Local roundup

Reviews of recent (and not so recent) Columbus albums:

The Lost Revival - Homemade Confetti
Let me first say that I'm way late on this one. The Lost Revival released its debut, Homemade Confetti, earlier this year, but it somehow passed me by. That band wasn’t hiding under a rock, either. The seven-piece multi-instrumentalists have become known for their intense live shows, earning them a spot opening CD101’s Summerfest this year.

Homemade Confetti, which was apparently recorded in one weekend, doesn’t sound the least bit like a rush job. It’s a big record, with lots of atmospheric layering in the background, providing a thick blanket in which to wrap Kevin Collins’s throaty vocals--like a less lackadaisical, sea-urchin-swallowing version of the Black Swans’ Jerry DeCicca.

Collins must be a Bob Dylan devotee, given some of his phrasing, harmonica style and religious imagery. (Not to mention the intro guitar riff to “Jailbait” sounds just like “Hurricane,” and “Thin Man’s Mile” is probably not a coincidental allusion to “Ballad of a Thin Man.”) But with all those instruments and dark overtones, any sort of “Americana” tag would be misleading--especially on a song like “A Bird on a Chain,” the best on the album. The Lost Revival has a sound entirely its known, and a good one.

Karate Coyote - Move EP
Just the name Karate Coyote exudes playfulness, so it’s no surprise this up-and-coming band’s debut EP, Move, is filled with hand claps and a friskiness that brings to similar-minded acts like Los Campesinos!.

Playful is cool with me, especially when it’s done this well. “Move yourself to dance,” instructs Karate Coyote on the bouncy leadoff track, “Move Yourself,” and if no one’s looking, you’ll no doubt find yourself heeding the advice. Surprises abound on this little EP, like the bluesy guitar solo on “Easy” and the synth outro on “Incogneat-o.”

KC is a new band, so there’s room to grow, of course. I could use more of the back-and-forth guy-girl vocals, and I think the singers in general are buried too deep too often on these tracks. They’re good enough to be front and center--a position Karate Coyote should get used to if it continues down its current path.

mp3: Karate Coyote - Move Yourself

Melty Melty - Rise of the Birdmen
A few weeks ago I told you about the whole debacle Melty Melty went through while recording Rise of the Birdmen, i.e. losing the entire album to a computer crash and having to start from scratch. It makes for a good story, but good stories only matter if the record follows suit. This one is so good you won’t really care how it came to fruition.

Like Sean Gardner’s other projects (Bookmobile, Winter Makes Sailors), Melty Melty continues his pattern of making highly accessible but no less artful indie rock, this time with an unmistakable deference to Pinback--a comparison I wouldn’t make lightly.

Rise of the Birdmen is polished and spacious. “Walls” is built around a simple, repeating guitar bend, and “Killing Time” is Melty Melty at its dreamiest, Gardner and former Kopaz compadre Kevin Davison making tasteful use of analog synths, eerie guitar and found sounds. “Same Situation” would be the obvious first single, if singles still mattered. Gardner’s instantly recognizable tenor has a tendency to wander too far into whiny land, but it usually anchors the songs nicely; his inventive vocal melodies provide the majority of the album’s hooks.

Nothing against the band’s label, We Want Action, but Melty Melty deserves something bigger, and with this debut, the band just might get it.

Melty Melty

For some reason the Other Paper never got the Melty Melty preview I wrote up on the website, so here it is, even though the release show was last weekend. Of all the local releases this year, Rise of the Birdmen is one I highly recommend picking up.

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On Melty Melty’s debut album, Rise of the Birdmen, singer Sean Gardner sounds like a man who has come to grips with technology’s aggravating tendency to implode. “Machines can tumble on over, it doesn’t even matter to me/ Machines can burn out their motors, it doesn’t even matter to me,” he sings on “Same Situation,” the leadoff track.

Gardner learned to roll with the punches the hard way. He and bandmate Kevin Davison had just about finished recording the album with their engineer/drummer Mark Himmel (The Slide Machine) when Himmel’s hard drive crashed. They lost everything.

“It was awful,” Gardner said. “We looked at companies that could recover hard drives, and it was way too much money and they couldn’t guarantee it. We got programs to try, spent countless hours at the Mac store, but it was just a lost cause. And then we all invested in external hard drives.”

It took a couple of months to gear up and start over, and once they did, the record began to take on a whole new feel. The first time through the songs had a raw, home-recorded sound, but Rise of the Birdmen is “a lot more polished than we expected and a lot more produced,” Gardner said. “We love it. I’m really, really proud of it, but it’s definitely a lot different than the beginning.”

The real beginning of Melty Melty goes back even further, to the days when Gardner and Davison were in Kopaz, a Columbus band that garnered some major label attention and then promptly called it quits. So the two began focusing on the direction Kopaz had started to take--slower, spacey, poppy and simple, taking cues from Pinback and German duo Tarwater. (On Rise of the Birdmen, the Pinback influence is impossible to miss.)

At first the pair tried to tour on their own, looping live drums with Gardner behind the kit. “It was a really cool idea but it didn’t always work,” he says. “Every song kinda started out the same and it wasn’t as fun to perform. And sometimes you’d get a bad sound guy who didn’t know what we were trying to do.”

Eventually Himmel came on board and Melty Melty did some touring, but he has since been replaced by Brian Moore, drummer for Brainbow and formerly of Tiara. Bookmobile’s Antonio Garza occasionally fills in as well, and the plan for this Saturday’s record release show at Ruby Tuesday is to have all three drummers playing simultaneously at certain points. It’s super-trendy these days for indie-rock bands to have two drummers, Gardner says, but three? “We’re treading new ground,” he joked.

Like Gardner’s other projects--Bookmobile, Winter Makes Sailors--Melty Melty doesn’t shy away from a hook. But Gardner said the different bands occupy a different space in his head when it comes to songwriting. Slower songs tend to become Winter Makes Sailors tunes; catchy, fun songs usually go Melty Melty’s way, and when writing for Bookmobile, Gardner said there’s “beer in the air and jump-kicking, the fun rock and roll side.”

Oh, and then there’s the Kyle Sowashes, but Gardner admitted not much sweat goes into his role there. “All I have to do is write a sweet tambourine part.”