The Music Tapes Bring 'The Orbiting Human Circus' to Athens

Despite all the flak millennials catch for supposedly having short attention spans, this generation increasingly consumes information and entertainment in a committed, focused way. Podcasts have risen to the forefront of culture, offering immersive listening experiences on topics such as true crime, history, sports and comedy. From “This American Life” and “Fresh Air” to heavy hitters “Serial,” “S-Town” and “Stuff You Should Know,” this now-established platform enriches minds and commutes alike.  

For Elephant 6 mainstay Julian Koster, the podcast boom couldn’t have come at a more convenient time. Koster had been planning a series of projects for The Music Tapes, his group with Robbie Cucchiaro and Thomas Hughes, that revolved around the exploits of a fictional janitor of the Eiffel Tower. There was one big barrier in the way, though: He wasn’t quite sure if there was a format capable of fully conveying his stories.

For one, Koster loves performance; anyone who’s witnessed a Music Tapes production can attest to this. For those who haven’t, imagine a troupe traveling with a circus tent filled with carnival games—which they did for their Traveling Imaginary tour in 2012—and you’ll start to get the picture. Similarly, Koster is fascinated with the art of storytelling and recording, having made narrative records for years, in addition to contributing to a number of iconic albums from Athens and beyond. 

However, those mediums alone couldn’t do the breadth of Koster’s narrative justice. He needed some sort of storytelling format that people could really get involved with—that could allow his magical fiction to unfold over time, but also keep listeners enthralled with every new installment. Frankly, he needed a podcast.

“I feel like I’m just just really, really lucky that the podcast thing happened, that podcast culture exploded the way that it did,” Koster says. “Really, we sort of thought there just wasn’t an audience for it, or a way to even make sense for us just to put it out as a record. So the thing that happened in podcast culture was so awesome, because suddenly there was a place for something like that to go… and an audience just waiting for it. It was kind of this really magical moment.”

So Koster created “The Orbiting Human Circus (of the Air)” in collaboration with Night Vale Presents, the network responsible for popular fictional narrative podcast “Welcome to Night Vale.” The series features voice acting from Mandy Patinkin, Charlie Day, Tim Robbins and Hedwig and the Angry Inch’s John Cameron Mitchell, a group Koster recruited by happenstance and backstage at Music Tapes shows. The podcast ended up breaking into the iTunes top 10, and has been given the green light for a second season.

In “The Orbiting Human Circus,” the janitor, played by Koster, confronts surreal events and assorted characters night after night as he cleans the Eiffel Tower, inhabiting a world devoid of any discernible era. Its events could be taking place during any time period, past, present or future. Fittingly, its companion EP, which contains music featured in the podcast’s first season, was recorded on a multitude of apparatuses: a 1930s wire recorder, a 1940s Presto record lathe, a 1960s tape machine and a modern computer. 

“That stuff is my passion. I love those machines,” Koster says of the equipment, recalling his purchase of the wire recorder while on tour in Montreal in the ’90s. “I took it home, and it was the most magical-sounding thing ever. It plays back at you, and it literally sounds like it’s 70 years old.”

This confluence of recording practices and sounds and playful experimentation with time heightens Koster’s charming innocence. “I feel like a superhero or something,” he says. “I feel like it’s my cape. I feel like I have this secret power to make things in the past.”

As Koster and company tour in support of the podcast, they seek to bring the same immersion and involvement required of podcast listeners to the venues they play. Interspersed with Music Tapes songs, the set revolves around Koster’s janitor, who is tasked with cleaning up each concert hall. He says each venue will appear nearly unrecognizable to the public. “You’re going to go into the 40 Watt,” he explains, “and it’s not going to look like the 40 Watt.”

There will be some instant gratification, too. "It’s kind of like you’re walking into a whole story, and there’s all kinds of fun and impossible events that happen—and it happens all over the 40 Watt," says Koster.

Spoon Steps Further Left of Center on Hot Thoughts

Austin, TX indie-rock icons Spoon can’t seem to make a bad album. The foursome has churned out a slew of solid records over the past 20 years, coloring outside the lines enough with each release to challenge listeners and itself while maintaining a commercial viability necessary to keep its household name. A montage in a TV drama? A rom-com soundtrack? There’s a Spoon song for that.

It comes as no surprise that Hot Thoughts, the band’s most recent album and first for the famed Matador label since the late ’90s, contains plenty of infectious, body-moving grooves. But in the wake of a dismal 2016, Spoon stepped further left of center this time around.

The group’s reinvigorated sense of experimentation stemmed from the final stages of writing and recording 2014’s They Want My Soul. “This one just kind of felt like more of a continuation of ideas, and the way the band was playing together towards the end of [that] tour,” says bassist Rob Pope, speaking from Mexico City, where Spoon recently played three shows before returning to the U.S. “The band was in pretty good shape, and it felt like we were playing really good shows. And so we just got right back into it.

“We had talked about how we kind of wanted to make a record that sounded a little different,” adds Pope. They Want My Soul track “Inside Out” served as the best jumping-off point.

“There’s no guitar on it,” Pope explains. “There’s all these kind of crazy things. It’s kind of a non-traditional arrangement: There’s a big, long outro, and that felt really fresh and cool to us. When we started working, we kind of wanted to stay on that path and maybe get a little more into songs that sounded like the future, or meshing a couple things that weren’t supposed to fit together, like really lush string sounds and hip-hop drum machines.”

The result is an album that features no acoustic guitar, a heavy reliance on synthesizer and other out-of-the-box approaches to instrumentation and arrangement. “We wanted to push the acoustic piano back to the corner of the room, and maybe put the acoustic guitar away and try our hand at some other stuff,” Pope says.

A disheartening calendar year also played a role in shaping the sound of Hot Thoughts. The influence of Prince and David Bowie, their legacies fresh on the band’s mind, can be found in the titillating “Hot Caress” and “Can I Sit Next to You.” For the latter, Pope even admits to a slight melodic nod. “It originally started out on a stringed koto, which gave it kind of a ‘China Girl’… feel to it,” he says.

Additionally, “Tear It Down,” with its refrain of “Let them build a wall around us/ I don’t care, I’m gonna tear it down,” took on greater significance. “We were working on that one pretty early on in the record—early 2016,” Pope says. “I remember the first time Britt [Daniel] sang that lyric. I was like, ‘That’s great. It’s very relevant to right now, but Trump’s not going to win this election. That isn’t going to mean anything a year from now.’ And here we are.”

There’s no longer a need for Spoon to prove itself, but with Hot Thoughts the band has delivered a captivatingly catchy record with plenty of sonic deviations and intrigue. The group’s schedule for the rest of the year speaks to that end, with jaunts across the States alongside Tennis, the Shins and the New Pornographers, among others. “We’ve got stuff lined up for a long time,” says Pope.

Deep State and Oak House Release Sophomore LPs This Month

If there’s one cold, hard truth that’s become increasingly evident in the music industry, it’s that there is no one way to “make it” these days. 

Except for an uptick in vinyl over the past few years, physical album sales have dropped, making way for a surge in popularity among streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. As a result of that shift, much attention has been given to live performance as artists’ primary means of revenue. But to confound matters, some artists don’t even perform live, instead posting music and videos online in hopes of going viral. Whichever way you look at it, yesterday’s approach just doesn’t hold up anymore.

Two of Athens’ most promising rock bands, Deep State and Oak House, are releasing anticipated new albums this month, taking practical steps towards making their rock and roll dreams come true. The former recently signed to Sacramento boutique label Friendship Fever to release its sophomore full-length, Thought Garden, while the latter has enlisted the help of former Athenian and Noisy Ghost PR publicist Michelle King to promote its self-released second album, Hot or Mood.

“When is that guidebook going to come out about being a successful band in 2017?” Deep State singer and guitarist Taylor Chmura asks sardonically. 

But Deep State is doing something right. With its brash, high-energy live show, the melodic punk band has become a townie household name. After Deep State established a solid regional following by touring behind its debut, 2015’s Nice, Friendship Fever founders Chris and Sabrina Watson found the group in typical internet-era fashion: by scouring Bandcamp. The couple reached out to discuss plans for future releases and soon signed the band, preparing for this month’s Thought Garden.

Despite the fervent nature of the band’s output thus far, Chmura says Deep State’s latest full-length comes more from a place of self-examination. “Our first full-length, Nice, is about voicing frustration outward. Thought Garden seeks to be more introspective,” he says. 

The album’s title is taken from a passage in Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund, in which the protagonist ruminates on humanity, realizing that it’s more courageous to sin and suffer the consequences rather than “laying out a lonely harmonious thought-garden, strolling sinlessly among one's sheltered flower beds.” 

In other words, you have to go through some stuff to really understand what it means to be human—and you’ll be better off for it. It’s a mature, enlightened vantage point that requires thorough listening to recognize. With the exception of the record’s closer, “Urn,” Thought Garden is still full of the rollicking, uptempo gems for which Athens has come to adore the band.

And thankfully, it seems Deep State is in it for the long haul. “We love to play,” says Chmura. “We will keep doing it as long as we can, and hopefully more folks will jump on board with us.”

That sentiment is shared by Friendship Fever, says the label’s Chris Watson, who is set to release the record digitally and on CD and vinyl with press and radio promotion. “Personally, if people love it, that's a success,” he says. “Professionally, something that pays for itself in terms of sales [and] licenses and serves the purpose to build or help establish a creative career, that's a success.”

Oak House (Photo by Rebecca Cash)

The new release from genre-bending trio Oak House, Hot or Mood, likewise finds the band coming to terms with a new phase—something potentially bigger than itself. Singer and guitarist Gresham Cash points out that the connection between the band’s most recent lineup is one of the largest factors in pushing it towards a clearer, more unified vision. 

“[Bassist] Connor [Sabula] joined, and then we started to kind of compositionally change directions pretty dramatically,” says Cash. “Connor and [drummer] Wes [Gregory] kind of understood what I was trying to get through our songs and what I wanted from the rhythm section. Pretty much immediately after our last album, our sound started shifting more into a certain direction, and our live show definitely came across in a different way than our recordings.”

That new direction inspired the unit to think more critically about what its sophomore album should sound like, and how to bridge the gap between the record and Oak House’s live show. 

“It’s a challenge as a band to put yourself into the studio to paint a broader picture, and then to condense it live and pull off what you can pull off,” says Cash. “So, we pretty early on were thinking, ‘OK, we’re a three-piece now, so what can we do as a three-piece?’

“We basically came to the conclusion that we wanted our record to have the aggression and intensity and volume—drums and bass-wise—of our live show, but not to just be a heavy album,” he continues. “There’s still layers and attempted beauty and stuff like that. We didn’t want to just squash everything with a live show, which is a lot of times what we have.”

On top of discussions regarding the band’s sound, Cash was determined to make art and music a career, not just a hobby. The band talked seriously about what to do with the album and how to further the goal of making music as a legitimate, full-time venture. Though a label deal wasn’t in the cards, it was able to enlist the help of a national publicist to promote the album, garnering track premieres and coverage from NPR and Consequence of Sound, among others.

While quantifying the results of that sort of press is difficult, it’s seen by most musicians as essential to increasing exposure, offering bands a national reach and introducing them to hordes of potential new listeners. Additionally, it provides the clout booking agents, venue promoters and labels often look for in a group looking to make music its primary hustle.

Still, both Oak House’s and Deep State’s standout new albums speak to the new reality of the music industry—one that has no set path to or definition of success. Ultimately, a band can only use the resources available to it to attempt to navigate a rather absurd world, which, like the world at large, doesn’t always make much sense.

Exploring Five Essential Dinosaur Jr. Albums

As Athens knows, there’s no better breeding ground for off-kilter rock music than a college campus. The Classic City’s claim to fame rests on the shoulders of bands from the late ’70s and early ’80s that took punk to interesting new places, ushering in the era of “alternative” music, or “college rock,” as it’s conveniently known. While we had our R.E.M. and B-52s, New England was an equally prominent hotbed for underground sounds, thrusting a slew of artists onto the national stage. Few of those were more significant than a noisy trio out of Amherst, MA called Dinosaur Jr.

Ahead of the band's Georgia Theatre performance in support of its 11th studio album, last year’s Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not, here’s a look at five standout albums from the Dinosaur Jr. catalog that helped cement the group’s status as alt-rock heroes.

Dinosaur (1985) Before there was a Jr., there was simply Dinosaur, a young band that got loud. Its eponymous debut album covered much stylistic ground, drawing influence from hardcore, jangle-pop, metal and country. Although Dinosaur didn’t receive much commercial success, it opened the door for the New Englanders to perform more regularly throughout the Northeast in front of new audiences and influential indie artists like Sonic Youth.

You’re Living All Over Me (1987) The band joined the ranks of famed West Coast indie SST to release You’re Living All Over Me. Its sophomore album showcased a solidified sound, bringing each disparate influence together in a single song instead of spreading them out across the album. While the record boosted Dinosaur Jr.’s ascension in underground circles, testy band politics were becoming an issue. Two contributions from bassist Lou Barlow, “Lose” and “Poledo,” foreshadowed the advent of his equally influential indie-rock project, Sebadoh.

Green Mind (1991) The band’s major label debut for Sire Records was also its first without Barlow, who was kicked out of the band after touring behind its third album, Bug, wrapped. The majority of Green Mind was recorded by Mascis, who toned down the harsh distortion in favor of more layered arrangements featuring acoustic guitar and keyboard. The band enlisted a new bassist and toured heavily on the album with support from Nirvana, and overseas alongside Blur, My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain.

Beyond (2007) Dinosaur Jr.’s long-awaited return, after a lengthy hiatus (over 15 years for the original lineup), came with the release of Beyond on Fat Possum. The album itself sounds like a time capsule of Dinosaur past, touching on most of the group’s cornerstones: Mascis’ slacker drawl; virtuosic, classic-rock inspired guitar solos; and a heavy-hitting rhythm section.

Farm (2009) Though Beyond was the band’s anticipated comeback, it was its 2009 follow-up, Farm, that packed the melodic, riff-filled punch expected of the alt-rock stalwarts. Recorded at Mascis’ home and released on Midwestern indie Jagjaguwar, the album captures the raw power of the trio’s original albums with more calculated precision. From the opening wallop of “Pieces” to the wah-wah accented “Over It” to the eight-and-a-half minute “I Don’t Wanna Go There,” Farm proved that the band was back in full force.

How to Book, Promote and Survive a Spring Tour →

As we approach spring, Athens’ concert calendar also blossoms. Music venues have been hard at work booking shows throughout this unseasonably warm winter, as evidenced by the announcements that roll out with each passing day.

Just as we’ll start to see more touring acts swinging through town, spring is a time for local bands to branch out. Although the internet has made it easier to share music and information, many groups still feel the need to show face outside of their hometown—to increase their fanbase, connect with industry professionals and experience the ups and inevitable downs of life in the van.

Ahead of this touring season, Flagpole spoke to local-music experts of varying backgrounds and experiences to put together a dossier—with apologies to any former MI6 agents out there—on the ins and outs of playing out of town. This modest list of tips and tricks should help fledgling local acts hoping to hit the road, and give insight to outsiders on what it takes to go from hometown heroes to well-respected road warriors.

Booking Your Tour

The bedrock of any tour is good booking. As a preliminary step to the tour itself, it can seem far less important—and less fun—than actually playing shows. However, if ample legwork and planning are done before hitting the road, the chance of hitting a snag along the way is greatly reduced.

After deciding on a general route—up and down the East Coast or throughout the Southeast are great places to start for a young band—start compiling lists of contacts for each city you hope to play in. Chances are, if you’re going on tour, you’ve shared bills in Athens and Atlanta with a bevy of out-of-town bands, so get back in touch with these folks first to see if they’re able to return the favor. At the very least, they’ll be able to point you in the direction of other bands that would make a good fit.

Eureka California (Photo by Stacey-Marie Piotrowski)

From there, don’t fear the cold contact. “We just start reaching out,” says Eureka California drummer Marie Uhler, “usually by email, to venues and promoters if we can find them, or bands we know in the area, and try to put things together.

“In the past, DoDIY has been a huge resource, but in the wake of DIY spaces being hunted and shut down, it's not fully back online yet,” she adds. After the hugely popular Oakland, CA DIY venue The Ghost Ship tragically burned down late last year, underground spaces across the U.S. have been singled out by authorities and targeted by alt-right trolls online.

Owen Hunt, who keeps especially busy with booking and promoting shows locally, as well as playing in multiple projects like Dead Neighbors, Harlot Party and his own Swamp, echoes that sentiment, noting how DIY spaces he’s reached out to recently have either shut down or tightened their privacy settings.

Don’t let bigots rain on your touring parade, though. If there’s one thing music does best, it’s bring people together, and there are plenty of warm, welcoming scenesters out there looking to lend a helping hand. “The most rewarding [thing] is working really hard and finally locking in a show that you know is going to have a solid crowd, and play[ing] with some really cool bands,” says Hunt.

Keep in mind that more traditional venues, especially those in larger cities, need a few months’ notice in order to adequately promote the show. Bryant Williamson, local guitarist and operator of the Caledonia Lounge, usually likes to have three months’ notice when booking shows at his venue; clubs in Philadelphia, New York and Boston should be booked closer to five months out, he says. So, get bookin’, y’all!

Promoting Your Tour

After securing a solid string of shows, the next step is ensuring that each one receives ample attention. There are several avenues bands on a budget can take, but the major two are still traditional print media (and their accompanying online outlets) and social media, which has become a necessity for reaching current and prospective audiences.

The former, much like booking, requires a fair amount of lead time—close to two months in most cases, if not more. Take into account the fact that most writers need to pitch your story to an editor for coverage, do their own research, conduct an interview, write and submit the story for further edits and formatting before it prints.

To help make it as easy as possible for writers to understand why your band is important and deserves coverage as you stop through their city, Athens publicist Alyssa DeHayes recommends having a few key components ready: easy access to your music (a private Soundcloud or Bandcamp link if your record is unreleased, or a public link if it’s out already); an up-to-date band bio; album art, if applicable; and any relevant press quotes from other outlets. 

“Press quotes can also show that a band is established, or building momentum, and help demonstrate that a band is noteworthy enough to be selected for coverage over the many other bands an editor is being pitched,” says DeHayes, who coordinates and carries out album-release and tour-promotion campaigns for Riot Act Media. 

Social media, though an intrinsic part of human communication these days, can often get overlooked. Keep subtle aspects in mind, like posting to all your outlets regularly while on the road, and reminding Facebook event attendees when you’re nearing their city. 

“[The] week of, share some videos or tracks on the event page so people who have RSVPed see notifications and are reminded,” suggests DeHayes. “People get busy and Facebook events get buried, so try texting your pals, and maybe they'll bring more pals.”

Surviving Your Tour

You’ve made it. After weeks of emailing, practicing and saving up money, it’s time to hit the ol’ dusty trail. By all means, enjoy it, but keep a few things in mind while soldiering on and fighting for space in the van.

First off, as much as a tour can be viewed as an exciting adventure, you’re essentially working. For a short time, you may have managed to get away from whatever gig pays the bills, but being broke away from home is no fun, so take it seriously. If you’ve done your best with booking and promotion, it’s likely you’ll come away with a bit of coin from the door, on top of whatever you’re able to make from merchandise sales. 

Be honest with yourselves, the venue and the promoter. Know what size audience you’re capable of drawing, and be professional at the venues you’re playing—they’ll take notice and look out for you. “We have very fair door deals, so if your band draws well, you don’t even need a guarantee,” says Williamson. “That’s how we see it at the Caledonia, at least.

“In my experience touring with Cinemechanica and Bit Brigade, this is also true of the venues we play,” Williamson continues. “We just set up door deals at venues, and I know the venues appreciate that. It’s fair. We make money based on the amount of people we draw into the room. If we don’t draw a good crowd into a room, I’m not interested in taking [money] out of the venue’s pocket.”

Finally, regardless of geography, music scenes are often close-knit, so maintaining rapport is essential to future success at home and on the road. 

“If you are a band who gets along with everyone, is generally nice, shows up on time, doesn't cause drama or trouble and just acts professionally—because it's like going to work, it's your job—then promoters and venues will try to help you build an audience,” says HHBTM Records head Mike Turner, highlighting the golden rule of touring. “Just being nice goes a long way. You'd think that wasn't even a thing, but it is.”

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More Touring Tips

“There are tons of ways to save money on the road, but I think folks need to figure that stuff out on their own. It's different for everyone, and what works for some folks might not work for others. Don't spend money on stuff you don't need, and make a budget and stick to it. Check it each day, and adjust when you go over." —Mike Turner

"Don't make [the tour] too long. It doesn't take very long to get into an on-tour mindset—sometimes a few hours, sometimes two days—but you find out pretty quick how you get along with people you have to spend 24 hours a day with." —Marie Uhler

"I learned—as someone who was hosting touring bands at my house a ton at the time—that sometimes when you think you're being a good host, the band wants to go to sleep." —Alyssa DeHayes

"Skip the rider and just go for actual money. You can buy your own water, food, etc. No one really wants to have to run around getting stuff for a rider anyway." —Mike Turner

Roadkill Ghost Choir Survives Label Drama, Readies False Youth Etcetera →

The adage “never judge a book by its cover” rings especially true in journalism, but in the music industry, where appearances are as essential to an artist’s brand as the music, putting aside expectations can be difficult. It comes as a surprise, then, when Andy Shepard starts to recount, with barely a trace of a Southern accent, the origin story of Roadkill Ghost Choir, the band he started in the small town of DeLand, FL with his two brothers, Max and Zach.

“I was doing music mostly just by myself in my room, recording stuff and throwing it online,” he says, before he was approached by a local promoter to play a show. It took little work recruiting Max to play drums and Zach bass, but fleshing out the rest of the lineup posed some trouble. “I was looking for a pedal steel player, and it’s almost impossible to find someone that’s in their 20s, especially where I’m from,” Shepard says. 

But the brothers struck gold at their father’s DeLand studio, North Avenue, where local musician Kiffy Myers was interning. “So he kind of waltzes in,” Shepard says of Myers, “and we all like the same kind of music. It was kind of like this serendipitous moment of, ‘Hey, let’s make some music together.’” They continued playing shows together, picking up guitarist Stephen Garza along the way, before recording and releasing the Quiet Light EP in 2012.

By 2014, the band had recorded and released its debut full-length, In Tongues, to much fanfare. They moved to Athens and toured extensively on the record, performing at Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, Governor’s Ball and on “Late Night with David Letterman”—all signs of a band well on its way.

Behind the press accolades and festival gigs, however, was an undercurrent of pressure stemming from the band’s management and de facto label at the time, M-Theory. “We did the EP, and then pretty much after that we toured nonstop,” says Shepard. “I can’t write for shit while on the road, so we would have no time off at home where I could settle in and really just work stuff out. I only had maybe three finished songs when they were like, ‘Hey, we want you in the studio. We’re gonna book time in three or four months.’

“That freaked me out, because this was our first full-length record,” Shepard continues, “and they weren’t going to give me any time to really dig into the songs and make sure everything was exactly where we wanted it.”

Despite those frustrations, the band eased back into life in the Classic City, where Shepard outfitted his own recording space and started work on a new Roadkill Ghost Choir album. He began demoing False Youth Etcetera in early 2015 at a more relaxed pace, tracking parts on his own before sharing with the band. 

The group then headed back home to DeLand to record at North Avenue, spending nearly a month expounding on those initial demos and fine-tuning each song. In addition to its bread-and-butter roots-rock, False Youth offers an expanded palette of synthesizers and keyboards.

“I was listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen when I was writing the record, and I loved those ’80s kind of synths: thick pads [and] big, goofy leads,” says Shepard. In a similar vein, he was hoping to inject Roadkill’s heavy subject matter with a little bit of rafter-reaching pep. “It kind of got old playing shows where you look out and you realize that no one fuckin’ moves,” he says with a laugh.

The band now had the record it wanted to make under its belt, and all it had to do now was release it. But that would be too easy. Contractual issues with M-Theory reared their ugly head, prompting yet another wave of tense relations that left the band fighting for the rights to its own material. 

“It was just this hell of lawyers emailing each other back and forth, and it would take about two weeks to get a response to some stupid question,” says Shepard. “So we were just sitting, waiting, not really knowing if we were going to get the record back at all, which was completely depressing.”

Cooler heads and lawyer jargon finally prevailed, and the band won back its songs, which it will share as two separate volumes digitally before releasing the whole thing on CD and vinyl this spring. As for what Roadkill will do next now that it’s virtually a free agent, Shepard is inclined to simply enjoy the moment and take it easy. 

“I’m working on a whole bunch of stuff right now,” he says. “I don’t know what it’s for or what’s going to happen with it, but I’m still kind of dipping my toes into that slowly. I’m gonna kind of go slower and just figure it out.”

The Jesus and Mary Chain, Through the Years →

Believe it or not, there are musicians out there with no particular interest in shaking up the status quo. Instead of becoming the next big band, their intention is simply to play the kind of music they don’t hear enough of and think should exist. One such group, the Jesus and Mary Chain, falls into that category, but the band’s story differs from most artists with those same desires.

In fact, with the release of its debut, the Jesus and Mary Chain unknowingly set the precedent for alternative music for years to come, constructing the blueprint for shoegaze in the process and continues to inspire bands who share their inclination for both pop melodies and harsh distortion. We took a look at the band’s history and influence ahead of its performance at the Georgia Theatre.

1983: After years of planning, writing and recording, brothers Jim and William Reid form the Jesus and Mary Chain in East Kilbride, Scotland.

1984: Creation Records head Alan McGee gets ahold of the band’s demo, subsequently booking and promoting a Jesus and Mary Chain gig at The Living Room in London that summer. It lands the group a one-off signing to the legendary label. Its debut single, “Upside Down,” is released that fall.

1985: The band delivers its landmark debut, Psychocandy. Taking cues from seminal ’60s rock bands like the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and pop aficionados like the Beach Boys and Phil Spector, the album toys with two distinct sonic elements: bubblegum-sweet pop tunes and collages of extreme noise. The record’s feedback-laden guitar squall and catchy vocal melodies, coupled with the band’s notoriously raucous live shows, garners critical praise from music press; NME names Psychocandy the best album of the year. Drummer Bobby Gillespie leaves the group to focus on his band Primal Scream, which he had formed years before.

1987: After releasing another handful of singles, the band sets out on a UK tour, releasing its sophomore album, Darklands, along the way. The album sheds much of Psychocandy’s harshness, fine-tuning the group’s keen ear for melody and incorporating drum machines in place of live drums. That fall’s tour culminates dramatically when, after being heckled by fans throughout a gig at Toronto’s RPM Club, singer Jim Reid retaliates with his microphone stand. Charges are eventually dropped in exchange for a donation to the Salvation Army and an apology to those assaulted.

1992: Following the release of its generally overlooked third album, Automatic, and the Rollercoaster EP, the Jesus and Mary Chain makes a stunning comeback with Honey’s Dead. The album’s lead single, “Reverence,” tops the UK charts, and subsequent tour and promotional efforts focus heavily on cracking the American market. The Reids and their rotating cast of support musicians play David Letterman’s show that year and make an appearance at Perry Farrell’s burgeoning Lollapalooza festival.

1998: After re-joining Creation and signing to Sub Pop in America, the band releases Munki, its last album before disbanding.

2003–2013: The use of Psychocandy single “Just Like Honey” in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation reignites interest in the Jesus and Mary Chain, hipping a new generation of listeners to the band’s fuzzy, proto-shoegaze sound. The group reissues its first five albums on Rhino before playing Coachella in 2007, where it’s joined onstage by Lost in Translation star Scarlett Johansson. The band continues to release greatest-hits albums and box sets while touring off and on.

2014–2015: The band sets out on an expansive tour to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Psychocandy. Jim Reid also announces that the group has been recording its first album in nearly 17 years, reflecting a “more mature Mary Chain sound.”

2016: Ahead of a short North American tour, McGee announces that the band will release its new album in spring 2017.

Wild Nothing's Jack Tatum Adjusts to Life in the Spotlight →

“It sort of feels like a different life,” says Jack Tatum, on the road somewhere between Atlanta and New Orleans. Tatum, who helped bring a new wave of bedroom-recorded indie pop to prominence with his project Wild Nothing, is reflecting on his abrupt transition from laptop auteur to internationally recognized artist.

Tatum’s story begins—at least according to music mythology—in a dorm room in Blacksburg, VA. After releasing a few demos on the internet, Tatum was discovered and signed by Captured Tracks label head Mike Sniper, who added Wild Nothing to an esteemed roster of kindred practitioners that would in time include Beach Fossils, DIIV and Mac DeMarco. Gemini, the first Wild Nothing album, which Tatum recorded by himself in said dorm room with the software GarageBand, was released in 2010, inspiring a wave of critical praise that led to extensive touring with a full band.

“That record changed my life in such a monumental way, and I still don't know if I've processed it fully sometimes,” Tatum says. “I was really young. Things moved really quickly for me after that record came out, and I had to keep readjusting the level of attention that I felt comfortable with.”

Tatum expanded the project’s scope and sound for Wild Nothing’s sophomore album, Nocturne, which was recorded in a New York studio with producer Nicolas Vernhes. The album possessed a richer, fuller sound with more distinct parallels to the band’s live show, and its increased exposure prompted even more touring.

With Wild Nothing’s third full-length, Life of Pause, now under its belt, the rigorous cycle of promotion and playing has become the norm again. Despite the unrelenting schedule, though, there’s an underlying ease within the album that points towards a place of newfound comfort for Tatum. 

“I think in a lot of ways, Life of Pause is a portrait of domestic life. Things were pretty normal for me after touring for Nocturne [ended], and I really needed that to happen—to become a homebody again and be in a serious relationship,” Tatum says. 

That normalcy allowed Tatum to create at a relaxed pace. He expanded on the art-pop inclinations of the Empty Estate EP, which immediately followed Nocturne and served as “a necessary stepping stone” for trying out new ideas. He let some ’70s soul influences creep in and even flew to Stockholm to record with John Eriksson of Peter, Bjorn and John. 

That’s not to say the writing and recording of Life of Pause was a leisurely affair; there were still the usual logistics of time, place and cost to take into account. 

“It's too terrifying for me to ever book studio time without a record being pretty fully thought-out,” Tatum says, “so I ended up spending a long time working out kinks in New York beforehand.” The album itself, he acknowledges, is “a pretty Frankenstein record—written in New York, recorded in Stockholm and Los Angeles then mixed back in New York.

“Things deviated slightly while we were [in Stockholm],” he says, “but for the most part, I had things pretty planned out. I'm cool with a bit of improvisation, but that also leads to more dead ends sometimes, which can make you pull your hair out when you're shelling out a ton of money on studio time.”

As the band travels the country for its third wave of touring since Life of Pause was released in February, it’s hard to say if Tatum’s ease is here to stay. “For me, this record was coming from a much happier place, but as I get older, I can't help but question my place in the world,” he says. “Existential melodrama.”

Regardless, he’s grateful for the path he’s traveled and knows it’s a hard one to come by these days.

“Sometimes it really is just about luck and timing, but I take an optimistic outlook,” Tatum says. “I do believe that really good music finds the right ears, eventually, more often than not. The thing I'm really grateful for is the fact that Gemini allowed me to be in the position that I'm in now—still doing what I love and exploring new ideas.”

Muuy Biien Is Not the Band You Remember →

Amid the carefree abandon of New Year’s Eve, the night typically provides an opportunity for reflection. It may present itself early on in the evening before meeting up with friends, or it may sneak up suddenly, as the midnight countdown approaches. Whatever the case, one takes stock of the past year and begins to develop plans for moving forward. What didn’t work out? Where does one go from here?

As those thoughts began to seep into the minds of countless individuals across the world last Dec. 31, Muuy Biien was already putting its plan into action. The punk group, whose members call both Athens and Atlanta home, took the 40 Watt stage an hour before Times Square’s televised ball drop. Anyone familiar with the group’s signature hardcore sound had no clue what was going on. The lights were dim and cold, the air was thick with fog, and the music itself provided a newfound sonic atmosphere touched on previously only by the band’s ambient instrumental recordings. The songs were a little slower, a little funkier, even, and—wait, was that John Fernandes on violin?

“The hardcore thing, that’s basic knowledge,” says singer Josh Evans about the drastic change in sound. “Fundamentals,” clarifies guitarist Robbie Rapp. “Rudimentary,” drummer Jacob Lake adds.

“Naturally, that was kind of how I saw [Muuy Biien’s early music] at the time. It wasn’t something I thought I was going to be doing now, but [I thought], ‘In order for me to get to where I need to be, I need to get [that] out of the way,’” Evans says of the band’s initial releases: a five-song set of his own 4-track recordings and the band’s debut, This Is What Your Mind Imagines, a smattering of raucous, breakneck punk and experimental drone. Muuy Biien cemented and capped off this formula with what the group considers its first true full-length, D.Y.I., released on local imprint HHBTM Records in 2014.

From there, the band consolidated its lineup and began approaching songwriting in a more collaborative fashion. Muuy Biien is now a four-piece comprised of its most consistent players: Evans, Rapp, Lake and bassist Parks Miller, who’s played with the band for some time but makes his recorded debut on the band’s brand new LP, Age of Uncertainty.

“Now that we’re all working together a little bit more, there’s just this other element of a rhythmic, funky nature to the newer stuff,” says Lake, describing that as the biggest overlap in interest and style for the group’s four members. Recorded live to tape with minimal overdubs at Chase Park Transduction and pieced together with other material Evans and Rapp had recorded, the album’s groove and bite showcases a band now closer to The Birthday Party than Minor Threat. 

The foursome wasn’t just bouncing ideas off each other more freely—they openly accepted contributions from outsiders, too. Although the band has worked with others in the past to record and help produce, they say Athens veterans David Barbe and Fernandes had an instrumental role in helping shape the sound of the record.

And underneath the slinking groove of Miller’s bass lines and Lake’s accented snare pops, there’s also a noticeable change in the music from a lyrical standpoint. Though still uniquely Muuy Biien in tone, Evans says Age of Uncertainty is “not as personal.” 

“D.Y.I. was a lot of inward thinking and a lot of paranoid shit,” he says. “Ridiculous stuff.” This time around, he chose to write from a more thoughtful and observant place, taking on morality and public shaming in one fell swoop. The title, then, characterizes both how the band viewed its future at the time of writing and recording as well as the broader cultural climate.

“I think with time… it’ll make more sense later, but that doesn’t make it bad or unapproachable now,” says Evans of the album. “I don’t know if old fans are going to dislike this record as much as [say], ‘Oh, that’s catchy, I like this,’” says Rapp. “It’s not watered down at all. It’s not a cop out. We didn’t go pop or anything,” he adds. “I feel like it’ll just have a broader appeal.” 

Indeed, it does put the band in a strange position—releasing a record it’s proud of, showcasing a sound it’s been building upon and moving forward with for over a year, while the public’s reception and reaction remains up in the air. Even so, Muuy Biien continues to move forward, a little surer of where it’s going.

Warehouse Plumbs the Depths on LP No. 2

Don’t let Atlanta post-punk band Warehouse’s quick ascension in underground circles fool you. The five-piece, which quickly became the capital city’s freshest musical export following the re-release of a stellar debut album on Brooklyn indie Bayonet Records, hasn’t had it quite so easy.

For instance, take the recording of the group’s most recent album, Super Low, which bore the weight of a band unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight. Early last year, Warehouse was featured as a Stereogum Artist to Watch after Bayonet—spearheaded by industry mainstay Katie Garcia and her husband, Beach Fossils’ Dustin Payseur—announced it would provide a physical release for Tesseract, the band’s first album, which was released digitally in 2014.

“With Super Low, there was a lot more expectation from us, and also a higher level of personal expectation from ourselves,” explains Warehouse singer Elaine Edenfield.

Super Low was tracked in New York following a two-week tour before Edenfield, wanting to polish her takes, re-recorded vocals at home. The band then submitted the album to its label, but “they kindly asked us to just scrap the whole thing,” Edenfield says. Warehouse then started from scratch, recording the album at the Living Room in Atlanta, where they originally recorded Tesseract in a day. Although unplanned, the additional sessions resulted in a final product Edenfield and company were very happy with.

Recording hiccups were just the tip of the iceberg, however, considering what lies beneath the surface of Super Low’s 10 songs. Warehouse has always excelled in transferring the principles of abstract expressionism to its music, allowing Edenfield’s relatively cryptic lyrics to form impressions in listeners’ minds instead of presenting direct narratives. The group’s sophomore album doesn’t digress from this philosophy, but a simpler, more pointed melodicism from the guitars and bass actually brings more focus to Edenfield’s personal writing.

“My style of songwriting is, for better or worse, very personal, but also in contrast really vague and open to interpretation,” Edenfield says. “I like to have [my lyrics] be this ambiguous but hugely emotional thing you can find lots of personal meaning in.”

Much of the album centers around the dissolution of a long-term relationship, which Edenfield copes with in myriad ways. Her signature gruff growl describes an attempt at self-preservation on the album’s title track, as she sings, “You’re reeling me in/ And wringing me out” and “Gouge my eyes/ And make me see another way.” Elsewhere, there are attempts to balance devotion with an inevitable end, like on “Reservoir,” which provides the closest thing to an uplifting mantra one will find on the record: “Don’t ever fall behind/ Just ’cause it’s easier/ Don’t ever lose your place/ Or throw it all away.”

Written in part at a punk house Edenfield says was eventually torn down to make way for a parking garage, the remaining songs that made the cut were completed at a newer home across the street from Super Low, a food mart. The title “seemed to fit, because the album became about going down into this deeply endogenous place of introspection and destruction, only to come out in a new and not-so-familiar landscape,” Edenfield says.

While there is much common ground between Tesseract and Super Low, the band sheds the texture and complexity of the former for its latest effort. “The songs on Super Low came together as a more concise continuation of Tesseract and [were] written largely in the same style,” Edenfield says. “Many of the songs are written by Alex [Bailey] and Ben [Jackson] on guitar, and everyone else is trusted enough just to fill in however they see fit.”

The subtle changes in sound mostly have to do with the band’s own critical analysis and deliberation. “We are slow songwriters, and so we had lots of time to figure out the elements of Tesseract that we did and did not like,” says Edenfield. “We knew we wanted more variety and intentionality, like, for example, a very slow-moving song with only talking, or a long instrumental bit.”

Having already incorporated these new songs into its sets for some time now, the band is ready to embark on a short two-week tour this October up the East Coast and throughout the Midwest before hitting the West Coast and Europe next spring. And as tends to happen with artists that are required to focus on a particular project for an extended period of time—and especially when that material comes from one’s deepest, darkest depths—the group is already motioning towards album No. 3. For now though, the members of Warehouse can breathe a sigh of relief as they put the strains of Super Low behind them.

Kishi Bashi Overcomes Personal Strife, Finds Comfort in Common Ground →

Writer’s block is the worst. That sentence alone—those five words, totaling a mere 22 letters—took at least 30 minutes to come up with. No joke. Adequately expressing one’s message in an engaging way is a daunting task, and starting is always the hardest part. But as real and irritating as the creative wall is, it’s still surprising that an individual as creative and talented as Kaoru Ishibashi could fall prey to those same speed bumps. 

For those unfamiliar with Ishibashi’s background, the man is nothing short of a phenom. Over the past few years, he has developed quite the CV: a stint playing with of Montreal; his own cadre of recordings under the name Kishi Bashi (including a live album backed by a string quartet); film scoring; commercial sync licensing; and his bread and butter, a jaw-dropping live performance, which typically includes layers of mesmerizing, manipulated vocal and violin loops. 

However, for Ishibashi’s most recent album, Sonderlust, it took a little longer for the creative juices to start flowing. 

“I was so burnt out last spring after touring,” he says, referring to a stint that included performances with a string section, as well as a separate leg with his standard backing band accompanying pop mainstays Guster. “It was pretty intense.”

So Ishibashi and his family headed to Folly Beach, SC for a breath of fresh air. Naturally, he couldn’t help but fiddle with the instruments stored in the house’s music room. “I tried to kind of do my stuff, and couldn’t really do anything. At all. It was kind of frustrating,” he says with a laugh. 

As he struggled to create a record stylistically similar to his past work, Ishibashi began using the recording software Ableton Live. “It allows you to manipulate samples really quickly, so that you can just be very creative with it,” he says. “There are a couple songs that literally started because of these samples.” The album’s opening track, “m’lover,” takes a violin arpeggio and loops it over and over as sampled vocal harmonies, drums and strings propel the ballad to its emotional limits.

With this new approach, a new sound started to develop. “Once I realized this was not going to be an orchestral pop album, it got really easy,” says Ishibashi, who began to let in more of the sounds he’d always gotten excited about—specifically, 1970s soul, funk and rock.

“In the back of my mind, I understood that maybe it’s a good move, because if I made an album kind of frustrated and not too excited about it, I’m sure it would just translate into the music, so I should just go with what I was excited about at the time,” says Ishibashi.

Hints of ELO and Pink Floyd come through on tracks like the Wurlitzer-led slow groove of “Who’d You Kill” and the peppy “Why Don’t You Answer Me,” which finds Ishibashi pushing his voice into territories he only flirted with on previous albums 151a and Lighght. “I’m so far removed from being able to sing like that or write like that, that I also took it upon myself to challenge my singing style,” he says. “For me, it’s really different.”

While new discoveries and experimentation shaped the music of Sonderlust, trials within Ishibashi’s personal life became the record’s lyrical focus. 

“My marriage was kind of struggling. It was already always struggling, just because I’m a touring musician,” he says candidly. “Classic story. It definitely gave me a lyrical element. I dove into the music almost like a distraction, and that kind of helped me.” 

As he navigated a separation, it became increasingly important for Ishibashi to relate what he was experiencing with his listeners, which is where the title of the album comes into play. Derived from “sonder,” a word created by writer John Koenig and posted on his blog, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows—a site dedicated to providing names for the countless, hard-to-define emotions humans experience—“sonderlust” describes the desire to connect with as many strangers as possible, knowing they all experience as complex a life as one’s own.

“I have this kind of worldview where I really feel connected to a lot of strangers, essentially, who listen to my music,” says Ishibashi. “When I make this music, I’m really thinking about them as much as I am myself, about how this would help them or influence them or maybe make their lives a little bit better.”

Ruby the Rabbitfoot’s Striking New Direction Reflects Personal Growth →

It’s been a little while since we last heard from folk-pop songstress and former Athenian Ruby Kendrick. Over the course of two albums, Kendrick carved out an unmistakable identity in the Classic City as Ruby the Rabbitfoot, injecting her gentle yet catchy ballads with flairs of rollicking Americana. By the time she left town, her songs and live show had developed the sort of pleasant nuance that often goes overlooked and under-appreciated in a town fixated on finding the next best college-rock band.

Since the release of her last album, New as Dew, on Normaltown Records in 2014, Kendrick has experienced her fair share of creative growth. Before New as Dew was even released, she shared the non-album track “Coffee & Honey” and its accompanying lo-fi music video; it was a misleading hint at the time, given the song’s slow-burning drum machine and wispy melody, but evidence that the gears were already turning and the songwriter was headed in a new direction.

Touring behind the album commenced, and Kendrick relocated to Los Angeles. While travel and a new setting can serve as the inspirational catalyst for an artist fixated on continuous growth, another development served as the biggest influence on Kendrick’s recently released third album, Divorce Party: a breakup.

“I want this to be a soundtrack for anyone going through a transition,” Kendrick says. “Having your heart broken is something that humans all experience. It’s how you learn and how you grow.”

Written at various points during the course of the relationship, Kendrick says Divorce Party’s nine tracks ultimately allowed her to process everything that transpired. To express those moments of total bliss and utter resentment, Kendrick opted for a completely new palette of sounds that pick up where “Coffee & Honey” left off; the live drums and twangy guitar of Ruby the Rabbitfoot’s past make way for beats and synths this time around. 

“I’m a songwriter first and foremost, and I think in the past it's been my nature to pick up the guitar,” says Kendrick. “But in my free time, I love pop music and rap music and R&B. So I had a heavier hand in the style I wanted this time.”

As Kendrick’s music changed, so did her process. “I believe all of these songs started off with vocal melody. The lyrics and melody would then inform the tempo, followed by the beat; then it would be a matter of figuring out the key and chord progressions,” she says.

To help bring her newfound sound and vision to life, Kendrick enlisted Athens producer Andy LeMaster, best known for his work with artists like Bright Eyes and Azure Ray. “It was primarily Andy and [me] off and on for a year,” she says. “I would go home and lay down my ideas and bring them to Andy, Andy would make edits, and I would take his ideas and go from there. It was very back and forth.”

Album opener “Beach Flowers” begins with an ocean wave of a synth as Kendrick declares, “I built you up into a castle in my brain/ And though it’s made of sand/ I like making plans just the same.” As rolling percussion pans from left to right and a simple bass line keeps the song grounded, she shares more: how she feels lonely, uncertain, let down. That makes way for a moment of self-empowerment in the chorus, as she belts, “I’m not afraid/ I’ve been torn to shreds, and I get up/ I do it again.”

Kendrick’s creative reinvention isn’t limited to just her music. Look to the goth-tinged video for that same standout track, with its oceanside choreography and makeshift seance, to see all that Ruby the Rabbitfoot has to offer. The video’s director, Natalie Neal, who has screened at Sundance, is an integral collaborator with Kendrick, rounding out the visual presentation of her art. “It’s been terrific. I love working with Natalie,” Kendrick says. “I feel like I can really surrender and know that I’m going to love the finished product. She taught me how to take flattering photos and ultimately feel comfortable in my body,” she adds.

Through the intense hardship of moving on from a relationship, Kendrick has found new life and a new direction for her art. Now, she says, she’s happy. “Even though there's this connotation of disruption and heartbreak, divorce parties have a celebratory energy,” she says. “Every person that we love teaches us, so when it's time to part ways, I think it's beautiful to appreciate everything we've gained from the experience.”

How T.S. Woodward Forged His Own Path at UGA's School of Music →

“It’s been a really weird couple of years,” says Scott Woodward, nursing a beer underneath a peak mid-afternoon sun. The mustachioed bandleader, who performs as T.S. Woodward, has been on a rollercoaster ride of denial, re-routing and acceptance since his start at UGA in 2011. With little background in either performance or composition, Woodward was forced to find an alternative route to attain his degree after being turned away from the Hugh Hodgson School of Music. Though the experience proved to be incredibly taxing, Woodward’s outside-the-box thinking and a sturdy support system helped his dreams—both figurative and literal—come to fruition.

“I knew that I wanted to study music when I came here, but it was always a pretty big uphill climb,” says Woodward, who started off playing drums as a teenager before making his way to guitar and then piano. After completing two years of prerequisite requirements in and outside of the music department, Woodward auditioned for enrollment at Hugh Hodgson twice, to no avail—once with voice and once on piano.

“It was hard to hear [the rejection] then, but it makes a lot of sense now,” he says. “Music education, the way it’s set up, is just designed for people that have been doing it their entire life and have been in the system studying classical music. It wasn’t enough for me to just like classical music.”

But Woodward wasn’t ready to give up. He began to explore his options, consulting other UGA faculty members for advice before honing in on the Interdisciplinary Studies Program. “It’s like a shadow branch of Franklin,” Woodward says. “It was really hard to find out about it and get more information.”

The program, which essentially allows students to create their own majors from multiple fields of study, as long as the majors reside within the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, gave Woodward the opportunity to study composition and perform while incorporating coursework in music business, production and creative writing, too.

With renewed purpose and his degree in popular music composition safely underway, Woodward began to put into practice what he had been learning, taking full advantage of the resources the music school had to offer. “I would just sign up on a calendar when I was going in [to one of the school’s recording studios], which ended up being every single weekend for the better part of a couple years,” he says.

Around this same time, Woodward had been having a series of recurring dreams involving drowning and learning how to breathe underwater—an uncanny mirror to the distress and subsequent adaptation he had been dealing with in real life. These dreams quickly became the songwriter’s creative focus. “I relate to the dream world a lot more than the real world,” he says with a sincere smirk. 

Indeed, listening to the fruit of his labor, the surrealistic How to Breathe Underwater/In the Black Box double LP, one can feel that Woodward made these scenes from sleep his own musical refuges. The album is comprised of two distinct sections: The first is a studio-recorded batch of four experimental pop songs and five electronic pieces; the second is a series of four pop tunes sandwiching three instrumentals, recorded live as part of Woodward’s exit show.

Together, the 16 songs introduce listeners to both sides of Woodward’s educational focus and also give a glimpse into his second world, “a swirling, shifting no-man's land populated by the specters of memory and ambition.”

Needless to say, Woodward’s more than happy for the rollercoaster ride to be over and to be accepted into the fold by the gatekeepers who originally prevented his entry. As the long process of learning and creating comes to a close—with a celebratory release show slated for Friday at Flicker—Woodward wants to “get quiet again,” but also has new ideas churning about for T.S. Woodward.

“I change faster than T.S. Woodward does—or can,” he says of his two identities. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, throughout this whole ordeal and into post-graduate life, is a determination to simply continue turning his dreams into reality. “All I want,” he says, “is to keep playing and learning.”

Athens Popfest Founder Mike Turner on Why He Brought It Back →

Moving to a new town can be daunting. For starters, there’s the whole “leaving your old life behind” aspect, which is enough to throw anyone into existential uncertainty. Settling into your new digs and fostering fresh relationships is a whole other story. Yet Florida native and Athens Popfest founder Mike Turner wasted no time making the Classic City his new home in 2004.

“The first Popfest was just to celebrate [Turner’s record label, Happy Happy Birthday to Me] moving to Athens. There wasn’t a plan to do a second one or another one beyond that,” he says. But despite having no experience putting on festivals—Turner says his booking up to that point consisted solely of single-night house and club shows—Popfest continued to flourish over the years, bringing in some of independent music’s most notable names as headliners.

With lots of performances from the Elephant 6 and HHBTM families, as well as appearances by artists like Mission of Burma, Bob Mould and Throwing Muses, the festival took off. Putting together an event of its scope, however, even with the help of Turner’s fellow Athenians, proved to be a taxing venture, and the festival has been dormant since its 2011 edition. 

“I needed to take time off and wanted to work on other things,” says Turner. “It would take up a large part of my year, which made doing anything else kinda difficult.”

Returning this week for the first time in five years, Popfest is once again set to bring Athenians and outsiders together for multiple days of music. Taking place at the Georgia Theatre, Little Kings Shuffle Club and The World Famous from Wednesday, Aug. 10 to Saturday, Aug. 13, the festival’s lineup includes Daniel Johnston, Deerhoof, Elf Power, Ought and a reunion of legendary local band Love Tractor, plus a slew of up-and-coming talent. 

One can only hope that this year’s comeback event convinces Turner to make Popfest a regular occurrence again. “I’m very excited about it just being back,” he says. “It’s been nice seeing people playing and attending getting excited.” 

See the full Popfest schedule in the Calendar, and make sure to check out the program insert in this week's print issue. Stay tuned for more Popfest coverage in the coming days.

Pylon's Legacy Endures With New Live Album & Pylon Reenactment Society →

The American music landscape was evolving rapidly throughout the 1970’s. Tired of the bloated corporatism rock and roll had taken a turn towards, underground music movements began gaining traction in both cultural meccas and isolated townships across the country, from the bohemian experimentalism of no-wave in New York City to the off-kilter industrialism of Devo and Pere Ubu in Ohio. It makes absolute sense then that Athens, Georgia, a sleepy Southern college town rich with conservative tradition, would soon become a hotbed of cultural vibrancy and institutional dismantling during this period of rebellion.

Party-starters the B-52’s and alt-rock torchbearers R.E.M. are the most notable groups to emerge from the early Athens scene. Funny enough, though, while those bands were blasting off and garnering praise from music publications across the country, its members were paying compliments to Pylon, a lesser known group of post-punks with a penchant for jagged yet danceable music and a thrilling live show. In fact, years into their career, Rolling Stone praised R.E.M. as “America’s Best Band,” to which drummer Bill Berry humbly sidestepped the accolade and passed it onto his art school peers.

Over the course of two albums and a handful of singles during their first incarnation, Pylon proved to be one of the most preeminent bands of their generation, setting the blueprint for what punk music with groove could and should be for decades to come. But despite a stellar discography, bills shared with countless other greats of the era and kudos from their Southern companions, the four-piece never achieved the same level of acclaim before disbanding in 1983, placing them somewhere between cult heroes and small-scale cultural icons.

Now, though, with a double live album to be released on July 25—deceased guitarist Randy Bewley’s birthday—Pylon is poised to remind audiences old and new that success isn’t always measured by the number of people that blended in at your arena concert or vacantly watched your video on MTV, but rather by the way one’s music shakes the absolute core of an individual, creating a connection that lasts a lifetime.

The idea to release a live album, or at least its initial source, can be traced back nearly ten years. The band began re-issuing their first two albums, Gyrate and Chomp, in 2007, but bassist and founding member Michael Lachowski was in search of an alternate cover to use for the new editions. A photograph of the original Gyrate cover with years of evident love and wear had been acquired, but finding one for Chomp took a little extra legwork. “I put online somewhere, ‘Does anybody have a cover that looks like that for Chomp?’ [Record producer and fan Henry Owings] ended up mailing his copy, and I photographed it,” Lachowski says. “I kept it for so long that he eventually had to ask for it back,” he adds with a laugh. Years then passed by before Owings approached the band again in 2014, this time with an interest in working with them to sift through their live recordings and release an album to the public.

“I never really liked live albums, but I also thought that Pylon live was the best way to experience Pylon. So a live album was at least partway there,” says Lachowski. “We basically were saying ‘If you can find a good recording, and it’s of a good performance, and it’s of a somewhat significant performance…it should at least be a show that means something, that we could at least remember it or cared about it,’” he says.

“I told [Owings] I had a box of Randy’s tapes, because Randy was basically the archivist in the band, he was the one that kept everything,” says singer Vanessa Briscoe Hay. “In there he found this CD that was a mix-down of four songs from this performance [the band’s last show at Athens club the Mad Hatter before disbanding in ’83], and he said, ‘The quality is really good, I’d like to find these tapes.’ So then he went on a merry chase to find these tapes,” says Hay. After an extensive search, the rest of the show’s mixes were located and the project was fully underway.

The show itself was billed as a send-off for Pylon, who had released its sophomore album earlier that year and been on tour with U2. Two investors had coordinated filming the night’s affair, which was co-headlined by the band and fellow Athenians Love Tractor, as a pilot for a PBS series on Athens music akin to Austin City Limits.

“When they edited their little show, they picked out four or five songs and they pulled footage from throughout the whole night, so some of it was actually synced and some of it was just sort of thrown in there. The rest of the video I don’t think has survived, only that mix-down part has survived. Thankfully the audio for the entire set was still intact somewhere,” says Lachowski.

Though they remember few specifics about the performance (other than members of the audience did eventually join the band onstage), the restored tapes demonstrate a band confident in their road-tested abilities to play and sway a crowd, with no indication that this would be their final show together.

“I think our performances were pretty rugged at times. But, having said that, I think that the kind of music—and, actually, the way we played it—allowed for a certain amount of roughness or rawness or an edge,” says drummer Curtis Crowe. “Even if we were ragged, it still was okay. A little roughness actually enhanced our sound,” he says. The band tore through a setlist culled from their two albums and closed the night with a cover of the Batman theme song.

Roughness and edge, in fact, were exactly what began to put them at odds with larger mainstream audiences in the months leading up to their first break. That and their disinterest in becoming the money machine others within the industry were attempting to turn them into. After the release of Chomp, the band hit the road opening select dates for U2, who had just released their breakthrough album, War, and were well on their way to rock stardom.

“I didn’t want to play for their crowd. It was like these people just can’t wait for us to get off the stage,” says Lachowski.

“If Jesus Christ had opened up for them, they would have booed him off the stage,” chimes in Crowe.

“We weren’t interested in that, so our booking agent goes, ‘Well, why are you doing this?’ That started the conversation. Why are we doing this,” says Hay. “In retrospect, maybe we should have hung out another year or two, but whatever.”

“There’s a lady I know who once said ‘It’s impossible to predict the past,’” responds Crowe, smiling and candidly pointing at Hay.

Though Pylon reunited multiple times over the years after their initial breakup, the band changed forever in 2009, when co-founding member Bewley suffered a heart attack while driving and passed away shortly thereafter. Their legend now lives on with a tribute act of sorts fronted by Hay.

Local musician Jason Nesmith, who had played alongside the singer in Supercluster—a veritable who’s who of Athens talent—approached Hay in 2014 to see if she would be interested in playing a short set of Pylon material for the Art Rocks Athens Foundation’s inaugural events.

“I started calling people. I told Vanessa she could do anything she wanted for fifteen minutes,” says Nesmith. “Honestly, I don’t know whose idea it was to play Pylon songs. I would like to think I would not suggest it myself, because that would be pretty ballsy to try to put myself in that situation. But she remembers it was me.”

Dubbed the Pylon Reenactment Society, the band was recently voted Best Tribute Band in Athens by readers of the local alt-weekly, Flagpole. Lachowski even joined the group onstage when they performed during the awards show—an addition Hay is open to again when they perform later this month in celebration of Pylon Live’s release. “We have a couple more Pylon songs worked up, so we can almost take requests now,” jokes Nesmith.

As the industry continues to evolve and fragment—pulled in one direction by major labels over-saturating the market but still struggling to survive, and in another by independent communities sticking to the ethics and practices maintained within for decades—Pylon’s philosophy is as essential now as it was thirty-five years ago. While our country is yet again in the throes of social and political unrest, dismantling the institutions that have led us to such decline and holding true to the values of unadulterated artistic expression proves most paramount. Getting people moving while doing so just makes it that much better.

With Pity Party, Taylor Chicoine Brings the House Show to the Web

If an Athens band breaks up and there was no one there to record it, did it ever really exist? The question has confronted countless townies over the years, and has only grown more crucial in the digital age of content creation and sharing. 

“There are so many people in Athens who play music,” says videographer Taylor Chicoine. “The music’s all really great, but it’s such a transient town that people play for a few months, and they never play again. If I could document a snapshot of what’s happening right now and put it on the internet, it’s there forever.”

Chicoine, who graduated from UGA in 2013 with a degree in mass media arts and a certificate from the Music Business Program, has been doing just that for about a year with a multifaceted, multimedia concept that includes two distinct outlets: an intimate house-show series for local bands and live video sessions for touring acts making a stop in town. The videos, posted on Vimeo, offer viewers a glimpse of Athens’ DIY spirit.

Dubbed the tongue-in-cheek Pity Party Social Club, the series began with shows in the backyard of Chicoine’s Normaltown residence every two weeks, and has featured quieter sets from songwriters Lee Ann Peppers, Erin Lovett and former Athenian Evan Tyor, as well as noisier performances from groups like Dead Neighbors and Saline. “The cops have come probably five or six times,” Chicoine says with a laugh, “but they’ve never written me a citation. They’ve been really cool, actually.”

Shot during the middle of the day, when the risk of receiving a noise violation is far lower than on a Sunday night, Chicoine’s Pity Party Presents branch allows touring bands an opportunity to acquire some promotional material while on the road. “Who knows what they do [during the day, before their show],” Chicoine says. “They come to Athens—this is a small town—maybe they’re just hanging out.” Olympia, WA band Oh, Rose and Atlanta folk-pop group 100 Watt Horse have recorded sessions, as has former Athenian Cara Beth Satalino, with her Baltimore band Outer Spaces.

As Chicoine’s central ideas have grown in scope, he’s had to make a few adjustments. Now the sole organizer, videographer, audio engineer and editor for the gatherings and their accompanying media (Tyor assisted with recording before moving in early May), Chicoine is now spacing out events to reduce stress.

“I did shows every other week for a few months last year, and that was really hectic,” says Chicoine, seated on a lawn chair atop his backyard stage. “To book four bands for a month and then set up and film and put it out and keep it up just got kind of stressful,” he says.

That’s not to say he’s losing steam. In addition to the house shows and live sessions, the Pity Party name was recently attached to new recordings by the aforementioned Dead Neighbors. “They’re the first band that I recorded in the house just for audio purposes,” says Chicoine. On top of that, Chicoine is set to record the forthcoming album by up-and-coming local punk group Nihilist Cheerleader, which will be released through his own, newly christened label, Perfect Attendance Records. “So the Pity Party is the social club and the touring bands and, now, the inside recording—it’s just a catch-all for any music stuff that comes out of the house,” Chicoine jokes.

There will be plenty more music pouring out of the Pity Party house soon. WANDA and Jianna Justice recently brought a little cheer to the miserably misnomered backyard gathering, and Chicoine is currently lining up shows for the rest of the summer. Though the space’s proprietor will split his time between booking bands, setting up mics, mixing audio and shooting video, to him there’s nothing more enjoyable than putting together a finished product—a snapshot of what’s happening in Athens music. 

Well, that and calling it a night. “My favorite part of the house shows is when they’re over and the last band finishes, and then I grab a beer and start coiling cables and sit down,” he says with a laugh.

New Madrid Ramps Up the Intensity on magnetkingmagnetqueen

Georgia’s summer swelter has officially taken hold of our fair city. Flock to the nearest pool for a soothing dip, or beat the heat indoors with a cold beverage. Do whatever you must to keep the tension from running high, because although the season’s turn signals familiar benefits, this summer’s bound to bring a storm. And while local four-piece New Madrid has been calming Athens’ nerves for years now, the band’s latest album, magnetkingmagnetqueen, with its blend of expansive psychedelics and heady krautrock, is a far stronger storm than we bargained for.

Like any storm, the progression towards magnetkingmagnetqueen was a gradual build-up. The band’s reverb-washed debut album, 2012’s David Barbe-produced Yardboat, was the type of laid-back music perfectly suited for humid grill-outs, recalling early My Morning Jacket and classic Southern rock in proportionate measure. Over time, the band—guitarists Phil McGill and Graham Powers, bassist Ben Hackett and drummer Alex Woolley—would come to be recognized as one of the most exciting live groups in town, following up its debut with 2014’s Sunswimmer on Athens’ Normaltown Records. While Yardboatprovided a low-key soundtrack to midsummer nights, the sophomore album kicked things up a notch, mirroring the sprawling, atmospheric intensity the band’s live shows had come to be known for.

It makes sense, then, that, after a couple years of relentless touring, the band’s most recent record placed it directly in the eye of the storm. 

“Playing a lot of shows had more of an influence on this record than the last two records. When we had done Sunswimmer, we had toured a good bit regionally, but hadn’t really ever gotten in the groove of playing every night, of playing different places,” says McGill. “I think [magnetkingmagnetqueen is] more consistently propulsive and more of a drum-heavy record” with less breathing room, he continues. “We’re doing a little shorter sets with higher energy.”

There’s a striking dichotomy between the band’s newer, punchier songs and its jammier material that reflects the music’s recording locales: Chase Park Transduction, here in Athens, and Dogwood Lodge, an old, isolated church camp outside of Chattanooga that McGill attended as a kid. 

“It’s funny, because once I really got into music and I would travel around, one of the things I’d [think] would be, ‘This would be an amazing place to set up and make music, or record a song.’ Any place I’d go, I’d be kind of scouting that out,” McGill says. “We just kind of got lucky that in the middle of the summer it wasn’t utilized, and we were able to make that happen.”

The band set up shop with a mobile recording rig in one of the facility’s big, open halls and began laying down material without outside distractions. “A lot of the songs that we got from that session are the bigger, longer ones that are vibe-ier, and then the ones that are a little quicker with more bite we did back at Chase Park,” says McGill, adding that the relaxed pace of recording allowed him extra time to record vocal snippets on his own. The devilish, 11-minute “Guay Lo,” for instance, stretched on from an original two-minute piece at Dogwood, and an alternate version McGill kept to himself incorporates samples of crowd noise from last fall’s Republican debates.

By far the most bold and diverse New Madrid record to date, magnetkingmagnetqueenembodies the contradictions we face on a daily basis, including the politically absurd. And though each of the group’s records has ties to summer, McGill’s says the third album represents the season’s unpredictability. “This is like summer turning into fall,” he says. “A lot more parched. Bigger storms. Definitely not as relaxed, not getting to fully enjoy summer in the same way.”

Chris Cohen Releases As If Apart, Just Wants to Swim

Few would hold it against you if the name Chris Cohen doesn’t ring any bells. The Los Angeles native is the type of restless musician whose involvement with various better-known projects over the years has overshadowed a brilliant, more recent solo career. With a lustrous sophomore release that puts a modern spin on the ’70s AM singer-songwriter mold, Cohen is making a great argument for why you should get to know his name.

Throughout the early 2000s, Cohen recorded and performed with The Curtains, a San Francisco-based group whose jazz and electronic-influenced sound eventually made way for more melodically-focused pop fare. Around that same time, he joined the fellow S.F. experimentalists in Deerhoof on guitar, taking part in recording several critically acclaimed albums before parting ways with the band in 2006. Soon after, he began supplying his talents as a touring member for songwriters Ariel Pink (as part of his Haunted Graffiti band) and Cass McCombs.

Now, splitting his time between others’ bands and musical outlets of his own, Cohen maintains that each brings its own sort of fulfillment. “I like playing the instruments and producing for other people's songs, but I also love to write and sing my own,” he says, conceding that “right now I’m mostly working on my own.” That follow-up seems like a bit of an understatement; Cohen recorded every instrument on his latest solo album, As If Apart, by himself.

Written and recorded over a nearly three-year span, As If Apart is a distinctly different type of record than those recorded under his Curtains moniker. “I wanted to write different types of songs—songs that had fewer parts and fewer key changes. So, that dictated a certain amount,” says Cohen. And although his jazz influence remains present across its 10 tracks, there’s an incredibly accessible element to the album that naturally lends itself to some easy listening. 

As one can imagine, there’s a wide range of thoughts and feelings that accompany the creative process when there’s just one person behind the wheel. 

“It's lonely sometimes, but also very fun. I get into the music and don't have to communicate with anyone verbally until it’s done, so that's great,” says Cohen, adding that his mind ran the gamut from “this is terrible’” to “I love this” to “let's try something else” while working on the record. Regardless, he maintains that confidence in the material was key—he just didn’t know how long it would take to finish.

As If Apart clearly expresses this range. There’s the initial bustling excitement of album opener “Torrey Pine,” the somber meditation of “Memory” and the collected reflection of “Yesterday’s On My Mind.” While the record—his second for New York indie Captured Tracks—shares sonic traits with his labelmates and possesses a uniquely vintage California sound, Cohen’s trademark is really all his own. 

“The people who listen will have their opinions and descriptions,” he says. “My music fits perfectly into my weird mishmash world, making sense to me without genre tag words. I synthesize music from my favorites, then filter them through myself.”

With his musical idiosyncrasies firmly in place and album No. 2 available to the world, the next logical step is touring, with a stop at Go Bar this Saturday. For a guy who writes and records his own records, Cohen describes his live band as really just “friends from before.” “The touring band is always people I like… I’d never ask someone to play who I didn’t want to spend time with,” he says.

The whole experience—writing, recording, giving interviews and touring—can be consuming. How does one find reprieve? “What I’m most looking forward to is playing, but I also wanna stop for some swims along the way,” says Cohen. “If anyone has good tips in Georgia, hit me up on Facebook!” 

Athens, show the man some true Southern hospitality.

Alan Palomo Takes Neon Indian in New Directions →

“I need to simplify things,” says Alan Palomo from his Brooklyn apartment. The Texas native has spent the last several years living in New York, and is about to hit the road for another North American tour in support of VEGA INTL. Night School, his most recent album as Neon Indian. His comment is pragmatic, prudent, even frugal, but given the sheer scope of last year’s release, with its genre-spanning musical maximalism and rich visual accompaniment, one wonders if simplification is even possible at this point.

In the eight years since Neon Indian’s genesis, with a big push from the blogosphere, Palomo has risen from low-key chillwave stylist to the forefront of alternative and electronic music, garnering consistent critical praise along the way. Though raised in a musical family—his father was a Mexican pop singer, and his brother plays bass in the Neon Indian live band—Palomo attended the University of North Texas in Denton to study film, which shaped the way he approaches music.

“I don’t see myself much as a musician,” he states in earnest. It’s hard to believe at first, but where Palomo’s coming from becomes clearer as he continues, claiming his talents lie more in the realm of production. In that regard, one might best picture him as a man with a vision—able to piece it together on his laptop but in need of a little help from his friends to pull it off in concert.

“It was chock full of shit to figure out,” Palomo says of VEGA, noting how much his writing was influenced by its anticipated live representation. “I do find it really important that it gets replicated correctly.” 

In addition to executing the record as accurately as possible, Palomo is utilizing the savvy of collaborators on the road in other ways, too; Julian Gross, drummer for New York art-punks Liars, has provided key support in reimagining VEGA’s late-night kitsch. “We have some neon signs,” Palomo says, discussing the album’s main theme and influence: a cinematic, cartoonish reimagining of New York’s after hours.

With his background and wide knowledge of film, the 27-year-old found inspiration in Martin Scorsese’s 1985 comedy After Hours, translating some of his own night-on-the-town experiences in similarly caricatured fashion. “I feel like there’s a very deliberate disposition,” Palomo says, when the sun goes down and last call draws near. He references the melting pot of backgrounds in the Big Apple, which served as creative fodder—in particular, young people who have yet to be properly acquainted with the night. “They haven’t really learned how to carry themselves in a social situation yet,” he says.

Neon Indian’s absurdist palette is wide, as evidenced by the reggae-tinged “Annie” (Palomo wrote much of the record aboard a Carnival cruise ship) or the smooth synths of “Smut!,” which plays out in the off-limits section of a local video store. The promotional lead up to VEGA even touted a hotline one could call for a free single; “Hey there, sexy,” the voice on the other end said before texting a link to said track.

As Palomo’s laid-back retroism and futuristic electro-pop collide, Neon Indian’s future becomes unclear; the hazy late nights have left the impresario in need of a new outlet—or at least one he hasn’t attended to in some time. “Once I write a record, I need to put on a different hat for a while,” he says.

Time away from Neon Indian has included film, music and the intersection of both. In addition to directing the eight-and-a-half-minute video for VEGA track “Slumlord Rising,” Palomo has written a sci-fi script, scored a movie that appeared at the Toronto International Film Festival and acted in an upcoming Terrence Malick flick. As for whether or not he’ll return to the creative outlet that launched his career across the world wide web, he says, “If Neon Indian were to continue, it would need an overhaul.” Better yet, maybe just some simplification.

The Church Looks Back and Moves Forward →

Australian four-piece The Church has been called many things in its 35-year existence: psychedelic, post-punk, new wave, dream-pop. But despite a 20-plus album catalog and induction into the Australian Recording Industry Association’s Hall of Fame, the tag that’s undeservedly stuck with the band through it all may be “cult.”

From Sydney, bassist, singer and founding member Steve Kilbey gives the impression that neither success nor misfortune could phase him now. “I am OK. Things will be good for tour, with a little extra rehearsal in Texas before [the] first show,” he says, referencing the band’s upcoming 17 dates throughout the eastern United States, which begin in Dallas on Apr. 8. The group is slated to perform two separate sets each night: a complete run-through of their sophomore album, The Blurred Crusade, and a second of standouts spanning their lengthy discography, including cuts from their latest release, 2014’s Further/Deeper. 

Characterized by its mystical imagery and expanded sonic palette, The Blurred Crusade is one of the band’s finest records. From the opening one-two punch of singles “Almost With You” and “When You Were Mine” to the stellar, lovelorn “To Be In Your Eyes,” the band’s sophomore album hardly misses a beat. However, there’s an underlying irony to Kilbey and company’s decision to play the album in its entirety for American audiences, as the album was denied a proper U.S. release by Capitol, the band’s record label at the time, who claimed it wasn’t radio-friendly enough. 

The Church would continue to have an interesting relationship with the States over the years, and particularly with Los Angeles, where they recorded several albums, but the band eventually broke through to mainstream audiences with the release of 1988’s Starfish, which was certified Gold in 1992 by the Recording Industry Association of America. The band’s most recognizable single, “Under the Milky Way,” even broke the top 25 on the U.S. Hot 100 chart, and was years later featured in Donnie Darko, leading newer audiences to dig up the band’s past.

When plainly asked why play The Blurred Crusade out of the myriad other possibilities, Kilbey responds glibly. “Well, we did Blurred Crusade in only a few places, so [we’re] coming back to some places we didn’t do last time,” he says, referring to the band’s co-headlining North American tour last year with The Psychedelic Furs. “We're gonna start doing all our albums in their entirety again eventually, I imagine, and we had this one ready from an Australian tour last year. So we can tick them off one by one as we do them, I guess.”

With the abstract plan to work their way through other standouts from their back catalog, Kilbey is sure new material is in store, as well. It helps that the songwriting process now has a renewed energy. After another founding member of The Church parted ways with the band—Marty Willson-Piper, in 2013—guitarist Ian Haug of Australian rock band Powderfinger joined to help write and record Further/Deeper. 

“Ian is an amazing player and a very relaxed guy with his own mojo and trip,” Kilbey says of the guitarist, who shares co-writing credits on the record. “He worked out surprisingly well.”

Haug’s recruitment does seem to rejuvenate the band on record, and his playing style pairs seamlessly with the other members. Further/Deeper cuts “Delirious” and “Lightning White” are full of signature Church guitar haze, while the group puts its own ’60s psychedelic spin on “Laurel Canyon.”

Whether or not The Church was or will ever be ever a household name is a moot point, especially given the fact that Kilbey has rarely given in to the desires of the industry, preferring to make the music he wants. Uncompromising and nowhere near ready to stop, the frontman has a simple reply for what comes next after April’s tour: “Well I guess it’ll be time for another tour or album, then.”