Nat Baldwin - People Changes

(Western Vinyl, 2011)

The grace of a new Nat Baldwin album means that 2011 is now, officially, a good year for music. That’s how I consider it anytime the man let something loose. That’s how I consider People Changes.

What I’d add is that People Changes develops from what we’ve come to expect of Baldwin—an acoustically lush bass-centric album filled with rich, sideways pop music—into a melting pot of that same-said pop with more avant garde elements (harkening back to his debut, Solo Contrabass).

The extreme of that experimental push is “What Is There,” the penultimate track on People Changes, which layers Baldwin’s bass-work on top of itself to produce a tangled beauty not dissimilar to some of Sean McCann’s recent work, though quite unique in and of itself. It’s something I’d love to listen to stretched out over the course of an entire album.

The free jazz and experimental peppering (which increase in frequency over the course of the album) are perfectly placed, and are more than welcome to the solid base of songwriting Baldiwn has developed over the years.

I want to say this is a transitional album, to assume this will propel Baldwin’s future work even further into the areas of experimentation and the unknown, but to do so would be to slight People Changes, which, of itself, is an absolutely divine picture of experimentation cohabitating with pop music.

Did I already say it? People Changes means 2011 has been a good year for music.

Weights by Nat Baldwin by western.vinyl

Green Gerry - O O O/Egg Nog

(Self Released, 2011)

1. I loved Green Gerry's debut full length.
2. Proof.
3. This--O O O/Egg Nog--is something like an EP follow-up: four songs.
4. It's marbled with coats of dust and ether, as before.
5. With ghosts inside ghosts, as before.
6. Underwater, as before.
7. And good/beautiful/warped, as before.
8. Instead of an open lake, a pond.
9. Drown.

Lougow - Dull Thicket

(Ozark Level Full View Records, 2011)

RIYL = Danielson, Thomas Function, Bird Names

This isn’t violent music (at least in any traditional sense), but I can’t help thinking of maligned things and things used to malign them with when figuring out how to describe Dull Thicket. Bedside drawers filled with dull knives. Loose guitar strings for cutting off circulation with. Pointed elbows and sharp-knobbed fists. True, this isn’t the overbearing type violence-rhetoric you find attached to metal or harsh noise music, but a kind of sparse backwoods-type danger that is quasi-poetic, thrilling and potentially horrific.

Let’s stop there.

At least lets stop that line of thought. Lougow isn’t lyrically morbid and, while it maintaining elements of dissonance, is not overtly harsh. In a base sense this is pop music (a term that has grown fat and useless). More specifically, Dull Thicket has strings the spread to natty, schizo-twee, freak folk and folk-punk. It’s definitely energetic music, restless music, music that is twisted and ever twisting, moving, evolving.

And I don’t think there is a possibility of listening to Lougow and not hearing a connection to Danielson.  (Though, if you were nonplussed by The Best of Gloucester County, Dull Thicket is a lush alternative.)

At the end of the day, Dull Thicket is wild pop music with a dangerously punk aesthetic; a frisky album that’ll likely wind up jailed for the freewheeling damage it causes, which is why you should be listening to it right now.

things to do by ozark level full view

House Of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski

(Pantheon, 2007) 

Pick up a copy of House of Leaves and flip through the pages and you will most likely be absolutely fascinated and completely discouraged from actually reading the text, because it looks like this...

Rich Kelly

Vincent Stall

Hush

Hush "Twin" Opening at New Image Art from G7D on Vimeo.

HYMNS: Refused - "Worms of the Senses / Faculties of the Skull"

Refused - "Worms of the Senses / Faculties of the Skull"
(from The Shape of Punk to Come: A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts, Burning Heart, 1998)

When I was a youngster, on days when it seemed certain the world was out to get me and I was certain to fight back, my mom had a final desperate move that -- in memory at least -- always worked: we'd read Mean Soup. This book would direct me through a series of screams, scratches, spittings and kickings, and then, at the end... I was okay.

"Worms of the Senses / Faculties of the Skull" kicks off one of two great Mean Soups for my adulthood: The Shape of Punk to Come (the other being Coltrane's Giant Steps). It's much, much more than a great anger management record, but these days I seem to visit it most often after a few hours of storming around pulling my hair, kicking out at the nearest objects and animals, cursing stream-of-consciousness under my breath like Albert in I ♥ Huckabees. Just hearing the quiet carhorns honking in the track's opening seconds slows my breathing down... even before the ripping sheets of filthy-hard guitar bursts come in, before Lyxzén's vicious scream announces the band's bone-shattering intentions.

And then all Hell breaks loose, and I'm airdrumming and screaming and pounding the floor and airguitaring and screaming and jumping and swinging and anything I had felt before the song kicked in is lifting heavenward out of me, just exploded out into the ether. It's one of the most dynamic, perfectly executed blasts in all of late rock music, an incredible, heart-stopping cacophony of guitar-and-vocal violence held together and multiplied by some of the most brilliant drumming ever. Ever. His name is David Sandström. Pay attention.

The song builds to a final, no-holds-barred catharsis ("Let's tAke the first bus outta here / Let's Go DDDAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOWWWWNNN"), punches the f**king lights out, and then the radio fuzz hits like a bucket of icewater to the face, and you're hooked, you need more immediately, you feel good, thanks, keep it coming -- and it's only a minute or two before the chorus of "Liberation Frequency" is breaking all Hell loose again.

MP3: Refused - "Worms of the Senses / Faculties of the Skull"
and for the parents: Mean Soup

HYMNS: Red House Painters - "Cruiser"

HYMNS is a new feature on Forest Gospel. The point is to post about songs that epitomize and create moods, and times, and places. Songs that are formally exciting and emotionally resonant. Songs, basically, that are perfect. We hope to introduce you to new things, but there will be some really obvious, part-of-the-collective-cultural-consciousness entries, too. Sometimes it's nice to be reminded.
Let us know what you think: you know where the comment box is.



Red House Painters - "Cruiser"
(from Old Ramon, Sub Pop, 2001)

This is pouring out of me. What's coming out of the speakers -- she made a motion like scooping piles of stuff out of her stomach -- are my actual real emotions as music. This sounds exactly as I feel and am thinking, right here and now.

Once, a girl lay in my bed, the night before we were separated for a long time, and said this about "Cruiser". The precision and efficiency with which Mark Kozelek is able to get to that whole gut-shoveling thing is still surprising after years of listening on repeat. The song is so simple, so at ease with itself, and so cutting for that. The guitarwork is absolutely elegant.

"LA took a part of me / LA gave this gift to me"

It's a sort of lament, a slow drive across a city and through the grief of leaving things behind. Kozelek quietly conjures the contradictory feeling of gain and loss both -- grateful for having had, mournful for having no longer. "Cruiser" churns with that particularly fresh strand of nostalgia we feel just as the thing is slipping away, still in sight, sparkling on the ground below us.

MP3: Red House Painters - "Cruiser"

Thee Oh Sees - Castlemania

(In The Red, 2011)

With Castlemania, Thee Oh Sees take the lead. While other lo-fi, garage-y type bands continue soft-pedaling just-above-average releases that seem poised simply to keep their collective heads above water, Thee Oh Sees have made a record that stands to devour hordes of unsuspecting listeners whole.

Perhaps that’s misleading. I mean, followers of John Dwyer and his troupe are surely not going to be surprised that the man has, yet again, exceeded expectations. They’ll probably read this with the response: Duh, didn’t you even listen to Help? Dog Poison? Truth is, Thee Oh Sees have long been front-runners among purveyors of outsider pop with a gritty, classic rock flair.

And to go ahead and answer, yes, I have been following Thee Oh Sees, and did listen to those previous albums. But there is something about Castlemania that’s got me bristling with summer-faced joy and jilted blues. It’s got me bobbing and weaving.  More so than before with Thee Oh Sees.

Maybe it’s the weather.

But it certainly is commanding me like Dancer Equired, Napa Asylum, Dye It Blonde and other like-minded albums haven’t been able to.

So take that for what it’s worth. I’ll just pronounce it: I love this album.

Thee Oh Sees - "Corrupted Coffin"

Cowboy Maloney's Electric City by Michael Bible

(Dark Sky, 2011)

I haven’t signed any contracts or anything, but I am scheduled, or have been assigned, to review this book elsewhere and, since it’s a slim one, don’t want to, you know, repeat myself or nothing. Still, an excerpt should do you well in addition to this book trailer which, despite having no language in it, is surprisingly accurate.

Cole Willsea