Fresh Ones

A roundup of the latest local CD releases

 

Swamp Baby

All Fours

I was driving home one afternoon this fall when a song came on WEXT. It was a warm acoustic lope with a touch of honky-tonk Telecaster and some hovering electronics in the distance. When the chorus came around I immediately realized my mistake. The song was “New Year’s Eve” by Swamp Baby, and I’d been listening to it for months. Like most of the material on All Fours, the quartet’s debut, the track’s a creeper. There’s certainly a hook in there—a gorgeous one—but it doesn’t hit you over the head. All Fours is the kind of heavy-lidded album that requires absorption as much as active listening, its subtlety generating déjà vu rather than recognition on repeat listens.

This quality is largely due to Nick Matulis’ songwriting. They’re simple tunes that get stretched out and slowed down for an effect that’s more atmospheric than melodic. Mike Hotter’s electric guitar, Meg Hotter’s violin and Frank Moscowitz’s electronics (including the incredible Omnichord) and percussion fill out this atmosphere and complete the four-quadrant archetypal theme central to the record and its album art. Recorded at the SRV Universal Temple in Greenville, the disc captures a reverent, hopeful atmosphere—a quality that translated well when the band performed at St. Joseph’s Church for this summer’s Restoration Fest—even when tracks like “Sin Pan Alley” and “Faust” feature dark orchestration.

It’s no coincidence that the whole thing opens with “Economy,” named after Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost, an exploration of that liminal state between void and retrieval. The whole disc has an unmoored feel to it, but there’s contentment there as well. At the end of closer “Red Skies,” another tender, subtle track, Matulis offers a friend, lover or listener this consolation: “If you don’t remember my name, that’s OK.”

—Josh Potter

 

Scientific Maps

Food for Witches

After a series of lo-fi recordings (including the masterful song and video “People Love Their Troubles”—YouTube it!), Aaron Smith (guitar/vocals), along with chief cohorts in musical mayhem Donna Baird (trumpet/keys), Jason Hughes (bass) and Phil Pascuzzo (drums/visuals), finally gives us 20 minutes of the unadulterated, studio-friendly Maps magic we’ve been yearning for. Short in duration but chockablock with memorable hooks, the disc starts with the sugar high of “Let Them See the Cables,” Smith singing like a hopped-up Bobby Darin that “everybody wants to plot (his) demise” before making way for an instrumental turn that marries psychedelic rock guitar with Baird’s brightly bopping horn. Producer Frank Moscowitz adds a biting guitar solo (among other things, including a Hammond organ) to “Baker Street,” a pulse-pumping number that takes the best elements of punk, rockabilly and classic pop to make a thrilling amalgam that reminds me of the classic Los Angeles band X. “The Red Conductor” intro smacks of a Beefheart jones, before a Theremin-sounding keyboard signals that it’s fun time again back at the hipster sock-hop. “Construction Begins” ends things with an ever-repeating coda that feels all autumnal and momentous, a grand ending to an EP that gives more pleasure than most double albums I’ve heard of late. It has been said many times, but this time it really is true—Food for Witches will restore your faith in rock & roll.

—Mike Hotter

 

The Viking

The Viking

The Viking are like that obnoxiously exuberant, overly talented kid you knew in high school, always mugging for attention and then delivering the goods. A renaissance man who achieved heights to which you could not aspire; you wanted to slow him down for a second, trip him up, maybe make him miss just one of his clubs, or a football game—anything to make him seem mortal. But at the same time you had to give him his dap, because he could just do it all. That is the kind of metal the Viking deliver: frantic, overachieving, Southern-tinged technical trash built up with movements that sporadically shift with new feeling, undulating rhythms and blazing guitar work. And it is all captured on their debut LP. If you are a fan of modern tech-metal bands like Between the Buried and Me or the Red Chord, the Viking may just be your favorite new band.

—David King

 

Ramblin’ Jug Stompers

Hobo Nickel

The most famous jug band tune ever was the Rooftop Singers’ 1963 No. 1 hit “Walk Right In,” a remake of a 1920s song by the Memphis group Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers. The lyrics, particularly the line “Daddy let you mind roll on,” allude to an opium den, perhaps the Chinese establishment that stood near the corner of Second and Beale around that time. Throughout the 10 tracks of Ramblin’ Jug Stompers latest CD, Hobo Nickel, the groove is so relaxing that you feel like an intoxicated vagrant lying on his hip in that Memphis hop joint watching the smoke curl up from the long-stemmed pipe the Chinaman hands him every time he gives him a 5-cent piece.

Jug band music was never about flashy instrumental work, and the Stompers—local music deites Greg Haymes, a.k.a. Wild Bill, on washboard and harmonica, Paul “Bowtie” Jossman on banjo, Mike Eck on mandolin and jug, and Steve Clyde on guitar—stay true to that tradition. The disc’s strong suit—that good-time, loosey-goosey feel—kicks in with the opening cut, Uncle Dave Macon’s “Morning Blues,” when the kazoo and the harmonica banter among themselves in between the verses as the washboard, mandolin, banjo, and guitar lazily float the rhythm downstream.

The only departure from the jug-band-roots repertoire, Billy Joe Royal’s 1965 pop hit “Down in the Boondocks,” comes next. The banjo picks a calypso grove, and the age-old theme of love versus class distinction incarnates anew.

On they roll until the final track, the Delmore Brothers “Freight Train Boogie,” where Clyde is in good voice and Haymes’ harp caterwauls the train whistle imitations that are obligatory in any railroad song. Just when you think the record is over, they surprise you with an ragtimey instrumental coda of kazoo-driven mayhem. Hobo Nickel is a euphoric offering from some of Albany’s most venerable musical veterans.

—Glenn Weiser

 

Dirty Stayouts

. . . And Then There Were None

These assholes have a song called “Fuck the Metroland.” Who could resist rising to this kind of bait?

There are three women on the CD cover, but of course the Dirty Stayouts are another angry dude band with raged-out songs about how pissed off and filled with self-loathing they are. The music is catchy, old-school pop-punk that’s well-played and would make pretty good background music for doing grunt work, drinking beer or busting shit up. The lyrics, however, suggest the usual inchoate, whining emo rage that seems to afflict the other half of American youth not enthralled by Justin Bieber.

There’s no point, however, in dwelling on, or getting all lefty-pissed-off about, the dumb lyrics. The Dirty Stayouts may castigate the poor for being lazy, the middle class for being drones, and liberals for wanting to steal rich people’s money, but they don’t seem to have their heart in it. And as for “Fuck the Metroland,” well, thanks for raising our name recognition among the kids who’ve never read a newspaper.

Oh, and a personal FYI for the band: Your assertion that Metrolanders are “fags” is incorrect as a matter of fact, at least if you are using the term as a homosexual slur. We’re all white and heterosexual—and as boring as you motherfuckers are.

—Shawn Stone