Monthly Archives: July 2012

Sibling duo JEFF the Brotherhood have been honing their blend of rock, pop, raucousness and psychedelia for quite some time. Staying power and a relentless touring schedule has helped them secure a major label deal, and Hypnotic Nights emphasizes the pair’s penchant for melody over their fitful desire to take it outside, a somewhat disappointing circumstance remedied substantially by their simple gift with a hook. Those who love when the pop meets the rock however, will consider it good medicine.

Not to be deliberately obscure, but I guess my pick for the best two-piece band ever is Seattle’s fabulous The Smashchords, a wild and wooly pair of post-Link Wray u-ground wackos that employed a still startlingly conceived and surprisingly effective two guitar lineup and released a wondrously zesty seven-song self-titled mini-LP on the custom built Rough Trade subsidiary Smash Trade way back in 1981 that along with two self-issued cassettes is absolutely scarce these days; their entire recorded output persistently cries out for a nice reissue package from some benevolent corner of the record industry.

My reasoning for picking The Smashchords is predominantly concerned with the high quality of their sounds, but there is also the undeniable aspect of pure nerve in the duo’s music, an admirable daring that makes the impulse to award them with the mantle of finest two-piece even more attractive. They certainly have some stiff competition, though; Flat Duo Jets, Lightning Bolt, The White Stripes, and The Black Keys all spring to immediate mind.

But all those runners-up employ drums in their overall strategy, a maneuver quite sensible in helping a stripped-down attack to connect as something other than mere novelty; tough and pure rockabilly-inspired mania, mayhem-inducing noise mulch and deep strains of Americana, blues and pop inflated with enough rhythmic gusto to fill a stadium with good natured frenzy.

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When we first met KITTEN in 2010, we were well, …smitten. So much so that frontwoman Chloe Chaidez took over TVD for a week as the band went from CMJ to the UK. KITTEN had just released their first EP “Sunday School,” and Chaidez was already coming into her own Karen-O-meets-Cat-Power-meets-Annie-Lennox-meets-something-completely-new at 15 years old.

Fast forward two years and KITTEN has kicked off a Summer tour with The Pomegranates and has a new EP “Cut It Out” hitting store shelves on August 28, and a full-length album due out early 2013. Just yesterday KITTEN released a banging new track off the August EP, “Japanese Eyes.”

Chaidez, now 17, has used the past two years to hone her mature vocals, badass vibe, and KITTEN as a band. Chloe confides she’s “really fortunate” to pursue her love of music having picked up her first instrument, a bass, at 10. When it comes to making music, “It’s not something I thought of. ‘Oh this is what I like, I want to do this,’” she said.

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After two LPs featuring strong songs and the virtue of sonic consistency, the Welsh unit Future of the Left deliver a new album of peaks and valleys brought on by the admirable desire for growth. If The Plot Against Common Sense, which sees vinyl release on July 17th, is the least successful of their recordings thus far, it also presents a band disinterested in resting on their laurels.

Back around the start of this once fresh millennium Mclusky (or if you prefer, mclusky) hit the public consciousness with truly impressive intensity. The band exploded out of the gate with such well calibrated and noisy post-hardcore fury that after hearing a few of their tracks a handful of times I faultily assumed their music was released under the aegis of a racket-loving American label like Touch and Go.

Indeed, they would’ve fit right into the agenda of Corey Rusk’s enterprise, particularly in the years ’89 to ’94 or thereabouts. Huge yet agile and oozing pissed-off intelligence, they really felt like a band reared in Chicago or the Twin Cities or even deep in the bowels of Texas. But no, they were from Cardiff, Wales and had been signed up by the tastemakers at the rather excellent Too Pure imprint, home of PJ Harvey and Stereolab but also such lesser known worthies as Moonshake, Th’ Faith Healers, Pram, and Scout Niblett.

It was a roster in which Mclusky stood out while fitting in very well. And once acquainted with their status as Brits the band came into sharp, vivid focus. Anybody desiring a one album primer in what made them such a big deal is advised to check out the band’s superb second album Do Dallas, their most highly regarded record mainly because it comes hurdling out of the speakers like a radioactive cannonball, opener “Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues” finding singer/guitarist Andrew “Falco” Falkous swaggering and seething like a fascinating, foulmouthed lunatic. And from that immediate highpoint Do Dallas manages to easily avoid letdown, a notable feat as a decade has elapsed since its release.

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Once again, we’ve got another far-out slab o’ wax to grace your turntable. This one is the self-titled debut from a band called Anywhere. You might even call it a super-group. Read on for the full scoop on Anywhere.

“Anywhere began as a LA/SF collaborative project started by musicians Christian Eric Beaulieu and Cedric Bixler Zavala. Fresh off years of writing and touring as co-founder of Bay Area acid punk extremists Triclops!, Christian decided to immerse himself in the resonant universe of acoustic guitar and began performing solo under the moniker Liquid Indian.

In early 2010 while in Los Angeles to perform at an art opening of mutual friend artist Sonny Kay, he befriended Cedric (singer of The Mars Volta) who was a DJ for the event. The two exchanged numbers and planned to record something acoustic rooted in the open tuning, eastern raga style Christian was delving into. Months later the pair met in Los Angeles, enlisted the mobile engineering talent of Toshi Kasai (Big Business) and tracked the new material in 2 days at The Melvins practice space in downtown Los Angeles. During that same visit Christian played live on “The Watt from Pedro Show” as the musical guest of Mike Watt (of The Stooges, fIREHOSE, Minutemen).

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“I can still remember the feeling of holding that very first Beatles album in my hands. I was holding a piece, a real tangible piece, of the soul of the band that changed the world.”

“The first record I bought was Meet The Beatles. It was an immediate next-day follow-up to watching The Beatles on Ed Sullivan in 1964; I felt with every ounce of my 12-year-old being that my life had just been changed forever! I knew what I was going to do for the rest of my life, play music for people. Help people feel alive and vibrant!

The energy around this synthesis of musical traditions brought forth by the four Liverpool chaps was transcendent for me. I was no longer an adolescent school boy from New Jersey, I saw myself in a new light—I was someone who could change the world with my music!

From that day on, it was not about celebrity or fame, it was about making people feel. It was about creating something that was so alive that it also made others feel it. It was about helping myself and others rise above the mundane; above the everyday grind and get in contact with the kind of joy that I felt emanating from the grooves.

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