MakeMe’s latest album, House of Brakes, deals in the futile art of trying to stop the unstoppable. Musically, however, it’s all about tension and release. Full of bracing melodies, jarring guitars, lush textures, frenzied beats and a sweet/punky playfulness, House of Brakes is as energizing as a cold shower and as satisfying as a hot bath. ...

On their debut 7-inch, Chat with Sivan, the Bay Area stringed-folk duo Foxtails Brigade give us a taste of their upcoming full length, The Bread and the Bait, and a peek into their vivid imagination. Pressed on clear vinyl and featuring gorgeous hand-drawn antiquated artwork, the record is enchanting right down to the last detail; even the flies are a nice touch as they circle around while the album plays.

Side A's title track sweeps you through the looking glass into a dream-like hallucination about the sweetness of life and death, showcasing Laura Weinbach's weightless vocals and classical guitar prowess, and Sivan Sadeh's communicative violin. Pregnant pauses separate the different movements of the song, and a recurring singsong melody alternately gives way to more turbulent atmospheres marked by feverish guitar picking, paranoid violin and impressionistic lyrics that swarm with "queen communist killer bees." ...

On their debut 7-inch, Chat with Sivan, the Bay Area stringed-folk duo Foxtails Brigade give us a taste of their upcoming full length, The Bread and the Bait, and a peek into their vivid imagination. Pressed on clear vinyl and featuring gorgeous hand-drawn antiquated artwork, the record is enchanting right down to the last detail; even the flies are a nice touch as they circle around while the album plays.

Side A's title track sweeps you through the looking glass into a dream-like hallucination about the sweetness of life and death, showcasing Laura Weinbach's weightless vocals and classical guitar prowess, and Sivan Sadeh's communicative violin. Pregnant pauses separate the different movements of the song, and a recurring singsong melody alternately gives way to more turbulent atmospheres marked by feverish guitar picking, paranoid violin and impressionistic lyrics that swarm with "queen communist killer bees."

"Foxtails Brigade" is born in the backyard with musings like "Daisies smile bright while roses fight...When morning glories whisper the secrets of night / Black-eyed Susans wait with second sight," and laments the loss of innocence. A snare drum rolls in and out of the song, briefly sharing a heartbeat with the guitar, and, with dramatic crescendo, the strings join together in a theatrical waltz as "the Foxtails Brigade marches on." Like on the title track, Weinbach instills the impeccably crafted song with unique chord progressions and complex guitar plucking that often resembles the sound of a harp.

Where many two-piece bands try to make up for their small numbers in the studio by layering the hell out of their recordings, Foxtails Brigade choose a more stripped-down approach, showing an impressive amount of restraint. The result is stirring, hypnotic and beautiful to behold. I'm excited to escape with them this Sunday night, August 9, at Café du Nord for their 7-inch release celebration with Agent Ribbons, Devotionals and Garrett Pierce.
www.foxtailsbrigade.com
-Katherine Hoffert

untitled
(Parks and Records; 2008)

untitled
(Parks and Records; 2008)

Anyone who has spent any time trying to be a "working" musician by writing, recording, and selling an album has been told this basic nugget of music biz wisdom by a number of industry insiders: If you want your album to get noticed, you gotta have your best material up front. You gotta immediately grab the record label intern's attention, or the reviewer's attention, or they aren't going to listen past the first 15 seconds.

 

Of course, plenty of bands violate this conventional wisdom every day, and many of them still get plenty of attention. At this point, there's nothing revolutionary about, say, starting your album with a minute and 49 seconds of swelling ambient noise. That point notwithstanding, it still takes a certain amount of dedication to your particular artistic vision to buck the industry's prescriptions and just do your own thing. After all, many, many (dare I say the vast majority?) of musicians are mostly in it for the attention and the fame and money they're hoping will follow that attention, and are therefore only too happy to tailor their sound to whatever helps them "make it" in the music biz.

 

So when I got Shuteye Unison's untitled debut EP in the mail and tossed it in my CD player, you could definitely say I was a little shocked when, somewhere around the 30 second mark, I realized these guys were taking their time, letting the ambient noise get good and swollen, before launching into the first song proper. By the 1:49 mark, I was duly impressed. Not because I was blown away by their novel sound or anything, but because this opening track says to me, "We are artists first and foremost." 

 

The question now, of course, is: Did the rest of the album deliver on the art?

 

Yes indeed, Shuteye Unison delivers. Of the six tracks in total, the opener is the only one composed entirely of ambient noise. The rest of the songs defintely have an atmoshperic quality, and there are several interludes that resort to the pure noise. But the songs are more properly described as a sort of indie psychedelic pop rock.

 

After the minute and 49 seconds of ambience that opens the album, "Tomorrow's Five Horizons" seems to charge right out of the gate - though of course I mean that in relative terms. A driving bass lick starts it off, and I love how it just comes bubbling up out of the noise. Then the chiming, reverb-soaked guitars come in, and the somehow simultaneously soaring but whispery vocals take over. It all has a rather sublime feel. Even when it's at its most hard charging, there's a sense of detachment, an awareness of something larger than the exigencies of this song, like these aren't even songs at all but indie psych pop dispatches from some astral plane.

 

The intro to "Fields Landing" brings the tempo back down to a crawl and imports some samples of a dude talking, too, a nice touch. It lends an experimental feel to this brief interlude before, once again, the reverb-drenched guitars come in, this time with a crunchiness that adds a satisfying heft to the song. As the tempo starts to slow down at the end of the song, the drum beat and the bouncing bass line remain in lockstep and you also realize these guys have serious chops in addition to a finely honed sense of craft. And no surprise, since Shuteye Unison is comprised of veterans of several other Bay Area bands, including The Rum Diary, Built for the Sea, and The Action Design.

 

If I was forced to pick a standout track from this album that is too consistently good to really have a standout, I'd say "Latin Metrics" is it. The bass line is, at times, just so damn melodic it hurts. I love it when a band can bring a bass line to the foreground and lodge it firmly in your head.  

 

What makes this album even easier to like is that it's out on Parks and Records, a green record label based right here in the Bay Area. Last year they made donations to the National Parks Conservation Association, the National Forest Foundation, and Friends of the Urban Forest out of their proceeds. Local and green? I know what you're thinking and, no, it doesn't get any better than that.

[Mike G.]


[STREAM] Shuteye Unison: Various tracks on MySpace

WINDOW TWINS
I'm This Tall City
(Howell's Transmitter; 2009)

Window Twins' debut, I'm This Tall City, is a complex and rewarding album. The songs are mostly composed of dense layers of ambient and found sound, but the tunes are still catchy. Real catchy - even if they are mostly idiosyncratic as all hell. There are plenty of memorable melodies and simple but effective beats to provide points of access, if you're listening right. But it's one of those albums that make you feel like it's almost a travesty to even try and describe it, the music is so hard to describe and speaks so eloquently on its own. ...

WINDOW TWINS
I'm This Tall City
(Howell's Transmitter; 2009)

Window Twins' debut, I'm This Tall City, is a complex and rewarding album. The songs are mostly composed of dense layers of ambient and found sound, but the tunes are still catchy. Real catchy - even if they are mostly idiosyncratic as all hell. There are plenty of memorable melodies and simple but effective beats to provide points of access, if you're listening right. But it's one of those albums that make you feel like it's almost a travesty to even try and describe it, the music is so hard to describe and speaks so eloquently on its own.

Nonetheless, allow me to attempt to describe it.

Opener "Maybe It's Time" showcases the overarching, conflicting aspects of layered experimental noise and pop accessibility, with one of the most infectious vocal hooks of the album on top of a laid-back hip hop beat and organ, piano, bells, bass, and other less-identifiable sounds. The lyric that provides the album's title is also one of the most impossible melodies to get out of your head: "Hey there, voice, please just let me be / You're so small, I'm this tall city."

The lyrics are often surreal bordering on abstract, but deeply evocative, providing just enough narrative to tell a story. I'm thinking primarily of "Purple Flies" here. The song kicks in almost nonchalantly after a brief interlude of strobing sound. Despite the subtlty, the song tells a strangely moving tale about a guy named Joey who "had a camper with three young wives / Parked it on an island in the middle of the world / Parked it by the nest of the Purple Flies." Joey, as it turns out, located his house near the eponymous insects even though he "Knew about the danger of the blind horse crew / Homicidal poets with poisonous eyes / Looking for the nest of the Puple Flies."

And if a line like that doesn't have you already clicking over to their website to buy this album, then you and I have nothing in common whatsoever, and nothing I could write will convince you that this album is awesome.

It's hard to tell if the song offers any resolution to this budding conflict between Joey and the blind horse crew, but then, that doesn't really seem to be the point. Just as the Window Twins' sound is something like sound collages crammed into pop structures - maybe I've got that backward, but at any rate, suffice to say there's as much a pop and folk influence as there is an experimental bent - the lyrics on "Purple Flies" are a barely-constructed fairy tale crammed into an impressionistic rendering of some nightmare world inhabited by purple flies and a gang of sightless homicidal poets who either ride horses or are horses, I'm not sure which.

The blind horse crew turns up again, one can assume, in the track "Blind Horses." And our beleaguered pal Joey would seem to reappear on the stage in "Joey Conductor." But it's not immediately clear if these songs are actually the continuation of some linear narrative. They're more like themes running through this magnum surrealist opus. But that's what's so brilliant about the album: Window Twins is, when you strip it down, just two guys laying noise over simple beats. And yet the album bears repeated listening, subtly revealing itself only to the intrepid listener who is worthy of the reward.

I'm This Tall City isn't a radical departure from the Twins' other projects - which include Black Fiction, Ray's Vast Basement , and The Fresh & Onlys. And yet it's like nothing else you've ever heard. With I'm This Tall City, Window Twins have definitely created an entirely unique sound and a thoroughly delightful album.

[Mike G.]


[STREAM] Window Twins: "Maybe It's Time", "Purple Flies"  

CASY AND BRIAN
No Fiction
(Self-released; 2008)

Meet Casy.

Meet Brian.

Meet Casy and Brian .

Their latest release is a 3-song EP entitled No Fiction.  The tracks on this album don't have names, but who uses track names anymore anyways, it's sooo 20th century. ...