“The Art Teacher and the Little Stallion” is the first track on Oh, Glory. Oh, Wilderness. the third offering from Holopaw. The song introduces the character the Little Stallion who inhabits most of the songs to come. “Toy piano tinklings punctuate his every step” as we follow his coming of age. His journey is marked by lost sailors, boys on motorbikes, lazy matadors, hobbyists and foxes lurking in fake gas lamp light. The Little Stallion welcomes these characters, seduces them with “polished pearls” or is, in turn, seduced by their “horseplay, towel whips and bathing suits rolled down off sunless hips”. He falls in love with them and, more often than not, betrays them causing him to lament, “So many sailors lost to this drunken sea, so many sailors lost to me.” There is sweetness and grit, longing and potential violence.
Holopaw musically plays with similar tensions: lulling strings are undercut by anxious guitars, lilting “la’s” turn sinister and demanding. In “Little Stallion with a Glass Jaw” horn blasts announce a charge that is quickly clipped to a hush. The bounce of “P-a-l-o-m-i-n-e” stumbles towards chaos at the bridge only to be righted by a whimsical Bay City Rollers-esque chant. The last song on the record, “The Hobbyist and the Conductor (Avalanche)” begins with bright, carillon chimes that stand in stark contrast to the thunderous din that ends the song like a slack jawed finale to a fireworks display. Triumphant “la’s” punch through the smoke and ash to have the final say.
The band articulating these musical tensions is Holopaw’s strongest yet. The core songwriting team of John Orth and Jeff Hays has remained constant. The lineup has contracted and expanded in the swampy heat of Gainesville, Florida to now include Patrick Quinney, Matt Radick, Jeff McMullen, Christa Molinaro and Jody Bilinski. Throughout the record Pink Razor’s Erin Tobey lends sublime backing vocals and harmonies to buoy these otherwise troubled tales.
The album was recorded over a year and several trips to New York by Jeremy Scott (Woods, Vivian Girls, These Are Powers) at The Civil Defense studios in Brooklyn, USA. Holopaw is joined by members of Taigaa!, the Good Good, and Mahogany who add violin, clarinet, and trombone. Their additions further embellish arrangements that include trumpet, pedal steel, organ, accordion, piano, cello, clavinet, pianet and rhodes. After two records on the Sub Pop label (Holopaw, s/t and Quit +/or Fight), the band considered both self-release and working with Glacial Pace Recordings (owned and operated by John’s friend and collaborator on the Ugly Casanova record, Isaac Brock) before deciding to join the Bakery Outlet family.
The last line of Oh, Glory. Oh, Wilderness. calls out, “The trains that you sent screaming into tunnels (boot black) will spill into the light. La, La, La, La, La!” Oh, Glory. Indeed.
HOLOPAW
May 20 - 40 Watt, Athens, GA #
May 21 - Village Tavern, Mt. Pleasant, SC #
May 22 - Local 506, Chapel Hill, NC #
May 24 - The Southern, Charlottesville, VA #
May 25 - Otto Bar, Baltimore, MD #
May 26 - Black Cat, Washington, D.C. #$
May 27 - The Bell House, Brooklyn, NY @
May 28 - The Bowery Ballroom, New York, NY !
May 29 - Johnny Brenda’s, Philadelphia, PA !
# = w/ Matt Pond PA and Bobby Long
$ = w/ Army of Me
@ = w/ The Forgetters
! = w/ Besnard Lakes and Land of Talk
1. The Art Teacher and the Little Stallion
2. The Lazy Matador
3. P-A-L-O-M-I-N-E
4. Little Stallion with a Glass Jaw
5. The Last Transmission (Honeybee)
6. Oh, Glory
7. Boys on Motorbikes
8. The Cherry Glow
9. Black Lacquered Shame
10. The Conductor and the Hobbyist (Avalanche)
Midwesterners often feel obligated to apologize for/complain about their landscape. Chicago’s Light Pollution does not. The contrasting feelings of wonderment and isolation evoked by the frozen Midwestern plains deeply pervade their sound.
23-year-old songwriter James Michael Cicero grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, the son of Italian and Spanish Catholics. His grandfather was a first-generation Spanish immigrant trumpet player who moved to Chicago to lead a Big Band; aspirations that did not ensure financial stability. As a result, when Cicero bought his first guitar at the age of seventeen, his father took to locking it in the attic.
Cicero left for college in Dekalb, IL, met drummer Matt Evert, obsessively wrote songs in class, and soon dropped out. Over the following years, the two honed their skills and sensibilities, eventually acquiring Nick Sherman and Jed Robertson; evolving into what is now Light Pollution.
Swirling analog synths, shimmering arpeggios, and washed out tape noise are embedded into combinations of 90’s shoegaze, chillwave, and vocal psych-pop. Thanks to a unique blend of hi-fi and lo-fi tracking and their Midwestern demeanor, they are able to create hazy, psychedelic, layered sounds that set them apart from recent waves of lo-fi pop bands.
Light Pollution has recently finished up their full length debut, Apparitions due out on Carpark this summer. Cicero wrote the album over the course of a long, stoned, agoraphobic winter spent isolated in a heatless warehouse west of Chicago.
LIGHT POLLUTION
05/17 - Cleveland, OH Grog Shop ~
05/18 - Hoboken, NJ Maxwell’s ~
05/19 - New York, NY Bowery Ballroom ~
05/21 - Providence, RI Jerky’s Music Hall ~
05/22 - Clifton Park, NY Northern Lights ~
06/04 - Chicago, IL Lincoln Hall#
06/05 - Toronto, ON Rivoli Cabaret#
06/06 - Montreal, QC Petit Campus#
06/07 - Allston, MA Great Scott#
06/08 - Brooklyn, NY Knitting Factory#
06/09 - New York, NY Mercury Lounge#
06/10 - Washington, D.C. DC9#
06/11 - Philadelphia, PA Kung Fu Necktie#
06/12 - Pittsburgh, PA Brillobox ^ !
06/13 - Lawrence, KS The Jackpot Saloon+
06/15 - Denver, CO Larimer Lounge
06/16 - Salt Lake City, UT Kilby Court
06/18 - Visalia, CA Cellar Door@
06/19 - Fresno, CA Audie’s Olympic@
06/20 - San Francisco, CA Richshaw Stop@
06/21 - Portland, OR Doug Fir@
06/22 - Vancouver, BC 917 Main@
06/23 - Seattle, WA Vera Project@
06/25 - San Jose, CA Blank Club@
06/26 - Los Angeles, CA Spaceland@
06/27 - San Diego, CA Casbah
06/28 - Phoenix, AZ Trunk Space
06/30 - Austin, TX Emo’s Jr.
07/01 - Frisco, TX Lochranns
07/09 - Louisville, KY Forecastle Festival %
07/11 - Chicago, IL West Fest *
# = w/ This Will Destroy You
@ = w/ A Place To Bury Strangers
~ = w/ Phantogram
+ = w/ Holy F***
^ = w/ Neon Indian
! = w/ Wild Nothing
% = w/ Flaming Lips, Massive Attack, Spoon, Devo, Cap’n Jazz and more
* = w/ Small Black
Light Pollution Apparitions
(Carpark)
Street Date: June 8, 2010
1. Good Feelings
2. Oh, Ivory!
3. Drunk Kids
4. Fever Dreams
5. Deyci, Right On
6. Bad Vibes
7. All Night Outside
8. Witchcraft
9. Ssslowdreamsss
LIGHT POLLUTION LINKS:
MySpace: myspace.com/lightpollution
Swarming guitar fuzz, bass waves, Jana Hunter’s voice, and insistent drum throbs are the core components of Baltimore’s Lower Dens. Hunter, sometimes known for intimate, ghost-heavy weird-fi, is now writing and playing with a group that might get filed as new wave, or drone pop, or post-punk. With due deference to her solo work, we’re very glad.
The swarming wave-throb, coupled with Hunter’s lyrics and redolent, charred voice, wrecks. The band’s upcoming record, Twin-Hand Movement, is eleven perfect songs long. From opener “Blue & Silver” (anxiety
mounts at a quick clip until the final climactic release) to “Plastic & Powder” (a churning, narcotic slow-burner) to “Hospice Gates” (penultimate album cut, proud weirdo anthem, possible creative zenith), not one is a space-taker. They’re rife with the survivalist paranoia you’d expect from residents of a post-urban port hole (and this particular songwriter), crafted methodically and beautifully, and carry you enthusiastically out into the rolling breaks of industrial filth-water.
Lower Dens formed in 2009, when Hunter set about finding a full-time band. They spent the rest of the year sweating in attics and basements, and only stepped out of the shadows to do a quick tour and record. Twin-Hand Movement was recorded by Chris Freeland (ex-Oxes drummer; proprietor of Beat Babies, Baltimore), mixed by Chris Coady (at his DNA, NYC), and mastered by Sarah Register (of the Lodge, NYC and the band Talk Normal.)
They’ll tour this summer, first through the US with hometown friends Future Islands and then again and again, and everywhere.
LOWER DENS
5.13 Ocean Springs, MS - Rusty Robots
5.14 New Orleans, LA - The Saint
5.15 Houston, TX - Mango’s
5.16 Austin, TX - Club Deville
5.17 Lubbock, TX - Riprocks
5.18 Las Cruces, NM - Equinox
5.19 Phoenix, AZ - Rogue Bar
5.20 San Diego, CA - Tin Can Alehouse
5.21 Los Angeles, CA - Sync Space
5.22 Los Angeles, CA - The Smell
5.24 San Francisco, CA - El Rio (early)
5.25 Eureka, CA - Lil Red Lion
5.26 Portland, OR - Rotture
5.27 Ellensburg, WA - Raw Space
5.28 Olympia, WA - Northern
5.29 Seattle, WA - Sunset Tavern (early)
6.1 Denver, CO - Rhinoceropolis
6.2 Kansas City, MO - The Foundation
6.3 Bloomington, IN - The Bishop
6.5 Chicago, IL - Permanent Records (In-store @ 5pm)
6.5 Chicago, IL - The Hideout
6.6 Detroit, MI - Majestic Cafe
6.7 Toronto, ON - Double Double Land
6.8 Montreal, QC - Green Room
6.9 Burlington, VT - Monkey House
6.10 Dover, NH - Brickhouse
6.11 Boston, MA - Brookline Cable Access
6.12 Brooklyn, NY - Silent Barn
6.13 Baltimore, MD - Penthouse
All shows w/ Future Islands
Lower Dens Twin-Hand Movement
(Gnomonsong)
Street date: July 20, 2010
1. Blue & Silver
2. Tea Lights
3. A Dog’s Dick
4. Holy Water
5. I Get Nervous
6. Completely Golden
7. Plastic & Powder
8. Rosie
9. Truss Me
10. Hospice Gates
11. Two Cocks
A year and a half after releasing the acclaimed Alopecia LP, WHY? returns with their fourth album, Eskimo Snow (released Sept. 22, 2009). The two records are each other’s perfect foil: While last year’s release found Yoni Wolf and the gang delivering a tight set of intricate rhymes, live loops, slurred hooks and acerbic wit, Eskimo Snow offers a sung, sobering take on mortality that unfurls in lush waves of Americana and pop-infused psych-folk. Pre-mixed in Nashville by Lambchop’s Mark Nevers (Silver Jews, Bonnie Prince Billy, Calexico) and worked over by Alopecia engineer Eli Crews, this album is WHY?’s most live-sounding yet - a shadowy and sprawling piece as intimate in subject matter as it is handsome in timbre.
WHY? actually recorded Eskimo Snow at the same time as Alopecia, at Minneapolis’ Third Ear studio, with Fog’s Andrew Broder and Mark Erickson rounding out a live quintet. The vision for two separate albums emerged on a snowed-in night after a hot toddy or two. If Alopecia, however inexplicably, maintains a summery tone, then Eskimo Snow captures the bite and resignation associated with the Midwestern winters that these Cincinnati boys grew up with.
“These Hands” opens the album up rich and with deliberate pacing, Doug matching Yoni word-for-word (you’ll find no vocal overdubs here) and the rhythm section operating under heavy reverb. Vibraphone likewise duets with piano, windy wordless vocals fly around the atmosphere, and wet footsteps soon carry us to “January Twenty Something.” Here, you’re in the room with WHY?, listening to the bass rattle the drums and the drums rattle the vibes. Amid this folksy grandness, the whole crew sings for the chorus, bending their harmony into a gorgeously warped drawl. Next, “Against Me” brings the album’s brightest moment yet: a crescendo of bells that eventually dips into an aural whirlpool while Yoni spins picturesque observations like a countrified Dylan.
Across Eskimo Snow, Yoni weighs his ability to create a legacy against life’s transience. On the luxe, pedal-steel-drenched “Even The Good Wood Gone,” he transposes himself with a mummy in a museum, begging, “No flash photography,” drawing a line from the dubious promise of fame to the brittleness of antiquity. For “Into The Shadows Of My Embrace,” he explores sex and decay while the track vacillates between a live wall-of-sound and spare church organ passages. “One Rose” is gentler, sporting a Western stride and dark piano hits whose echoing blackness mimics Yoni’s wistful poems. Toward the song’s end, the chorus of Alopecia’s “A Sky For Shoeing Horses Under” makes a stormy reprise.
Most impressively, this record presents a band uninhibited, but evermore accomplished at imbuing sound with mood. “On Rose Walk, Insomniac” rolls forth on a tempestuous din, Josiah drumming hard through the chorus, where Yoni’s voice sounds like its running through a Leslie speaker. “Berkeley By Hearseback” comes in so soft, the guitar tones feel like waves of grain next to the splashy cymbals and that Jim James-worthy cowboy croon ricocheting through the background. “This Blackest Purse” weaves a melancholy that shirks dourness for a curious smile. And when the titular song brings the album to a hushed close, Eskimo Snow’s place in the narrative becomes clear. Rather than spit at death or threaten it with suicide, Yoni stops bucking against the inevitable. In the process, the band discovers a rich place that the rest of us can happily live within.
Josiah Wolf Bio:
On his debut album, WHY? multi-instrumentalist Josiah Wolf offers up a rare solo work with true legs of its own. His voice deep and straight at times and impossibly fragile at others, Wolf deals both in visual snapshots that illustrate the wistfulness of a mundane moment, and canny excavations of those poignancies that lie beneath the surface: tough triumphs, tougher truths, and outright failures. Wolf’s lean poems are set to an autumnal mix of warm folk and easy psychedelia played out (by Wolf alone) on guitar, vibes, kalimba, Hammond organ, bells, bass and drums to name a few. The end result is a sort of chamber pop minus the showy sweeps - virtuosity without the virtuoso - making Jet Lag as impressive in its subtle execution as it is a timeless, heartfelt listen.
“The Trailer and the Truck” begins the album like a lost thought on its way out of sleep. Notes freed by mallets bounce into the fuzzy foreground, bent chords stretch out from metal strings, then bundled bursts of drum-and-strum clear the way for Wolf’s voice. On “Master Cleanse (California),” he mulls over region and religion atop spare acoustics and a kaleidoscopic chorus where shimmering sounds move to an elastic tempo. One of the album’s best follows, “The Opposite of Breathing,” whose shuffling beat, cool tones and rich texture evoke late ’60s Greenwich Village. In that space, Wolf’s lyrics find him as Jet Lag often does: on the other side of divorce, hoping for the beatific wind that’ll blow him onward.
Throughout these songs, style and substance are treated with equal aplomb. The rolling bass and bright vocals of “The New Car” split the difference between The Zombies and Daniel Johnston. “Skull in the Ice” is lush in its instrumentation - blending bossa guitar, marimba, and tinkling keys - but sports Wolf’s most intimate singing yet. “The Apart Meant” rolls out a cloudy darkness, to which Wolf replies David Berman-like, “I guess it’s goodbye now/Did I guess wrong?/’I guess it’s goodbye’/Is a broken man’s song.” After such heaviness, the quiet Paul Simon folk of “That Kind of Man” feels like fresh air, while “Ohioho” is genuinely sunny, with Wolf following a different road with a different girl by his side.
Jet Lag came together following the dissolution of an 11-year relationship, and over the course of a move from California back to the Midwest, where Wolf grew up. It’s no surprise then, that the album contains such deeply moving works as the spooky, Cohen-esque “Is the Body Hung” and the warm, grand tribute to past love, “In The Seam.” But Jet Lag’s final two songs only look back long enough to prepare their author for newness. The stormy “Gravity Defied” conveys that knowing resignation that eventually comes, while on album-ender “The One Sign,” the breeze that Wolf was waiting on becomes a gale threatening to crash a loaded airplane. Rather than cower together or pray to God, however, the passengers stand to face fate head on. Wolf’s final lyric - “‘Heaven help me’ are just words / That time will make you say” - echoes out before the shelter offered by the song dissolves into the outdoors.
WHY? & JOSIAH WOLF
05-27 - Vancouver, BC - The Biltmore Cabaret*
05-28 - Portland, OR - Wonder Ballroom*
05-30 - Eugene, CA - WOW Hall*
06-02 - Oakland, CA - New Parish Of Oakland*
06-03 - Pomona, CA - Glasshouse*
* = w/ The Donkeys
WHY? ONLY
05-29 - Gorge, WA - Sasquatch Festival
06-26 - Minneapolis, MN - First Ave %
07-01 - Calgary, AB - Dickens for Sled Island Festival
07-02 - Calgary, AB - Olympic Plaza for Sled Island Festival
07-09 - Cincinnati, OH - Mid Point Indie Summer Series @ Fountain Square
07-17 - Chicago, IL - Pitchfork Festival
% = w/ Deerhoof & Southeast Engine
JOSIAH WOLF ONLY
05/21 Chicago, IL Schuba’s @
05/22 Minneapolis, MN 7th St. Entry ~
05/23 Fargo, ND The Aquarium
05/24 Billings, MT The Railyard
05/25 Missoula, MT The Palace
05/26 Seattle, WA The Vera Project %#
05/31 Eureka, CA Nocturnum #$
06/01 Reno, NV The Underground (The Treehouse Club) #
06/04 La Jolla, CA Che Cafe !
06/05 Tucson, AZ Solar Cultural Gallery !
06/06 Phoenix, AZ Trunk Space !
06/08 Salt Lake City, UT Urban Lounge !
06/09 Denver, CO Hi Dive !
06/10 Lawrence, KS Jackpot Music Hall !
06/11 St. Louis, MO The Firebird !
06/12 Bloomington, IN The Bishop !
06/15 Buffalo, NY Mohawk Place
06/16 South Burlington, VT Higher Ground
06/17 Northampton, MA Iron Horse
06/18 Philadelphia, PA Kung Fu Necktie
06/19 Brooklyn, NY Knitting Factory
06/21 Pittsburgh, PA Morning Glory Coffeehouse
# = w/ The Donkeys
% = w/ AU
$ = w/ Citay
@ = w/ Serengeti
! = w/ Cars & Trains
~ = w/ Dark Dark Dark
