FEATURES

Fall On Your Sword get serious with the score to Another Earth. By Shaun Brady

Judged solely by their YouTube page, Fall On Your Sword might be easy to write off as little more than a mildly clever pair of musicians with access to editing software. Amusing enough to pass a little downtime in the office, their videos tend to target fairly low-hanging fruit—pop culture punching bags like David Hasselhoff (“Powerless Man,” a mash-up of backstory-narrating openings to ’70s/’80s TV series) and William Shatner (“Shatner on the Mount,” remixing an infamous interview detailing the sexier side of his mountain-climbing escapades in Star Trek V). Hell, the name of their YouTube channel is “fallonyoursword69,” indicating a sniggering, junior high sense of humor.

A wholly different side of the Brooklyn-based duo is revealed on their debut CD, however, the soundtrack to director Mike Cahill’s Sundance award-winning debut feature,Another Earth.

Cahill’s film involves the life-changing collision of two people on the night that a parallel Earth is spotted in the night sky. While that cosmic intrusion into the everyday hangs over the entire film (quite literally), Cahill focuses more on the idea of second chances, how an alternate existence offers a chance for redemption. FOYS’ score is a blend of classically influenced piano and strings commingled with electronic drones and pulsing techno, which perfectly captures—even divorced from the images it was composed to accompany—the film’s blend of human drama, philosophical meditations and sci-fi otherworldliness.

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Spencer Krug frees himself to make new artistic choices with his ever-changing project, Moonface. By Bryan C. Reed

If Spencer Krug is known for anything, it’s his activity. Since 2005, not a year has passed without at least one new album from at least one of his many bands.

Krug entered the collective consciousness first as a sideman in Carey Mercer’s Frog Eyes (Krug left after that band’s debut, 2002’s The Bloody Hand), then as a founding member of Wolf Parade.

When Wolf Parade’s Isaac Brock-produced debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary, arrived in 2005 via Sub Pop, it was one in a pack of emerging Canadian indie bands with a knack for bending bombastic rock into new shapes. But Queen Mary offered a glimpse at the sort of busy arrangements and impressionistic lyrics Krug would continue to explore in other projects. It also introduced Krug’s dramatically enunciated singing style; 2005 also saw the debuts of instrumental trio Fifths of Seven and then-solo project Sunset Rubdown. Fifths of Seven, formed with cellist Beckie Foon and mandolinist Rachel Levine, released its sole album, Spry From Bitter Anise Folds, while Sunset Rubdown expanded into a steady lineup and built an acclaimed career of its own. In 2006, Krug joined Frog Eyes’ Carey Mercer and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar to form Swan Lake, a studio-only project with two releases under its belt.

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Speculating what Odd Future will become is as difficult—and fun—as defining what they are. By Justin Hampton

The fuse is lit. You don’t know when the next explosion is going off, but you know it’s coming. Besides, being taken by surprise is half the fun. Maybe they’ll start a fight with Chris Brown over Twitter. Or maybe one of them will injure his foot stage-diving into a crowd at SXSW or at a show, while a horde of fans chant “Golf! Wang! Golf! Wang!” or slogans to that effect, unconsciously hoping he’ll get up and injure himself even more seriously. Hell, maybe even the put-upon, insanely-gifted-yet-bitter leader may eventually crack under the pressure and self-destruct, with the last detonation leading to the group itself. That’s always fun.

Of course, it’s supposed to be a new day. Goodbye, evil major labels. Hello, bloggers, social media and an ultra-empowered music audience. This is the bowl the Los Angeles-based hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All have dropped into, skateboards and all, and it’s amazing who’s watching. Pharrell, The New Yorker, Dr. Dre—practically everyone who’s wondering about the fate of the music industry wonders whether these kids will pull off the ultimate trick move that gets everyone making money again. Just ask Billboard, who called these guys the future of the music industry. It’s definitely not the time for a faceplant.

I’m talking to them early on, however, when it’s all fun and games, before it becomes a job. And just like everyone else, I’ve got an agenda when I’m talking to them. It’s not the one that they think, however.

So, I drive into downtown L.A. I run into Hodgy Beats outside the parking lot, practicing a flip on his skateboard. “The rest are coming, but I always end up early.”

“Cool. Well, let me show you where this place is.”

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Magnetic Fields songsmith Stephin Merritt rifles through his mind’s attic in compiling Obscurities.

Stephin Merritt is nothing if not precise—in his speech, his painstaking approach to conceptually specific projects (including, most famously, the Magnetic Fields’ self-explanatory 1999 opus 69 Love Songs), and, especially, in his meticulously well-formed songcraft. Uncharacteristically, then, Obscurities, a new compilation issued via Merritt’s 1990s home base Merge Records, offers a peek under the rug of his tidily appointed catalog, with a delightful assortment of lost gems and loose ends: b-sides and compilation tracks from multiple Merritt outlets (the Magnetic Fields, the 6ths and the little-known Buffalo Rome), and a handful of previously unreleased numbers, including several from an in-limbo musical project whose premise, as he described to me, sounds like a logical occasion for 6.9 billion love songs. He spoke with me by phone from Los Angeles—where he’s been living for five years, although, he said, he still spends “a quarter to a third” of his time in New York, where he keeps a tiny apartment “the size of his living room in L.A.”

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Kamtin Mohager accesses his inner fanboy on the Chain Gang Of 1974’s latest, Wayward Fire. By Brian Baker

Kamtin Mohager’s work is a sonic crazy quilt that straddles genres without belonging to one. Take “Stop,” the opening track from Wayward Fire, Mohager’s sophomore album as the Chain Gang Of 1974; initially a Brian Eno bedroom demo channeling the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, the song exhibits flashes of ’80s synth pop and swells of proggy bombast, then sneaks in a sly sample of Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again.”

“Stop” and the nine tracks that follow are indicative of Mohager’s attention deficit love of all music. “When I was younger, I listened to early emo, skate punk and pop-punk bands,” says Mohager. “I would go to ska-punk shows and mosh my ass off. My live energy is from that time in my life. When it comes to music, sonics and emotion, it’s all over the place. Pulp, Stone Roses, Echo & The Bunnymen, Tears For Fears, early ’90s alternative rock. I’m a massive Secret Machines fan. My favorite artist is Ryan Adams; you won’t hear it in my music, but I love the guy. I think the Horrors are the best band in the world right now; they know what the fuck they’re doing.”

Wayward Fire and its predecessor, White Guts, were accomplished primarily by Mohager with limited accompaniment, but he tours with a full band that may be documented in the studio soon. CG74’s flexible structure plays into Mohager’s musical vision. Read More »

Imagine Ennio Morricone as a rock band? We’re sold on Spindrift. By Shaun Brady

There’s a chicken and egg conundrum to the psych-cinematic songs of L.A. band Spindrift. Which comes first—the soundtrack or the movie?

In the case of the band’s own 2008 feature, The Legend of God’s Gun, the answer is “both.” A grungy homage to spaghetti westerns, the film began life as a concept hatched by Spindrift songwriter/frontman Kirpatrick Thomas, which he fleshed out into an Ennio Morricone-flavored score. The band then hooked up with filmmaker Mike Bruce, who turned the tale of outlaws, vengeance and adultery into a messy exploitation oater full of gore and overlaid with so many scratches, burns and skipped frames that it looks like it served time as a floor covering in a 42nd Street grindhouse. The preexisting music was retrofitted to the now-existing film for which it was intended, then reconfigured once more for the ensuing soundtrack album.

“So, you’re looking at three different versions of the soundtrack for one movie,” Thomas says. “Before, during and after.”

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Deer Tick’s John McCauley Starts A New Band With Members Of The Black Lips, Dead Confederate And Los Lobos. By Sean L. Maloney

“What up, stud? Wanna hear a rad new record?”

Yes. The answer is always yes, but I was about 10 hours late in noticing the text. John McCauley from Deer Tick and I had been playing text-tag for a week or two. He had just moved to Nashville and was cutting a record over on the west side of town with his new band Diamond Rugs, featuring members of the Black Lips, Dead Confederate and Los Lobos. I’d spent my summer whoring myself out to the top-40 for 15-cents-a-word and was burnt out on my regular beat and spending five nights a week working in clubs to make ends meet. Music was becoming boring, more of a chore than the catharsis it should be. Did I want to hear a rad new record? Yeah. Did I need to hear a rad new record? Double yeah.

Almost 24 hours from the original text, we would make it happen, and by the end of the night, there would be pubes on fire, space-time loops through Electric Avenue—a real street!—and copious amounts of beer consumed. While I can’t promise that all listeners will have the same experience, there is plenty of potential: Diamond Rugs make the sort of loose and limber rock ‘n’ roll that inspires liquor-induced hijinks. It’s rowdy and ribald without ever entering asshole-at-the-bar territory; good-natured shenanigans from genial punk-rock goons making rock music for your local jukebox. It also makes a great soundtrack for driving down back roads drinking a sixer of Bud.

It’s a really frickin’ rock ‘n’ roll record, and yet essentially Nashville. Recorded in 10 days with no real prep, the Diamond Rugs album is a group of pros going off-the-cuff and coming up with greatness. It’s an album rooted in the classics—there’s plenty of country and blues influence tempering their ramshackle Replacements vibe—but it never comes across as calculated. The songs have a natural ebb and flow, a balance between bashful and brazen that was lacking in my summer of pop whoredom. They had a recklessness and joy that was lacking in the bands I heard on the stages of Music City. Or at least that’s what I was hearing while trying figure out why exactly my drive through East Nashville with John kept putting us on Electric Avenue.

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Fans don’t know whether to dance or act out at a Cliffie Swan show. And that’s just fine with Sophia Knapp. Her philosophy: Let ’em do whatever they want.

“I like a rowdy audience,” says Knapp, who plays guitar and shares lead vocals in the Brooklyn trio. “Last time we played at Union Pool, there was a guy at the front of the stage air drumming throughout the entire set …  Some people will make out during the slow songs. I really enjoy a show where people can cut loose, so that’s always a pleasure.”

No wonder the crowd’s all over the place: Cliffie Swan contain multitudes. Knapp’s long been obsessed with psych-rock; drummer Linnea Vedder, the group’s other lead singer, shoots from the soul. But Memories Come True (Drag City) is best experienced as ’70s soft-rock threaded with mid-’90s distortion. Think Fleetwood Mac with a Breeders chaser.

It’s their first release as Cliffie Swan, but Knapp and Vedder spent much of the past decade playing as Lights, with two albums to their credit.

“It’s not a completely different band, but we just felt that it [was] appropriate to have a change to kind of mark this new phase,” Knapp explains.

There’s a simple explanation for the name change—avoiding confusion with a Canadian musician who plays as Lights—but there’s more to it than that. “The band had been through a lot of mutations throughout the years,” Knapp says.

She and Vedder started playing together in 2004, and with the help of a succession of bassists, they turned their once-sparse sound into something heavier than their feathery vocals would suggest. Now that Knapp splits her time between Brooklyn and Austin, songwriting’s a solitary endeavor, but everything jells when the band comes together in the studio and to play live.

Whatever the crowd’s doing, the ladies on stage are ready to put on a show—with fashion rather than pyro­technics. “What you wear, that really reflects your mood,” says Knapp. “And the music is pretty fantastical, so it feels natural to wear something flamboyant to sort of match the energy level of the songs.”

—M.J. Fine

London power-pop outfit the Jags had a 1979 hit with debut single “Back Of My Hand” but disappeared almost as quickly as they rose to fame. Thirty years later, MAGNET’s Timothy Gassen tells the tale of one of the new-wave era’s seminal acts. (For a history of American power pop, read our 2002 cover story.)

The term “one hit wonder” is often used as cynical criticism, usually by those who have never had even one song of their own climb the charts. What jaded music fans don’t understand is that bands that carry the weight of the “one hit wonder” tag often have a full catalog of other fine work that never reached a larger pop audience. Many pop listeners are just too lazy to search for anything but their spoon-fed top-40. That means many power-pop fans still don’t realize that the Jags remain one of the new-wave era’s most accomplished acts. And that their sound only starts with 1979 smash “Back Of My Hand.”

Record labels and radio in the U.K. were grudgingly forced to allow new-wave and punk sounds to edge onto the airwaves in the late-’70s, long before their U.S. big brothers would even consider such an experiment. The young public’s interest in these startling sounds meant a new breed of U.K. bands needed to be cultivated, signed and promoted—and quickly. The Jags were perfectly suited to seize that moment.

“The Jags started in 1978 when Nick Watkinson (vocals, guitar) and Neil Whittaker (drums) went to Wales to rehearse with John Alder (guitar) and me,” said bassist Steve Prudence in late 2007. Watkinson and Alder were the band’s busy songwriters, with plenty of original pop material to develop together. (The Jags’ John Alder is no relation to the Pink Fairies’ drummer of the same name, who is also known as “Twink.”) “The beginning was really idealistic, rehearsing in the Welsh hills. To me, it’s not so much ‘sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’—it’s ‘sweat and tears and rock ‘n’ roll.’ I could fill a half pint glass with sweat from my jacket after a gig.”

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The gory details of selling your entire CD collection. By Matt Siblo

After 15 years, untold thousands spent and a constantly revised collection of lists protruding from my wallet, I came to the sobering decision to sell almost my entire CD collection. My reasons are not so much environmentally noble (although I will gladly accept pats on the back for my recently acquired plastic sensitivity) as they are pragmatic. Simply put, I could no longer chase the plastic ghost; I found myself unable to keep up. Times are tough, and since I’m as obstinate as any other collector type, I’d rather have nothing at all than a half-assed, incomplete lot. Thus began the arduous task of hocking an almost obsolete product (CDs) to a brand of specialty retailers swiftly on the verge of extinction (independent record stores). What follows is a bulleted recounting of the guilt-inducing experience of selling off my memories, one dollar at a time.

Modest Mouse’s “Bankrupt On Selling” from 1997′s The Lonesome Crowded West:

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