Author Archives: othersideoflife

Loren Connors, Red Mars (Family Vineyard)

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This week’s edition of the LEO Weekly includes my review of Red Mars, the new solo album by Loren Connors:

Guitarist Loren Connors toiled for decades in near-willful obscurity, self-releasing his recorded output under multiple pseudonyms. Only rarely in his early years did Connors work with other musicians, and as a result of his relative isolation, he developed a singular, insular style of playing guitar that, while inspired by the blues, thankfully never sounds “bluesy.” Despite his being diagnosed with Parkinson’s in the early 1990s, the rest of the world somehow caught up to Connors shortly thereafter, and he entered a still-ongoing fruitful period consisting of multiple collaborations (with avant-garde types such as Jandek, Jim O’Rourke and Keiji Haino), and the formation of his own band, Haunted House. Red Mars, his first truly solo release since 2004, harks back to Hell’s Kitchen Park, the first Connors record that I heard, way back in 1993; but it sounds even more desolately stark than previous efforts, an achievement I thought nearly impossible. As such, Red Mars is one of the darkest, sparest, listen-only-at-4 a.m. records I’ve ever heard. And that’s a compliment.

You can buy it from Family Vineyard here.

WOODEN WAND, NATHAN SALSBURG, and DANE WATERS at ZANZABAR, Tuesday, September 13th

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The Other Side of Life and Cropped Out! present:

WOODEN WAND (from Lexington, on Young God Records)
NATHAN SALSBURG (from Louisville, Kentucky; debut album forthcoming on No Quarter)
DANE WATERS (from Louisville, Kentucky; member of Sapat and Softcheque)

Tuesday, September 13th
at ZANZABAR
2100 S. Preston Street
9 PM DOORS, $6, 21 and over
BUY TICKETS HERE!

James Jackson Toth has been playing and recording (and releasing) music for over a decade, most notably as leader of the now-defunct New York-based collective Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice. After a solo album in 2007 on Rykodisc, and Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! label and the Mad Monk label, he continues under the name WOODEN WAND with his new release on Michael Gira’s Young God Records label, Death Seat. Abandoning the psychedelic wail of WW&VV for a starker, more direct songwriting style, WOODEN WAND’s most recent tunes are harrowing and hellaciously good. Michael Gira writes that Toth is “a passionate singer and guitar player and inhabits the songs as he performs them with straightforward, unpretentious, and confident gravitas. I’ve been listening to this record over and over for the last several months—we went through dozens of equally compelling songs before choosing the line up of tracks—and the more I listen, the more honored I am to be associated with James Jackson Toth.”

NATHAN SALSBURG is an archivist, producer, guitarist and writer based in Louisville, Kentucky. He has worked for the Alan Lomax Archive since 2000, for which he currently serves in the capacities of production manager, photo and video archivist, and general digital catalog editor. Since 2006 he has produced and hosted “Root Hog Or Die,” a vernacular/traditional music program on East Village Radio, and is curator of the Twos & Fews recording imprint, also a vernacular music entity, and a collaboration with Chicago’s Drag City label.  Salsburg maintains an index of on-line vernacular music resources at his blog, roothogordie.wordpress.com, and contributes occasional music writing to the Louisville Eccentric Observer and the Other Music weekly update. This past week, the Tompkins Square label just released Avos, a collaboration between Salsburg and Chicago guitarist James Elkington (formerly of the Zincs), and Salsburg’s first solo album, Affirmed, is due November 15th on No Quarter.

DANE WATERS is one of Louisville’s brightest musical talents. As a member of SAPAT and SOFTCHEQUE, she displays an impeccable melodic sensibility, and has a voice so wonderfully haunting, it sends chills down your spine. Dane is in the midst of working on her first solo album, which we can’t wait to hear!

Check out the Facebook invite here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=183890385017722.

SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE at UNCLE SLAYTON’S this Thursday, August 25th

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(pic swiped from Uncle Slayton’s web site.)

We really, really miss Skull Alley. Jamie Prott ran a great-sounding venue, and when we started booking shows there, we were so pleased that Jamie was super-friendly and easy to work with. We miss the DIY spirit that pervaded the place, from the mosaic-tiled bar  to the, ahem, ever-changing decor. Since the venue re-opened with a new name, Uncle Slayton’s, this spring, we haven’t been interested in going to check it out, mainly because there hasn’t been a show worth going to, in our estimation.

So it comes as a bit of a surprise that SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE, the vehicle of the incredible Ben Chasny, is playing there this Thursday. Who booked this? Who cares? We’re glad! Here’s the particulars:

SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE 
w/Donovan Quinn and Band of Carnies
Thursday, August 25
8:30 PM / 8:00 doors
$8 / 18+ with ID
Purchase tickets here
Experimental, Out-Folk, Pop Rock

SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE is basically just one man (but what a man!) – Ben Chasny, along with whomever he ropes in for recording or for shows. This man-band started in 1997 when Ben self-released his first LP in an edition of 400, little dreaming that one day Six Organs of Admittance would sell 37 times as many records. Over the years, Six Organs has had many releases on a variety of labels, most notably Holy Mountain, and became one of the most influential sounds in the free world. In 2005, Ben found a home at Drag City and released the landmark album, School of the Flower. “Free jazz ninja drum master” Chris Corsano joined Ben and the results were a perfect blend of melody, out-folk, minimalism and noise, getting much critical applause and ending up on year-end best-of-the-year lists by magazines such as Mojo, Wire, and Magnet. Among other projects, Ben has played in the touring band of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and plays guitar in the bands Current 93, Badgerlore, and Comets on Fire. Six Organs’ 10th album, Asleep on the Floodplain, released in February – ten portable slabs of home recorded blur-and-ripple (and warble) from a (mostly) acoustic man-band.

No idea who the opener(s) are, but really, if you can, you shouldn’t miss Six Organs. Ben is one of our favorite living guitarists, an absolute killer player with impeccable sensibilities. Yowza! Here’s the video for “Light of the Light,” off his new album Asleep on the Floodplain:

Oh yeah, Uncle Slayton’s is located at 1017 E. Broadway, near the corner of Broadway and Barrett. Yeah.

TENDER MERCY, GIVING UP/PUTTING OUT, SLITHERING BEAST at MAG BAR, Tomorrow! Monday, August 22nd

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Our friends at CROPPED OUT and SOPHOMORE LOUNGE are putting on this fantastic show tomorrow at Old Louisville’s favorite watering hole, the Mag Bar. Here are the particulars:

The triumphant return of Sophomore Lounge’s pop-slop magicians, GIVING UP (Louisville, KY/Garner, IA) and PUTTING OUT (Chicago, IL). Featuring members of STATE CHAMPION and MEAH!, with special guest openers SLITHERING BEAST (Clark County country cookin’).

JUST ADDED: Louisville heartstring-strummer and friend of the family, Mark Kramer a.k.a. TENDER MERCY will round out the night with some stripped-down, hauntingly sparse acousti…c numbers of his own. For fans of: Little Wings, Red House Painters, Spokane, etc.

This is the last show of a three-week tour for GU/PO, so come on down, buy yourself a beer, drink half of it, pour the rest of it on them, then buy one of their records to say you’re sorry. Then buy yourself another beer, and put a Warren Zevon song on the jukebox. It’s Monday night, what else is there to do?

http://soundcloud.com/tender-mercy
http://givingup.castlemorbius.com/
http://www.gooddrawers.com/puttingout
http://www.slitheringbeast.com/

9 PM. $4. 21 and over.

The MAG BAR is located at 1398 South 2nd Street, at the corner of Magnolia and Second. You knew that, as you’ve been going there since before you were old enough to drink.

The ubiquitous Facebook invite is, of course, here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=252908064739438.

CATHERINE IRWIN and LOWER DENS at ZANZABAR, Wednesday, July 27th

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CATHERINE IRWIN and LOWER DENS

The Other Side of Life and Cropped Out! present:

CATHERINE IRWIN (from Louisville, member of FREAKWATER)
LOWER DENS (from Baltimore, Maryland; featuring Jana Hunter, on Gnomonsong)

Wednesday, July 27th
at ZANZABAR
2100 S. Preston Street
9 PM DOORS, $6, 21 and over


(photo of Catherine Irwin by Jason Creps.)

CATHERINE IRWIN has called Louisville, Kentucky home, or at least her home base, all her life. She began performing by playing guitar in punk bands “and not caring a bit about country music,” she says. Still, the seed for her band Freakwater was inside her: “Most of the country music I heard on radio, I hated. But I loved the Carter Family, the way they would approach songs about death and dying or being saved and rejoicing the same way. That kind of music seems to age better. I can’t see myself playing punk anymore, but this kind of music I can see playing the rest of my life” (Chicago Tribune).

LOWER DENS is a band from Baltimore whose first LP, Twin-Hand Movement, was released last year on San Francisco’s Gnomonsong label. Sonically, they come from some place near new-wave, kraut-rock, post-punk, and pop. Twin-Hand Movement, specifically, is a record that incorporates those sounds to form its own. LOWER DENS formed in late 2008. Jana Hunter (guitar and vocals) needed a touring band for her solo work and found, through mutual friends, Abram Sanders (drums) and Geoff Graham (bass and vocals.) Twin-Hand Movement was made with the help of Chris Freeland (recording engineer, drummer for Oxes, proprietor of Beat Babies Studio just outside Baltimore), Chris Coady (mixing engineer with TV on the Radio, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Beach House records to his credit, proprietor of DNA Downtown studio in NYC), and Sarah Register (mastering  engineer at The Lodge in NYC, serious player in Talk Normal.) Amongst others, they cite Wire’s Chairs Missing, Chrome’s Half Machine Lip Moves, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, Faust IV, and Snakefinger’s Greener Postures as companions and influences. LOWER DENS is indeed at once classic and of the times, sounding familiar but not dated, recalling the warmth of nostalgia but not its tiredness. LOWER DENS is coming fresh off their latest tour opening for CASS McCOMBS.

Watch LOWER DENS perform “I Get Nervous” from their NPR Tiny Desk Concert here:

Check out the Facebook invite here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=210328669015245.

Colin Stetson, New History Warfare Volume 2: Judges (Constellation)

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Today’s edition of the LEO Weekly includes my review of Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare Volume 2: Judges:

Multi-reedist Colin Stetson presents an intriguing proposition on his second solo album, New History Warfare Volume 2: Judges: What would it sound like if the saxophone was used not as merely a vehicle for solo expression, but as a polyphonic, looping instrument in the service of highly abstract music? There are some antecedents in the modernist, multi-disciplinary work of Rova Saxophone Quartet, and perhaps Steve Reich, but Stetson’s approach bears few traces of any jazz tradition, apart from an occasional Albert Ayler-esque squeal. The result is an album of highly textural sounds that seem, at first listen, to have been created through heavy digital processing, but New History was recorded entirely live — with the exception of a French horn overdub, a guest vocal by Laurie Anderson and one by Shara Worden, of My Brightest Diamond, on a haunting version of “Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes.”

Buy it from Constellation here.

Arbouretum, The Gathering (Thrill Jockey)

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Last week’s edition of the LEO Weekly included my review of the new Arbouretum record, The Gathering:

The last time a rock band cited Carl Jung as a primary influence was probably on The Police’s swan song, Synchronicity; but on Arbouretum’s new record, The Gathering, Dave Heumann has found inspiration in the father of analytic psychology’s posthumously published, hallucinatory “The Red Book.” The lyrics are darkly imagistic and dream-like, and perfectly match Arbouretum’s music, a hybrid of the heavy post-hardcore of Lungfish and the delicate melodic sensibility of 1960s-era British folk rock bands like Pentangle. High points include “The White Bird,” which sets the album’s ominous tone; “Highwayman,” a haunting ballad of reincarnation; and “Song of the Nile,” a sprawling 10-minute epic dealing with gnostic mythology. Heavy bands rarely sing lyrical concerns worth further exploration, but in The Gathering, Arbouretum has successfully turned the stuff of dreams into reality.

Buy it from Thrill Jockey here.

Sidi Touré & Friends, Sahel Folk (Thrill Jockey)

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This week’s LEO Weekly includes my review of the new Sidi Touré album Sahel Folk:

Although Sahel Folk is Sidi Touré’s debut for Chicago-based Thrill Jockey records, the Mali-born singer and guitarist is no stranger to the international music scene. In 1976, a young Touré joined the Songhai Stars, one of Mali’s famed “regional orchestras” that frequently toured the western Sahel (the transitional zone between the Sahara Desert and the sub-Saharan savannas of Africa). On Sahel Folk, Touré addresses issues concerning his countrymen on songs like “Adema” (about his country’s continuing modernization), while his guitar playing retains a loose, casual yet melodic feel enhanced by the album’s you-are-there approach — apparently it was recorded in the living room of his sister’s house, over cups of tea, with a maximum of only two takes per song. Sahel Folk’s beautifully hypnotic melodies should provide fans of Ali Farka Touré and Bassekou Kouyate plenty of reasons to love Sidi Touré.

Buy it from Thrill Jockey here.

The Phantom Family Halo, Music from Italian T.V. (Sophomore Lounge)

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Today’s edition of LEO Weekly contains my review of the new Phantom Family Halo record, Music from Italian T.V.:

Over the past year, The Phantom Family Halo released its Monoliths & These Flowers Never Die double-album and subsequently played a number of epic shows in town. Music from Italian TV continues with a pleasantly confusing blend of styles in a more concise format. Staples of their live show, like “It’s OK About the War (Gettysburg Jam)” and “Bringing Back the Dead” get a more polished, sublime treatment, while longer tracks like opener “I Believe In Everything” and “Overkirsh” present yet more experimentation, the former resembling a jam off Amon Duul’s 1969 classic Psychedelic Underground played backward and superimposed with television dialogue. There are a number of good bands in Louisville these days, but there’s not another band here, much less the rest of the nation, as inventive as The Phantom Family Halo.

Buy it from Sophomore Lounge Records.

The Phantom Family Halo performs in Louisville this Friday, Nov. 12, at 7 PM as part of Art After Dark at the J.B. Speed Museum ($5 for museum members, U of L and Bellarmine students, $15 for non-members). More information here: http://www.speedmuseum.org/calendar/Brown-Forman_Art_After_Dark.

STATE CHAMPION, TURBO FRUITS, PUJOL, and NATIVES at the RUDYARD KIPLING, Thursday, November 11th

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STATE CHAMPION (from Louisville/Southern Indiana, on Sophomore Lounge Records)
TURBO FRUITS (from Nashville, TN; ex-Be Your Own Pet, on Ecstatic Peace!/Fat Possum Records)
PUJOL (from Nashville, TN)
NATIVES (from Louisville, KY)

Thursday, November 11th
at The RUDYARD KIPLING, 422 W. Oak Street
$6, 9 PM, 21-and-over

Ryan from State Champion and Sophomore Lounge Records is putting together this great show for Veteran’s Day at the Rudyard Kipling, and you should be there. PUJOL were one of the highlights of last month’s CROPPED OUT FESTIVAL, for sure. As soon as we get more information on the other bands playing, we’ll update this post, so keep checking back. Thanks!

UPDATE, 11/5: Here’s some more information on all of the bands, including some mp3s!

STATE CHAMPION you should know, but just in case you don’t: STATE CHAMPION started in 2006 as a moniker for the early acoustic experiments of Ryan Davis. It has since evolved into a rock n’ roll band with a Chevy van and a vinyl record. Having created a sound that is a product of its upbringing, with Sweetheart of the Rodeo on the radio, Bleach idle in the tape deck, and a Smog song stuck in its head, Davis & Co. drive through forty minutes of sincerely howled, sloppily executed, stripped down garage-country on their full-length debut, Stale Champagne (released this year on Sophomore Lounge Records). “The band is an under-the-radar phenomenon in the making, the classic style of quality band that Louisville overlooks… The tone is just right for this type of subtle rock. A bit earnest, a bit funny, a bit smart.” – Joseph Lord, Velocity Weekly.

Listen to a track by STATE CHAMPION here: “The Years”

“TURBO FRUITS (ex-Be Your Own Pet, on Ecstatic Peace/Fat Possum) mine the punk rock spirit of the late ‘70s for their sound, a spastic mix of spunky MC5 giddy-up and glammy, feel-good guitar mayhem. Although the scenes they invoke were long dead before any of TURBO FRUITS were even born, their frantic interpretations are irrepressibly fun, like a T. Rex record skipping. It’s hard to fathom a band with so much dope-smoking innuendo in their lexicon being as busy as they are, much less as fierce and, hell, lively as they sound on their recordings.” – Nashville Scene

Listen to a track from TURBO FRUITS: “Mama’s Mad Cos I Fried My Brain”

“PUJOL (on Infinity Cat/Third Man, etc.), the punk-rock project of [Nashville] musician Daniel Pujol, has a gritty, garage-band sound, but with guitar riffs and catchy hooks that are hard to resist. PUJOL have already won a loyal following with addictive songs like “Mayday” and “Too Safe.” Plus, they’ve got a famous fan in fellow rocker Jack White, who’s producing the band’s next single on his label, Third Man Records… We’re betting PUJOL won’t be Nashville’s best-kept secret much longer.” – NYLON

Listen to a track from PUJOL: “Too Safe“

NATIVES are a psychedelic, garage rock band out of Louisville, KY. Think 13th Floor Elevators, Velvet Underground, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, etc. Familiar faces, with a killer live set to boot. Featuring ex-members of The Invaders, Ten to Midnight, and more.