Bonnie "Prince" Billy - Beware

Will Oldham is an unpredictable, eccentric fellow, but it’s probably safe to say that after 10 years and 12 albums (including live records), the Bonnie “Prince” Billy moniker is his primary means of musical output. Previous pseudonyms--all variations on the word “Palace”--haven’t surfaced since 2004’s Bonnie “Prince” Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music.

As BPB, Oldham has prolifically traversed Americana terrain, dabbling in Nashville country, Southern gothic, Gram Parsons country-rock and hauntingly spare folk. His voice has matured along the way, but still retains a laconic, warbled quality.

Oldham said in a New Yorker profile a few months back that Beware (out now) would be his “big” album, meaning he would promote it with singles, photo shoots, etc. “I am Goodbye” is the first single, and it’s a good primer for the rest of the album--a downright zippy tune that revels in the concept of goodbyes using swirly guitar and mandolin.

It’s the next logical step after last year’s In the Light, a strong album I overlooked until this year. It’s a sunny record, full of arrangements that could be considered elaborate compared with the quiet starkness earlier albums like Ease Down the Road and Master and Everyone. Beware is even more elaborate, working in a full roster of musicians contributing all sorts of bits and pieces to the whole. In the final track, “Afraid Ain’t Me,” you’ll hear a flute solo, hand claps, horns and bongos, to name a few.

It’s too big for Oldham, but only slightly so. While the arrangements can sometimes serve as roadblocks (the vocal echo, strings and choir on “Heart’s Arms”), often they enhance (the marimba and pedal steel on “You Can’t Hurt Me Now”).

The more barren “There is Something I Have to Say” hearkens to those earlier albums, serving as a nice rest before ramping up again. And there’s still Oldham’s words that’ll creep you out or make you laugh. Or both: “I want to be your only friend. Is that scary?”

He can also be ominous and a little confounding, as on “Death Final”: “In a pit of bodies I am loved by all/ By ham hock and by handkerchief, by damsel and by doll/ An angel warns us with its unfinal call/ It was not death final, it was only fall.”

Referencing a ham hock in a song about death is unexpected and a bit jarring, but keeping us guessing is something Oldham has down to a science.

(Also at The Other Paper)

Lohio, Karate Coyote, The Randys - Rumba

In the middle of Lohio’s set at the Rumba Café on Friday night, lead singer Greg Dutton led the band through a song called “You’ve Got a Lot of Nerve,” during which he repeated this sentiment several times: “I can tell you’ve got some things to learn.” Each time I heard it, I couldn’t help thinking of that adage about the pot and the kettle.

Lohio has much to learn. The Pittsburgh fivesome is pleasant enough on record, merging the squeaky-clean indie pop of bands like Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin with intermittent doses of introspective folk-pop. But onstage it was all quite bland—not awful, by any means, and certainly not devoid of talent. There just wasn’t anything the least bit distinctive in the performance to set the group apart from countless other bands charting a similar course. Lohio is so safe that it’s entirely unremarkable.

The band was at its worst during the slower, more folk-leaning songs, which highlighted the weaknesses in Dutton’s voice as he sang in a low, unconfident register. The band was at its best during more upbeat songs like “Modern Days,” adding some much-needed energy to the performance. But regardless of range or tempo, Dutton was pretty much devoid of charisma, which enervated even some of the band’s bounciest songs.

A bad mix could have been part of the problem here. Dutton’s voice was always soft, and the bassist’s harmonies (I assume?) were inaudible. But here’s the bottom line: There are some bands that can convincingly and engagingly pull off a song with a chorus that consists only of “Hangin’ out with you.” This was not one of those bands.

Despite having shared the stage with bands like the Avett Brothers and American Music Club, Lohio looked and sounded bush-league. And it seemed even more bush-league following the Rumba’s early-show act, the Randys, which kept a shoulder-to-shoulder happy-hour crowd dancing and grinning.

The Randys are actually the perfect happy-hour band, despite the fact that you might not recognize a hefty chunk of the songs they cover from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. No matter. The band has a way of resurrecting genres you may have mentally discarded (e.g. polka). On Friday, the band even strung together five or six Hawaiian tunes with spot-on harmonies, ukulele and lap steel guitar. Quite impressive.

The Randys manage to do what so many cover bands (a misleading label) can’t: that is, conveying authenticity for whatever period they tackle while also allowing the songs to be influenced and strengthened by their own musical histories and attributes.

Karate Coyote closed down the night on some high and low notes. With only one EP out (Move E.P.), the young band made the odd decision to start the show with old and new songs that aren’t on it, none of which I was particularly fond of.

Sound problems didn’t help here, either. The second guitarist was lost in the mix, and despite having the strongest pipes of the indie-pop collective, female vocalist Sam Corlett was barely audible. Even so, I much preferred the songs she led to guitarist Ryan Horn’s tunes.

I was happier once “Move Yourself,” the strongest EP track, came along. “So Far So Good,” a song CD101 has been pimping, sounded pretty good, too, as did “Incogneat-o.” But the band has some more work to do before its stage show does justice to its recorded material.

(Also at The Other Paper)

The Receiver - "Visitor" video

Columbus band The Receiver made a video for a new song called "Visitor" off their upcoming sophomore album, Length of Arms, due out this spring (CD release show 5/8 at Skully's). Production-wise, it's probably the best music video from a Columbus band I've seen, and a good song to boot. Bandmate brothers Jesse and Casey Cooper have submitted it to an Ohio Film competition, so if you agree with my positive assessment, be sure to give it some YouTube ratings love. I'd say it very much deserves to be a finalist.

Elvis Perkins in Dearland

Elvis Perkins in Dearland just released its eponymous debut album, but you can think of it as a companion piece to Perkins’s 2007 solo outing, Ash Wednesday. Calling that one a solo album is a bit misleading, anyway. There were certainly some stark arrangements with just Perkins and his acoustic guitar, but more often it incorporated strings, horns, glockenspiel, vibraphone, etc.

Elvis Perkins in Dearland builds on that, as the singer/guitarist’s three touring mates help him heap more textures, more stylistic influences and more instruments on an Americana base. The songs almost never collapse under these arrangements, instead creating an ever-shifting palette for the casual vocals and poetic lyrics.

Voice-wise, Perkins has some of the idiosyncrasies of Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum and the timbre of Rufus Wainwright, but with more restraint than either of those singers. He has an easiness about him that brings to mind Leonard Cohen—not overly sentimental, yet not dry, with a slight vibrato around the edges. Nothing is rushed, nothing is forced.

This record, like the last, offers ruminations on grief and death—which, given his background, Perkins could be excused for writing and singing about for the rest of his life. His father was actor Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates in Psycho, and his mother was photographer Berry Berenson. Anthony Perkins died of AIDS-related complications in 1992, and Berenson was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11 in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Leadoff track “Shampoo”—which begins with the chirping of cicadas and crickets, flittering woodwinds and light acoustic strums—seems to use eccentric folk singer John Jacob Niles’s “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” as a reference point, intermingling themes of love and death. “Black is the color of a strangled rainbow, black is the color of my lung/Black is the color of my true love’s arrow, black is the color of a human’s blood,” he sings. The song has some reggae flare, but it’s anchored in Elvis-land with Perkins’s harmonica.

Despite the weighty material, “Shampoo” and other tunes like “I Heard Your Voice in Dresden,” “123 Goodbye” and the horn-heavy “Doomsday” are more sprightly than much of Ash Wednesday. Perkins also takes care to ensure that his lyrics don’t become overbearing. “I don’t let doomsday bother me, do you let it bother you?” he sings, letting us know that death, while devastating, is something he’s been forced to come to grips with.

mp3: Elvis Perkins in Dearland- Shampoo

Singing Through the Hard Times: A Tribute to Utah Phillips

Folk singer Bruce “Utah” Phillips identified himself as an anarchist, but that didn’t stop him from making a 1968 bid for the U.S. Senate in Utah. He lost, but he got plenty of his ideas across through his music, fed by his years as a rail rider, soldier in the Korean War and unflinching supporter and member of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union (aka “the Wobblies”).

Phillips died last year before he could hear the finished product of a compilation that was released recently, Singing Through the Hard Times: A Tribute to Utah Phillips. This 39-track, double-disc set isn’t just folk-inspired. Most of the contributors sound like folk purists—the kind of people who, when the crowd booed Bob Dylan during his electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, would have chimed right in.

Casual music fans will recognize a few big names here, such as Emmylou Harris (“Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia”), Pete Seeger (“Or Else! (One-a These Days)”) and Ani DiFranco, whose Righteous Babe Records is releasing the set. Diehard folkies will notice Tom Paxton—who won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award last month—Jean Ritchie, Rosalie Sorrels and probably a couple of others. And then there are quite a few relatively unknown singers, strummers, banjo pickers and the like.

Emmylou could sing stock-market symbols, and I’d still enjoy it. She just has one of those consistently wonderful, engaging voices. There are some strong offerings from relative unknowns, too, such as Saul Broudy’s cowboy-country take on “Starlight on the Rails” and the hypnotic drone of “Hymn Song” captured by Emma’s Revolution.

But 39 tracks is excessive for just about any compilation, so it’s no shock that there are some not-so-strong tracks. Lisa Null’s take on “All About Preachers” sounds like an open-mike out-take, and Judy Cook’s “Kid’s Liberation” and a couple of others are a stone’s throw from the folk parodies of Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind. (Those interpretations are admittedly spot-on, so that’s not a scathing critique.)

Not surprisingly, what reverberates most on this compilation is Phillips’s storytelling and social-change sentiments. When the thread by which our country’s infrastructure hangs gets more frayed each week, there couldn’t be a more timely sentiment than the chorus from the album’s title track: “We are singing through the hard times, singing through the hard times, working for the good times to come.”

mp3: Magpie, Dan Schatz, Emma's Revolution & more... - Singing Through the Hard Times

Staying relevant

Neko Case has a new album out, and if you liked Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, you'll like this one. Same vivid, bizarre songwriting, same terrific voice. Same electric-red hair, too, judging by the album cover and features in Paste and Spin. In fact, she graced the cover of Paste's February issue.

Before hearing the album, I was pretty excited to read about Neko, the making of Middle Cyclone, etc. But, to my disappointment, Paste decided to do a "50th Issue Lovefest"-themed issue, which I guess was also some sort of Valentine's day tie-in. This also meant the cover story on Neko Case ended up being a list of her favorite things ("17 Things I <3"). There's a reason most good, long-form feature stories rely on more than a Q&A with the artist, just like there's a reason good stories aren't made up entirely of quotes. Generally, I learn more about an artist and his/her music by reading about a writer's experiences with that artist rather than a string of quotes. Some of my favorite music journalism is such because of what a writer perceives behind and between the quotes--the way someone's face twitches, the way she gets visibly awkward when addressing a certain subject, how she holds her spoon, interactions with strangers, etc.

Which is why I enjoyed Ellen Carpenter's Spin profile of Neko far more. While it may seem counterintuitive, I don't care about Neko describing her favorite things in her own words. I want to hear a good writer describe her favorite things, how that conclusion was made and why they're her favorite things. Not to mention that what she hates is probably far more interesting.

One example. Both stories talk about how much Neko loves her grehounds. In Case's words (from Paste): "Dogs live for today. I love them for that."

In Carpenter's words (from Spin): "Neko Case's biggest fans bum-rush her at her front door. 'Hi, guys!' she singsongs as four large dogs come clattering over floorboards to fill the entrance of her Tuscon, Arizona home with sheer body-wiggling desperation. You'd think she'd been on tour for weeks, not at a local cafe for two hours."

Which is better?

All this to say, the use of gimmicks in music magazines seems to be on the rise, and Paste is certainly not the only guilty party. (This little case study could be easily reversed in a different issue.) I understand that print publications are suffering right now, which I presume is why the newest issue of Paste is the March/April edition. Guess it's back to bi-monthly. But if print publications are trying to compete with free information on the Internet, then they should be emphasizing what makes a print publication different. Not to say that this is the only struggle print publications have (horrible economy, dwindling advertising dollars, etc.), but adapting to the age of the Internet doesn't mean restyling a magazine so it's more like a webzine or a blog. Any number of music blogs have Q&As with artists every day, and they're rarely interesting.

Readers of print publications want more. They want the writing to be a cut above what they speed through on their Google Readers every day. So make it worthwhile, music mags. Adapt, don't conform. And stay away from shallow gimmicks.

Matt & Kim, Hollywood Holt, Tin Armor - Skully's

From the moment Matt & Kim played their first note at Skully’s on Friday night, a guy standing in front of me gripped the railing of the stage, closed his eyes, threw his head back, smiled and moved to the beat. He didn’t stop until the final note was played.

At some indie-rock shows, a guy like this might stick out like a pair of pressed khakis. But I only noticed him because I was watching the show from the comparatively sedate side stage. From the front of the stage almost all the way back to the bar, enthused kids threw their hands up, danced, gyrated, shouted along and generally immersed themselves in the music coming from this keyboard-and-drums duo. I even saw someone skipping. While a scene like this is somewhat of a rarity at a Columbus rock show, at least at most of the venues I frequent, I get the feeling it’s standard fare for Matt & Kim--the smiliest couple in indie rock.

Though I’ll happily put on the duo’s sophomore album, Grand, when the mood strikes, I admit the couple’s youthful exuberance and Matt Johnson’s prone-to-cracking, slightly emo vocals don’t knock me out on record. But in a live setting, watching Kim Schifino pummel her floor tom with affixed perma-grin and seeing Johnson bang out the opening notes of “Daylight,” the giddiness is contagious as a runny nose.

It was odd that with a live show this good, the two screens behind the pair just rotated fairly boring images of words like “Grand” and “Matt and Kim.” The only cool image was some exploding fireworks. It didn’t detract from the vibe, but I imagine with some more time and thought put into the projections, wide-eyed fans’ heads would explode.

Heeding the “simple is better” punk philosophy, almost all of the tunes were propelled by Schifino’s simple beats. I was happy to hear all three of Grand’s opening trifecta--“Good Ol’ Fashion Nightmare,” “Cutdown” and “Daylight”--at some point in the evening. They’re the best songs the two have written. Before the last song of the night, Johnson stood up and gave a passionate, endearingly idealistic speech about supporting Obama, remembering everything in life and trying hard, followed by the only (seemingly) unironic rendition of Europe’s “The Final Countdown” I’ve ever heard.

Chicago rapper Hollywood Holt did a good job of getting the crowd all riled up, despite being relatively unknown and employing a sheepishly green deejay (“DJ Skyler”) prone to screwing up. Judging by the five to ten friends roaming the stage taking pictures and video, Holt is pretty new to this game. But he was determined to get the place moving, and his mix of old-school rhymes, crunky beats and vaguely punk influences did the job.

Like Matt & Kim, Hollywood ain’t afraid to make you smile, with lyrics about the cleanliness of his clothes and the recent purchase of a moped. For some reason, I also found his onstage sidekick hilarious (in a good way), so that helped, too. Fans of party rap, electro and the Beastie Boys should find much to like.

I forgot that I’d seen opener Tin Armor before when the band opened for Frightened Rabbit and Spinto Band, so I guess the locals didn’t leave a big impression on me. But I really liked what I heard this time. The band’s blend of punk, pop and rock just felt more put together, feeding off the energy of a full house. This time I’ll remember.