The Window Right are a three piece space rock musical outfit. Right? Suppose so. Space is a nice place for these Brits. None of their tracks can seem to stay grounded. There’s an skyward trajectory to their instrumental stylings, an upward lift that breaks songs open from a jog to a gallop to a sprint. Combine the grand scope of prog rock, plus terse jazz nods, with the epic vistas of krautrock, and circumscribe the action inside the crisp lines of Brit pop, and you have the Window Right. They are a live band’s live band. Grinding out technically accomplished digital/analog jamouts that preserve an unleashed spontaneity alongside the precision. Though the three piece has performed with the likes of Damo Suzuki, famed Can vocalist and all around avant garde rock god of the 1970s, the Window Right’s music trends towards the ultra-contemporary. In their pulsing metric machismo, the guitar/bass/drums/laptop ensemble achieves the automaton flair of a mellower Richard D. James. The gentle valleys and peaks are even reminiscent of pre-suck Coldplay (yes, there was a time they didn’t suck), though when the band dials up the intensity they match the aggressive ferocity of neukrautrock and hausrock contemporaries Dinowalrus (in the US) and Drum Eyes (in the UK). The scope of the Window Right’s music spans a vast emotional and historical divide, the sort of reach that only instrumental music, without the articulated commitment to topical ephemera, can accomplish.

The affinity between The Window Right’s approach and some of the classic Krautrock has spawned an ongoing collaboration with Damo Suzuki. The three members of The Window Right - Matt, Neil, and Smudge - bring a new school element of laptop sampling and electric beats to the old “meat and potatoes” rock ensembles of yore. When the new and old school elements meet each other halfway on the shared common ground of live improvisation the results can be pretty magical. A recent TWR/Damo gig at the Hoxton Square Bar in London was an exercise in pure spontaneity, sheer creation, a rock ‘n’ roll séance. None of the songs were premeditated, preplanned; the night unfolded as an adventure of raw musical intrigue, a Lizard King odyssey importing digital elements back into the primordial analog soup of surly, sweaty invention. With such an superlative rapport, the upcoming TWR/Damo gig at the Hebden Bridge Trades Club at the end of July is not to be missed.

Chainsaw guitar chews through the first minute-and-a-half of the A side “BOW SONG”, a metal machine monument to sonic violence. For The Window Right, the industrial siren song acts as entrée to a more primitive landscape that relies on the textural possibilities of sound over the melodic. A warm walking bass opens up a grand vista premised on the vagaries of a spare, warbling three or four note guitar lick. Barely a lick, a skeletal apparition of a musical theme. This is music for the millennial masses, part of the wayward joint drift of the avant-garde and popular consciousness away from the ideological mainstream of modernist constructivism. A Beatles/Stockhausen presentation of a Can/Reich production of a Neu/Glass film. The Window Right chases after the profane peculiarities of transcendence in songs that wrinkle and flex between opposed poles of ectoplasmic desire and astroliminal logorrhea: grade-A existential jabberwocky. The song opens up with a light touch reminiscent of a new age minimalism, but the percussion bites down hard, the sting and moan of the electric guitar radiates a feverish intensity that militates against the too easy mystico-spiritual solutions of the unicorn-and-seashell elite. In the contrapuntal variations of light and dark you can hear the  bloodbath of the mid-20^th century, the total annihilation that sucked the air out of Western civilization for a generation, the lingering embarrassment of rehabilitation, the survivor’s guilt. “BOW SONG” searches for a clarity free of remorse, but uncovers only the needling tension of an anxious soul trapped in a hall of mirrors.

The fragile pitter-patter of a bright-eyed Telecaster ushers in an air of sobriety on the B side “GREENDIVIDEDBBLUE”. Gone are the Sisyphean gesticulations of “BOW SONG”. In their stead a palpable calm overtakes the music, as slow and gentle as an advancing cloud. The guitar notes pass crisply and clearly; the hi hat rings clean; the bass leads you by the hand. The overall approach is so well calibrated that you hardly register the quickening pace, the rush of the cymbals, the measured ecstasy of the slide to double time right before the three minute mark. As if a wind picked up; as if a jet pulled off the tarmac; as if a wild horse had jumped the fence, headed at breakneck pace into the highlands, the sinews straining with mad grace, becoming a blur, a speck on the horizon, then lost into the free nothing. The Window Right’s B side is an acceleration into empty freedom, free of pain and devoid of hope.

A new EP and a new album are in the works for The Window Right. The trio are feverishly recording material now, esconced snugly in their studio above a London carwash. Hours and hours of live jams are being put down in search of that magical moment. The method speaks to the Window Right’s commitment to the live sound, the limitless challenge of capturing the uncapturable, sustained by the enduring belief, which all musicians share (except DEVO), that music is a moving image of eternity. A hearkening to the immutable gyrations of the celestial spheres. A six-stringed paean to the gods supported by beer, perspiration, and the white noise hum of a warm amp. More gigs are on the horizon for The Window Right, around the UK and on an upcoming Scandinavian tour, so look them up before the album comes out because nothing replaces the experience of live music.

Mike Gutierrez

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

The first major sign that Birnbaum was inching his way towards rock fame with his band Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a melding of jazz and noise rock. Noise rock has always held a strange fascination and allure for jazz and classical types alike, stuffed full of Apollonian rules and modal regulations by day, looking for a little anarchic Dionysian release by night. And you don’t need to hold to the Glenn Branca-line that “jazz has stopped evolving and become a dead art” to appreciate what the sonic fundaments of rock n roll might have to offer in a jazz hybrid. Not so much that the musical vocabulary of rock has outpaced jazz in terms of relevance; rather that rock in the second half of the 20^th century assumed the mantle that jazz had carried so brilliantly in the first half: a total commitment to the live experience in all its spontaneity and confusion. Jazz was born in the hurly burly of speakeasy clubs. Jazz was music to get high to. Jazz was a threat to the Establishment. And white America fought back, either by throwing Clorox-clean, teenybopper puppets at the art form to coopt the music, or by banning it altogether. Jazz was dangerous.

These days you only need about five minutes in a jazz club these to see how dusty the entire experience has become, with middle-aged couples tapping their fingers quietly at tables while working their way through two-drink minimums. Rock n roll at mid-century was an exciting way out– the next big thing– but has largely died the same death. Listen to the radio and you’ll hear bands that sound like bands that sound like bands, an eternal recurrence of suck. White Stripes is Leadbelly twenty-times removed. No wonder musicians turned to noise at the turn of the new millennium. If every pattern has been copped, the only path to genuine novelty lies off the music page in the ethereal realm of overblown honks and sticky feedback. Noise is the ultimate cover for new music, a secret laboratory nurturing precious seedlings in a dead landscape. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, described as “equal parts Albert Ayler and Deerhoof”, was Birnbaum’s entrée into a post-genre musical dimension.

The first formal gig of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was a Boston Jazz Composers Collective showcase. Thereafter the band started playing their own gigs and touring. A combination of guitar feedback, drum bashing and good-old-fashioned yelling at the audience (“STOP FUCKING EVERYTHING UP!” was the repeated tagline, a real crowd pleaser) allowed Birnbaum to stretch his wings without dipping into the Byzantine modal morass of jazz composition. Good live rock and roll screeching captures the live spontaneity jazz used to have before it became hyper-academicized in the latter half of the 20^th century.

His time in Boston has also included playing with local luminaries Drug Rug as well as Eli Reed and the True Loves, showcasing his saxophone skills with both ensembles. Like good drummers, good brass specialists are always at a premium in a guitar-dominated music scene; so Birnbaum has never lacked for gigs, but has been increasingly concentrating on his personal project Boy Without God in recent years. Part of that renewed focus has come about due to his not-as-of-yet-patented “one minute a day” recording method. Birnbaum describes it best: “The minute-a-day thing is a creative exercise I’ve done on and off since I came up with it in 2007. It helps me get over my internal editor, who is a nasty sonofabitch. Basically, every day I sit down to make one complete minute of recorded music (all the parts and all the mixing, so I don’t really have to touch it afterwards) and try to connect it to the previous day’s minute, creating a long, winding piece of music of indefinite length that functions sort of like an abstract, musical diary. I really like writing this way because it gratifies the impatient part of me and gives me something tangible at the end of every day.” Artists use all sorts of rituals to get them in the mood, and the minute-a-day method has been Birnbaum’s own personal recipe.

You can hear the fruits of that labor on Boy Without God’s genre-smashing full-length release Your Body Is Your Soul as well as Walking On Water Wasn’t Built in a Day, the EP from which both the A and B side of the Ampeater 7” have been pulled. In Walking On Water… drums, guitars, ukulele, saxophone, plus “found sounds” have been tied together into a neat little 4-track package showcasing Birnbaum’s affection for classic pop forms. Attentive listeners will recognize the ba ba-bum chick drum line from the Greasers-era hit “Leader of the Pack” in our A-side “City Kids.” A raw slow burn of feedback ushers the ear into a sweet, meditative number that mixes equal parts Beach Boys and Justin Vernon, sweet memories of summer love. When the horns kick in, the song warms up and strikes a vintage tone that you rarely hear these days, a lush spectrum of orchestral pop on an intimate scale. As “City Kids” segues directly into the B-side “Call a Yellow Taxi,” you can even hear the crunch of an apple. Found sounds in the form of percussive fruit. Boy Without God brings the sound (and the taste) of the unexpected, but warmly welcomed. Birnbaum seems to be savoring the familiarity of more well-behaved soundscapes, in lieu of the noisescapes or mad skronk of his past. Perhaps the audience stopped fucking everything up?

Look for sporadic shows here and there, including a Northside Music Fest showcase, as Boy Without God puts the finishing touches on a new album, which Birnbaum describes as, “by FAR the thing I’ve done that I’m most proud of, and it’s the first BWG album where I really got to use all my composing/arranging chops in writing out complex string and horn parts and then bringing in friends to play them, usually better than I ever imagined they could be played. I cannot say enough how amazing the performances are that other people (including Danny Mekonnen and Will Graefe from the ALB) gave on this album. They all just killed it dead. Uh, in the good way.” Come watch Boy Without God kill it (in a good way) this Sunday at Bar Matchless.

Mike Gutierrez

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

The 21st century is beautiful and its name is Truman Peyote: two guys, Caleb Johannes and Eric Farber, from Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts who so successfully meld the textural possibilities of the digital and analog, of samples, found sounds, and live instrumentation, that their music is less like a hybrid and more like a brand new species. Acts like Aphex Twin may have trailblazed the path, and still others like Animal Collective may be getting more press, but Truman Peyote proves this sound is more than just an isolated phenomenon. The dam has burst and a new zeitgeist is upon us. After listening to their digital 7 inch, caroming ingeniously between cosmic psych-noise and infectious pop, you’ll wonder why the hell it took so long.

Truman Peyote gained some nice traction at the end of 2009 via a spotlight on the track “New Wife, New Life” by the Website-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named (rhymes with Bitchspork). The electro-hippie vibe of the song played up to the near hysterical adoration for Animal Collective at the time. It was a nice “we can do it too” moment, but don’t listen to Truman Peyote expecting an Animal Collective tribute band. Johannes reflects on the AC comparison: “In my opinion, “New Wife, New Life” is structured in a way more simplistic way than any Animal Collective song.  These days everyone is so focused on comparing bands to other bands, and while some of it may have merit, it’s not always the best for us.  YES, I listened the shit out of Animal Collective in high school, YES I bought their records and loved/listened them to death, but NO, we did not start TP or create these songs to resemble Animal Collective in any way.  Our style is just obviously the direct result of EVERYTHING we have ever listened to and enjoyed…” Their latest full-length release Light-Lightning is a much more savage, inchoate experience than Merriweather Post Pavilion. Novel sounds and melodies morph at the speed of life, like fetal cells, exploding with alien possibility in an electronic placenta. Songs bubble up, effervesce, and retreat back into the froth without ever giving themselves completely to a reductive comprehension. Often the transformation is violent: tracks “Fishscraps” and “Firetime = Snowday” cultivate unique ambient signatures, beats and all, and then suddenly lapse into minimalist or found sound digressions. These songs are not highways; they’re more like the historic quarter of an old European city, full of alleys, nooks, niches…and dead ends.

The most exciting songs on Light-Lightning are the ones where Truman Peyote elicits a certain expectation, and then dramatically overturns it without warning. If the pair, Caleb Johannes and Eric Farber, produced an entire album like the song “Beantown”, they could do quite well as the afore-mentioned AC cover band; if they did the same with the last half of “Sarah Delta” as source material, they would make a fantastic Aphex Twin ripoff. But they do neither. Or rather, they do both and more, piling invention upon invention like an impossible musical Jenga, having created in Light-Lightning a towering, polyglot structure that should fall to pieces but somehow never does. A remarkable achievement.

Since Light-Lightning, Truman Peyote has released Peaced Together, a split 12” with Many Mansions. The A-side for the Ampeater 7 inch, “Magentadoor II” was taken from this release. The four minute track starts hot and heavy with a monstrous, moody synthesizer intro. An overture in minature. Electronic music was an early influence for the band: “We definitely started out with a much heavier influence from dance music (using synths, drum  machines, and samplers), but recently we’ve been adding a huge dose of pop in there.” The pop makes an entrance about a minute into the song. The synth overture winds down, a beat kicks in, and a singer drops a few stanzas of rock ‘n’ roll haiku before the instrumental side of the song reasserts itself. The sound is restlessly inventive, hitchhiking from genre to genre: “We used to only play electronically, but now I play guitar, and we tour with Orion Russell (of Lord Jeff) who rocks the drums for us.  For our recordings the drums are either done by Wes Kaplan (of the Craters), Orion, or Motoki Otsuka (of Vitamin Seed).” If you see Truman Peyote on tour these days, expect to see the whole crew coaxing out this sonic mixer with “live” instruments side-by-side with the samplers. The recording process has grown beyond the original two members as well. Light-Lightning was, “…recorded, mixed, and mastered with the help of our friend Jake Yuhas (formerly Dropa, now Bug Eyes)….the recording process of Truman Peyote is always a big collaboration with a lot of our friends who are also making killer music out of Boston.”

The B-side, “Steelestack”, comes off a split 7-inch with Turtle Ambulance. If you’ve only heard “New Wife, New Life” the ferocity of “Steelestack” might surprise you. Johannes remarks, “….but surprising people at shows is what we love.  It makes the whole experience more enjoyable, keeps us fresh…” The track begins innocently with a few electronic burps, blips and squiggles. Then a recurring sample of what sounds like a videogame character shouting “Power up!” announces itself. Again and again and again and again. Truman Peyote dresses the sample up with a full wardrobe of effects. Squeaky, muddy, crackly: the sample is reinterpreted through a thousand different lenses and hurled at the listener. It’s a “Richard D. James spinning the sandpaper” moment. This isn’t music meant to doze off too. It’s howling, insistent, neurotic, and will not be ignored. The brief interlude of classical piano towards the beginning and the gentle synth outro only serve to remind the listener just how brutally their ears have been manhandled. The song is beautiful, but it’s a terrifying beauty, like the open maw of a wild carnivorous animal.

Plans for the future include a tour with their 12” partners Many Mansions in July as well as a tape release via Mirror Universe sometime this summer. So be on the lookout for the tour and the tape, and expect the unexpected: “The new tracks are waaay different from Peaced Together, so we’ll see what people think.”

Mike Gutierrez

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Beat Radio is a synth-influenced Americana outfit that’s had more lineup shuffles than Spinal Tap has had drummers. The moniker dates back before 2005 when five musicians came together to form the band. Fastforward to the present day and there are still five members, but the road in between was anything except smooth. Three original members departed for good, eventually replaced by Dan Bills (synths/keys), Evan Duby (lead guitar) and Brian Ver Straten (drums). Mike McCabe (bass) took a sabbatical around 2008 and, in the words of the remaining musician Brian Sendrowitz (vocals/guitar/casio), “…I found myself suddenly without a band– I spent the next year working on Safe Inside the Sound mostly on my own.” The band, or ‘collective’ as Brian has taken to calling Beat Radio, had been whittled down to one (a ‘collective’ of one!). It takes no small amount of guts to hold onto your dreams in the face of loss and adversity, but struggle has always produced great art. Like a fire that rekindles from a single ember, so it was with Beat Radio. “I started collaborating with Dan Bills about halfway through [Safe Inside the Sound], and he ended up playing on the album and bringing a lot to it on keys and synths. When the album was finished this past fall we started playing out regularly again and the band grew slowly and organically.” By the end of 2009 Beat Radio was stronger than ever. “We’ve been playing as a 5-piece since December and it’s definitely the most fun and rewarding experience I’ve had playing in a band.”

Credit: Gilbert Ng

Nothing pulls a band together faster than good material. Safe Inside the Sound boasts an album’s worth of solid songs that run the pop gamut between alt-Americana and indietronica. The winsome melodies, dressed up in synth progressions and digibeats, will tempt the melancholy onto the dancefloor half the time (and have them weeping into their beer the other half). There is a Great Plains sadness here, a “seen them come, seen them go” folky sadness that points to the earlier songwriting of Sendrowitz: “Before Beat Radio, I’d done more acoustic based singer songwriter music.” With Safe Inside the Sound the compositions hewed away from freeform folk paeans, towards more tightly regimented pop structures. “The biggest change was writing songs to rhythm tracks.  Before that, lots of my songs had a strummy, looser sort of feel – like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.  With Beat Radio songs, I’ve set out to make songs that were simpler, more like pop music, and hopefully more universal.” There is an inherent optimism in pop music that counters the more tragic tones of Beat Radio, resulting in a delicate dialectic between sadness and joy that speaks to the heart.

Safe Inside the Sound sells the indietronica hard for the first three tracks of the album. Opener “Follow You Around” is particularly impressive. A chorus of quasi-industrial synth sounds paints a picture of quiet emotional devastation– the perfect backdrop for Sendrowitz’s heartbroken vocals– before exploding into a thunderous blitzkrieg of teeny-bopper transcendence and pitch-shifty solos. After t initial electronic flourish, Beat Radio starts to gradually foreground the guitar over and above the synths. “Stranger Flowers” is straightforward, strummed folkrock melancholia, albeit with digital beats. “Green Luxury Condo” drops the beat altogether in a reflective paean to the melody of “Amazing Grace.” It’s around this point in the album that you realize Beat Radio’s influences are less MGMT, more the folk and country greats of yore. So when you hear “Hard Times for Dreamers” towards the end, with its moseying guitar, dusky lyrics, and mandolin, you’re hardly taken by surprise. Most every track on Safe Inside the Sound could become your new favorite song. The real acid test of the album though is the singing of Brian Sendrowitz. He worships at the altar of some other polarizing vocalists: J Mascis, Neil Young, Daniel Johnston. Either you get his style, or you don’t, and that will make all the difference.

The Ampeater Review finds Beat Radio at a particularly significant juncture in its development. The digital 7” includes of some of the first post Safe Inside the Sound material to be released, although tracing timelines with a collective can be deceiving. The B-side, “Lonely From Rock and Roll,” was actually co-written in 2003 by Sendrowitz and Timothy Lannen, who, along with Robert Haussmann, were both charter members of the very first incarnation of Beat Radio (both continue to play music as the Diggs). The title comes from a humorous lyric by the Tragically Hip, but the underlying motication is more melancholy. As Sendrowitz recalls, “It was towards the end of that band we were in, and believe it or not, it was kind of about the band breaking up. I always really liked the song, but it always felt unfinished.  As a writer, I don’t ever really throw anything away.  Songs are like your kids, you want to see them through, see them get recorded, performed, etc.  I actually finished writing the song in early 2008 and recorded a demo.  It was weird – the Beat Radio lineup from that time was sort of winding down, running its course, slowly breaking up.  Maybe it was something about those emotions that reminded me of ’03, and let me finish the song at that time. Working on the track over the last few weeks definitely brought me back to both of those times – kind of bittersweet memories.  Do you know that Mercury Rev song ‘Holes’?  There’s that great line: ‘Bands, those funny little plans, that never work quite right.’”

The A-side, “High Time” is the inspirational yin to the melancholy yang of “Lonely From Rock and Roll.” Sendrowitz describes his writing process for the single: “…I like the idea of trying to write a really simple song that can be useful to people and maybe inspire them in a direct sort of way.  So many songs we hear these days are cloaked in multiple levels of irony.  When you’re trying to write something that is universal, you sort of have to let go of the fear of being cliché.  My wife Liz inspired this song pretty directly– there’s a line in it that says ‘there’s nothing for you going upstream.’  That’s something we’ve been trying to practice.  You have to be open to let life happen– when you’re struggling really hard, swimming against the tide, you may be going in the wrong direction.” The narrator ruminates on “facing your fate”, a terrifying prospect for all of us. But the redemptive power of love and beauty means that none of us have to face that fate alone.

Since Safe Inside the Sound Beat Radio has tweaked their record release strategy in a move that is partly pragmatic and partly reflective of their personality. The band’s goal for 2010 is to finish and release two songs every month, thereby skirting the album format. “Most of [the songs] will come out via our Bandcamp page…[the Ampeater digital 7” is] an exception, because this Ampeater piece is a special occasion!” In the new digital landscape where an album can circulate around the internet in less than a day’s worth of pop-and-fizzle, releasing tracks a couple at a time allows a relationship to form between artist and audience. “I don’t know if singles will become dominant over albums, but as an artist, it has been kind of refreshing…Having something to share with people on a consistent and regular basis makes sense, and is really rewarding, because we’re in direct contact with our audience.” That’s a welcome approach to new media in a time when most bands use social networks as one-way megaphones to PR-indoctrinate their fanbase. So look them up on their Bandcamp site, say hi on Twitter (@wearebeatradio), and keep an eye out for more singles in 2010.

Mike Gutierrez

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Loyal Divide is five guys who started playing music together in Columbus, Ohio around 2005 until the lure of bright(er) lights and a big(ger) city drew them to Chicago. It was a journey not just of miles, but also of musical maturation. The earlier Loyal Divide received favorable comparisons to Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade, comparisons most bands would be ecstatic about, but the band felt they were destined to make a different style of music. The band pulls no punches in relating their thoughts on their earliest work, “For the first EP, we poured money  into recording time at a studio with no real idea of what we were doing. We paid no heed to things like consistency and sequencing, and the whole process was casual. That can work wonderfully for some groups, but it didn’t for us. The music was random and derivative as shit.” That’s an unusual level of honesty to hear from a band these days (doubtless, they were their own fiercest critics), but Loyal Divide is an unusual collection of guys. In a day and age when most musicians jump from band to band, from sideproject to sideproject, looking for a winner and engaging in the sort of speculation you might expect to see from a Wall Street broker, the five members of Loyal Divide remained true to their project. In the face of the positive notices they received for their first EP, they reapplied themselves to find a sound that was more uniquely their own, in their words, “….we purchased some rudimentary recording gear and started from scratch. The learning process was long, and the output has been way too slow, but we’ve become more cerebral and particular about our music.” Now five years removed from their beginnings in Columbus, Loyal Divide has established itself as a band to watch in its native Chicago and beyond, having carved out a unique blend of breathy shoegaze, Brian Eno intellectronica, and Kraftwerk’d beats. The results of their metamorphoses produced the well-received EP Labrador, which the band hopes to roll into a full-length album.

On the Labrador EP the listener appreciates how far Loyal Divide have taken their songs from the indie rock generica of Arcade Fire and Sub Pop flavors-of-the-month. A crunchy looped beat and cocked-pistol sample signals that we are out of the garage and very much “in da club” on the EP opener “Young Blades”. A bubbling wave of synth, a siren blast, and tribal rhythms combine into a DJ Shadow-esque mélange. The vocals don’t come into full focus until a minute and a half into the four minute song– only then do you realize there is a band behind this wall of atmospheric trip-hoptronica, not a DJ. And when the vocals do come, they are soft, mantric, repetitive, almost sounding like samples themselves, coaxed out of the peaks and valleys of the ambient soundscape instead of being laid over the top like movie credits. Adam Johnson and Christopher Sadek share the vocal duties; the pair’s strategy is to use vocals to create atmosphere and ambience woven directly into the fabric of the song. There are no American Idol moments here, no Broadway turns, no grandstanding, nothing that will distract the listener from the pulsing musical gestures of the underlying themes. That doesn’t mean the vocals are strictly wallflowers though– in fact, the decisive motif on the song “Vision Vision” (named #1 song of 2009 by Radio One Chicago, by the way) is an earthshattering howl. It cuts you to the quick, a sort of Trent Reznor “I want to fuck you like an animal” banshee scream that, for all its fearsomeness, kind of makes you want to get out on the dancefloor and shake your damn boo-tay.

For their A-side, Loyal Divide is sharing with the Ampeater Review readers a single off their upcoming album. The track is called “DDF” and shows how deftly the group has melded their “rock bandy” roots with a more contemporary clubtronica sound. Bassist Siddharth Chittajallu and drummer Andrew McCarthy lay down a creeping, crawling rhythm over which floats the signature motif of the tracks, what sounds like a sample of classical Hindustani verse run through heavy effects, plus a tremolo. The tremolo transforms the sample into a pulsing, hypnotic wash of sound while the rhythm section continues to grind away at the listener. This motif alternates with forbidding, Depeche-moody vocal stanzas, trading back and forth. And as the song begins to work its way into the interior recesses of your body and mind, a more distinctly Oriental sample fades in like an advancing bank of thick fog, swallowing the listener whole. For the B-side the Ampeater Review is fortunate to get a hold of a previously unreleased mix, a remix of Loyal Divide’s popular “Vision Vision.” All the old elements are in place: the slap bass, dreamy “landing UFO” whir, the hypnotic beats, but a few subtle effects have been added to foreground the fearsome banshee howl all the more. The disco-vampire screech is kicked up a notch, entering a “breakdown”-mode for a fiery final salute in the last minute of the song.

With a successful EP, a sharp video of their hit single “Vision Vision” (shot by BBGun Film) and some good touring/festival experience (the band’s highlight of SXSW: “We randomly saw GZA on an outdoor stage playing shit from Liquid Swords.  So cool.”), Loyal Divide looks poised to make an impact with their as-yet-untitled full-length album set for release sometime in May. The band shared some early insight on the release with the Ampeater Review: “It’s basically an expansion of the Labrador EP with 8 or possibly 9 new songs.  The new songs sound like NIN on a shoestring budget minus the goth poetry, but a bit looser.” For all you fans of goth poetry out there, don’t be concerned because there are plenty of dark rites to feast on in the grinding rhythms, synth ambiance, and subbacultcha club aesthetic. It’s best to leave the industrial haikus to Mr. Reznor, the quasi-reliqious anthems to Arcade Fire, the bedroom indie to Wolf Parade, and let Loyal Divide just be their glorious selves. It’s worked damn fine so far.

Mike Gutierrez

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

It’s no mistake that You Can Be A Wesley often receives comparisons to the indie rock legends from the 90s. The band revisits a time when guitar was still the undisputed king-of-the-ring. Heard Like Us saunters, sprints and strolls through a postpunk landscape where the spartan simplicity of the standard-issue punk arsenal is highlighted with a few bells and whistles to achieve a more country, folky coloring. You Can Be A Wesley can sound brash and raw when they want to, as they do on the riveting climax of “Creatures.” Saara Untracht-Oakner and Winston Macdonald know how to make a guitar scream, while Nick Curran (bass) and Dan Goldenberg (drums) can pelt the listener with some aggressive rhythms when they want to. But the most characteristic moments of the album come in songs like “Wildlife,” “Kiddie Pool” and “Make Up Your God” where the band takes a more contemplative and (comparatively) quieter approach to their subject matter. Like Pavement, You Can Be A Wesley can rearrange the abrasive textures of a punk inheritance to craft songs that leave behind the easy confrontational attitudes of adolescent chutzpah for more uncertain, more mature, and more perplexed territory. Heard Like Us, recorded with J. Mendocino (of Pretty and Nice), used a few unconventional means to coax some strange flavors out of the music. Untraacht-Oakner recalls the odder instrumentation choices: “We used some keyboards, melodica (“Rearrange the Sea”), random percussion things including banging on books and couches.  There’s a bunch of layers in some parts that make it really interesting sonically but it all blends in well so that it’s not very obvious.”

Complementing the instrumentation are lyrics that mix the trivial with the profound. The inspired juxtaposition is so absurd as to be true to life. Consider the track “Fourth Walls”, which lifts its title from reality TV jargon, the so-called ‘fourth wall’ that separates the self-important D-level role players from the writers, producers, and crew whose job it is to record the drunken shenanigans for posterity. The ‘fourth wall’ is the constantly compromised dividing line between real and the surreal, the hyphen between ‘reality’ and ‘TV’, for characters like Gary Coleman and Omarosa. But for you and me, the ‘fourth wall’ is that dividing line between our own subjective hopes, dreams and estimations of the world, on the one hand, and an impersonal bird’s eye view of the world that always threatens to annihilate our pretensions. Life seems to be a continual feud between these two halves, a predicament into which we are all tirelessly plunged. Grim stuff; but slowly building riffs and sweet progressions of “Fourth Walls” remind us that there is beauty even in struggle, and that for every storm there is a quiet afterwards.

You Can Be A Wesley makes music that rewards relistening. You may like a song immediately, but not be able to figure out what excited your fancy until you’ve become more familiar with its twists and turns. A quick twangy line from the lead guitar, a naked walking bass, a percussive flourish: you’ll find pleasant surprises scattered like colorful easter eggs all through their songs. You Can Be A Wesley has a gift for the light compositional touch, the sort of off-the-cuff invention not usually written down or even discussed, that is characteristic of bands with a lot more experience. If there is one bold element that will grab you right away, however, it’s the standout vocals of Untracht-Oakner. She’s concocted a strange alchemy in her delivery, impressive in its range and depth. There are the pixy strains of Joanna Newsom in “Kiddie Pool”, the folk bansheeisms of Margaret Darling (of Seedy Seeds) on “Wildlife”, and occasionally she hits an old skool riot grrrl howl à la Kathleen Hanna (literally “old skool”- Hanna just donated her collected papers, ‘zines, letters to New York University– is she planning to die soon?). Without sounding like a copy, she’s managed to cull the best of all their qualities into a truly ennervating hybrid.

For the A-side, Untracht-Oakner pushes her vocals all the way up to eleven. The Boston press fell in love with “Creatures” when it came out as the single for Heard Like Us. The track begins with a quiet xx-esque bassline, bouncy drums, and talky vocals before upshifting into a banshee-howling chorus. It’s the old loud/quiet/loud manouevre that drew so many comparisons to the Pixies. The memorable climax was the result of some experimental tomfoolery in the studio: “There’s a part in Creatures,” Untracht-Oakner remembers, “where my vocals had a robot type effect on them.  That was really funny when we were recording it.  Jeremy would also just twist knobs on our pedals as we were playing parts and some really cool sounds came out of that.” Who knows if Black Francis would have tolerated someone toying with the knobs while he sang (probably not), but maybe he should have, because the sustained 6-measure howl is one of the most unforgettable moments of the album.

The B-side “Summerhomes” is one of You Can Be A Wesley’s old favorites. Untracht-Oakner recalls its genesis: “Summerhomes is from our first 3 song demo that we gave out at shows which included “Gravity” and “Fire It Off”.  We recorded it with our friend Alex McKneely in his apartment in Allston…Winston wrote that first guitar part and was looping it with a pedal and playing slide over it.  This is back in winter 2007.  Winston taught me how to play the main riff and I think I went home that night and wrote lyrics immediately.” The track is a quieter, more reflective number: an acoustic, finger-picky meditation with a pretty-as-a-picture slide guitar. The lyrics hit their peak of poignancy with the line “We found out how we’ll die/So we all bought summerhomes in the sky.” Not the sort of sentiment that is going to spark a proletarian revolution, but true to life nonetheless. You Can Be A Wesley reserves it for special occasions: “It has to be the right mood…we don’t want to bring people down if they just want to dance and get wild.”

No longer Boston’s best-kept-secret, You Can Be A Wesley have been previewing new material at shows all up and down the east coast and into Canada. Untracht-Oakner reports on the status of the new songs (but keeps mum on release dates): “…we have a bunch of songs we’ve been playing live and then a bunch that are in the works and almost done and a few ideas here and there for other things.  We’ve got a full album’s worth of material on it’s way.” On the direction of the new songs: “A lot of the new songs rock pretty hard.  We’re definitely getting into some louder stuff and just trying to keep it fun and interesting. There are a couple songs in the works that are more sway-ie than dance-ie but will still punch you in the face.” Sway-ie, dance-ie, but will still punch you in the face. Figure out how to make music like that and You Can Be A Wesley too.

Mike Gutierrez

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The band out of Boston wastes no time on stylistic curlicues in their compositions. Fuzzed-out, stomp-boxed 60s power pop melodies grab you in the first few seconds and don’t let go. The songs are short, direct, noisy– and that’s exactly how the trio of Ben Potrykus (guitar), Jen Dowty (bass) and Andy Sadoway (drums) like it. Their first EP Our Very First Cassette, released late 2009, was a quick and dirty romp that got solid reviews from critics and tastemakers. Though the band’s approach sounds simple, there’s a complexity bubbling beneath the surface that holds your attention. The jagged guitar lines and off-the-cuff vocals are tossed off like the mad strokes of an action painter in full frenzy, while remaining confined within pop art superstructures. Imagine Jackson Pollack, drunk on corn whiskey, trying to copy Warhol’s soup cans: a superlative mess that nonetheless attains a certain iterative fascination. Girlfriends took a similar tack on the EP, trading on the listener’s familiarity with certain pop forms to introduce a decidedly unfamiliar savagery into the proceedings. The song “suckin rare meat off the bone white china” mixes whammied guitar, megaphone vocals, and some rough Beach Boys’ harmonies into a beastly surf safari. “bites + scratches” captures Girlfriends in a more reflective, Pogues-mode, attempting to muster up a mood of good old-fashioned heartbreak. It’s a great song, but the heartbreak isn’t entirely persuasive. The riffs are just too damn fun to frown over.

The ease with which Girlfriends traverses the pop register is a testament to their origins out of the roiling, moiling cauldron that is the Boston music scene. Discount booze and college kids aplenty keep the clubs filled while the insane 1am closing time of the subway preserves a niche for late night DIY house parties. The give and take between public and private forums sustains an occasionally inspired dialectic within the scene. “2004 was a formative year for me,” as Potrykus recalls, “cos I started living in the city in late 2003 and I saw and met Clickers and Night Rally and the Faux and the Mules and Dreamhouse and Neptune, and now Denial and, I think, Wildildlife (they were just ‘Wildlife’ then) and everyone was being really loud and noisy and splitting their time between basements and clubs, which I thought made things a lot more interesting.” That’s quite a list of bands; but what artist can resist the louche allure of down-and-out of bohemian Boston, of Jamaica Plains, of Allston “Rock City,” of Cambridge and Somerville? Breeding grounds, one and all, for raunchy rawk and fine purveyors (according to Potrykus) of “authentic south American food,” “organic fair trade markets,” “thrift stores” and “all that crap.” When Potrykus, Dowty and Sadoway aren’t shopping for ethically-reared beef to mix into their picadinho de milho, the band members find time for other projects including Christians & Lions and Magma Divers– that’s a pretty full plate.

For their A-side, Girlfriends chose “Good To Be True” from their first EP Our Very First Cassette. It’s a straightforward Ramones-style ballad that has lived a few lives since the band recorded it late in 2009. On the first edition of the cassette, “Good To Be True” starred an as-yet-unidentified “space alien laser” solo and might have been recorded in a shoebox. In the words of Sadoway, “Tapes sound like shit usually, am I right?” For the Ampeater 7-inch, Girlfriends gave the song a quick spitshine: bulking up the vocals, balancing the mix, and generally bringing the track up to the strenuous standards of a self-proclaimed “garbage power trio.” While the “space alien laser” solo gets more or less dropped (you’ll have to see the live show for that, or dig up a first edition cassette somewhere) the crisper mix targets two elements that makes Girlfriends great: sing along lyrics and simple song structures. The lyrics of “Good To Be True” describe a downer narrative of teenage emotional insecurity, but the words are set to a bouncy, jangly riff that is so catchy it’s impossible to brood.

The good vibes continue on the B-side with a cover of the Vaselines’ “The Day I Was a Horse.” Clocking in at a trim 1:39, the cover satisfies the band’s appetite and predilection for the short form. In fact, their longest song appears to be “I Was Here But I Disappear” (3:22) from the EP. Commenting on the short form, Potrykus remarks, “…so many good bands and people are into writing shorter songs again too– which I really like. Good two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half minute songs are hard to beat sometimes.” One notable master of the short form, the recently-passed Jay Reatard, appeared to be on the verge of reintroducing the mainstream to the unique possibilities of the short, sweet and simple. Whether brevity makes a comeback will depend on bands like Girlfriends reaching back to a time before bloated Bjorkestras became the apple of every indie musician’s eye. Seriously, how much time is required to relate the absurdity of “the day I was a horse”? Even the Metamorphosis was a short story.

With the release of the second edition of their debut EP, Girlfriends has shown the beaten-up, old cassette format still holds some intrigue. Whether this heralds a triumphant return to the cassette in general (don’t hold your breath) remains to be seen. The irony is, of course, that the Ampeater Review is releasing “Good To Be True” and “The Day I Was a Horse” as digital pantomimes of a vinyl 7-inch. The world is topsy turvy with different ways to listen to music. The appeal of one specific format appears to be the same appeal of music subgenres: a sense of community, a sense of belonging, a sense of whatever-let’s-party.

There’s a slew of bands that have recently released work in the cassette format, like Quilt and Truman Peyote, and a ton more that are percolating within the same scene, including Kid Romance, Thick Shakes, Earthquake Party!, Young Adults, Maine Coons, and more. These are bands that play all different types of music– garage, electronic, folk, psychedelia– so there doesn’t seem to be any coherent movement afoot. But one trait they do share is that they’re all putting together exciting new music that merits attention: really, what more could you ask for?

Mike Gutierrez

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

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

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]