The Ampeater Review

I work at a desk. It’s a big long desk, and most of the time I have it all to myself. So, I lis­ten to music all day long. Some­times I go on shuf­fle adven­tures, some­times I let whole albums or com­pi­la­tions play through, but more often than not I get stuck on a song that becomes an anthem of sorts for the day. I get so hooked, so intensely enthused about a sin­gle musi­cal event that I sel­dom make it all the way through on the first attempt. After sev­eral rep­e­ti­tions of the first verse and cho­rus I finally let it play to com­ple­tion, and then again, and again. When I find a gem like this, it goes in a spe­cial playlist. The whole process repeats until the playlist swells to over an hour, at which point I send the whole damn thing out to friends as Force Music On You (FMOU) vol­ume X. It’s tough to send folks music with­out over­tones of pre­ten­sion, so I eschew any greater sense of order and present the whole thing alpha­bet­i­cally by artist, with lit­tle to no con­text or expla­na­tion. Of the hun­dred or so peo­ple who sub­scribe, about 17 down­load the mix, I would guess maybe 10 actu­ally lis­ten to it, and 2 or 3 send me a note explain­ing why they loved or hated a par­tic­u­lar song. On the week I included All Fox’s “Fit To Advise”, I received 9 e-mails ask­ing if I could send over the com­plete album, and 7 follow-up emails ask­ing if I had any more All Fox albums. It’s fairly rare for me to include an Ampeater band in an FMOU, let alone one that’s still pend­ing con­sid­er­a­tion for a review. And yet, All Fox defied prece­dence and spread like wild­fire from the Ampeater sub­mis­sions box to my per­sonal favorites playlist, to the “most played” sec­tion of my clos­est friends’ iTunes. We do a lot of explain­ing here on Ampeater, in an attempt to jus­tify exactly why a cer­tain artist mer­its such a bright spot­light of intel­lec­tual scrutiny, but All Fox needs no coax­ing to break through the shell of rel­a­tive obscu­rity. The music cat­a­pults itself across what­ever divide sup­pos­edly exists between artists and lis­ten­ers, and once it’s play­ing you have lit­tle choice left but to move and be moved by it.

All Fox is pri­mar­ily Alex Fox Tschan, a 25 year old from Deltaville, VA who cites his father as his great­est hero, and was very nearly Dr. Alex Tschan, but for a bold deci­sion to redi­rect his sights towards Brook­lyn and a sub­se­quent renais­sance in his cre­ative fac­ul­ties. He left Vir­ginia Tech in 2008 with a degree in Bio­chem­istry, but with a pen­chant for deep thought and a sense that there remained some­thing unful­filled in his musi­cal poten­tial. Tschan has been tak­ing ten­ta­tive stabs at music mak­ing for the last ten years, but only saw his tal­ent develop dur­ing col­lege, as he found con­fi­dence in his once timid voice and real­ized that he would only (and could only) full explore the range pos­si­bil­i­ties avail­able to him if he focused solely on his craft. Med­ical school isn’t exactly known for the range of diver­sions avail­able dur­ing one’s free time, so he put his foot down and kicked a hitch in the hith­erto straight-arrow path his life had taken to date. Work­ing crap jobs for crap pay, Tschan made use of the time afforded to him by a flex­i­ble sched­ule to make music. In an inter­view with Sweet Tea Pump­kin Pie, he reflected, “For me, despite being broke, it has given me more energy and hap­pi­ness to put towards my friend­ships, ideas, poems, songs, etc. than I could have ever dreamed. It has been the most reward­ing and pro­lific time of my life, and it feels like it’s just starting.”

Leav­ing Alex Tschan at home in Vir­ginia, it was All Fox that made the migra­tion to Brook­lyn, and he made it with an aston­ish­ing purity of intent. Long since a mecca for ris­ing stars, New York has a ten­dency to attract the kind of ass­holes who buy gui­tars to “hit it big”, “make bank”, and “get laid”. All Fox came to our fair town with the hope of grow­ing his art, escap­ing parental and soci­etal expec­ta­tions, and dis­cov­er­ing what it is that makes music a suc­cess­ful medium for the trans­mis­sion of ideas and emo­tions. Whether it’s work on his lat­est LP, screen­play, poem, or com­mu­nity project, All Fox has the insight of a gen­uine artist, and the ded­i­ca­tion to pro­duce work at a pro­lific rate. When I last wrote him about his Ampeater sub­mis­sion, he had not one, not two, but sev­eral albums worth of mate­r­ial for my perusal that had been com­pleted in the months since his orig­i­nal sub­mis­sion. The songs on this 7-inch are culled from his first full-length solo album Peace­ful Heart. Per­formed with a coterie of musi­cians on a huge vari­ety of instru­ments, the album lands some­where between Suf­jan Stevens circa 2005 and Ani­mal Col­lec­tive arranged for cham­ber orches­tra. Influ­ences range from Sam Cooke to Walt Whit­man, and seep out into the music as it skirts the edges of one’s expec­ta­tions. All Fox’s songs assume a kind of crys­talline struc­ture, dart­ing here and there with the con­fi­dence that its mes­sage can be con­veyed in a more sophis­ti­cated man­ner than most pop songs pre­sume. He goes so far as to assume an intel­li­gent lis­tener, or at the very least one that leaves a chan­nel open for sug­ges­tion. Songs can take a num­ber of approaches to sat­is­fy­ing lis­ten­ers. Some­times they’re lin­ear, mov­ing from Point A to Point B in a swell that peaks and then recedes; some­times they’re cir­cu­lar, pro­gress­ing in closed sequen­tial loops of verse, pre cho­rus, and cho­rus; but some­times they’re a won­der­ful pas­tiche of influ­ences, atti­tudes, and impulses that sug­gest more than define the final des­ti­na­tion of a par­tic­u­lar song­space. It’s this lat­ter mode that rep­re­sents the pre­dom­i­nant approach used by All Fox, and it’s indica­tive of a gen­uinely great mind at work, craft­ing some­thing potent on a higher order than the blues and folk based idioms that are mixed so thor­oughly with Amer­i­can soil you can prac­ti­cally taste them in a McDon­alds ham­burger. All Fox makes music that’s ever so slightly for­eign to the aver­age Joe, but that nev­er­the­less res­onates deeply with some­thing fun­da­men­tal in the human spirit.

In his Ampeater sub­mis­sion, All Fox included a link to down­load the full album, com­plete with lyric sheets for each song. Tschan’s words are poetic, and it’s but a small stretch to assume that many of them might have begun as actual poems. I had the chance to speak with Alex on the phone, and he came across as part scholar, part artist, and part philoso­pher, dis­pens­ing wis­dom on music (both his own and other people’s) with a kind of insight and reflec­tion that’s rare in young musi­cians. He explained, “a poem, and a song, and a story, a piece of art, a movie, they’re all the same thing–they could all be called ‘Fit to Advise’”. It’s the notion of trans­fer­ral across media, that a song pos­sesses an essence that can be con­veyed in another form. It’s a more extreme ver­sion of the reduc­tion that hap­pens between record and stage; a great sym­phonic epic per­formed on solo acoustic gui­tar is still that same song, its essence is just cap­tured using a dif­fer­ent set of tools. I get the sense that All Fox would make music with the world if he could wrap his hands around moun­tains and smash them together. He explained, “Melodies hap­pen in my head, and it’s my job to make sure I get them down. Some­times I hear whole songs, fully orches­trated, but I don’t always have the tools to make them a real­ity.” The suc­cess of A-side “Fit To Advise” is in join­ing together odd rhyth­mic frag­ments into a song struc­ture that’s wholly unortho­dox and yet cap­tures lis­ten­ers in an organic flow from sec­tion to sec­tion. It’s almost clas­si­cal in its motif-oriented com­po­si­tion, intro­duc­ing sound objects or tex­tures that grow, evolve, and re-appear at var­i­ous points through­out the song. Every word, every sound is inten­tional. When you lis­ten, focus not only on the music or lyrics, but on the inter­sec­tion of the two. Pay atten­tion to how the sound­scape col­ors the text, and whether it remains con­stant or fluc­tu­ates across mul­ti­ple rep­e­ti­tions. There’s mean­ing stuffed into every crevice of this song, and I ques­tion whether I’m “Fit to Advise” (har har) on the author’s pri­mary intent, or whether there even exists such a thing in the com­pli­cated brain of Alex Tschan, but I nev­er­the­less present the lyrics here for your con­sid­er­a­tion as you listen:

Hey lit­tle brother! Let’s go for a ride!
But clean that look off your eyes first.
Man, I told you before! … if i’m fit to drive, then I am sure as hell fit to advise you.

Hey lit­tle brother, whatcha got on your mind???
I guar­an­tee you I’ve been below that line.
So I wouldn’t worry!
Between drugs & women… you’ll be doin’ alright if at least one ain’t hard to find.

I know you burn with desire, but easy tiger, she’s so lovely & com­plex.
Please, take my advice before you start…

I know you’re dying to try it, but easy tiger… have you researched its full effects?
Please, take my advice before you start…

And if you’re ever feel­ing expired! Well, easy tiger, it goes one right through the head!
Please, take my advice before you start…

B-Side “Engel­hard Gro­cery 1997: Mama’s Outta Stamps” is a beau­ti­ful ascent to an extended instru­men­tal outro. After a sin­gle verse we’re lifted up by lay­ered gui­tars, strings,  and scat­tered per­cus­sion. It’s a cathar­tic release after the rel­a­tive chaos of “Fit to Advise”. I was recently asked by a music lov­ing friend if elec­tronic instru­ments were now the pre­dom­i­nant method of cre­at­ing music. The answer is cer­tainly “no”, but that’s almost beside the point. That some peo­ple even con­sider this a binary ques­tion is my main con­cern, and a con­tin­ued source of bewil­der­ment to me. Most of All Fox’s songs exist in a realm that pull heav­ily from both sides of this spectrum–acoustic ban­jos min­gle with heav­ily processed elec­tric gui­tars, dig­i­tal pro­duc­tion, orches­tral strings (some­times elec­tri­fied), and even oboe. Most peo­ple develop pro­fi­ciency with a tool and then only later dis­cover the cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties made pos­si­ble by the skills they’ve acquired. All Fox turns this par­a­digm on its head and brings arti­facts into being almost as an act of immac­u­late cre­ation, inspired by noth­ing more than some whis­per in the back of his thoughts that he’s then able to har­ness and make real. The result is not only praise­wor­thy but almost envi­able. He’s cur­rently work­ing as part of a col­lec­tive, inspired by the psy­chol­ogy of Jung and the poetry of Rumi. I’ve been sworn to secrecy on the details of the oper­a­tion, but there are excit­ing things com­ing our way from All Fox, so stay tuned while he learns to move moun­tains. In the interim, you can down­load the com­plete album at Band­Camp for $8, or save some dough and steal it from this artist-endorsed Medi­aFire link.

Ben Heller

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]

Issued almost two years ago on Novem­ber 30th 2009, AEM029 intro­duced The Unsa­cred Hearts as a band in the midst of a sea change, caught between their early roots as a fire­brand post-punk out­fit from Blue Point Long Island and an uncer­tain future as a group of poet­i­cally inclined and musi­cally intel­li­gent adults with jobs, law degrees, wives, and chil­dren. For the last five years The Unsa­cred Hearts have been work­ing towards their lat­est album, fix­ing on it like a dis­tant star that’s always vis­i­ble but just barely out of reach. Instru­men­tal ver­sions of the songs have been float­ing around for years, serv­ing as the sound­track to band mem­bers’ lives, both inform­ing and being informed by this great tran­si­tion. Drum­mer Travis Har­ri­son even walked down the aisle to an early ver­sion of B-Side “Flesh and Bone”. Work­ing off and on at Seri­ous Busi­ness Music with a coterie of friends, the album began to take shape, and at last The Unsa­cred Hearts com­pleted and released The Honor Bar. We’re thrilled to fol­low up on our orig­i­nal 7-inch with two tracks from this release, which is avail­able now on CD and Cas­sette from Seri­ous Busi­ness Records.

I spoke with drum­mer, pro­ducer, and engi­neer Travis Har­ri­son about the new record and the impe­tus behind The Unsa­cred Hearts’ change in musi­cal direc­tion. It was, he explained, an attempt to make music that was more acces­si­ble, and that he could put on at home with­out being asked to turn it down or off. The band sim­ply wanted to make the kind of music that they them­selves wished to lis­ten to. After years of punk-inspired invec­tive, The Hearts wanted to recast them­selves in a mold that spoke more directly to their cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. When their self-titled debut was released in 2004 they didn’t have fam­i­lies or careers. There’s a rea­son that the music-to-beverage-matching web­site drinkify.org lists “The Unsa­cred Hearts” recipe as 4 oz. Mar­i­juana, 4 oz. Gin­ger Ale, and 1 oz. Macallan Scotch. They were once young dudes mak­ing loud music. Now they’re medium-young dudes mak­ing lis­ten­able music. It’s a change that makes most musi­cians uncom­fort­able, like they’re giv­ing up some essen­tial part of their being by sac­ri­fic­ing the atti­tudes they devel­oped as teenagers. But what The Unsa­cred Hearts under­stand is that their energy and enthu­si­asm isn’t gone, but rather rechan­neled into cre­at­ing a lush musi­cal ter­ri­tory they were once too drunk or near­sighted to fully ren­der. Singer and lyri­cist Joe Willie sums this up won­der­fully, “While we made our bones on ultra-distilled rock and roll, weird chords and wild live sets, we always led with the heart. Loud and fast, yes, but the sonic boom was just the straight­est line to the truth.”

If “the truth” is some­thing that can be dis­tilled into a song (and I believe it is), then Joe Willie is a kind of musi­cal ora­cle. In his ear­lier days he came across as a fren­zied beat poet front­man, as if some­one had given Jim Mor­ri­son the stage at an open mic and handed him an eight ball of cocaine. On The Unsa­cred Hearts’ lat­est mate­r­ial he comes off as sage-like, split some­where between Tom Waits, Lou Reed, and Gil Scott-Heron. The acoustic land­scape of this album is less jagged than in past attempts, and Joe Willie’s spo­ken vocals float atop a more serene tra­jec­tory, allow­ing for greater focus on a blended aes­thetic and lyri­cal turns of phrase. In his sum­mary of the album, which is itself a mas­ter­ful bit of prose, he turns back to New York as a cycli­cal influ­ence on The Honor Bar. He explains, “The Honor Bar evokes the city of New York itself or, rather, the city resounds in The Honor Bar. The mael­strom and beauty of the city comes across in the sparse, unerr­ing beats, the stark instru­men­tal phrases, the myr­iad voices in whis­pers and shouts. Webs of sounds, words and images — all traf­fic on the Bow­ery and mid­town sky scrap­ers — jux­ta­pose with the sweet inti­macy of the fire escape and 2AM walks down soli­tary side-streets.” It’s a sound­track not for New York City, but an abstrac­tion of New York City, for those pre­cious few moments when you lose your­self com­pletely in the web of mono­lithic archi­tec­ture and com­pact humanity.

A-Side and title track “The Honor Bar” fades in to a tum­ble of per­cus­sive thun­der and giv­ing way to hand drum per­cus­sion and a dri­ving fig­ure on acoustic gui­tar set to the walk­ing pace of your aver­age long-legged New Yorker. The instru­men­ta­tion is lush, with glock­en­spiel, bass, piano, accor­dion, elec­tric gui­tar, and a com­pressed drum set added to the mix at the cho­rus. There’s an elec­tronic vibe to this track that’s unheard on pre­vi­ous recordings–the tin­kered drum sound and dis­torted melodic fig­ure on the outro all hint at an extended sonic palette for The Unsa­cred Hearts. It all serves as a back­drop for Joe Willie’s bari­tone mus­ings, which are heard with a new depth and res­o­nance thanks to the rel­a­tive tran­quil­ity of the musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment. This was the last song com­pleted for The Honor Bar, and best encap­su­lates the atti­tudes dri­ving the band’s project in self-reinvention. This is music I could read to, music I could work to, music I could put on and ignore, but what makes it spe­cial is that I wouldn’t actu­ally want to do any of those things. Some­thing about it con­tin­ues to com­mand lis­ten­ers’ full atten­tion, and it does so through a great depth of musi­cal vision rather than pure vol­ume. This more than any­thing is a sign that The Unsa­cred Hearts aren’t just grow­ing up and con­tin­u­ing to make records–they’re maturing.

B-Side “Flesh & Bone” is a lyri­cal pas­tiche of musi­cal and lit­er­ary ref­er­ences. Some are undoubt­edly inten­tional and some maybe inci­den­tal, but none come off as heavy-handed. Rather, they suc­ceed in evok­ing the spirit and ambiance of entire songs and impart­ing some part of their essence and mean­ing on “Flesh & Bone”. The com­plete lyrics are below, with footnotes:

Pic­ture me, pic­ture you, in a pic­ture book(1) we’re pag­ing through
Pic­ture me with the slings and the arrows(2), pic­ture me when the dirt road nar­rows
On a hill, far from home, straits of Gibral­tar, streets of Rome(3)
Mis­sis­sippi River rolling slow, lost in the rain, Juarez, Mex­ico(4)

When you’re tired, when you’re on your own
I’ll be there, flesh and bone
I miss you, baby, when the river bends(5), I miss you, baby, when the dirt road ends
Pic­ture me, pic­ture you
Pic­ture me, per­chance to dream(6), pic­ture you, beside the stream

When you’re weary, when you’re on your own
I’ll be there, flesh and bone

1.) The Kinks — Pic­ture Book: “Pic­ture book, pic­tures of your mama, taken by your papa a long time ago. // Pic­ture book, of peo­ple with each other, to prove they love each other a long time ago.”

2.) Shake­speare — Ham­let: “To be, or not to be, that is the ques­tion: // Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suf­fer // The slings and arrows of out­ra­geous for­tune, // Or to take arms against a sea of trou­bles, // And by oppos­ing end them?”

3.) Bob Dylan — When I Paint My Mas­ter­piece: “Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rub­ble / Ancient foot­prints are every­where / You can almost think that you’re seein’ dou­ble / On a cold, dark night on the Span­ish Stairs”

4.) Bob Dylan — Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues: “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez // And it’s East­er­time too // And your grav­ity fails // And neg­a­tiv­ity don’t pull you through // Don’t put on any airs // When you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue // They got some hun­gry women there // And they really make a mess outta you”

5.) The Coun­try Gen­tle­men — Down Where: “Down where the river bends // With God’s help we’ll meet again // Under the same old sycamore tree // Proud of each other in the land of the free // I’ll go down to the ocean blue // Just as close as I can to you // This old ocean might keep us apart // But it won’t keep you dear from out of my heart”

6.) Shake­speare — Ham­let: “To die, to sleep // To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub! // For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, // When we have shuf­fled off this mor­tal coil, // Must give us pause—there’s the respect // That makes calamity of so long life.”

These ref­er­ences weave an intri­cate sub­text to the song, evok­ing numer­ous depic­tions of death and forc­ing us to con­sider the nature of human mem­o­ries and inter­ac­tions. The Pic­ture Book ref­er­ence sug­gests that we doc­u­ment our own lives only to con­vince our­selves that we’ve had sub­stan­tial expe­ri­ences once we can no longer feel them so acutely. And yet, though mem­o­ries fade, some expe­ri­ences per­sist across time, and there’s an ele­ment of humanity’s pres­ence that we can seem­ingly access through local­ity or state of mind, as indi­cated by the ref­er­ence to When I Paint My Mas­ter­piece. But through all this, through hard­ships and strug­gle, what should be our rela­tion­ship with death? Is it an escape or a demise? Joe Willie engages this con­ver­sa­tion with a text of his own, pro­foundly con­tem­plat­ing man’s posi­tion on this earth and our rela­tion­ship to a hazy past and a pre­car­i­ous future. This inter­ac­tion is real­ized musi­cally as an acoustic bal­lad, giv­ing way to vocal coun­ter­point between Joe Willie and guest vocal­ist Jay­may, in an exchange that grap­ples with the eter­nal nature of true love, which is wholly sup­ported by Willie’s lyrics and simul­ta­ne­ously prob­lema­tized by the var­i­ous ref­er­ences sprin­kled through­out the song. Once fully teased out, it’s a bril­liant polemic that’s typ­i­cal of Joe Willie’s remark­able insight as a lyricist.

To round out his descrip­tion of The Honor Bar, Joe Willie writes, “The Honor Bar is cer­tainly not for every­one and nei­ther are The Unsa­cred Hearts. When we formed, our only goal was to make rock n roll. We did not ask, what is cool, what do peo­ple want to hear, or what should we wear. The only ques­tion was, how do we keep play­ing rock n roll? And, over the years, we kept ask­ing that ques­tion with each new song, each live set bring­ing a response. When we last asked, the answer was The Honor Bar.” I couldn’t have said it bet­ter myself.

Ben Heller

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]