That’s where I’m at a loss. Phish chose a costume that’s too much like itself, like pulling a durable, blue dress shirt and khakis out of the closet, when it should have worn something playful, like a frilly, retro tuxedo, freaky clown suit, or novelty teeth. Or maybe that’s exactly what the band was shooting for, the shirt and khakis, only it’s not funny, like Oscar’s “sensible consumer” costume on The Office?

The history of Phish’s costumes has been well documented. Phish wore its first musical costume in 1994, when the band performed the entire Beatles White Album. The costume made perfect sense, a mannerist rock band covering a mannerist rock album – a cover of a “cover.” The Who’s Quadrophenia, another double LP dose of classic rock, followed in 1995, and crystallized the costume concept – give fans the most bang for their buck, i.e. a classic, time-tested double album.

Phish’ 1996 choice, Remain in Light by the Talking Heads, was unfamiliar to most of the audience, many of whom came from the Hippie side of the musical spectrum, but it didn’t matter. Songs like “Born Under Punches” and “Crosseyed and Painless” were built for extending in concert (watch Stop Making Sense), and Phish could mimic David Byrne better than Paul McCartney or Roger Daltrey. After two classic warhorses in two years, fans seemed willing to let Phish off the hook for breaking with tradition, and some even noted the galvanizing effect the Afrobeat-inspired collection had on the band’s playing.

In 1998, Phish covered Loaded by The Velvet Underground, an album of unhealthy debauchery and proto-Glam, three-chord rockers. They were easy songs to learn, fun to jam out on, and stress-free to sing. A few people grumbled, but by now it was clear that you couldn’t really anticipate what the next costume would be. And then Phish abandoned the costume concept for more than a decade.

With the score tied at Crowd Pleasers, 2, Guilty Pleasures, 2, last year’s Exile On Main Street couldn’t miss. It worked because the album simply has so many stellar cuts: “Rocks Off,” “Let it Loose,” “Tumbling Dice,” all of Sides Two and Four. Together again, Phish was content to get its collective rocks off. It could be as loose as it wanted to be with Exile’s bluesy rave-ups, piano anthems, and sloppy cowboy rock, and didn’t have to sweat the details. Keef wouldn’t mind, right?

The Beatles, The Who, The Talking Heads, The VU, and The Stones are all iconic, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-type bands. Waiting For Columbus was a great album by a faceless, cultish band of incredible musicians, one lacking household recognition and somewhere down the road from their heyday. When it was released in 1978, Little Feat, like other bands with strong ties to the Hippie Aesthetic, was hardly the hippest thing going, a mixture of SoCal yacht rock (listen closely and you’ll hear Glen Frey ripening avocados in the background), Steely Dan-ish jazz-pop, blue-eyed soul, and even jazz-fusion, a testament to – and perhaps by-product of – their individual day jobs as in-demand studio players.

Back then, with an LP and turntable, you could easily skip the clunkers. You dug Side One’s first three cuts (“Fat Man in the Bathtub,” “All That You Dream,” and “Oh Atlanta”) and hopefully got off the couch in time to flip the vinyl before “Old Folks Boogie.” If you didn’t make it, your baked ass fell asleep, and you awoke amid the silence that followed the needle reaching the inner groove. Eventually, you got up and put on the stellar Side Two (“Time Loves a Hero,” “Day or Night,” “Mercenary Territory,” and “Spanish Moon”). Rarely would you stop listening before Side Three, the climax of a Feat concert – “Dixie Chicken,” seguing straight into a sprinting “Tripe Face Boogie” – and the subsequent encore, “Rocket in My Pocket,” a Lowell George-penned, pocket symphony of sorts. Side Four? You avoided it entirely. It remained as pristine and scratch-free as the day you bought it, unless your ex-hippie neighbor dropped by to hear “Willin’” (a small price to pay for some free bud). Early CDs made it even easier to skip Side Four (two cuts, “Don’t Bogart That Joint” and “A Apolitical Blues,” were deleted so that the album would fit one disc), and I suspect that iPods were designed at least in part for the purpose of avoiding “Old Folks Boogie.”

Even so, few classic albums – Exile, Blonde on Blonde, Pet Sounds, any Beatles album – don’t have at least one song to skip over. Stylistically, Phish’s musical costume was a perfect fit, and maybe that’s the only thing that matters after all. But it wasn’t scary, funny, exotic, esoteric, playful or even popular enough, and unlike Remain in Light, it’s hard to imagine how Waiting For Columbus will push the band’s music forward. It was a rich, maroon-colored crayon of a costume, like dressing up as a Turnbull AC, the much feared, no-frills gang from the movie The Warriors, instead of as a flashier Baseball Fury.

Click here to read the article in the Hartford Advocate.

When you ask a question, he lays out the basic outlines of a response, adding flourishes, digressions and important secondary themes, such as a lengthy — but fascinating — elucidation of the “Ravi Shankar Syndrome” that grabbed hold of the Indian music scene in the 1970s and kept other worthy players from getting their fair share of attention.

Even the subject of today’s interview — his upcoming performance with Niladri Kumar, one of India’s young sitar lions, as part of Wesleyan University’s 34th annual Navaratri Festival — turns out to be a secondary theme in a richer narrative. What’s really interesting is the story of how Hussain and like-minded musicians pioneered the fusion of Hindustani and Carnatic musical traditions with Western jazz and rock over the course of three decades, laying the groundwork for what we now call world music. And just as a fragment of rhythm often gleans insight into the fabric of an extended composition, Wesleyan’s not insignificant role is crucial to understanding that story as well.

Hussain began lessons with father, tabla legend Ustad Allarakha, at age 3. A self-described tabla brat, the young prodigy soon impressed everyone with his formidable technique, playing his first American gig with Ravi Shankar at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York in 1970. Hired by the University of Washington later that year, Hussain heard the Balinese gamelan, Chinese classical music, and exotic African rhythms for the first time.

The limits of his knowledge became palpable; when he returned to Mumbai for a visit, Allarakha cemented the young man’s fresh sense of humility as Hussain tried to awe his father with his new experiences. The father’s muted response — That’s great, but don’t try to be a master; always be a good student and you’ll get by just fine — struck a chord in the young player, one that continues to resonate.

Hussain returned stateside with a new attitude, finding work at the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music, a school started near San Francisco by Khan, the South Indian sarod master. Between 1972 and 1981, Hussain rubbed shoulders with a host of free-spirited musicians — Mickey Hart and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, David Crosby, Carlos Santana, Alejandro Escovedo, Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, and members of Big Brother and the Holding Company and Journey — who gravitated to the college. They shared his love of learning, his desire to interact with musicians from traditions other than his own, and his incessant need to jam.

“It was an interesting time and it led to many interesting collaborations,” Hussain remembers. “San Francisco and New York seemed to be the two areas where musicians kind of, you know, hung out, and this was the area where I was the only Indian percussionist available to play with, and got a chance that I think was the chance of a lifetime.”

Wesleyan, meanwhile, was the East Coast equivalent of the Khan College, a veritable hotbed of ethnomusicological studies, drawing students and masters of Indian music from all over the globe to Middletown. One eager student was English guitarist John McLaughlin, who had already established himself as a virtuoso on recordings with Miles Davis and his own fusion band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra. McLaughlin traveled from New York to study veena, a classical Hindu lute, at Wesleyan, where he ran into the South Indian violinist L. Shankar, the nephew of McLaughlin’s veena teacher. The two decided immediately to start a band with the visiting Hussain and percussionist T.H. “Vikku” Vinayakram. The quartet became known as Shakti, arguably the first world music fusion group and one of the genre’s most successful. “It all came out of one little coffee shop on the Wesleyan campus,” Hussain says.

Shakti disbanded, but Hussain went on playing. He collaborated with Hart on the Planet Drum project; the duo won the first Best World Music Grammy award in 1992. In 2000, Hussain’s Tabla Beat Science, an electronica project he started with Material’s Bill Laswell, brought the tabla into the new millennium. Hussain, along with banjo player Béla Fleck and double bassist Edgar Meyer, recently released an album of original compositions called The Melody of Rhythm.

Hussain doesn’t distinguish between collaborators and friends. He e-mails Fleck and Meyer when he discovers a good recipe for shrimp curry. Their families exchange books and check out new restaurants together. “When you interact,” he explains, “you don’t just put two or three or four great musicians together and say, ‘OK, now make music.’ There’s more to it than that. Music is one part of it. Meeting, interacting, getting to know each other, being friends with each other, opening your hearts to each other … you have to be able to interact and communicate on all levels of relationship. And the juice of it all needs to appear in your music.”

Kumar is no exception. “I see myself in him 30 years ago,” Hussain says. “He is probably the finest sitar exponent of his age coming out of India.”

On an afternoon in Los Angeles, China Forbes, multilingual chanteuse of Portland, Oregon’s “little orchestra” Pink Martini, relaxes in a hotel. She’s interrupted momentarily from our phone conversation when her dog discovers dessert remnants leftover from the events of the prior evening.

“Last night, Rufus Wainwright and [pianist] Thomas Lauderdale did a sing-a-long,” she laughs, “and I’m in the space where the party was, and my dog is eating cupcakes off the floor. I don’t want her to eat paper.”

A couple of days later, with the famous Hollywood sign looming in the background, Pink Martini played a three-night stint at the legendary Hollywood Bowl, joined by Rufus Wainwright, screen actor, singer, and Oregon native Jane Powell, NPR’s Ari Shapiro, and the original cast of “Sesame Street,” all backed by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. It was a typically eclectic spectacle for the band and yet another testament to the creative vision of Lauderdale, the group’s founder and leader.

“[Wainwright] is such an amazing artist,” says Forbes. “To have him be a part of our show [was] just a special treat.”

When the band heads out to the northeast in November, Forbes, a native of Cambridge, Mass., will reunite with friends and family. “It’s always great to come back,” she says. “To be there in the fall and remembering my childhood, and just being in the seasons. I love fall. It’s my favorite season. I think we’ll be there a little late for seeing leaves change, but it’s great to go back. I’ve got tons of family and everybody comes to the shows. Because of the touring, to be able to keep in touch with so many people actually face-to-face, not on Facebook — which I’m not on — but actually seeing people … it’s one of the nicest aspects of the job.”

Pink Martini’s most recent album, Splendour in the Grass, celebrates the innocence and charm of times past, adding a dash of playful debauchery. A collage of pre-British Invasion styles, it recalls an era before the growth of an alternative pop-music history was stunted, long before psychedelics and political upheaval, with most baby boomers still in short pants and the Cold War a dark cloud in the collective sky. Although teen idols ruled this land, and even Elvis was pressed — willingly — into the Tin Pan Alley mold of music production, some of America’s greatest popular music was born as the Golden Age of the Super Producer — Phil Spector, Lieber and Stoller, even young Brian Wilson — took shape.

Of course, this period was cut tragically (some would say mercifully) short by a quartet of mop tops in matching suits. Still, with a knowing wink of Kennedy glamour, Splendour nods to a time when mainstream pop was once again in the hands of Brill Building types, fighting off the onslaught of rock ’n’ roll’s first wave of unruly upstarts. At various points, you can imagine Jackie De Shannon lunching with Karen Carpenter, Bacharach and David pitching a song to Dionne Warwick, and the din of ’70s children’s sing-along LPs in the background as you get up to turn the TV dial. Just as you long for some darkness amid the fun and froth, a poignant version of “New Amsterdam” by composer Louis Hardin, a homeless, sightless composer from New York alternately known as Moondog and “The Viking of Sixth Avenue” before his passing in 1999, ends the festivities.

That Pink Martini manage to retain a hip, indie sensibility without all the usual ironic trappings of retro-dom is somewhat remarkable. “I think that’s because it’s all filtered through Thomas’s unique vision,” says Forbes. “He just loves beauty and different languages and mixing disparate styles together, and just sort of whatever he likes, he likes to put into the mix.”

Forbes admits she’s not old enough to have experienced Pink Martini’s musical world, one not limited to vintage Italian and French pop, Maiden Voyage-era jazz, American swing, Afro-Cuban orchestral jazz, classic Hollywood musicals, and glossy AM radio pop from the early 1970s, directly. Nevertheless, music and culture from bygone eras appeals to her romantic side.

“It’s probably something that touches on childhood for me, you know, just watching black and white movies with my parents and listening to old LPs crackling on the stereo,” she says. “I think when you hear that music it reminds you of a time that’s gone that, even though I wasn’t alive when this music was created or recorded, it still was a part of my childhood, and I think everyone’s a bit nostalgic, you know?”

Here’s a conversation I had with Mark a few months back…

There’s a clip on You Tube clip that shows the behind-the-scenes recording of your new album Little Vigils. Watching it, you get the sense that it was such a fun process for you. Obviously, you’ve worked with these musicians before and there’s a sense of friendship that is evident in the clip. Is recording always like that for you, or is that the result of having done it for so many years? Was it just this album in particular that was enjoyable? I would say that there’s always been as much of a degree of fun, as much as possible, making all my records, you know. I’m a different musician and a different artist every time I make one in the sense that I’m that much deeper into what I’m doing and I’m that much more capable of certain things, so while all of them were really fun to make, the places that you can go and the degree to which you can go there kind of vary. This record, just compared with the last record, was way more fun to make. The previous record, Delivered, I started making when my son had been home from the hospital for maybe eight days or so after he was born? It was an incredibly unsettling time, but it was the only time I could get everybody together, so we just had to go for it. It was kind of an exhausting, sleep-deprived time, full of a lot of joy but also filled with a lot of new concerns and unknowns.

It’s the biggest change in your life, you know? Oh, yeah, definitely. I wasn’t the same person anymore, but I had just become that new person, and I didn’t really even know who that was yet, you know, and what was required of me. So, to make art against that kind of backdrop, it was really cool because in some sense I was too exhausted to over think things, and I worked much more from the gut and just kind of plowed ahead, which really worked for that record. This time around, it was kind of structured like a little vacation for me, you know, a working one at that. We went up to Maine for four days to this farmhouse, so I didn’t have to come home every night and, you know, deal with the normal domestic responsibilities. We got to sequester ourselves away and have some fun with some guys that I’ve become really good friends with over the last few years, so yeah, I think this record was definitely a new high water mark as far as fun and also the ease with which it was made. The whole thing was basically made, I would say, 95% of it was done in four days. All of the vocals were live with no overdubs or anything. Same for my guitar parts. There was an ease with making this record that just came from being, I think, in a little easier place personally, you know, now that I’ve grown into my skin a little bit.

With that kind of time constraint, I imagine everything was pretty well thought out in advance, or was it that you had stuff and brought it in, and with the comfort level with the musicians, you knew it would be translated easily. It was more of the latter. This record was probably the least labored-over and least rehearsed in advance of any that I’ve ever done. Really, the guiding principle was… in the past, I’ve always been so ginned up over making a record, you know? Going in the studio and making a record… “This is going to be around forever! We’ve got to make this really amazing and artistic statement.” It just got to be a little exhausting to do things that way and to think with that mindset. I just kind of looked at my notebook and thought, “Wow, I’ve got this group of songs here that seem un-ambitious in a good way,” you know? They are songs that extol the smaller moments and the smaller things, and there’s a lot of natural imagery in them and a lot of stuff that’s almost like musical comfort-food, you know? And all I really wanted to do was get my friends together whom I play with in a lot of different kind of formats around town here in Boston and just get them together and let them do what they do as they heard it. If you get great musicians and great friends together and add a little whiskey into the melting pot there, all sorts of crazy things can happen and all these happy accidents, and it was really as simple as that this time, just like, “Let’s not over think this. Let’s just go enjoy each other’s company for a few days and roll some tapes” (or the computer as it is now).

A line in the song “August” (from the new album) struck me: “A fool would ask for more.” Is that something you’ve come to believe in more at this stage of your career and life?  I think that’s a perspective that I couldn’t have when I was just starting out in my early twenties. You start out wanting the world and so confident in your abilities that you think that it can’t help but happen, that you are going to make this huge mark with your music and all that that brings with it.  I guess as I’ve gone along… there’s a previous song called “Unraveled” that basically says, “I ain’t given up, I’ve just changed my mind.” It’s not that I’ve given up on those early dreams that are more focused on stardom and societal impact. It’s just that I’ve changed my mind and I’ve seen a little bit of what’s more important, and obviously family is the biggest part of that now, and I think much less in terms of a musical career than I do in terms of a life in music. I’m always doing something musical with my life, whether it’s jamming on the pots and pans with my son or going out and playing a gig backing one of my friends or doing my own thing. All those little pleasures that I talk about in that song, “August,” which is on the new record, all of those are what matters, and there are so many people that don’t even have that much, you know? To lust after more just for the sake of “more” is to miss the whole point it seems.

Is songwriting … the craft, the process, etc. … something that you and your circle talk about or is it more like Fight Club? You know, “the first rule of Songwriting is…” and so on. (Laughs.) That’s a great analogy. I think it’s more like the Fight Club, at least in New England. Artists in New England tend not to be as centered around co-writing like they would be down in Nashville. It’s more of a solitary, poetic endeavor, and I don’t know why that is, but it’s certainly aided and abetted by the fact that it doesn’t make much sense to collaborate on the next biggest hit, because the machinery is not here [in New England] for that. It is in Nashville. The relationship between music and money in Nashville is … well, there IS a relationship. There isn’t one here. (Laughs.)  There really isn’t. So, it tends to be more of a solitary thing up here. That being said, there are degrees of that, and I have some of the most enjoyable experiences and some of my most well-loved songs are co-writes that I’ve written with my friends. That song “Volunteers” was co-written with my friend Pete Nelson, to whom I sent lyrics at the eleventh hour, thinking, “This is 95% a good song, but it’s missing something.” And Pete, who had never heard the melody or the music, wrote back a final verse with a couple tweaks that really set the sights on that last 5%, you know, and got it across the finish line. I do write most of my songs alone, wrestling with things in my own way, but every once in a while I do enjoy collaborating, and often times, if you do it right, it takes you to places that you can’t get to on your own. And that’s really exciting, because then you’ve really gone into a new place.

What should folks come to your show prepared to see and hear?  I’m very certain and confident that people will leave one of my shows uplifted and entertained, but only if they stay until the end (laughs). There’s a bit of an arc to the performances, and definitely songs like “Volunteers” go pretty deep in, and in some ways can be unsettling. I definitely try not to be afraid to go there, even with novel audiences, but I always do it with an eye for working up to that and then leading everybody as best as I can back into the light a little bit by the end of the show. That being said, it’s all done with a fair amount, a certain degree of energy that you may not often find or that people don’t often associate with when they think of folk music. It’s a pretty energetically intense show. It’s not just me kind of sitting on the stage in a chair sharing a couple of tales and playing songs. There’s a real sense of dynamics. I try to move a little air, so to speak, when I’m digging into things.

[Click here to read and comment on the Creative Loafing review and listen to some tracks off the album.]

Album Review: Sons of Hippies, A-morph.

Their latest album, A-morph, is a conceptual work about transformation of the kind that comes reconciling seemingly disparate lyrical and musical elements – primarily the abstract vs. the pointedly political (a duality that lies at the core of the group’s aesthetic sound), but also between private lives vs. the public world of a rock band as well as the balance between the twin pursuits (not always mutually exclusive) of art and commerce, is a rich and rewarding album. Much the White Stripes (another duo), SoH has always been a band defined by – and perhaps striving to transcend – dichotomies of various sorts: male and female, black and white, peace and anger. And even in their music, much like forebears Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Pixies, even Zeppelin, contrasting sections of loud and soft, ethereal and overpowering often play themselves out. Rather than subverting contradictions, SoH embraces them; it bravely sticks out the battle. The word “brave” is fitting; on recordings, Kelly’s singing always sounds larger than life, towering way above her diminutive frame. The recent work is much more fluid and comfortable, and the MicroKorg riffs are largely absent, as SoH manipulates contrasting lyrical and musical elements without self-consciousness seeping through, as though Kelly and Canales are no longer afraid out of sheer politeness to shape each other’s contributions, which can often happen in a band with more than one songwriter.

Nothing’s tentative on A-morph (nor is the disjunction evident on the cover art). Paranoia and murder run rampant on the album’s first half. Bullets fly, as do short, punchy riffs, and sections sound frantically pasted together into prog-rock songs. In “Jab Away” (track 2), sides are chosen right off the bat; it’s Washington bad-boys and “secret sons” pulling rabbits out of hats pitted against “Andalusians” who can only “shake their heads” in disbelief. Kelly sings, “It’s a really bad time to be faithless/ It’s a really bad time to be faceless and alone,” and in “No. 16” (track 3 – the song where their individual contributions are most evident) Canales sing-shouts, “Money for sale! Come and get it, people!” The three-minute song-length barrier isn’t broken until “We Will Live Again” (track 5) whose chorus (“I’m sorry that I pulled this world for so long”) pulls away from the self-deception characterizing much of A-morph’s first half. “Man or Moon” – along with “Maybe Today” and “Ladyhawk” a strong candidate for radio-friendly single-hood – best illustrates Kelly’s uncanny knack for pairing abstraction and political urgency, further driven home by the urgency of her vocals and Canales’ pounding. It recalls how she urged us to “See Bright Red” in last year’s “Spaceship Ride,” a miniature, filigreed fist pumping into the air. Here, Kelly pronounces, “Heat in the summer/bright in the stream of eternal things/ are you ready to get in the ring?” “Man” and “moon,” “real” and “reaction”: these dichotomies seem perfectly in keeping with SoH’s aesthetic of cohesive two-headedness.

Perhaps the album’s only weak moment, “Dunes” is a waltz that poses a riddle and interjects more conversational language (“Now here’s a riddle to figure out: which way is forward, which way is down? … Honey, it ain’t about the money…”). “Dunes” comes off as an interlude, a passage into the second half of A-morph, which is formidable and thematic. “Maybe Today” is tripping your ass off at a huge outdoor festival (“The colors are changing, I can feel the love running through my veins/ a free ride into your heart – what a big surprise/ when you catalogued every light and firefly”). Here, Kelly’s nuanced voice – she’s capable of making the word “catalogue” sound perfectly erotic – is at its most unabashedly romantic and physical. “Ladyhawk” is a call to arms for robotic, “weekend sorcerers,” “life-like, with motors inside,” complete with an epic, arena-worthy chorus (“Do you see us cut like a talon, fly like a falcon, bite like a snake?”). Wetter, somewhat drowsy musical textures (accomplished in production through the greater use of reverb and echo) in the album’s second half are musically analogous to the greater confidence and strength of the lyrics, as though all of the jittery, stop-start paranoia, all of the jabs, flying bullets, killers, murderers, and money-driven, easy sugar-highs (all abstractly implied, naturally) of the first half are overcome. A song like “Omni” (track 4), for example, in which lyric fragments “like I told you before,” “I cannot be fooled,” and “you can never rely” are manically repeated four times before we are allowed to move onto the next thought, would be out-of-place. Instead, “Ladyhawk” is SoH at its most tribal, a standout cut with a droning coda, one ripe for extending in live situations where people are recklessly shaking ass.

My natural inclination is to look for irony in the lyrics from “Daydream Nation” (the reference to Sonic Youth’s late-1980s masterpiece early offers further evidence of where the Hippies’ two heads are at, musically speaking) where Kelly’s and Canales’ agenda – if that’s the right word – is laid bare: “We fight for freedom and we fight for faith/ we fight for children and we fight for grace/ to everyone who can carry on/ we fight for reason and the right to say.” But there is no irony. I don’t know if that’s unique, refreshing, or disappointing, but it doesn’t feel bad. In this context, irony would sound bizarre.

4 out of 5 stars

(5 stars being reserved for albums like Revolver, Blonde and Blonde, etc).

SoHs’ MySpace

SoH’s SonicBids

Lately I’ve been listening to indie-rock bands from the last decade, maybe because I’m feeling old and trying to get a handle on the 2000s (it’s ending soon). I’ve made room in my life, therefore, for “bands” that I just stumbled on and/or missed when they were hot (for a split-second; tastes change so quickly now; blame the internet, of course… but it also raises the possibility in my mind that music theory, musicology, analysis, etc. as DISCIPLINES, are geared to respond to music way too slowly; musical trends happen ten times the speed they did even a couple of decades ago, not to mention hundreds of years… and that begs the question: how are these disciplines going to respond? Are they going to lag even further behind the musical times? If music is created, consumed, and one-upped faster than ever, shouldn’t we be doing hastier analyses and getting them out there? Who even has the time to read a 40-page article in Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, or Nineteenth-Century Music? Who cares anymore? Naturally the answer is, “Well, careful analysis takes hours, weeks, months, etc… and I get that. I get that.) like Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes (too much reverb for my taste), Arcade Fire, Bright Eyes, Girl Talk (altogether a different topic), Decemberists, on and on. I’ve also read quite a bit of music journalism talking about how current indie-rock sounds “African.” I’m thinking about it, and I’m thinking about it, and I’m driving, and thoughts are churning, and I’m trying to make sense of why that is, or even how that is, i.e. what are the actual musical devices being used that sound “African?” (Besides, naturally, polyrhythm… )

I balance this with thinking about current indie-rock music in general, how I hear it, what it sounds like to me, and what are the overarching features of the music itself. There’s no freaking way anyone can generalize about the whole of it, so I’m obviously not attempting THAT. What I DO hear clearly, though, are certain trends organized over extremely broad periods of time. What I come up with is strictly my own interpretation, but (foolishly) I’ve come to trust my ears and instincts on such matters.

There’s one metaphor that I see crystal clear for the time being, so here goes trying to document it. It roughly has to do with the difference between three melodic tendencies stretching back to, say, 1963 and ending with today. I am NOT trying to be all inclusive, because there are infinite variations on these patterns. Some songs, in fact, use more than one pattern. And, of course, left out of these groups are the standard major (C – D – E – F – G – A – B – C) or minor (natural minor, usually, or i.e. A – B – C – D – E – F# – G# – A ascending; G-natural and F-natural descending) mode melodies. Also, this says NOTHING about rhythmic features of melodies and only tangentially takes into account melodic contours (step vs. leap, etc.), both of which affect how a melody strikes us.

I’ll take a second to describe these in turn and give an example of each.  

1) bluesy, major/minor scale melodies; these shift back and forth between the major or minor third scale degree AND the major and minor seventh scale degree (i.e. C – D – either E-flat or E natural – F – G – A – either B-flat or B natural – C);

This is found in your typical, early Beatles song, particularly those written by Paul McCartney, where the fluctuation between 3rd and flat-3rd in the major mode mirrors the usage commonly found in the blues idiom. The fluctuation occurs regardless of what type of third appears in the accompanying harmony, though it usually happens in songs with more tonic-seventh (you know, those “bluesy” sounding chords that are stable, but not so much…). “I Saw Her Standing There,” from the Please Please Me album is chronologically the first to exhibit this trait, along with later chestnuts (I hate that term) “Drive My Car,” “I’m Looking Through You,” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

The Beatles, “I Saw Her Standing There” (circa 1964)

Perhaps the song that BEST illustrates this tendency is “Got to Get You Into My Life” off of the Revolver album. The verse uses the major 3rd (B natural) in the melody while the chorus uses the flat-3 (B-flat). The “outro,” interestingly, uses the lyrics of the verse (“I was alone, I took a ride, I didn’t know what I would find there”), which exhibited the major 3rd, and places them in the context of the chorus, with the B-flat, thereby creating a world in which both the verse and chorus exist.

The Beatles, “Got To Get You Into My Life” (1966)

I’d say that most of the poppier Hair Band music of the late 70s and all of the 80s, because it was mostly revved-up, distorted, classic rock and roll, drew upon this “bluesy” collection for its melodic content.

Guns N’ Roses, “Welcome To The Jungle” (1987)

All that changed with GRUNGE, which brings me to category 2.

2) major scale melodies with a flatted 7^th scale degree, sometimes known as the “mixolydian” collection; these emphasize very strongly the tri-tone relationship between the flatted seventh and the normal, diatonic third scale degree (i.e. C – D – E – F – G – A – B-flat – C; emphasis on the E and the B-flat);

The mixolydian collection was used all through the 60s as well, usually to achieve that “exotic” feeling of otherworldliness. Even the Beatles used this pitch collection a lot. Llisten to “Tomorrow Never Knows,” for example; it’s mostly a major scale, even pentatonic-based melody (“Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream”) until you get hit with the flatted seventh in the second half (“It is not DY-ing… It is not DY-ing”). The most important melodic notes, the ones that are given the greatest emphasis, are the third (“Turn off your mind”) and flatted-seventh (“dying… dying”) scale degrees.

When Grunge showed up, groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam must’ve perceived this pitch collection as a way of distinguishing themselves from the Hair Band dinosaurs (this is a HUGE, presumptuous, unsupportable statement, I know, but it’s convenient). Think of Pearl Jam’s “Evenflow” off of their popular debut album, Ten. The first two notes of the melody are the third and flatted-seventh scale degrees. That’s the song’s HOOK.

“FREE – ZIN’…. Rests his head on a pillow made of concrete…”
”FEE – LIN’ … maybe he’ll see a little better set of days….”

ETC.

Pearl Jam, “Evenflow” (1991)

A much craftier melody is found Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” which I think, in a way, anticipates the third category I’m going to get into (perhaps because it’s “late grunge?”). The first half (“What else should I be?”) steps up from the third scale degree to the fifth. The second half (“All apologies”) begins with a leap up to the octave third scale degree, followed by a step down to the tonic and ultimately the flatted-seventh scale degree before getting back to the fifth (previously heard at “be”). All of this takes place over a stable, tonic harmony (i.e. the chord never changes, and it sounds like “home”).

The twist, however, comes with what can be considered the song’s Refrain:

In the sun / In the sun I feel as one / In the sun / In the sun / Married! / Buried!

The harmony changes to the subdominant (IV) chord. The opening melodic fragment (“In the sun”) transposes the beginning of the verse (“What else should I be”) up to begin on the fourth scale degree, and like the verse, the melody eventually reaches the high third scale degree (at “in the sun, in the SUN”) before stepping back down through the tonic, flatted-seventh, and fifth scale degrees (“I feel as one”). This sounds REALLY exotic because it occurs all over that subdominant harmony, and scale degrees 3 (“SUN”) and 5 (“ONE”) don’t belong there. It’s a great effect that turns the subdominant harmony into a Major Seventh Chord (basically the tonic triad plus a normal, diatonic seventh scale degree). So, what I’m saying is that Nirvana creates a Grunge-y melody that also busts out of it’s constraints a little to use other interesting harmonic colors like the major seventh chord. (Pearl Jam was always one step away from being a Hair Band anyway, in my opinion, not that they aren’t good.)

Nirvana, “All Apologies” (1993)

All this leads me to what I hear being used in a lot of the “Africanized” indie-rock of today.

3) the pentatonic pitch collection (i.e. C – D – E – G – A) used primarily in a major mode setting, with that caveat that if a seventh scale degree is needed, the diatonic, leading-tone version is used (i.e. B-natural).

Again, a total exaggeration, but I hear a great deal of major mode pentatonicism in Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes, and other “folky” indie rock bands.  Why is this African? I couldn’t tell you. And that’s not to say that’s all these groups use. I’ll tell you what I read into it, though…

The primary melody of “My Girls,” an irony-free song as far as I can tell, is pentatonic. Only in the second part (“I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things…” etc.) do we get a seventh scale degree (on “I don’t MEAN..”).

I don’t particularly hear much irony in indie-rock anymore. I think that went out with the 90s. I’ve come to the conclusion that you can “hear” irony in musical terms. Sometimes I hear it in the mixolydian, Grunge-era melodic collection, yes, but not always. At the risk of sounding entirely too teleological here, I hear those melodies as self-consciously striving to break free of what came (immediately) before by drawing on previous models of “exotic” melodies, i.e. that “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Age of Aquarius – type stuff. And I think, to a degree, it worked. There’s no confusing the sound of Nirvana with Guns ‘N’ Roses. But hidden in all that self-conscious striving (an ironic concept in itself, since Grunge was supposed to not care, right? OOOO… I’m going to get in trouble for this…), I hear walls put up for protection, a desire to protect the inner sanctum. There’s plenty of effort put into sounding different. These new bands are much more forthcoming with their emotions, and in that I hear a musical metaphor: pitch collection 3 rather than 2 or 1, although things are so postmodern these days that I’m not surprised to hear any one of them used, occasionally in rapid-fire succession.

Anyway, I’ll try to clean this up and make better sense of it someday. Feel free to share your thoughts, if you followed.

Album Info: Merriweather Post Pavillion (2009)

Drummer Pete Stolp, 28, posits a deeper meaning. “Cassolette works,” he says, “because, in addition to being a French casserole dish, which is why I think we got dubbed French pop, because it’s a French word, even though we don’t have any ties with French culture or anything really, the word means the scent of a woman and armpits also. It transcends vulgarity and walks the fine line.”

It’s Sunday afternoon, a good time to talk about music, food, and smells. It all seems very French.

Stolp operates the phone while the other members switch up, occasionally chiming in behind him on subjects ranging from their name to their music to how they got together in the first place to why the hell they ever got — perhaps mistakenly — lumped under the heading French pop.

Cassolette came together organically, as many bands do, out of the ashes of other local bands. “I was in a band called Kit! and more recently in a band called Que Possum,” Galbraith says. “Pete was in Saint Sweetheart and Envy of Angels, and [guitarist-singer] Jesse [Coleman] was in the Turncoat, and Andrew [Wyatt] is This Is an Adventure.” Collectively, they befriended bassist Aaron Beasley, 23. “Basically all of our bands … Andrew’s band, Jesse’s band, my old band, have all played together,” explains Stolp. “And for whatever reason, maybe it’s just because everything comes to an end, all those bands ended and died, as this band someday will.” Galbraith and Coleman, 22, write the songs.

Wyatt’s This Is an Adventure, a collaboration with Alex Zalo, is still going strong. “We’ve been recording some new stuff and kind of taking a little bit of a break from that,” Wyatt says, “but we’re still together. [Cassolette] started out kind of just jamming altogether, and then we started writing songs together.”

Like European beer, Cassolette band doesn’t have a born-on date. “I don’t really know what defines a real band,” Stolp admits, “but we are here. We are omnipresent. We’ve always been here and we always will be. We are having fun with the moment, not trying to look too far into the future, looking kind of hazily at the past, but we’re here.”

Recordings will be forthcoming, especially if — ahem — outside funding were suddenly to avail itself on the steps of their rehearsal space. “We are just really recording ourselves, kind of DIY in my garage,” says Galbraith, “And we’re hoping that with those recordings maybe we’ll put out a seven-inch or something, but we’re hoping that someone will come along and say, ‘Hey, you guys want to record and I’ll pay for it?’” She laughs. But right now we’re just recording ourselves. Jesse does most of that.”

While billed as French pop, Cassolette’s sound doesn’t bear any resemblance to, say, that “Foux du Fafa” sketch from Flight of the Conchords. Their music doesn’t strive to sound like anything or really do anything, for that matter. And I guess that’s a little French in spirit. Perhaps  Euro-cool is more accurate: It’s music for lounging around the café with a newspaper, people-watching and then perhaps hitting the disco. (In that sense, then, perhaps, it does mirror the Conchords sketch.)

“As far as the recent French music,” Coleman says, “I think there’s a lot of good stuff that’s come out. But the French stuff that we listen to is in English anyway.” “I think we are more synth-pop, a little twee, a little indie there,” says Galbraith. “I listen to a lot more Swedish pop than I do French pop, I’ll tell you that, personally.”

Coleman thinks the French pop thing goes back to the name; he doesn’t cite French pop as an influence on his writing. “Me, personally, I listen to a lot of Bob Dylan. I know Pete listens to a lot of Black Sabbath and Ciera listens to a lot of Belle and Sebastian. And Andrew doesn’t listen to anything at all.”

The band’s best live show to date, according to Stolp, was their high-profile 11 p.m. set at the Cock & Bull’s Noise Ordinance show, which united much of Sarasota’s musical talent for one night and one cause. “The sound was great, and everyone was really nice as far as accommodations for bands,” says Stolp. “They gave us a little bit of beer. We got to play in front of a lot of people.” As for the event’s larger meaning, to rally against seemingly unfair ordinances that force local music businesses to silence themselves after a certain time of night, Stolp says Cassolette largely just tagged along and tried to do their part. “I hope that something came about from that,” he says. “I’m pretty sure that raised a little bit of awareness. Or at least got a bunch of people drunk.”

Cassolette intends to get up to St. Pete and Tampa after it gets its act together in Sarasota but before it overstays its welcome. The plan is “to do that whole getting-used-to-playing-together-as-a-band thing,” explains Stolp. “And I think we’ve reached that point. … We don’t want to wear anybody out. I don’t want people to be like, ‘Oh, God, Cassolette’s playing again this week at this house: There’s nothing else going on so I guess I’m going to go do that!’”

“Lately we’ve been playing out every other week,” says Galbraith. “We’re trying to keep it down to once a month, but lately there have been a lot of good shows going on, so we’ve been wanting to play them, I guess.”

Cassolette’s next show falls this Saturday at Rosemary Rising with The Equines, Completely From Mountains and Reggie Williams. They have plenty of merch to sell but no recordings yet.

“Basically, I want to under-promise and over-deliver,” says Stolp. “I’m not promising they’re going to get [a recording], but if they get anything they should be damn happy because it’s going to be good.”

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Neil knows about bands and genres of which I have never heard, crazy stuff called downtempo or stoner, which he tosses off as though he was referencing common handles like jazz or reggae. When we were setting up equipment, loading stuff in and out of the studio, changing strings, or just bullshitting, Neil would invariably have something spinning that was bizarre and just far enough out of my comfort zone to make me feel uneasy and intrigued. On at least one occasion since then, my eyes have popped open in the early morning hours, an odd, angular melody floating around my head without any recollection of who the artist was or where I had heard it. Eventually I would realize that it was something Neil played in the studio. When he was not saucing up a chip, that is.

Neil’s favorite recording project at the time was a band called Great Friend of Mine. The band, in fact, consisted of great friends of his from Venice High School, now students at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. The band stays connected to Sarasota County through family and friends. They formed five years ago as Aim at the Kid. A little over a year ago, they honed their sound and adopted the new name. They replaced the original bass player with a new one. Clearly proud of what they captured in the studio, Neil played most of the dense, challenging concept album they called Desperate Songs, seemingly based on a surreal encounter between a narrator and a poetry-spitting stranger, for us. (On our dime? Hey, wait a minute…)

I would be lying if I told you the concept behind Desperate Songs made any sense to me. Nevertheless, one does not have to grasp art completely to enjoy it. I appreciate and applaud the incredible amount of time and effort it must have taken to compose and record the album, and I have listened to it quite a bit.

Still, I feel like I want to know what is going on, at least a little. Therefore, I emailed singer Paul Gonter about it, and he put it thusly:

The album has two spheres of influence that are not wholly different or the same. Both musically and lyrically we decided to take a more conscious and decisive approach. We did not want to write parts. We wanted to write songs, and we wanted these songs to not only function as entities on their own, but also as an overall movement from the first track to the last. This idea of cohesion came from many bands, but namely The Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come and Recover’s Rodeo and Picasso.  The actual content of the music came from our desire to create what we consider good, heavy music. We all grew up listening to punk and all of its various subgenres, and we wanted to create something new (if not new to someone else, at least new to us) that still held on to the aggression and the responsibility of the punk world. This responsibility aspect goes into the lyrical content, which I wanted to line up with what we were trying to accomplish with the music. The most blatant philosophical influence on the lyrics was Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem. Though it was not the only influence, it was a perfect example of the conscious individualism that the lyrics are trying to express.

Heady stuff, to be sure, but it is well worth the time investment, and the music rewards your efforts blindly. Much of the album, beginning with “We,” is intoned in the voice of the stranger, his voice “an uncouth symphony of rasp and cracks; his song was a quaking mountain on a burial ground,” an accurate description of Gonter’s vocal delivery. Eight songs later, at the end of “The World,” so to speak, a long, droning fade-out based on two alternating chords with peppering drums, will make you forget about anything else you have to do today. “The World” returns the voice of the narrator, who brings the listener back to the unfolding scene: “As the heat rose from the street and the passing cars created an incredulous beat, I took his dirt-covered hands in mine and we (the World) sang in unison until the sun did shine.” They begin to sing together:

A journey tells what a book can’t read-

A master sells only what he can see-

So this is our ledger, this is our coin…

… Finally, “Nothing above me but the sun” (3:15 on the recording), after which GFOM treats us to guitar-soaked sonic splendor, captured brilliantly by engineer Neil. On the very last track, “Tisina (5-3000),” Gonter sings the last line in the voice of the narrator, “The only thing to know for sure is silence,” repeatedly, to great effect.

Listening to 7:31 minutes of “The World,” followed closely by “Tisina (5-3000)” (that’s how you should listen to the two tracks posted above), pushed up at dangerous levels of volume over Science’s monitors a year ago, I remember feeling mesmerized, old, irrelevant and galvanized all at once, and nothing has changed listening to it now. No, you do not beg the DJ to play Desperate Songs at your wedding, but these are serious, heavy songs laid bare and committed to 1s and 0s (and cassette) in our own backyard by ambitious young musicians.

The CD is for sale (click here), but as many bands are now doing, GFOM allows listeners who visit their website to download the whole album free of charge. “We all download a lot of music and it would be kind of hypocritical if we didn’t want people to download our music,” wrote Gonter. He feels strongly, however, that fans want even more: “The music industry has changed over the past 10 years, and though we have no ties to the industry itself, we have an understanding that as post-Napster music listeners we are going to want a little more out of releases than a few promo shots and typed lyrics. The Indie and DIY scene has really grasped onto this idea to help fuel a new form of creativity: the physicality of the release. I think this is why there has been a resurgence of vinyl and even cassette tape releases over the past decade… Artists are able to add an extra, tangible layer to their music that holds more weight than an mp3 in a labeled folder. So, we offer the free download, but also the hardcopy of the CDR with a zine style booklet that we have conceptualized, designed, and assembled ourselves.”

A company called Intellect is releasing Desperate Songs on cassette. GFOM recently recorded two new songs with Neil for a split seven-inch with friends Ghosting from Burlington, Vt., and are currently writing new material without anything specific release in mind. “Other than that,” Gonter stated, “we are playing shows whenever they are offered and are trying to set up a tour for spring break around Florida with our friends in You Blew It.”

Album Info: Desperate Songs (2009). Download an album sampler on Jamendo, and purchase it here.

Paul Gonter – vocals
Marko Kurtovic – guitar and vocals
Zach Frimmel – bass and vocals
Kyle Obney – drums

Visit Great Friend of Mine on MySpace and Tumblr.