“Of all the vague genre monikers that get batted around independent music’s current vocabulary (“chillwave” being the most infamous, and “witch house” the most blatantly stupid), “post-Internet” is probably the most bewildering. It’s a simple but deceptively nuanced buzzword that works only because it wasn’t born from the haughty pens of beard-stroking music critics. Montreal native Claire Boucher, who churns out 21^st-century electronic pop as the artsy synth-fueled fem-bot Grimes, conjured the label in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in late 2011, elaborating a thesis that perfectly captures Generation Y’s approach to making music.” Grimes brings post-Internet jams to Brillobox – PGH City Paper

Rock ‘n’ roll problems, for most of the world, aren’t real problems. The Hold Steady knows this fact intimately, but doesn’t seem to care. The Brooklyn-by-way-of-Minneapolis group believes in a world where Paul Westerberg and Bruce Springsteen are saints, redemption is found at the bottom of a bottle, and miracles happen nightly on bar stages across America.

With its upcoming release Heaven Is Whenever (out May 4), the band’s lineup has changed — mustachioed keyboardist Franz Nicolay left the group last January — but not its philosophy. The album’s lead single “Hurricane J” has all the trademarks of the Steady’s boozy, Midwestern romanticism: charging guitars, anthemic choruses and lead singer Craig Finn’s street-prophet poetics.

If anything, the group seems a bit more self-aware about its status as “America’s Greatest Bar Band,” a label that has followed The Hold Steady around for years. On the song “Rock Problems,” from Heaven Is Whenever, Finn howls, “She said, ‘I just can’t sympathize / with your rock ‘n’ roll problems.’” The band is seemingly coming to grips with a world that doesn’t seem to be on the same page as its rock-as-religion gospel.

But when the group rolls into Diesel on April 14 for its fourth show in Pittsburgh in four years, the outside world won’t really matter. Just listen to the last words of “Rock Problems” — Finn makes it perfectly clear where The Hold Steady stands on the subject. “This is just what we wanted,” he yells, “this is just what we wanted.”

The Hold Steady brings rock ‘n’ roll problems to Diesel – PGH City Paper 4/8/10  

From this post on, until I begin generating new content, I will be posting pieces I have published in other newspapers, magazines, websites, etc. The date of the publication will be attached in the title.

By Patrick Bowman

Chicago garage-glam rockers The Smith Westerns played Gooski’s back room last September, armed only with ’60s-pop harmonies, snarling distortion and youthful abandon. The set was lightning fast and practically on fire, breaking through the smoky haze of Pittsburgh’s consummate neighborhood bar like a brick thrown through a window in a fit of teen-age anomie.

The show, like most on the Gooski’s stage, was under the radar but urgent, coming quick on the heels of the group’s self-titled debut LP, released late last July. The album attracted the taste-making music elite (including Gorilla Vs. Bear and Pitchfork) and perfectly captured 2009′s love affair with lo-fi intensity in 10 tracks.

Songs like “Girl in Love” and “Diamond Boys” ooze with glam rock’s brash sexuality while betraying a gauche, youthful anxiety. This isn’t a gimmick; at the time of the album’s release all four members of The Smith Westerns were between the ages of 17 and 19. That balance of adolescent urge and knowing desire informs the album’s most indelible cut, “Be My Girl,” a track that struts with Marc Bolan’s bravura before erupting into the subtle-as-a-sledgehammer chorus.

The Smith Westerns are on the radar now, and on yet another national tour, which visits Brillobox on Wed., March 31. They’re ready to put an arrow through your sister’s heart, flaunting the reckless love of 17 like it was going out of style.

The Smith Westerns bring glam-garage to Brillobox – PGH City Paper 3/25/10

Brandishing a fully developed folk-pop sensibility and technical acumen that would put many groups to shame, Maps & Atlases have cultivated a sound that is both intricate and inviting, incorporating swirling pieces of mathy percussion, rubbery guitar work and head spinning harmonies that slowly evolves into the post-rock equivalent of Fleet Foxes.

Their 2010 release Perch Patchwork stands as the group’s most assured document of their fully formed aesthetic, surpassing 2008′s You Me and the Mountain EP in terms of accessibility and pure catchiness.  Patchwork’s best tracks teetering between the wistful joy of contemporary folk and off-kilter harmonies and time signatures. “The Charm” quakes and buzzes before ascending into a whirlwind wall of industrial percussion, allowing lead singer Dave Davison to soar with venom, reciting lines like “I don’t think there is a sound that I hate more,/than the sound of your own voice,” and “after all, you felt so small, it is hard.”

“Pigeon” bounces back and forth on the legs of an elastic guitar piece before breaking down into an island infused sway, complete with kettle drums and a horn section; ”Solid Ground” again allows Davison a quiet gateway before splashing down into the prog-folk of the track’s final two-thirds. Maps & Atlases are consumed by crafting whirling dervishes of composition, cyclically generating momentum from heady percussion and Davison’s rousing croon until every plate is spinning on a stick, carefully balanced and wavering only slightly.  The live show should be a sight to behold.

Maps & Atlases – The Charm

Maps & Atlases – “Pigeon”

Chapel Hill natives Polvo pretty much set the standard for the indie off-shoot known as math rock for the better part of a decade.  And while many purveyors of the genre became wrapped up in increasingly intricate and progressive compositions solely because of their difficulty and inaccessibility (as Pittsburgh legends Don Caballero can attest), Polvo managed to infuse even their most complicated songs with the primal, free-wheeling energy of classic hard rock.

Their 2009 release In Prism was their first in twelve years, but clearly showed the Merge stawlwarts had yet to miss a beat. While the release had all of the genre’s signifiers intact (alternative guitar tunings, jacked up time signatures, eight minute plus tracks), present was an atmosphere of loose improvisation and spacey,  psychedelic expansion. Regardless, the show the this Thursday at the Brillobox plans to be quite the head trip with these pioneers of math rock still capable of melting faces and local rockers The Ceiling Stares and new comers Broughton’s Rules filling out the bill.

Polvo – Beggar’s Bow

The last time Chicago avant-pop sextet A Lull came to the Steel City, they managed to book a gig playing  in the South Side’s only metal/punk bar, The Smiling Moose, and boasted only the five-song Ice Cream Bones to their name. Churning, yet delicate tracks like “Skinny Fingers”  and “White/Gold” hinted at where the group was headed sonically: circular rhythmic motifs, washes of acoustic guitars, muted, almost falsetto vocals and intricate percussion patterns that bordered on random sketching.

It’s a year later and A Lull plan to make a splash tonight at Lawrenceville’s Thunderbird Cafe, a far cry from the biker heavy back rooms of the Smiling Moose.  While their production hasn’t exactly reached a fever pitch (two released songs in fourteen months by my count) the group comes to Pittsburgh  with the “Weapons for War”/”Spread it All Around” 7” single in hand and some serious discussion of a full-length album due out later this year. Tracks after the jump.

Fortunately, the single manages to stand out as a triumphant new document of the group’s maturing sound: dense, focused and intricate with both tracks exhibiting skittering blankets of synth tinkering and a thicker embodiment of the rhythmic prowess exhibited on Ice Cream Bones. After hearing these two cuts, the anticipation for the full-length becomes a monthly update. How these songs will translate into a live setting will be a fascinating discovery, especially considering the Thunderbird’s small stage and A Lull’s six person lineup. 

A Lull – Spread It All Around

A Lull – Weapons For War

Erie, PA songwriter Roger Harvey, a.k.a. Dandelion Snow, has done enough travelling around the country to know what road music sounds like. Extended stays in Pittsburgh, Portland and New York City  have had this man literally criss crossing the nation for the past few years, and his latest release, June’s The Grand Scheme of Things, plays up the rootless troubadour persona something fierce. The title track is lavishly draped in magic hour sunlight,  dripping with world weary bits of wisdom tinged with the romantic yearnings for another place and time.  Luckily,  Mr. Harvey takes a pause from his road warrior ways to make a stop at Garfield Artworks this Friday, August 7th.

Dandelion Snow – The Grand Scheme of Things

Meeting of Important People’s 2009 self-titled debut release was a sketchbook of small details and stolen moments, stitched together as lyrically impressionistic vignettes and set against too many perfectly cultivated harmonies to count. The high points (“Mother’s Pay More” and “I Know Every Street”) offered glimpses of  a dreamworld populated by desperate youth and blood thirsty babes, detailing the lost nights and lost loves that never existed.

While that wistful album resembled something like  a book of  poetry, the group’s current effort, the seven song Quit Music EP available for download here, comes closer to a collection of short stories with each song possessing slivers of plot, drama and the fragile soul of small town life.  Lead singer/songwriter Josh Verbanets provides his characters with rousing backgrounds of British Invasion pop, bristling with moments of AM radio melody and world beating power chords.  Slowly, I could not shake the comparison to The Kinks and their small town/countryside opus The Village Green Preservation Society. Tracks after the jump.

Pieces of the story and town are small, but poignant: a father reconciling his skepticism and informing his sons to show hospitality to drifters looking for lodging  (“Training Song”), a man convinced he should shed all of his possessions and embrace Jesus as the messiah (“Jesus Song”), the boastings of status and reputation in a city that seems like a distant and unobtainable dream (“They Love Me in the City”),  a man’s fantasy of a perfect wife that, he claims, can focus his rudderless existence (“Country Wife”). Even the cover selected (Every Mother’s Son – “Come on Down to My Boat”)  tells the tale of a boy determined to impress the fisherman’s daughter by bringing her down to his boat.

The characters in these stories are grasping at fleeting notions of being a better person or doing bigger things, ideas that hit pretty close to home in Pittsburgh (the most small-town-like big city of them all). They may be running in place or only close to attaining the illusion of happiness, but their desire still has mass and weight. Of course, Meeting of Important People wouldn’t be Meeting of Important People unless they underlined all that existential dilemma with jaunty compositions of vintage power pop bliss,  littering these tracks with hooks and harmonies that would put most local acts to shame and slowly turning the sad irony of these meek characters into sincere hopefulness.

Meeting of Important People went back to their roots and assessed their influences with the Quit Music EP, resulting in their most fully realized and focused work to date.  It will be exciting to see the guys try these songs out in a live setting and with two upcoming EP release shows (7/24 21+ @ Thunderbird Cafe, 7/30 all ages @ The Warhol) we will all have chance soon enough.

Meeting of Important People – Jesus Song

Meeting of Important People – Country Wife

With their self-titled debut album released in late March, Fang Island have crafted what is almost certainly the greatest pure guitar record of the year. Combining the pummeling, dueling axe theatrics of vintage Journey and the unabashedly life affirming harmonies of Andrew W.K., the Brooklyn by way of Rhode Island group truly live up to their self-described aesthetic of  “everyone high-fiving everyone.” Tracks after the jump.

They have remained under the radar even amidst rave reviews, but got a major boost from The Flaming Lips, who have an almost uncanny knack  for hand picking opening acts before their relevance among the indie elite is fully realized (Deerhunter in 2006, Black Moth Super Rainbow in 2007, Evangelicals in 2008, and Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti coming up later this year ).  And from the looks of it, Fang Island appear to be destined for great things.

“Sideswiper” is the guitar epic of 2010, opening with a 1:30 of virtuoso, interlocking, upbeat Fender pyrotechnics before breaking down into what could passed off as a Mellencamp outtake from Pink Houses, adding another layer to Fang Island’s appeal: while the group does seem partial to flourishes of post-rock grandeur, they aren’t frigidly serious (as most post-rock guitar outfits are). The second half of “Sideswiper” has the warm feeling of five friends jamming in a garage on a sweltering June afternoon, underlining the fact that this music is loose, human, and fucking fun.

“Life Coach” is fun like kindergarten playtime,  relying on a plucky see-saw rhythm that eventually evolves into a healthy gallop, stopping and starting for swells of “Ohh’s” and “Yeaaahh’s” while the guitars excitedly crescendo.

Both tracks, along with the group’s trademark “Daisy” (see: Plan Your Week Accordingly) are three high points of an album that has many, setting the stage for Fang Island’s M.O.:  insanely talented musicians producing the most accomplished guitar rock of the year, and having shitloads of fun while doing it.  So, make sure you venture out to Station Square a little earlier than planned tomorrow and take a listen to what 2010 actually sounds like.

Fang Island – Sideswiper

Fang Island – Life Coach

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion are six years from their last release and about 14 years removed from the eye of the storm they created. After the group’s initial three record output in the early 90′s that focused on fusing noise rock, hip-hop drum patterns and delta blues together by any means necessary ending with 1994′s Orange, the boys had varying results sprawling in every goddamn direction. Regardless, their live shows were legendary. Each set came down like a ton of bricks on fire, showering crowds with heaving masses of seething New York City rage and white hot blues swagger. And no one really attempted to challenge The JSBX’s persona as new age, hardcore bluesmen;  the group predated the short lived garage rock revival of  The White Stripes, Mooney Suzuki and The Hives (among others) by a good five years.

Until 1996, however, the pieces had yet to come together in the studio sessions to recreate the incendiary nature of the JSBX’s best performances. But with Now I Got Worry, The Blues Explosion finally coalesced their influences into a sweaty, volatile stick of dynamite, injecting the recklessness of their infamous live act into the raw production techniques that pumped up tracks like “Skunk,” “Wail,” and “Fuck Shit Up” with red levels of hairy distortion. The album is a shotgun blast of the Stooges proto-punk, Muddy Waters slide guitar and rockabilly’s cruising road-ready weirdness, easily sounding as fresh as it did 14 years ago. Tracks after the jump.

Shout Factory! has just released Now I Got Worry (along with seminal live LP Controversial Negro) as an expanded reissue, complete with 12 b-sides and unreleased tracks as well as four radio spots.  For JBSX super fans,  this volume is a must have, documenting almost the entire studio session that brought Now I Got Worry to fruition.  Coupled with the group’s reunion tour, which makes a stop at Diesel later tonight, The Blues Explosion is back on the radar, ready to recapture some of that raw, unmitigated insanity that established them as iconoclasts of independent, American rock way back in the 20th century.

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – Skunk

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – Love All of Me