When you cast a look over her resume, it’s astonishing that Indiana-born songwriter Lisa Germano isn’t more well known: Session work with Bob Dylan and The Indigo Girls (?!); albums released on Capitol and 4AD to accolades in Rolling Stone and Spin; collaborations involving Johnny Marr, Phil Selway, Giant Sand, Calexico, among others; oceans of praise from Swan/Angel of Light Michael Gira, who has released her last few albums on his Young God imprint; stints accompanying pop legends like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Sheryl Crow. She’s worked with more rock superstars than most people have had jobs, yet she still remains appealingly enigmatic and (this is a dangerous word to throw around in talking about artists, but still) childlike. There’s something about her music that manages to be completely open and simple and yet at the same time elusive and mysterious, much in the way of the wisdom of little children. Her music is not, thankfully, cloyingly cute like most of the other artists who happen to strike, intentionally or not, the childlike aesthetic.

Take, for example, her Ampeater B-side “The Prince of Plati,” drawn from her latest Young God release Magic Neighbor. The chord progressions are fairly simple, the vocals strong and at the fore in a style that calls to mind PJ Harvey and other un-wispy female singers, the lyrics direct and unambiguous in their plea to a lover for a little comfort and escape and play. The song is appealing in part because it doesn’t shy away from directness in search of some kind of untouchably cool ambiguity, something that is irritatingly common in younger songwriters. In fact, it’s so direct and intimate, it almost feels voyeuristic to listen to it, something that’s enhanced by lyrics like “oh, nobody lookin/oh nobody see.” The whole song stands, lyrically, as an attack on the narrator’s own jadedness and an embrace of transient joys. She wants to “do the things we did before we thought we knew,” to return to a time before her assumptions about what life is or isn’t robbed her of the freedom to step outside her tired routines. The mentions of storytelling and play, simplistic and well-worn metaphors (sadness = blue), really draw out the childlike core of the song, making it easy to understand why Gira has said that her music reminds him of “early Disney songs.”

The unadorned and subtle arrangement enhances the simplicity and innocence of the song perfectly. The chiming, upper register piano definitely brings the Disney thing back to mind, especially in the slightly off-kilter lydian melody that closes out the song. As any modern jazz musician knows, the sharp 11 is the magic note that makes everything sound floaty and ethereal. Like all the other arrangements on Magic Neighbor, it was mostly worked out on the spot, and you can hear this in listening. The bass and pedal steel parts are simple and they never step on the vocals, which remain right up front, inches from your ears, instead choosing to fill out the backdrop of the song with airy clouds of sound. Germano’s voice walks a fine line between the breathy vulnerability inherent to the lyrics and necessary to a song so intimate, and the strength that is obviously there to be tapped. Rather than giving us everything she has, she draws us in by holding back.

A-side “Reptile” works a similar magic, working a very familiar I IV V chord progression and bare bones rock beat into something that somehow sounds strange. This simplicity is contrasted by the totally bizarre lyrics about light freaking out dying, God being a soul masturbator, and extraterrestrials handing out pamphlets of light to singers. I have no idea, but it certainly puts some images in your head. “Reptile” was originally recorded for 7 Worlds Collide, an Oxfam-benefiting charity CD curated by Liam Finn (of Split Enz and Crowded House fame), and it features Finn and Wilco drummer/improvising musician Glenn Kotche collaborating (I think) on one the most awesomely asymmetrical drum parts I’ve ever heard in my life. It kind of sounds like they brought them into the studio, and had them play along with the song the first time they’d ever heard it. It’s a kind of spontaneity that is so seldom heard in recorded music in a day and age when people tend to favor rigidly orchestrated parts over the conversational style of several musicians playing together, playing off one another (one could easily make the argument that this is a self-perpetuating cycle caused by a simultaneous rise of overdubbing and decline in technical skill among rock musicians, but that argument is probably best reserved for another forum). The song itself is so easy to follow, and the main bass and snare pattern so constant, that the percussion track is able to slip into part after part on instrument after instrument (congas, woodblock, rhumba-infused rim clicks, big cymbal splashes, laconic hi-hat, atonal marimba, thundering toms, metallic shakers) and never risk losing the listener. The fact that chorus of women’s voices that kicks in on the chorus sounds like a group of untrained singers in a room (you can hear them laughing sporadically clapping during the song) only adds to the feeling of looseness and lightness that makes “Reptile” so lovely and lively.

Germano’s music these days is “about trying to be happy with all the sad shit in the world, dealing with your own fights and being the mighty one who rises above it,” and that is as straight-forward and noble a mission statement as I’ve heard from a musician in a long while. It’s plain as day when you listen to her songs that this is the truth, and, for those of us who’d rather explore than be inscrutably hip, it’s as refreshing as a spray mister full of cold water on a summer afternoon in the park.

Gabe Birnbaum

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Susu is an aggressive artcore machine out of Brooklyn with one setting (loud) and no off switch. Their full-throttle sound is a welcome holdover from their beginnings as a larger hardcore/postpunk outift called Surgery Sunday. The rock-n-roll laws of attrition whittled down this original group to Andrea Havis (guitar, vocals), Mike Gabry (bass, vocals), and former-drummer Justin Bilicki, prompting a namechange to the shorter Susu. The leaner, meaner unit hooked up with engineer Martin Bisi to record their self-titled debut in 2006. Bisi, whose credits include John Zorn, Sonic Youth, and Bootsy Collins, helped Susu find their signature hard-driving, paint-peeling sound. “I think his influence was mostly present in the actual mixing and capturing of the song and sound,” as Havis recalls, “His drum sound is amazing. He really brings the instruments to life.”

One lineup shuffle later (Bilicki out, Oliver Riviera-Drew in) Susu found the loud and proud trio that has made a name for itself with three subsequent releases of pure sonic onslaught: Win, S/T, and their latest full-length R and R and R. The common denominator on all three releases has been a taste for defying conventional song structure. Experimentation, as Havis describes, “…is about going over the line of what would be traditionally done in a “song”, or doing it in a way that is outside the normal expectation. It’s not necessarily reliant on how it will be received/perceived, but chosen because collectively we (Susu) all enjoy it, or it moves us to build upon it.”

Eschewing standard verse-chorus-verse formats, R and R and R is a provocative musical statement that will command you to attention with all the authority of a drill sergeant on acid. Most of the sonic vocabulary, the raw guitars and the howling vocals, are reminiscent of the textures of the No Wave scene of the 80s. Intense, raw, a little bit dangerous. Much of the avant-garde music that came out of New York during the 80s proved tremendously influential. But when you go back and listen to the recordings of early Sonic Youth, Theoretical Girl, and so forth, you can’t help but feel the dingy audio doesn’t do justice to the music. Even the “high art” symphonies of underground legend Glenn Branca sound pretty shoddy (Wharton Tiers didn’t quite have his “A” game going yet). Susu rescues some of the musical possibilities that are only hinted at in those old recordings and reconfigures the elements in Rauschenbergian, No Wave assemblages. The sonic collages are sometimes punky, sometimes proggy, and don’t balk at trying something new. Drummer Riviera-Drew remarks, “We tend to flutter around a few ideas, then hover over one that seems to be of good quality. Much like honey bees pollinating flowers.”

The A-side of the 7”, “M.B.T.”, comes off the R and R and R album, on which Susu teamed up with producers Keith Souza and Seth Manchester. “M.B.T” takes a few elements, acerbic guitar licks, Kim Gordon-howls, frenetic bass lines, and the spitfire drums of Oliver Riviera-Drew, and weaves the minimalist, iterative designs into a bracing artrock tableau. In a time when independent music seems overrun by synth textures and somewhat foggy composition, the unrelenting precision and musicianship of Susu’s analog sound is genuinely shocking. Susu is tighter than a guido’s abs. The band flexes in a single unified motion, hurtling songs forward at breakneck speed and changing tempos at the drop of a dime. “M.B.T.” is not the sort of song that could be written alone in your bedroom on Garageband. The material on R and R and R was written in a collaborative procedure. As Havis describes it, “…Everything is worked out real time. We get together and improvise, jam, what-have-you, until someone has this part sticking out that everyone is feeling. And then we tuck it away into our memories. And so on. Eventually we have these 5-25 parts that we name arbitrarily (but all understand), and someone will hear something that goes together. [For example] the ‘chicken part’ would sound great with the ‘cheerleader part’. And eventually we put them together and move the pieces around and we have a song.” The result is a level of organic unity and cohesion that holds their music together even as the compositional forms push the structural boundaries of what we expect to hear out of a pop song. The result is, in short, art.

But don’t let the loud noises and artcore machismo fool you. Susu can be goofballs when they want to be. The track “Las Sirenas” off their latest album will have you searching for your Spanish-English dictionary, and they’ve been know to bust out absurdist lyrics like “I’ve got a roof/With a view/For when I wake up/And don’t know where I am” on “Clean vs. Dirty.” Naturally!

For their B-side, Susu brings it all the way back to 1983 with a cover of the Gloved One’s epic single “Billie Jean.” On the selection of the B-side, Havis remarks, “It’s just a killer song. Mike just started whipping out the bass line constantly so we decided to cover it since it was so fun to hear. That whole album is truly incredible (obviously!). And then he died. And we happened to be going into the studio.. It’s sort of a de-stresser song for us so we did it after we had tracked the record.. Just a quick take.” Riviera-Drew and Gabry hold down the rhythm section while Havis floats the dark, brooding melody over the top. The result is haunting yet danceable, as if all those zombies from the Thriller video picked up instruments and started jamming. The King of Pop would have approved.

It’s the combination of artcore firepower and absurdist flair that makes Susu special, and this 7” is a nice little introduction to their musical, Susu-ical vision. For the full experience of the brash trio out of Brooklyn, go check out an album or live show. The faint of heart (and short of humor) need not apply.

Mike Gutierrez

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The word ‘rococo’ has made a couple of surprising appearances in hip rock music lately. First as half of the title of a song from Bill Callahan’s fantastic(ally named) 2009 album Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, and now as the title of an album by The Paparazzi, the solo project of Erik Paparazzi, who you may know as Cat Power’s current bassist. It refers to an ornamentation-heavy style of 18th century art, originating in France, which is usually referred to in dictionary definitions as “fanciful” or “gay” (no, really). At first it seems like a strange word to apply to a rock album, but the more I listen to Rococo, the more it makes sense. The songs are so lighthearted on the surface that it’s easy to miss out on the endless series of carefully crafted hooks, guitar lines and arrangements that manage to sound as unlabored as if the band just made them up on the spot. The addition of lots of little bits of studio chatter (the reverby speech in the middle of “The Rococo Tape” is instantly recognizable the band talking about the take they just played) is a clever device that helps keep this looseness present and dominant throughout even the most complex songs, though Paparazzi’s yeah-I-can-sing-but-I’m-not-going-to-exert-myself delivery does a lot of the work as well.

In addition to the looseness, The Paparazzi’s songs are packed with a humor that comes out in all kinds of unexpected ways. Paparazzi combines a love for puns and wordplay that hearkens back to John Lennon’s early songs with a kind of free-associative nonsensical style that calls to mind Stephen Malkmus and gives us bizarre lyrics like “staring down a praying mantis” which are more about the sound of words than their meanings. For an example of the former style, think of the two possible readings of the titular phrase from Lennon’s “Please Please Me” and then check out the Paparazzi line from album-closer “Fall (Into It)” that hinges on the homophones of ‘eye’ and ‘I’: “Hey you with the lazy eye don’t care.” It’s wordplay for the sake of wordplay, but it’s appealingly easygoing. It sounds like Paparazzi is having a lot of fun here, which means that it’s easy to crack a smile at these little embellishments. For another example, check out Ampeater B-side “Epic Proportions,” which features lines like “you’ve got too much class for detention.” The puns go beyond lyrics as well, extending into the titles and arrangements, as on the song “Up, Up and Away (Major Scale),” which features, you guessed it, a keyboard part that consists solely of the major scale. But if this all sounds like too much, it’s balanced by the fact that the songs that carry these lyrical games are rock solid, built with an old-school craftsmanship and instrumental skill that it’s easy to overlook given how sweetly catchy and summery everything sounds. There are a lot of brilliant little nods to great pop music of yore: hard-panned guitars, natural alternating meters (“The Rococo Tape” slips effortlessly back and forth between 4/4 and 6/4 in a way that reminds me in its unobtrusiveness of the “sun sun sun here it comes” section of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” which actually dips into 5/4 though you’d never notice), four on the floor cowbell (more bands could stand to bring that back, it sounds great).

A-side “The Rococo Tape” (home of the aforementioned cowbell) is a perfect representative of the lazy, summery sound of the record. It struts forward for the first half, with Paparazzi’s sassy extra syllables extending all the words, and then, after a precisely deployed harmonica comes out of nowhere and slips right back into that nowhere, disintegrates into some reverb-soaked studio chatter that gives way to a descending guitar riff that brings the song right back, only a little faster. It’s a total pop jam with a surprisingly weird and constantly shifting structure. The talking in the middle almost serves as a kind of chorus, breaking up the similar first and second halves. This bizarreness of form, which doesn’t derail the song at all, actually turns out to be a blessing, as it lets the song maintain a feeling of surprise, which is almost impossible in recorded music. No matter how many times you listen to “The Rococo Tape”, it always sounds like maybe something different is going to happen this time.

“Epic Proportions” is a self-referentially titled slow burner that starts with the sound of a match and some sparse piano chords before busting out another perfect guitar riff, one that manages to hit that unexpected flat six on the last chord and keep you from getting complacent. It pairs perfectly with the ghostly female oohs that accompany it starting in the latter half of the song. Despite its title, “Epic Proportions” is a song that refuses to get dramatic or lose its cool. The song goes through a series of builds, but always pulls back into that acoustic guitar riff and loses the drums just at the moment you think it’s going to let loose. Take, for example, the moment, just before the 3 minute mark, where everything drops out under a crescendoing keyboard sound, and then, instead of the crash we’re expecting, we get a return to the steady 4/4 time, and an incredibly sparse, chiming guitar. I’ve said before that delayed gratification is the key to great pop music, and this is no exception. Even Paparazzi’s final leap into falsetto and the mob of overdubbed “oh no”s at the end of the song never really sound like they’ve lost control.

All of The Paparazzi’s music strikes a perfect balance between the kind of loose, flowing rock music people usually refer to as “shambling,” and really excellent pop craftsmanship, resulting in some perfect jams to tide you over until the warm weather kicks in. The two sides fit perfectly together to form songs that are simultaneously heavy and light, full on the one hand of lyrical puns and lighthearted touches like the little dissonant piano figure that pops up after the closing chords of “Epic Proportions,” and on the other of varied and extended harmonies, guitar riffs that sound classic without sounding old, and rhythmic and metric shifts that keep you on your toes. More bands would do well to remember that although sometimes songs with three chords are nice; most of the time things get a little more interesting with four.

Gabe Birnbaum

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There’s this wonderful moment in the British hipster-psychopath comedy The Mighty Boosh where the two protagonists Howard, an overweight, balding Jazz nerd, and Vince, a stringy vapid self-styled rave Jesus, are practicing for an upcoming gig at a local music club called The Velvet Onion. Howard has a microKorg running through a wall of effects pedals, several test-tubes bubbling with green liquid, and a dead crab in a vat of grease. Vince is banging on a cymbal and improvising a tuneless shaman warble while waving his hands around like a octopus who has just been exposed to a deadly dose of scopolamine. The sound is ungodly, a near-platonic interpretation of the worst music in the world. Eventually, the pair grind the track to a close. Vince looks at Howard, smiling like a super-shy, zit-covered twelve-year-old who has just masturbated for the first time. “Howard,” he says, barely able to contain his excitement, “We’ve invented a new genre!”

I bring this up because anyone who’s ever played music in a somewhat self-serious way has had this exact same epiphany at least fifteen times. The point isn’t that Howard and Vince, or you or I, or that terrible ska band at the cross-campus barbecue are hopeless romantics ass-deep in their own personal mysticism. It’s that inventing a genre isn’t the same as making a sound no one has heard before. I could fart into an echoplex and call it sniff-core and hope to God someone finds it interesting or hilarious. No, a new genre is about making a sound that everyone has heard before, just not in real life. Imagined musical futures, invented archetypes…that’s more like it. That’s what Lingering Last Drops, a crazy fucking good band from Sao Paulo, are conjuring up in this particular bottle-tornado of cyclical history.

We’ve seen some of the elementary particles of this music before: krautrock, freak folk, ambient dub, Throbbing Gristle, Bob Dylan, Flying Saucer Attack, Diamanda Galas. But, through some sort of Nobel-worthy experimentation, a new kind of microscope maybe, or an even larger Hadron Collider, Lingering Last Drops has produced prophetic and ingenious records of how those particles fit together, collide, mark quark babies. Imagine if Neu! were the bar band in Twin Peaks, or if the Basement Tapes were made in the cargo hold of Solaris with the oxygen levels hovering just above zero. The evil in these tracks isn’t a sneer or a leather jacket but a death virus, a mummification ritual burned in .0000001 font on the back of a silicon chip. Reverbed-out guitars, synths that sound like resonating teeth, drums delayed out until infinity, voices that sound like Satan’s out-of-the-office voicemail…you get the idea.

But not really until you listen to the songs. A-side “Love Shadow Syndrome” hovers weirdly on the edge of being pretty, like a girl-next-door type porn actress recovering from harelip surgery. Bendy demon surf guitars weave in and out of suffocating waves of synth pads, some syncopated tambourine motif hovering like scavenger gulls. The voice here is interesting too, somewhere between a Slint-ian breakdown whisper and a Nocturno Culto-esque frog burb. Eventually the whole thing disintegrates into hissing chaos, a CD skipping over the same patch of white noise forever, with, what else, a mellotron solo over it. I have to say, the audacity of that gesture is mad ballsy.

“Light,” the B-side, is both shorter and sparser, propulsive like a bad cough or a Serge Gainsberg track recorded from inside Melody Nelson’s skull. There’s a groove somewhere in here, climbing up joint by joint out of a snow-covered grave, but it’s so scattered, itchy-uncomfortable that it doesn’t make you bob your head as much as squirm in your seat. When the circuitry babble outro comes in at 4:20 like a million bot fly babies suddenly exploding out of your forearm, it’s hard not to seek out the nearest shower or bottle of Xanax. This might be the opposite of chill music, the kind of thing you might begin to hear if you broke out in a rash three minutes into a fifteen-year-long, cold-storage trip to the outer regions of space.

There still isn’t really a name for the music Lingering Last Drops is making. There is, however, a sensation associated with it at once so specific you wonder how to get rid of it, and so universal you wonder why you’ve never noticed it before. This band makes sounds so uncomfortable they should come with a prescription. I can’t wait for the remix album.

Ben Lasman

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True Womanhood have been around for about 9 months and their debut album, Basement Membranes, was released only a few days ago.  Nevertheless, the band has made a name for itself, particularly locally, through regular gigs at some of DC’s most renown venues. With an impressive knowledge and appreciation of local indie/experimental music, they’ve managed to integrate themselves into the scene remarkably quickly.  Moreover, although all 3 members of True Womanhood are only 23 years old, they’ve known each other since middle school and it shows in the comfort with which they blend influences and support each others’ crazy ideas.  The chemistry is all there.

Of A-Side “The Monk”, percussionist Noam Elsner remarks, “this is a song we originally recorded for our demo and re-recorded for this release. It’s an interesting song for us because both times we recorded it it ended up changing drastically during the process. So you could say it’s been a really long song writing process, even though the main structure of the song hasn’t been touched since we first started playing.” The latest version was recorded at Death By Audio in DC and mixed with the help of J. Robbins.  “When we got into J’s studio we realized he had all this amazing equipment like an awesome Charter Oak mike and some sweet plate reverbs that we put all over the song so we redid the vocals and put reverb and tape echo on a bunch of the sounds, we play this song with a timpani that has a piece of metal sitting on it, you could call it prepared timpani if you’re into Cage and that sort of thing, but it made the timpani sound all sorts of fucked up which was awesome and we tried to bring those sorts of weirder sounds out with the reverb plate.” Texturally, it’s fascinating.  Although the skeleton of the song is fairly conventional, it’s fleshed out provocatively.  The “weirder sounds” that Elsner speaks of give the song an ethereal quality which is haunting in places.  Lush reverb on innumerable guitars is offset by violent crashes on the “prepared timpani.”

The band reasons, “this is kind of a funny song because it’s one of our most straightforward poppy songs which was why we wanted to temper some of that with some stranger sounds, so like the Phil Spector breakdowns in the chorus got that treatment and hopefully we reached a happy medium between pop and experimental.” That they certainly do.  “The Monk” exhibits traces of pop, particularly in its structure and in the pre-chorus, where a catchy rising chord progression builds beneath falsetto laced vocals.  “I’ll meet you halfway…” But pop isn’t a word that would come to the minds to most listeners.  “The Monk” is a lot more accessible than, to draw on the John Cage reference, 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, but honestly I’m quite thankful for that.  It’s about as conventional as the kind of ‘pop’ put out by the likes of Radiohead or Bjork.

Actually, True Womanhood gets a lot of comparisons to Radiohead and also to Sonic Youth.  While the basis for such comparisons is fairly obvious, the band is a little uncomfortable whenever they’re drawn.  During an interview with DCist, guitarist/vocalist Thomas Redmond explained, “I feel that is just convenience. That’s all it is. What those two bands do is they mix crazy avant garde stuff with pop stuff.  And let’s be honest, that’s what we’re trying to do… But I think what’s really important to us is the new music that’s coming out now. We’d be more comfortable with a No Age and Beach House comparison. Or HEALTH and Beach House. Or No Age and Slow Dive…” It’s in moments like these that True Womanhood’s knowledge and appreciation of music really becomes obvious.  Actually, they make it clear that they’re influenced by just about everything under the sun.  Bassist Melissa Beattie points out, “we’ve listened to a lot of hip hop lately.”And sure enough, the band’s MySpace page ironically (or not?) states, “True Womanhood is the best rapper alive.” A full text of that interview can be found at here.

With regard to “The Monk,” Elsner concludes, “It’s also probably our happiest song, we don’t really do too much in happy moods so even when we do it still ends with the line ‘we tried and failed.’ make of that what you will.” Well, to me it’s not the ultimate but the penultimate line that haunts the most, “we eat our young.” Cheerful indeed.

Elsner describes B-Side “Shadow People” as an enigma.  “It’s probably the oldest song that we still play and since day one it’s been a fan favourite. It’s been around since way before we even had a demo but it wasn’t on the demo, and we got all these people asking where it was.” But he modestly asserts that the only “solid parts” are the guitar riff and drum track.  Beattie typically plays the drum track on the Vox Percussion King, a vintage drum machine that the band tells me has only ever been used on one other recording, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn.  So True Womanhood has a lot to live up to.  After all, Autobahn shattered barriers as one of the first commercially successful electronic music recordings.  But Beattie’s use of the Vox Percussion King is actually a lot more interesting than Kraftwerk’s.  A heavy guitar riff holds the song together, leaving the drums free to wander outside the lines.  Thunderous crashes and hits free to fall at moments when they might not be expected.  Also, as Elsner is quick to point out, “It’s got amazing sounds but it’s really old skool, you have to play all the sounds by hand with these weird paddle things.” Basically, it’s a spectacle.

The band explains that “for such a simple song, we’ve gone through a million ways of playing the song live, including the use of an electric guitar bowed with an acoustic, and also an installation we set up with a ton of organ pipes with mics fit inside which all ran into a mixer and some crazy effects.. So when we wanted to record there were so many options we sort of did not know the best way to fit them all together, and we went through many different variations before settling on this version. The recording features Thomas singing into some of the organ pipes and also I believe includes the use of every single Death by Audio pedal.” That’s right.  “Shadow People” might be a simple song but texturally, it’s  thick as fuck.  This becomes especially apparent at the end of the song when  the primary guitar riff and vocals dissolve, leaving a number of previously background sounds exposed.  “Wait, what was I just listening to?” And live, the possibilities are basically endless.  Elsner reflects, “the last time we played this song live it was an encore to some show we played in DC, and it turned into a crazy drum circle on stage with like half the audience and members of other bands all playing all the drums along with us, one of the coolest moments the band has been lucky enough to witness.”

Nate Greenberg

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