Pittsburgh surf rock/ post pop duo Action Camp (Maura Jacob + Bengt Alexsander) are back in the studio busily recording their follow up to the 2009 stunner Best I Can Do. In the meantime, the first single from their upcoming as-yet-untitled release  ”zero/one”  is available for purchase now.  Apparently it was also recorded for Conspiracy for Good, an organization I am not totally clear on even after perusing their website for the better part of ten minutes.

Regardless, “zero/one” soars.  The call and response vocals of Jacob and Alexsander work effortlessly amidst their self-proclaimed “doom pop” recalling pretty much any artist on Toronto’s Art & Crafts label (Metric, Stars, Broken Social Scene) with delightful effect.  Don’t miss the chance to catch more new material when the duo hits up Howler’s Coyote on Sept 3rd.

Action Camp – “zero/one”

Steel City MC Jack Wilson is back with the brief mixtape/EP Fame, enlisting Pittsburgh turntablist DJ Spaed to produce a challenging, dynamic collection of beats.  ”P & LE” possesses the most shadowy, sinister beat of them all,  coiling like cool smoke underneath Wilson’s tongue-twisting rhymes. This is pure mix tape nirvana: no hook, no pauses, just some muscular, spartan production and an MC who refuses to take a breath.  Wilson and Spaed’s Fame EP is available here for purchase.

Jack Wilson & DJ Spaed – “P & LE”

After seeing some other examples of Tobacco’s music video output, I don’t think we should expect anything less than a free form, sensory overload freak out. Suffice to say, his new video for “Grape Aerosmith” off his 2010 releaseManiac Meat is inching closer, and I mean inching, to something resembling a linear narrative.  Forsaking the old VHS mash-up style of his most referenced video “Hawker Boat,” Mr. Fec decides to give us a glimpse (maybe more of a screen capture of a dream) of a working stiff going off the deep in ways Kafka would be hard pressed to imagine.  Flaming meat wads be damned.

Built to Spill

For the Week of July 26 through August 1st:

Wednesday July 28
Legowelt @ Brillobox (sponsored by Garfield Artworks)

Friday July 30
Bear Cub, Chad Stipes Stereo & Triggers @ Brillobox
The Triggers – Ready Or Not

Kaiser Cartel @ Schenley Plaza
Kaiser Cartel – Ready To Go

Sunday August 1
Built to Spill @ Mr. Small’s
Built to Spill – Goin’ Against Your Mind

Yo La Tengo @ Hartwood Acres
Yo La Tengo – Beanbag Chair

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

Pittsburgh’s native shoegazers and local scene veterans Black Crash are back with three two tracks available for download on the group’s Facebook page from their forth coming LP due out in the fall.  “Sometimes Dreams” captures the group’s zeitgeist perfectly: cascading walls of guitars drenched in reverb,  yearning vocals from lead singer Ryan McElroy, and a muscular drum section that appears to be pushing everything else around. Passionate nods to the early 90′s alternative scene from Manchester are present but welcome, recalling Jesus and Mary Chain, The Stone Roses and some Boy-era U2 via the gorgeous, ringing guitar work (The Edge is smiling happily somewhere). Keep a look out for these lads with shows around town and an upcoming release on the horizon, I know I will.

Black Crash – Sometimes Dreams

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

For the Week of July 19 – 25:

Tuesday, July 20
- The Flaming Lips & Fang Island @ The Amphitheater at Station Square

Flaming Lips – Worm Mountain

Fang Island – Daisy

Wednesday, July 21
- Rogue Wave @ Andy Warhol Museum

Rogue Wave – Solitary Gun

Thursday, July 22
- Hammer No More The Fingers @ Garfield Artworks

Hammer No More the Fingers – Nobody Knows

Friday, July 23
- Lightning Bolt @ Belvedere’s (sponsored by Garfield Artworks)

Lightning Bolt – Colossus

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

C-Mon & Kypski don’t really play it straight (or safe for that matter).  These four Dutchman seem intent on jamming every possible dance/hip-hop/soul  influence they have ever come across into four minute bursts of insanely catchy, schizophrenic, beat boy symphonies.  With their latest release We Are Square, no two tracks sound the same, bouncing back and forth between Beck’s kitchen sink production approach of Mellow Gold and Odelay and a sort of DJ Shadow-taste-making, crate-digging dream world.  “More is Less” leans heavily on some fantastically placed soul  samples, but is propelled forward by the goofy Euro-tech beat, solid horn section and Abba-like sense of melody.

Along with Nobody Beats the Drum and Pittsburgh’s own electronic-freak smith  Summer Lungs, C-Mon & Kypski make a stop in their (presumably) first stop in Steel City tonight at the Brillobox. Video for More is Less and tracks after the jump.

C-mon & Kypski – Turn of the Tides