing Trees Music, The Cropper, InfUSion Magazine, and Blurt. Kelsey’s greatest weakness is a large bowl of pho, and though she doesn’t know it yet, her friends will soon host a soup intervention for her. In her spare time she enjoys exploring abandoned buildings, crafting dad-humor puns, collecting vintage key chains, writing long lists that utilize the Oxford comma, and acting like Larry David.
It’s that time of year again. The Hallmark teddy bears don caps and gowns, college towns are flooded with relatives and their flash photography, and “Pomp And Circumstance” is stuck in everyone’s head. It’s a time of reflection and anxiety and wonder and pride, so of course it requires a decent playlist. Some songs on here are cheeky, some are guilty pleasures we can ALL ADMIT TO, most are anthemic, and some’ll just bring a smile to your face before you walk across the stage. Congrats to the class of 2015… we did it, y’all!
If you’re still unsure just how prevalent 80s nostalgia is in today’s scene, pick up a shovel and dig the new Vaccines track. The playfully cool new track (off of their 5/26 release English Graffiti) uses the same faux string synth spurts that made you love your kiddie Casio back in the day. The track is full of crunchy swagger, drenched in leather and neon. Its Ratatat verses and Strokes choruses make it sound as big and bold and the Vaccines’ ambitions.
Despite having only been around for five years, this is a pretty damn confident-sounding group of dudes. Don’t write off “Minimal Affection” as a grab on a recent sonic trend – as with manyrecently releasedsongs, its lyrics tackle the dissonance between disaffection and desire in today’s youths (cue Liz Lemon gif). In a world seemingly bereft of ‘true affection’, maybe the only refuge left to find it is in a less-than-suitable relationship “when we don’t have a lot in common.” Most of us generally want the same things, but we’re also getting tricked into thinking we shouldn’t. The Vaccines brilliantly pair this sentiment with similarly disaffected music, cool on the surface but barely containing the bursts of fuzzy emotion that keep breaking through.
Reptar have shared the music video for their new single “Amanda,” and it’s (expectedly) a weird one. Two girls in white take turns putting weird fruit in each other’s mouths, and there’s some fun and casual waterboarding. It’s footage that could very well show up on your local public access station, placed there by local community college art kids. Given the song’s alluded-to themes about love and pain and long distance relationships, the vignettes seem to be commentaries on the small ways we hurt the ones we love the most.
“Amanda” recalls early Vampire Weekend, when they still had a massive hard-on for Graceland. It’s not as overloaded and excited a production as the first couple Reptar records – our boys have figured out how to get their ideas across while being economical with their sound. At first, vocals and xylophone reign; even when the smartly arranged horns come in, the room to breathe is refreshing and entrancing.
Lurid Glow is out now via Joyful Noise Recordings.
In the ongoing tradition of employing grotesque imagery, Sufjan Stevens’ tour-only song “Exploding Whale” has been leaked online. Thanks to a Reddit user, and with permission from Stevens’ label Asthmatic Kitty Records, the plinky, wandering track is now available to us all. It’s more Kid A than the offerings on his most recent record Carrie & Lowell, drawing comparisons to his previous album The Age of Adz. Its last minute goes from lightly peppered synths to full on autotune, but the whole track is supremely pretty – yet still subdued and understated, as it never fully swells as grandiosely as it could.
As with Sufjan’s other work, he manages to make art school vagueness feel frighteningly personal and intimate. It’s unfortunately commonplace these days for songs to use a gracelessly hashtagged title, but Stevens seems unironic in his plea for us to embrace his “epic fail.” Between this and the song’s title, it’s a possible allusion to Twitter’s fail whale – and, more broadly, the attention span-less social age in which we live. This is most apparent at the song’s beginning, when Stevens sings, “I’m nobody’s friend / Loneliness rides in my bed / My misfortune / Give everything you’ve got / While the sun burns hot, my addiction / Spoils my affection for everything good.”
(It’s also worth mentioning the single’s ace artwork, featuring an as-of-yet unexploded mobster whale who’s probably about to utter the word “sweetheart.”)
Last night, the 40 Watt hosted two newfangled Americana bands, firekid and Delta Spirit. Despite a sparse crowd and little fanfare, firekid – a two-piece Nashville group – delivered an interesting and varied set of reimagined roots music. Initially, they seemed like a group in the vein of Shy Girls, mixing whispered vocals with plucked guitar and hip hop beats. But it soon became clear that they were aiming for something bigger and not heard before. Singer/guitarist/sampling maestro Dillon Hodges and drummer Josh Kleppin combine traditional bluegrass and tex mex guitar picking – very skilled picking at that – with the hip hop beats of today’s top 40. The masterful guitar playing should come as no surprise, as Hodges won the National Guitar Championship at the age of 17, making him the second youngest person to ever do so. He struck as a contemporary of our own Sam Burchfield. Both traffic in blue-eyed soul that has clearly been practiced and perfected, and both are unabashed fans of big, poppy choruses, back porch cred be damned.
Hodges grew up in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which any music fan worth their salt knows as the birthplace of much of our favorite soul and southern oldies, a creative hotbed in the middle of nowhere. The highlight of the set was a “song about hipsters,” as Hodges introduced it (the heavily hipster Watt crowd was nonplussed), chronicling a metal band who traded in axes for banjos when the winds of changes shifted. “Everybody’s chasin’ the Americana dream,” he deadpanned, slyly knocking groups like Mumford & Sons, whose recent aesthetic change from suspenders to leather jackets proves Hodges’ point. But ironically, despite the Alabaman and Nashvillian ethos firekid so clearly possesses, one could easily lump them in with the very same bro country/brograss movements that irk them.
The song about hipsters even seemed to defend bro country at one point, noting that if Hank Williams is spinning in his grave, it’s not due to what’s happening in Nashville. Any way you slice it, roots music is going through growing pains and identity crises out the wazoo these days, and firekid are a perfect example. The group’s Nashville relocation, and its old and new ways of doing things, were on full display in their songs like “Getaway Car” and “Lay By Me”. The group even covered pop hits like “Bang Bang” and “FourFiveSeconds”, albeit a little less powerfully than the songs’ originally tigresses – if you’re gonna cover Ariana or Rihanna, you’ve gotta COMMIT. Songs where Hodges’ guitar playing was front and center were miles ahead of the sample- and synth-laden ones – it didn’t help that the 40 Watt’s continuing sound problems drowned out his vocals and overpowered the drums. Fortunately, as Hodges revealed in our recent firekid interview, their upcoming record will heavily showcase his flatpicking. But no matter where your chronological preferences lie, this is quite literally a band like no other.
Record Store Day 2015, an annual event held on the third Saturday of April, is fast approaching. The holiday has grown each year since its 2007 inception, and some horrible folks are even starting things early by gouging prices on eBay. But do not lose heart, Young Waxhopper: this is a day meant to celebrate independent record stores, so to squash the scalpers, all you have to do is wait until April 18, then just show up.
Though the problematic aspects and downsides of Record Store Day – as well as the vinyl comeback at large – have been well-documented, it’s still fun for fans of analog (fanalogs?) to come together on common ground and jockey for position to snag the coolest ‘sclusie. Maybe that’s just my competitive streak talking, though. The full list of exclusive RSD releases can be found at the event’s website, but we have lovingly compiled some highlights you should be sure to obtain.
As always, don’t forget about the $1 used bins, the vanishing compact disc, or cassette tapes, apparently. You can also just use the day as an excuse to catch up your non-exclusive collection, which is a more impactful contribution to your brick and mortar’s bottom line.
Father John Misty
Father John Misty‘s latest record I Love You, Honeybear is a meta ode to his wife and soulmate, so his contribution is a fittingly heart-shaped red 7″ acoustic version of the album’s titular track.
St. Paul and the Broken Bones
Speaking of funkily shaped slabs of melodies, St. Paul and the Broken Bones are putting out a 12″ single of covers recorded live at the Alabama Theatre… and shaped like Alabama. It remains to be seen if either of these will play on the average turntable, but it would be really embarrassing for all involved parties if they didn’t.
The Pizza Underground
For some wonderful reason, The Pizza Underground is still definitely a thing, and have recorded classics like “Pizza Gal”, “I’m Waiting For Delivery Man”, and “Take A Bite of The Wild Slice” to vinyl for the first time.
RPM Turntable Baseball
Following in the footsteps of last year’s RPM football, this year we’ll get RPM Turntable Baseball. It’s a two player game which probably gets old real fast, but still, it’s vinyl baseball!!!!!
Lullaby Renditions of the Grateful Dead
As you may have caught on, this writer’s favorite part of RSD is the Camus-esque absurdity of it all. So next up is Lullaby Renditions of the Grateful Dead, whose cover features a baby version of the band’s distinguished cartoon bear. Aww!
The White Stripes
But there’s real music stuff happening too. 2013 RSD ambassador Jack White has offered up The White Stripes‘ Get Behind Me Satan for its first commercial vinyl release EVER. Jack White/Third Man Records obsessives rejoiced at this announcement, because until now it’s only been sold for $500 at the label’s Nashville storefront.
The Zombies
Emblematic 60s poppers The Zombies are still touring regularly, and now we’re being treated to their never-before-released follow up to Odessey And Oracle. This may be their Pinkerton, so prepare yourselves.
Midlake
Midlake are releasing live recordings from a hometown show in Denton, TX., and you should buy it because Midlake are great, and you don’t need much justification beyond that. (Although it also comes with DVD concert footage.)
Violent Femmes
Violent Femmes recently released “Love Love Love Love Love”, their first new music in 17 years; now it’ll be available on vinyl along with three other new & definitely not self-deprecating songs: “Happy New Year Next Year”, “Good At/For Nothing”, and “Fast Horses”.
Ryan Adams
It’s hard to keep an unreleased Ryan Adams track down, and even though his fans must be exhausted buying all this music, it’s hard for the dude to make bad music. The 12″ features an alt take of “Come Pick Me Up” and “When The Rope Gets Tight” from an upcoming deluxe reissue of Heartbreaker.
And now a word from Record Store Day 2015 Ambassador Dave Grohl:
The Ravenna Colt is the side project of former My Morning Jacket guitarist Johnny Quaid, who co-founded MMJ with Jim James. He left the group in 2004 after the release of It Still Moves (taking with him the Kentucky farm they used to record on, incidentally changing their sound) and deigned to do what so many good ole boys have done: he moved west to find himself, and… became a carpenter? Yes, he went full Notebook on us.
Fortunately, he didn’t quit writing songs, and eventually had enough material to warrant moving back east to Tennessee, where twang dreams come true. As The Ravenna Colt, Quaid (nee John McQuade, but that doesn’t sound enough like the name of a Captain Planet associate, does it?) released 2010’s Slight Spell.
After that, Quaid moved again to Boise, Idaho and began working on what would become this year’s Terminal Current. This is a record full of lush, warm sounds that mimic Quaid’s own contrails – distinctly southern, but yearning to move toward America’s upper lefthand corners. Don’t get me wrong – My Morning Jacket’s influence is still heavily felt, especially in rhythmic tracks like “National Dander.”
Terminal Current is the same kind of sweetly sad, expansive western Americana that put the Jacket on the map. Yet it bears more resemblance to the more pedal steel-leaning side of contemporary roots music. This album is full of reverbed, lonesome waltzes that your favorite bar plays during closing time, much the same as Son Volt’s peanut shell-sweeping Honky Tonk.
Then again, reverb is beloved on both coasts, is it not? Songs like “Yutu” and “Absolute Contingency (Heartattack)” are the same sort of wavy, pensive beachcore tracks that Real Estate and Built To Spill deal in. Quaid sings of pioneers “With the strangest fear / And a fantastic chance / To leave behind / The filth and crime / And find somethin’ else,” and one gets the sense that he’s talking about his own life’s journey – it’s not insignificant that he left a band he helped create right before they gained enough staying power to reach indie rock’s upper echelon, only to move across the country and become a manual laborer.
Slight Spell obviously explored the emotional fallout that resulted, and Terminal Current is a continuation in some ways. The titular “Terminal Current” is the most explicit expression of the record’s loose plane theme, as its narrator slowly learns the true meaning of that adage about how you can’t go home again. But this record is also full of resolve at its author’s new direction, and sees Quaid get more comfortable in his solo shoes.
In the second single from Tame Impala‘s upcoming record, we find band mastermind Kevin Parker imploring his ladylove that he’s really sorry for hurting her feelings – but he just can’t help it, because he’s a dude.
Okay, pause. The song as a song is sublime Impala – pleasantly sluggish psychedelic garage rock that sounds like it was recorded at the wrong RPM on a vintage tape machine. It’s great music to listen to if you’re laying out, chilling in your room, or – and I’ll say it because we’re all thinking it – doing drugs.
Appealing sonic features aside, the whole premise of the song is a bit of a turn off. It reads like a bad non-apology that excuses bad behavior – “I’m sorry for what I did, but I couldn’t help it; this weak response excuses the same bad behavior in the future. Whew!” If this were being expressed through a veil of self-aware irony, that’s different. But Parker sounds genuinely saddened by his seemingly un-reign in-able self. “I have a conscience and it’s never fooled / But it’s prone to being overruled” he pleads to his woman, claiming to possess an emotional intelligence that he simply chooses to ignore at his convenience. We know you’re better than this, Kev!
Tame Impala’s new record Currents will be released later in 2015 on their new label, Interscope.
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Crowd during Reptar at Georgia Theatre. Photo by Chelsea Kornse
2015 has put another successful Slingshot Festival in the books. Despite hiccups here and there, this year’s festival drew unique and eclectic acts from around the world. Almost every band thanked the festival, and organizer Kai Riedl, for putting together such a fantastic offering, and I’d have to agree. But since we’re all bound by the physical impossibilities of linear time, my only regret is not seeing every act all at once. Where’s a Time-Turner when you need one, right?! Ba dum tsh. Anyways: it’s safe to say that another physical impossibility was having a bad time at any of these shows.
Thursday
Slingshot being a world-focused festival, it was more than appropriate to start things off with groups like Lassine Kouyate. Adam Klein, artist-about-town, has previously traveled to Mali for Peace Corps assignments and to visit friends he’s made there. A couple years ago he decided to go Graceland and record his own versions of traditional West African Mande roots music. He performed some of them at Hendershot’s as a six-piece, singing us songs about rebuilding after genocidal violence and the true price of blood diamonds.
Zarigani$. Photo by Hannah Pap RockiPeelander-Z. Photo by Ryan Myers
Japan Nite is a reliably supersonic experience, and the bands at Live Wire delivered. Zarigani$ was like a Japanese Death From Above 1979, throwing in random psychotic bass-tastic outbursts followed by ska influences and whistle playing. Somehow the vicious low-end punk still had a girly bounce, and even the dads in the crowd got into it. Peelander-Z were their usual colorful selves, playing duckpins and crowdsurfing with an ecstatic audience.
Andy Hull. Photo by Chelsea Kornse
Rounding out a packed first night was Andy Hull of Manchester Orchestra flying solo at the Theatre. Between him, the single guitar, a trained spotlight, and a small crowd, the show was almost uncomfortably intimate. Like a conversation with close friends, he was deeply touched by the fans who showed up – especially when a few requested the deep cut “Colly Strings.” Hull dug into his solo and Manchester Orchestra discographies in backwards chronological order, with passionate and bone-chilling results.
Nosaj Thing. Photo by Christopher Fodera
Meanwhile, DJs like Nosaj Thing and Clark blew minds at the 40 Watt with hypnotic dubstep beats and laser shows that would be enough to seize out a dog. The Watt’s disco ball has never looked better.
Friday
Dream Boat. Photo by Jordan Hampton
Vinyl Mag likes to party – this should be no surprise. So we hosted a couple showcases, the first being at Caledonia on Friday and featuring Dreamboat, Nightmare Air, and a very special Washed Out DJ set.
Dreamboat were one of many of E6 offshoots to play the festival, with John Fernandes on violin. The band’s cosmic pop, Henry VIII-esque chamber pop guitar licks, and vocal harmonies were enough to bliss out the crowd, but the colorful orb projected onto the group made it official: Dreamboat lives up to their name. Think Smoke Faeries with a little bit of U2 bombast thrown in, and you can get the idea – every song left the audience so entranced, we almost forgot to clap.
Nightmare Air. Photo by Hannah Pap Rocki
Up next were Nightmare Air, Dreamboat’s polar opposite. Proclaimed the ‘loudest band in L.A.’, their literally amp-busting amplitude woke up a lulled and contented crowd. Appropriately employing a smoke machine to create some nightmare air, their angular punk-and-stadium rock tunes stared into the void, like a Shiny Toy Guns played through Dinosaur Jr. volume levels.
Washed Out (DJ set). Photo by Hannah Pap Rocki
Finally, Washed Out’s Ernest Greene brought his earnestly (sorry) chill vibes to the small space. Greene combined house, dub, funk, and hazy psych plinks to keep the crowd bobbing. To make things get weird a bit, he brought an hourlong cinema smash featuring disturbing images of dissections and war propaganda and advertisements for companies like Standard Oil, Mazda, and Jell-O. Essentially it was like Mad Men word association on acid (so maybe just a day in the life of Roger Sterling), or a hyperspeed iSpy book for adults only.
Lord Fascinator. Photo by Mercedes Bleth
Over at the Theatre, Lord Fascinator opened things up with his freaky instrumental techno, requiring audience participation in the form of pulling people onstage and dressing them in body suits with attached face masks.
Reptar. Photo by Chelsea Kornse
Up next were Reptar, playing an album release show for their upcoming Joyful Noise Recordings offering Lurid Glow. Somehow the show wasn’t as packed as theirs usually are, but it was just as fun. They played classics like “Cable” and used a giant slingshot (HAH) to shoot t-shirts into the crowd.
Saturday
Saturday saw the continuation of Slingshot’s film contingent, with several movies screened at the Globe for free to all. William And The Windmill tells the amazing and heartwarming story of William Kamkwamba, a Malawian who, at the age of 19, used scrap metal and an outdated book to build his village a water-pumping windmill. Next up was a short called Brooklyn Farmer about the rooftop gardens of New York’s ~coolest~ neighborhood. (Between these first two films, one might get their faith in humanity’s future genuinely restored, which is kind of Slingshot’s whole deal.) Next up was Palimpsest, a quirky short about a house tuner who’s on call if you think your toaster and shower aren’t in the same key. Finally, the last full feature Buttercup Bill is a tense ‘psychosexual romance’ about love, obsession, jealousy, and what it means to be a soulmate.
Vinyl Mag continued to throw down with its second showcase, featuring more E6 greatness in Mind Brains and Nana Grizol. Mind Brains opened things up with impassioned, Circulatory System-aping psychedelic explorations of the soul. Naturally they too had some freaky videography to go along with the experimental sounds, mostly putting bizarre insect habits on display (even though I am deathly terrified of bugs, I watched for you, reader, I WATCHED FOR YOU).
Closing out the early evening, Nana Grizol put the poppier side of E6 on display, with songs that could fit in anywhere in the discography of the Apples In Stereo. They also gave Live Wire’s sound guy a shoutout, and it was well-deserved – sound quality has been spotty in Athens venues recently, but the new management at Live Wire clearly hired a pro.
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Nightmare Air pre-set. Photo by Matt Lief Anderson.
Netflix has tried its creative hand yet again with the first season of Bloodline, a star-packed drama about the true cost of family. The site’s answer to True Detective follows the Rayburns, a Florida Keys family who essentially own their small town. Patriarch Robert (Sam Shepard) and wife Sally (Sissy Spacek) have had an idyllic beachfront inn for over 50 years, which is shared and supported by their children. John (Kyle Chandler, good to see your face again) is the town’s good ole boy deputy; Megan (Linda Cardellini) is a local Jane-of-all-trades lawyer; Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz) is a beach bum boat repairman; and Danny… Danny, played by Ben Mendelsohn, is the eldest and an expat, and his arrival always spells trouble for the tight-knit clan.
When the town wants to honor Robert with a pier dedication, friends and family gather at the inn for the celebration, but Danny’s shadowy presence stirs up painful memories of the past. Episode 1 makes it quite clear that this is a family full of secrets, and the show has no problem taking its sweet time in revealing them.
Bloodline employs TV tactics that fans of Lost, True Detective, and House of Cards will be very familiar with. Most episodes are interspersed with voiceovers courtesy of John, who speaks in vague tones about his family’s wrongdoings. Each episode relies heavily on flashbacks from different characters’ perspectives, painting their guilt and regrets one shade at a time. The flashbacks’ MO is to be doled out piecemeal over the course of an episode, which loosely centers around the character whose memories we’re privy to. Each complete memory, revealed in an episode’s final minutes, is another piece to solving the Rayburn puzzle.
These tricks put the audience in the uncomfortable position of being at the mercy of characters who know more than we do, and this is a show that lords that fact over us. In an age where binge-watching is the norm – Netflix is no fool and has designed its shows to cater accordingly – narrative structures change, which explains the tantalizingly slow pace here. There is something to be said for making viewers wait even while they’re packing 13 episodes into a weekend.
However, the presumed (but not shared) context determined by voiceovers and flashbacks raises a couple of problems. One, the show is pretty much destined to have a too-cool-for-school vibe, a la the “divine truth of the universe” dorm musings on True Detective. Two, details are bound to get glossed over or hurriedly tossed at us. It’s not made clear until the final episodes that Danny’s love interest, Chelsea (HELL YES Chloë Sevigny), is a nurse, and the show does a poor job of establishing that Megan’s longtime boyfriend, Marco (Enrique Murciano), is also John’s partner. He needs one, because John is a truly terrible detective, putting little effort into his requisite dead girls case and somehow needing to ask another detective about the statute of limitations on giving false testimony. Shows should never spoonfeed, but dragging things out for the sake of continuous viewership is sadistic.
As you could probably guess from the cast, the acting is phenomenal. So much so that it sometimes painfully underlines the scripts’ weaknesses. Bloodline is a drama, so a lot gets sacrificed for the dramatic. During a pivotal scene where Sally tells John about Robert’s childhood, the dialogue feels stilted and overcooked; throughout, the writers seem trigger-happy about dropping f-bombs, even when it doesn’t add to character development or scene intensity. Most of John’s voiceovers are too ambiguous, obvious, or overdramatic to warrant necessity. And if I hear phrases like, “It’s what dad would want,” or “Wow, it’s so beautiful here” one more time in S2… well, I have no backup threat, but CHANGE THE RECORD. With a cast of this calibre, it would behoove the writers to mix it up a bit – starting with giving Spacek a wider role than sitting in a rocking chair staring wistfully into the ocean’s middle distance.
All that being said, it’s inherently compelling to watch. Danny is a loathsome scumbag, and despite everything that’s been done to him, he’s impossible to root for, and hate-watching is addictive. His slimy arrogance and sweaty wifebeaters are freakin’ repulsive (strangely, there are many parallels between him and the now-super-infamous Robert Durst – both are murderers and drug users, both have vendettas against their wealthy families, and both are visibly deranged). And the photography and cinematography are flawless, making the show aesthetically appealing enough to make up for its shortcomings.
It remains to be seen whether Netflix renews Bloodline for a second season. They would be crazy not to given how the finale ended, and despite the currently uncertain fate of Lilyhammer, none of their original programs have been axed. Given Bloodline‘s instant popularity, there’s no reason they’d change their formula, either. As Vox pointed out, the very craft of storytelling has been sacrificed for binge-friendly cliffhangers, which is good for business – the sooner you finish the season, the sooner you can re-watch it.
As I said earlier, this seems to be Netflix’s attempt at True Detective‘s massive success. Both shows contain deeply wounded characters who drink to forget the death-y pains of the past; both frequently get high on their own philosophy; both are set in the initially idyllic, unnervingly loamy swamps of the south; and both use those settings as omniscient extra characters that juxtapose natural beauty with humanity’s monstrosities. But even if imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, it means always being a step behind.
