Pete and the Pirates - One Thousand Pictures (Stolen Recordings/U.K.)

I guess they’re called Pete and the Pirates because they have two guys named Pete in the band. Otherwise, who knows, they might have been called Tom and the Tyrants (the lead singer’s name is Thomas Sanders). Frankly, it doesn’t seem like a name that was given a lot of thought. But what’s in a name; it’s what’s in the grooves, as they used to say when there were grooves. But I digress.

It’s their second album, you see, and it’s entitled One Thousand Pictures. And a stumble or two notwithstanding it’s really, really good. I suppose by the industrial standards of British rock they’d be considered an ‘indie’ band. But let me tell you right now – that means something very different with respect to music than it does in the States. Where Amer-indie rock is dominated by post-graduates cooking up genre jokes and goofball aesthetic strategies, young British musicians by and large aren’t afraid of: a) melody and b) making records that sound like they were actually trying to make the songs sound good. Crazy, I know. Hell, I’m even getting aural fatigue from my beloved American garage-rock. Seriously, does everybody have to shoot for a sonic spectrum that tries, usually in vain, to aspire to the sound limitations of a scratchy Sixties rhythm ‘n’ blues single? A Thousand Pictures, without being in the least ‘over-produced,’ sounds big. You can hear all the parts, distinguish the voices – the production enhances the performances. End of rant.

Vaccines - What Did You Expect From the Vaccines? (Columbia)

 

The Vaccines life changing qualities were hyped in the NME (New Musical Express), the British rock rag especially inclined to such raves. I think their writer said something about the Vaccines being the ‘next great guitar band,’ as if he could necessarily name the last one. Of course Mr. Brit-crit may soon turn on the Vaccines like a scorned lover; that’s pretty standard operating procedure among his breed. But, I thank him nevertheless for the tip. Sure I’ve been led down the garden path to this week’s band of the decade a few too many times, but it’s also where I first heard of the Libertines. So, you take the pointless detours along with the grand discoveries.

I downloaded all the free junk I could by the Vaccines. It was good enough to establish a qualified enthusiasm for hearing their, as yet at that point, unreleased debut What Did You Expect from the Vaccines?. Despite first impressions that confirmed certain indie-guitar band-by-the-numbers expectations (borrow from cool, iconic sources, and then do no harm), I quickly became convinced that the Vaccines are more than a superficial, formal pleasure.

Reverberations: New Lost Souls - Unwanted Gold (local release)

Reverberations: New Lost Souls - Unwanted Gold (local release): "The New Lost Souls are indeed a family band. Guitarist Chris Teasley met wife Sara, the band’s drummer, when they both exhibited paintings ..."

New Lost Souls - Unwanted Gold (local release)

The New Lost Souls are indeed a family band. Guitarist Chris Teasley met wife Sara, the band’s drummer, when they both exhibited paintings at a local gallery opening. Sara studied painting at the Kansas City Art Institute. After travels that included a five-year residence in Boston (where Chris studied art), the couple returned to Kansas City. They wooed Sara’s brother, bassist Andy Jordan, from New York to play in the group.

What started as a few friends blasting old Kinks songs gradually became a band devoted to writing and arranging original material. Unwanted Gold, the New Lost Souls’ debut, isn’t a knock your socks off at first listen record. Sometimes, frankly, those records fade quickly. Unwanted Gold is a grower, an album whose modest charms grow on you as you gradually appreciate what a steady, smart, rocking piece of work it is.

EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints (Souterrain Transmissions)

 I paid limited attention to Erika M. Anderson’s passage through the ensembles Amps for Christ andGowns. I’m not even sure I know what AFC tracks she contributed to. Their stuff only engages me a little. I couldn’t call myself a fan. And while I enjoyed part of Red State, the album Anderson and her collaborator Ezra Buchla recorded as Gowns in 2008, I wasn’t, you know, transformed. With Past Life of Martyred Saints I surrender.

As EMA (Erika M. Anderson), Anderson takes all the archetypal, iconic female artist references, puts them in a bag, shakes them up and out spills something that’s sounds influenced, for sure, but finally unique. Let’s name them: you know, get it out of the way (we’ll return to the relevant ones where necessary) – Patti  Smith, PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Cat Power, Courtney Love (nah, sorry, don’t hear it – although I do hear Kurt). Forget about that, though. Past Life Martyred Saints is a cogent, compelling work and a doozy of a solo debut from EMA. Anderson has a sympathetic supporting cast, but she’s responsible for the songs, lead vocals and plenty of guitars. Buchla remains as a central contributor on this record, spreading plenty of John Cale magic (keys and viola) that occasionally evokes the sound of vintage Nico.

Alex Turner - Submarine (Domino)

Alex Turner always impressed me as a guy who could be a character in a Nick Hornby novel, a highly individual, but still archetypal wounded post-adolescent observer - the best narrators often the ones observing the committed missteps of others.

Turner’s no rube. His parents were teachers, his dad Music, his mom German. Turner himself has said that he’d have pursued studies in English at the University of Manchester had his year off to take a shot at playing music not paid off. Of course it did pay off. The Arctic Monkeys are as big as it gets in the U.K and have made serious commercial inroads in the States. Their fourth studio album Suck it and See is out soon, their fourth in five years. The band tours relentlessly.

None of this has kept Turner busy enough it seems. His collaboration with Miles Kane and James Ford in the Last of the Shadow Puppets struck a bittersweet Sixties/Seventies obsessed tone with Beatles, Bowie and Scott Walker inspirations. Compared to the blazing guitar intensity of the Monkeys, Age of the Understatement was by turns a wistful and rueful set, an urchin’s take on beau monde. More stripped down in arrangement than Understatement, Turner’s songs for the film Submarine feature two guitars, a dash of keyboards and the rare drum track. Not having seen the film (the tale of an alienated teenage boy in Swansea who is romancing a troubled young girl and whose parents are in marital disarray) I can’t really comment on how the songs work in the film. But they stand by themselves splendidly.

Bambi Kino - s/t (Tapete)

 Bambi Kino was the name of the theater that provided exceedingly modest accommodations for the young Liverpudlians (George Harrison was an “illegal” seventeen years of age) known as the Beatles when they began their legendary tenure in Hamburg, Germany. They first played the Indra club, later the Kaiserkeller, Top Ten, and Star Club, as they worked their way up the rough and rowdy Hamburg club circuit.

Bambi Kino is also the name of a band of American rock veterans (members of Guided by Voices, Nada Surf, Cat Power, and Maplewood) obsessed with recreating the sound that a formative Fab Four blasted out of the Indra club. For the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles Indra/Hamburg debut, Bambi Kino (the band) played several dates at the Indra with a repertoire comprised entirely of songs that the Beatles played from that period.

White Fence - White Fence is Growing Faith (Woodsist)

 

He is White Fence. He’s the first among equals in Darker My Love. And he’s just hired on as a gun with the Strange Boys. Tim Presley is a busy guy. Compared to Darker My Love, Presley’s day job, the music on White Fence Is Growing Faith sounds pretty mid-fi and slap-dash. What it shares with DML is an almost encyclopedic appreciation for late Sixties rock sounds and styles – that and a song conscious sensibility. Listen closer, it’s clear that however home studio sounding White Fence’s music is, Presley puts a lot of love into the playing and presentation of the sixteen pop nuggets on Is Growing Faith. What at first reminds of Alex Chilton’s Like Flies on Sherbert (yeah, Alex used an ‘r’) is, in fact, not bashed out, but a meticulous one-man band studio concoction, rough edges retained for sheer verve.

Robert Scott - Ends Run Together (Flying Nun/New Zealand)

Ends Run Together by Robert Scott is a really terrific record. You probably haven’t heard it. You probably won’t, unless I encourage you sufficiently to pursue it. I hope I do.

The third release from New Zealand’s rejuvenated Flying Nun (Bats, Clean, Chills, Verlaines, etc.) imprint, it should be a release that puts the label back in the forefront of indie-rock perception, whether the mechanics of media and distribution allow for that is another thing. The music Robert Scott makes isn’t the issue. It’s there.

Scott has an extensive alternative pedigree. As the on again, off again bassist for the Clean, a Kiwi band with a fractured career trajectory who played the recent Scion Garage Fest in Lawrence (Oct. 2010), but primarily as the main singer-songwriter-guitarist in the Bats. The Bats, given Scott’s restless ways, have recorded intermittently since 1982, taking the decade between 1995 and 2005, for instance, off. Perhaps this contributes to their lack of career momentum, but the deeper truth is that they make music that’s too subtle, whose melancholy and grace is a bit too elusive for a mass audience in any event. It’s great stuff, though. Check out Daddy’s Highway from 1987 or At the National Grid (2005) to hear fine examples of their sound, and to hear how slightly, gradually they’ve morphed from their aesthetic. In a sense they share a jangly, folk-rock sensibility with contemporaries like Robyn Hitchcock, even R.E.M. Their melodic drone was an inspiration to bands like Yo La Tengo and Pavement; there’s something at once listless and forceful about the band’s energy, narcotic and seductive.

Me, the Black Angels at the Bottleneck, in Back to Rockville, KC Star music blog, thanks to Tim Finn

Review: The Black Angels

Alex Maas of the Black Angels. Photo courtesy of Nate Fors.
Before the Black Angels performance on Saturday night at the Bottleneck in Lawrence they treated an unsuspecting capacity crowd to a rocking history lesson, playing a lengthy set of Bo Diddley sides over the public address system.

Sure, much has been made of the Angels’ Velvet Underground inspirations. They took their name from a track off of the “Velvet Underground and Nico” album, and their logo incorporates an image of Nico. But blasting Diddley was their way of saying that the great drone they so expertly extend predates Lou Reed and company, and where there’s sonic hypnosis, Bo is in the house. 

 

The Black Angels took the stage to a recording of an address by President John F. Kennedy, speaking before Congress in 1961 and setting forth the goal of placing an American on the moon.

There are many ghosts in the Black Angels music, but none bigger than the decade of the 60s itself. Opening with two tracks from the band‘s debut “Passover”  -- “Bloodhounds on My Trail and “The Sniper at the Gates of Heaven” -- the band established a relentless throb that evoked the Velvets, Doors and the 13^th Floor Elevators.

Their third selection, “Sniper” (noted as “new sniper” in their set list), and two more songs from their newest release “Phosphene Dream,” maintained the hypnotic pace while introducing the rich melodic pop vein developed on their third album.  “Haunting at 1300 McKinley" was especially impressive, the band getting on it’s Music Machine/Seeds groove.

The Black Angels swap instruments (guitar, 12-string, bass, various electric keyboards) frequently and with intuitive skill; Nate Ryan’s 12-string work furnished that “All Tomorrow’s Parties” glimmer on certain songs, while Christian Bland’s piercing leads combined Mike Bloomfield blues bite (including some nifty slide work) with Jason Pierce’s (Spaceman 3) searing neo-psychedelia. He drove home the “Lucifer Sam” inspired riff from ”Bad Vibrations” with touch and authority.

Alex Maas, the bearded and capped front man, sang like Roky Erickson wrestling Ozzy to the ground for peeing on the Alamo. His stage presence is commanding without shedding his ‘one of the band’ solidarity. Stephanie Bailey’s drumming drives the band – isolate on her and you can hear how studiously arranged is the band’s menace.

The predominance of songs from “Phosphene Dream,” with their heavier emphasis on pop thrills, provided just the right balance of relief from the dark, two-chord vibe of the band’s early material. “Yellow Elevator” reminded that the Sixties featured sunshine along with apocalypse, that the Doors, no strangers to the dark side, also churned out agreeable ditties like “Take it as it Comes” and “Twentieth Century Fox.”
At the conclusion of the band’s hour-plus set the capacity crowd demanded an encore. The Black Angels obliged with a mini-set, including “Telephone,” perhaps the giddiest number from “Phosphene Dream,” a stone charmer of lysergic dimensions, but jubilantly rooted in jug band music. Throughout the show, Maas and Bland addressed the crowd occasionally, and with a sweetness that humanized their highly stylized dark themes ("Gimme Shelter" on overdrive) the band specializes in.

The Black Angels understand that there’s a balance to be struck between entertainment and what Jim Morrison called “an hour for magic” – an opportunity for both artist and audience to be transported to alternate, even sacred spaces, then brought back drained and satisfied. It’s a neat trick, but one that the Black Angels pull of brilliantly.

Lawrence’s L5 opened the show, showing that plundering the post-Velvet Underground style-book is collegiate sport; referencing VU and “Nuggets” are this generation’s version of the Harry Smith anthology. Evoking the Fall, Orange Juice, and Dream Syndicate (the gamut of post-VU sounds), L5 played with panache; their songs exhibiting real structure and melodic interest.

The Suuns followed them with a set that was long on intros, and short on songs. With singer Brian Shemie sounding like a tune-challenged version of Placebo’s Brian Molko, their Battles-cum-Krautrock ditties mostly demonstrated that “Sister Ray” (oh, those inevitable Velvets references) minus narrative and release is just tension, and that tension without release is dull.

In any event the evening was about the Black Angels. The full house (heavy on dudes) that packed the Bottleneck left buzzing and satisfied.
| Steve Wilson, Special to The Star