Tom Thumb and Leonard Mynx at TTs, Monday!

It’s a Sunday, and I know how you feel. But tomorrow doesn’t need to be just the beginning of another grey week working in the city, because you can take my advice and head out to TT the Bear’s Place for a night of really great (not to mention cheap) entertainment from none other than Tom Thumb (who produced one of RSL's top albums of 2008!), along with a rising star who has traveled all the way from Oregon just for you: Leonard Mynx.



Tom Thumb should need no introduction at this point – he’s simply one of the best to come from Boston in the last couple of years, and his folk tracks are a mix of euphoric and poignant at one and the same time.



Mynx has a little darker tone, brooding on tracks like “Valley of Sickness and Death” and “Mary.” He sings elegant and beautiful music which can carry you with densely woven lines like “In the grave yard, below the Ferris wheel/ The stranger takes his pose/ Out across the barren field/ Mary gave a rose to a ghost.”

This show will definitely be worth your time tomorrow night – don’t miss out on either of these great folk artists.

Super Furry Animal's "Dark Days, Light Years"

A little while ago I wrote about the Fleet Foxes, and I had some problems with their generally lovely sound. It was too close to the sources it was taken from, so you wondered, despite its beauty, why you shouldn’t just listen to the originals. Now I’m going to put my head on the block again, and argue that another album that is at least as beautiful, and is borne of some old music too, is worth treating in quite a different way.



The Super Furry Animals’ “Dark Days, Light Years” comes from a really idiosyncratic musical world. I have been a fan of this band for more than ten years, and I’ve seen them produce folk, punk, massive prog rock and hard electronica. This new album, as much of any of its eight predecessors (! – yes, a band you’ve been missing out on!), gives you a strange sensation from the beginning. It makes you feel like you can hear where it came from – perhaps 70s disco at times, or 80s hair metal, or psychedelia - but you can’t for the life of you get back there. It’s a crazed concoction all their own.

SFA are a band who play complex, moving music while holding the slightest of wry smiles as they do it. My brother-in-law listened to the opening track (“Crazy Naked Girls”) with me recently, and seemed slightly irritated by that smile. He felt the outlandish humor of it was contrived, because the huge shredding guitar solos that run through it were really compelling, but SFA were too cool to admit it.

Perhaps that’s true, but I think it’s fair to say that SFA never smirk at us as they play. The humor is offset by the beauty of the harmonies on a track like “Moped Eyed,” or the swirling eight-minute build of tracks like “Cardiff in the Sun,” which is too euphoric to be just a joke. They are serious about music, but they know that without the humor, they would quickly become way too serious to be digestible by the rest of us.



Let me say that “Dark Day, Light Years” is certainly not SFA’s best. That would have to go to either “Guerilla” (1999) or “Phantom Power” (2003). But there is no average work from this band, just as there is no average sound from any album they make.

Kristoffer Ragnstam's "Wrong Side of the Room"

Lots of reviews for Swedish song-writer Kristoffer Ragnstam seem to feel he can be compared to Beck. It’s true that he seems to have some of the eclectic tastes which has made Beck such a staple on the American music scene, but perhaps it’s unfair to look so far afield for influences.



There have been other important bands which suggest Sweden has a thriving music scene on its own terms. The Wannadies, for one, had some great (though more angry) guitar-pop in the 90s which Ragnstam at times seems to echo. Then there was American’s brief affair with The Hives. Though past their best now, they have done some great punk-pop music over the years. The question is then, will Kristoffer Ragnstam take up the mantel for the Swedish music scene?

It certainly looks like it. Ragnstam’s latest record, “Wrong Side of the Room,” is catchy and energizing in turns. Mixed by renowned Blur, Radiohead and Supergrass engineer, Chris Brown, it manages to be both polished and edgy.



His lyrics fit this model too. The song “2008,” for example, is a great mix of the humorous and poignant. The track begins with the lines “Nothing bores me more than an overrated poet/ with an acoustic guitar, and way too much to say.” As you begin to smile, he turns to sing “Nothing makes me feel more lonely/ than when I’m all alone, with you honey,” and you are suddenly in a quite different place.

Ragnstam has already had some success, touring in support of Debby Harry in 2007. With this new record, it looks like that was just the beginning, and Ragnstam will now make another assault on American shores, we hope even bigger, and more sustained, than his predecessors.

REVIEW: Ghost of the Russian Empire's "The Mammoth"

No-one ever said I was timely in my reviews. Austin Texas’s Ghost of the Russian Empire released their “The Mammoth” album last year, and it fell through the cracks for me. So this review is an apology, to Ghost, for my (quite literal) ignorance.

“The Mammoth” is an album shrouded in mystery. Ghost use so much reverb on most of their tracks that everything has a cloudy, lost feel to it. Vocals, in particular, drift past you incomprehensibly, swathed in ringing echoes of themselves. This is compounded with the dearth of information on the band (their ‘website’ is just a picture of the album cover – a cleverly engineered mystique?), and you start to wonder if Ghost are obscure, or obscured.



My comments may make it sound like “The Mammoth” is one big studio mishap, but here I feel sure Ghost are entirely in control of their direction. They claim a deep affiliation with Radiohead, but I don’t see it. Nonetheless, their album has some of the deep warmth of BRMC’s “Take them on, On Your Own,” some of the swagger, in songs like the excellent “Bleeding Machines,” of Kasabian’s eponymous first album (particularly tracks like “Reason is Treason”) – rolling bass is the only element you can hang onto while the song wheels around you.



So I highly recommend Ghost of the Russian Empire. They play dark music you can sink into, and sink your teeth into.

The Duke Spirit live at FELT

Tonight I pull myself away from a whirling first few days with my newborn child, and go into Boston to see the excellent Duke spirit. We fight our way to FELT through the blustery rain, and weave through unmarked doors and up dark stairwells to find the small room in which they will play. This maze like course makes the whole event feel like admission to something cosseted and secretive.


(The Duke Spirit at another (bigger) venue)

The set up is so small that after a few minutes shaking the rain off our coats and getting drinks, the band simply walk up right past us, from the back of the room, and pick up their instruments. This is a very cool band with an image to uphold, and tonight we get to feel, in this cloistered space, like we’re really part of their scene. Singer Liela Moss tells us that her dad used to live in Boston, presumably in the hopes that this will make the band seem more at home here. She need not worry, though nothing about the Duke Spirit seems to fit Boston, or even America (at one point she says, with some embarrassment, “Oh, I sounded a bit American then, didn’t I”). Instead, the crowd comes to the band – we are transported to some pub in Camden, North London, to hear the energy of the Duke Spirit playing on their home ground. It’s a rare chance to let a band show us where they are really coming from.


(Moss gives it her all, on their last tour)

Moss seems to exude so much calm confidence, and her voice, which sounds like it might break at any moment (but never does), is compelling. The rest of the band are no less able to project their control over the room, as they lead us through lots of tracks from last years “Neptune,” some B-Sides, and a couple of new tracks. I’ve missed the chance to see the band in the past, but after tonight I’m glad I got the chance to see them first in such an intimate setting, before their future success means they will play more distant shows.

Check out “Neptune” and feel the Duke Spirit’s great soul-pop music, so you’re ready for the next time they grace us with their presence.

Interview: Bell X1

Since their last full album, Flock, came out back in 2005 in their home of Ireland, Bell X1 have been through a blur of touring, line-up changes, big performances on shows like Letterman, the occasional tour-bus fire shenanigans, and – happily for the rest of us – some new recording.



The result of all this is “Blue Lights on the Runway,” an album which, when I caught Bell X1 singer Paul Noonan while in LA recently, I discovered is born of draughty old Irish castles and Eastern European getaways. It is an album that should justifiably draw Bell X1 a whole new audience of devotees. Tracks like “The Great Defector” are fun and approachable, and others, like closing song “The Curtains are Twitchin’” show Bell X1 are worthy competitors to (though also comrades of) bands like The Frames.

I began my interview with a question for the engineer in me…

Nick: I wanted to start by asking about recording the new album, [“Blue lights on the runway.”]. How much involvement do you have in the recording process? Are you really hands on with that stuff?

PAUL: I think we’d be pretty hands on at this stage. This is the first album that is ‘our record’ – we fully own it – and we’ve got lots of studio gear that we’ve amassed over the years, and we tend to just find a nice space to put it up in. We’ve done the last two records that way.

Nick: So effectively you’ve produced the album yourself?

PAUL: Yes, well our good friend Bill Hayes has been involved in the last two records. I wouldn’t be too au fait with the technical aspects, but Dave [Geraghty] is good at that.

Nick: You recorded in Dublin, yes?

PAUL: Well, we found a castle in the middle of Ireland. It had these great big drafty rooms with high ceilings – really for lords and ladies. There’s all this really characterful old stately homes that are very cold, but have great acoustics.

Nick: Was this album recorded all in one place?

PAUL: Yes. We try to keep going until we have to stop, so we did maybe a month of recording in the house and then, between all the bouts of touring we did last year, we’d take some time and maybe use people’s houses to finish things up.

Nick: It seems like it’s becoming more and more rare these days to record everything in one place.

PAUL: That seems to be the way things are going as the recording process has evolved.

Nick: Do you think it affects the project a lot, whether you record in one place or many?

PAUL: Yes, I think often you can overwork things as a result of meddling, as opposed to the recording needing that work. We did a session the other day with Steve Lilywhite in New York, and he was very much of the opinion that you should come into a proper studio, having rehearsed a shit-load, and having a pretty good idea of where you’re going. He put forward the somewhat controversial hypothesis that Sergeant Pepper… being the first high profile band who really didn’t know what they were going to do until they got in the studio, and then they used the studio as an instrument… that Sergeant Pepper killed music, which I think is being willfully controversial…

Nick: That is a pretty extreme perspective!

PAUL: Yeah, you can be wonderfully creative by looking at it that way too.

Nick: One track I really liked was “The Great defector” - it seems to me to have a lot of Talking Heads in it? Are they a big influence of yours?

PAUL: Yes, they would be. We may have gone a bit far with that one! But yes, when I first saw the video to Road to Nowhere, as a young kid, the physical comedy, as well as the visual aspect, appeals to people of a really young age. I suppose only in the last few years have I gone back and listened to their earlier records and loved them.

Nick: So you’d say they were a major influence then?

PAUL: They have been. I remember when we were making our second record [Music in Mouth] in 2002 in Chiswick, London, and we’d go back from the studio to our flat each night and one of the guys would put on their album “Fear of Music,” which I had never heard, and was a really joyous thing to hear when you’re in the throws of a creative process. It was a real inspiration.

Nick: Yes, there’s that great track – if I recall correctly – “American Guitars” or “Electric Guitars”…

PAUL: Yes, “Electric Guitars” is a great one.

Nick: So, given this big influence from an American Band, would you say you would have more roots in Irish or American music?

PAUL: Well, I don’t really think of us as an Irish band, whatever that means…

Nick: I mean, is there a big difference between music from the two places still, do you think?

PAUL: Yeah, Ireland has a bunch of very strong singer-songwriters, because the oral tradition in Ireland gives it that strength. You grow up [in Ireland] in a culture of storytelling, and playfulness with language, and I think that makes a big difference to the music scene. But I don’t think of us as particularly from that world, although being Irish does have a big influence on my writing.

Nick: The drums parts and synths in songs like “How your heart is wired” have some 80s overtones.

PAUL: We’re not exactly re-inventing the wheel with that, but we did have a lot of fun playing with synths and drum loops. I suppose I wanted to take tracks that we would have written in a more tradition way – on acoustic guitar or on piano – say Dave and I, at each other’s houses, and then take those songs and dress them in beats, etc. so they’d sound a little more fresh, but not change the backbone of the song.

Nick: So do you think that’s coming out of some older musical interests, or is it resurgent right now in general?

PAUL: I think it comes out of an appreciation for older bands. We are big fans of Depeche Mode, and we learnt a couple of their songs to play acoustically, and we discovered that their was great writing there – songs that would stand up with a single voice and acoustic guitar. We really like New Order as well, on the strength of their songs.



Nick: Could you talk a little bit about your creative process, since you seem to have so many roles in the band! How do things usually get started?

PAUL: There’s no real formula for it. In the past when we’ve landed on something that works and then tried it again, it doesn’t, which I suppose is one of the beauties of music. This time around I spent some time alone in Eastern Europe writing, and learning the more computer based ways of producing songs, so a lot of the initial writing was done like that. With the last record we were in a position to start songs with the four us [together], from scratch, but this time the songs were pretty well formed before we all got together.

Nick: So the Eastern European trip you did, was that specifically to write, or were you there for other reasons?

PAUL: It was just to get and away and write. In Dublin there are too many distractions!

Nick: I understand you still do the drumming when you’re in the studio – is that right?

PAUL: This is actually the first one I haven’t done. Tim O’Donovan, who’s been playing with us live for year did them this time.

Nick: So does that imply your moving to ‘fronting’ the band more? How does it feel when you go back to that instrument [the drums]?

PAUL: I really enjoy it. I miss it when I don’t do it. I try to get out once or twice a year and tour as a drummer with other bands. But we don’t really have that sharply defined roles within Bell X1 – we move from instrument to instrument. I enjoy not playing drums while recording all the time. I enjoy the freedom of being able to sing properly. I don’t see that as a new role for me really. Bringing Tim in to play drums gave us an injection of his energy and his feel for things. It’s quite a rhythmically driven record and we talked a lot about that, and he [Tim] has his own style which was a great thing to capture.

Nick: You’ve toured with The Frames in the past. I wondered what your thoughts were about the effect of the popularity of The Swell Season, and the film Once, on the Irish music scene? Is the scene really thriving right now?

PAUL: I don’t really know. I think for a long time the term Dublin band was a derogatory one, associated with a sort of blusterous pub-rock. I don’t think that’s any longer the case – that stereotype doesn’t ring true. I mean, there’s great electronic music in Dublin, there’s good, straight ahead three piece rock bands, there’s even some good hip-hop. It is pretty diverse. The singer-songwriter scene is still very strong, and some of that is the result of once. Glen [Hansard] is such an established singer-songwriter, and he’s connected to so many different eras of the singer-songwriter. That fact that he’s achieved this recognition, it pulls everybody up. It re-enforces the idea of quality song-writing from Ireland.

Nick: Thanks for you time, and good luck with the tour. I’m hoping to be at the Boston show myself.

PAUL: I’m sure it will be a messy affair, but we’ll try to keep order!

Raveonettes and Nickel Eye at Paradise.

Just before this gig started, I passed distinctively chiseled Strokes’ bass player, and front man of Nickel Eye, Nikolai Fraiture, coming out of the bathroom at the Paradise. Just a little star-struck, I mumbled “have a good show” to him, and he thanked me casually, before disappearing backstage.



I really meant it too. But just a few minutes later, as Nickel Eye ran through some of the songs they have been playing around the country from their upcoming first album, “The Time of the Assassins,” I had changed my tune completely. By that point I had stood listening to them wander through track after track, looking, frankly, like they might fall asleep on stage. This is not a criticism of their music particularly (although I wasn’t taken with it – it was weak and generally lacking in drive), but of their incredible complacency. I have rarely seen a band apparently less interested in an audience’s opinion of them. I suppose that’s what they call ‘cool’ in musical circles. Nikolai sang “Don’t let them get you down,” and I suppose I am now the object of his statement. So be it – the band can’t be given a free pass to ‘phone it in,’ on the basis of the momentum they have gathered from Nikolai‘s past life.



The Raveonettes, who followed them, are cool in quite different terms. Their style, melding 50s harmonies and guitar drenched in spring reverb with massive bass and screaming noise-core distortion is still fresh and engaging, even after several years at what many critics label the cutting-edge. A friend who came to the show with me argued afterwards that they are not so new as they might want us to believe – that bands like Suicide have been over this ground before.



Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps this incarnation of ‘cool’ has overcome my judgment. I could tell they wanted to keep up appearances for the crowd when singer Sharin Foo broke at our applause, from her sultry passivity, into a smile. She looked like she had given something away – a secret that, perhaps she feared would damage their dark image. A secret that they really do care what we think, and that they need us.

How ‘uncool,’ and how endearing.

Ghosty's "Answers"

Kansas’s Ghosty are an easy band to write about, because they have roots in so many different, great bands of the last 15 years. They are like a super-group founded by members from four or five seminal indie acts. There is some Elliot Smith in the vocals, some early Black Crowes in the guitar, some Pavement (circa “Wowee Zowee”) in the bass, some National in the drums and keys. What brings these bands together is the mellow drift of their melodies, and the soft warmth of their tone. Ghosty uses this combination of elements to write calming songs that run over you like water.

“Answers” is undoubtedly a very successful album because their quiet confidence shows they achieved exactly what they intended to with this production. Is there a down side? Only that soft waves of sound can lull you into a state where the more complex lyrical or even melodic moves, which the album sometimes makes, are lost as you slip into lethargy.



What you loose from this kind of problem is not something you will notice though. To drift your way though beautiful music, sometimes unconscious of its depth, is only really a loss to the band. “Answers” is like the flowers that seduced the Lotus Eaters – a sweet album from which it is hard to pull yourself away.

Tonight! Raveonettes at Paradise.

Tonight I'd like to recommend that you take a deep breath and step into the deep-freeze that our town has become, to go and see The Raveonettes, supported by Nickel Eye, at the Paradise. If anything could generate heat, it's Sune Rose Wagner's noise-core grind over Sharin Foo's soft, low vocals.



Nickel Eye, which is the band name used by Strokes bass player Nikolai Fraiture, are also generating a good deal of talk on the East-Coast scene. Amazingly, it looks right now like the gig is still not sold out. You should take this as a sign that you are being called to the venue, and join me down there.

A review to follow...

REVIEW: TV on the Radio's "Dear Science"

A few years ago I saw TV on the Radio supporting Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I really didn’t get it. Nothing seemed to gel for the band that day. All the strands that I can hear in their latest album, “Dear Science,” were there, but they remained disparate and seemed to struggle against one another. For one thing, they were playing support to a band I felt were the epitome of experimental, but controlled, guitar music, and somehow TV on the Radio were working against that control.



I suppose what I wanted out of the band was pop music (in its broadest sense) – that is, I wanted to hear hooks and melodies I could follow and reproduce in my mind. But, at least when I approached the band for the first time in a live setting, they just didn’t seem to cohere in that way. With “Dear Science,” that has all changed.

I don’t mean to suggest that I want straightforward music that is easy to digest, and I’m certainly not saying “Dear Science” is a ‘simple’ pop album. What it is, though, is an album which speaks to me (and hopefully to others) in a subtle but lucid language which can lead us carefully through intricacies with the band, rather than having us scratching our heads ‘on the outside’ of the album.



I have recently entered the fray regarding the Fleet Foxes, another band who have collected more accolades for their latest album than I have pipe dreams of super-stardom. Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, NME, The Guardian etc. etc. have all leaped to TV on the Radio’s cause. This degree of hysteria makes me nervous, and inherently resistant.

Unlike in the case of the Foxes though, I really think there is some justice in a system that gives institutions like NME such sway over all our opinions in this case. They are absolutely on the money when Louis Pattison says the album is one of the best of the last year. “Dear Science” is packed with beautiful moments, elegant harmonies over heavy synths, driving rhythms moving around jazz brass sections – the list goes on. From playing a cacophonous gig in Boston city center that I quickly dismissed, TV on the Radio now have my absolute attention.