Innholdsfortegnelse for May - June 2016 i Under the Radar

Britta Phillips has been making music with her husband Dean Wareham since 2001; in Luna from 2001-2005 and on their recent reunion tour; and in the Dean & Britta project that encompasses a wide breadth, including 2010’s 13 Most Beautiful: Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests . She was also the singing voice of Jem in the cult 1980s cartoon Jem and the Holograms and was in the ’90s bands The Belltower and Ultrababyfat. Remarkably, Luck or Magic is Phillips’ first solo album. Composed of half originals and half covers, including an electro minimalist take on Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide , ” which Phillips makes her own via her downright gorgeous vocals. She reworks the original’s unsurpassable sadness…

Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell says the word ‘supergroup’ “sits very uncomfortably with her.” She’s talking about her new project Minor Victories, which, as the term implies, also includes members of other noted bands—Editors’ Justin Lockey, his brother James, and Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite. “It sounds cocky and none of us are like that,” she explains. “So [the name] ‘Minor Victories’ attenuates that and keeps it low-key…. The phrase itself comes from the title of an EP by Justin’s friends Lanterns on the Lake.” “Justin sent me some instrumental tracks in September of 2014,” recalls Goswell of the project’s beginnings. “To see if I would be interested in writing with him. His initial idea was to create this massive sound with a delicate female vocal on it. We were going to do three…

“I just think of the record as ecstatic depressive realism, but I’m kind of laughing when I’m saying that but I’m also being fucking truthful,” says Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie of the band’s twelfth album, Chaosmosis . “It’s dark but it’s honest. It’s just the way I fucking see things. Other people maybe don’t care to see things in that way, but it’s just how I see them.” And indeed, Chaosmosis goes to some somber places and exorcises some demons. But it also covers a wide swath of emotions, accomplished via rhythms and textures that accentuate Gillespie’s innate ear for melody, and some big name guest stars, namely HAIM and Sky Ferreira. While a cynic may view these guests as a crass grasp at relevance,…

As a soft-spoken, unassuming guy from the Midwest, Kevin Morby isn’t the kind of songwriter you’d expect to write one of the fieriest political anthems of the Black Lives Matter era. However, that is exactly what he has done with “I Have Been to the Mountain,” his reflection on the 2014 choking death of Eric Garner by a New York City police officer. Over a rich backdrop of sighing strings, Mariachi trumpets, and a ghostly chorus of backing vocals, Morby delivers lines about Garner struggling to breathe at the hands of “the pig [that] took him down.” Culminating with a plea to “destroy the destroyer,” it’s a startlingly direct call to arms, made all the more striking by the matter-of-fact way he issues his charge. But Morby didn’t set out…

Working on her new album Will while visiting Lisbon, Portugal, Julianna Barwick would often walk through a train underpass between the recording studio she used and a nearby grocery store she would frequent for its selection of snacks. On one particular outing through the corridor, Barwick pulled out her phone and started wordlessly singing into the device’s recorder app. “I didn’t plan it ahead of time,” recalls Barwick, sitting in her apartment in Brooklyn’s Bush-wick neighborhood. “It’s just what popped out.” Taking what she had done back to the studio and transferring it onto a computer, Barwick laid down the foundation to her album’s opening track, “St. Apolonia,” named after the Portuguese capital’s oldest railway station. Throughout her life, Barwick has had a particularly unique reverence…

Following an auspicious singles collection in 2013’s Early Fragments , and their even better debut LP Loom , released in 2014, Fear of Men established themselves as a highly idiosyncratic entity in the annals of British indie pop music. They carried the torch of The Smiths and Cocteau Twins, daring to sound lush and melodic while challenging listeners—frontwoman Jessica Weiss’ arcane literary references would make even Morrissey blush, anathema in an era of pop culture that seems to grow more anti-intellectual by the second. On their second proper LP, Fall Forever , Fear of Men retain much of their signature appeal, with minor sonic accoutrements that render the album an even more compelling listen than their debut. A spiky, more…

It has been two weeks since Julien Baker made a triumphal trek through SXSW, but she is still buzzing. Playing five shows in four days, the 20-year-old singer/ songwriter became one of the festival’s breakout acts, taking a victory lap after her 2015 full-length debut, Sprained Ankle , became one of the year’s most-acclaimed breakthroughs. She even had what she refers to as the “quintessential SXSW experience,” sprinting to a club, guitar-in-hand, to be a last-minute substitution at Under the Radar’s day party at Flaming Cantina (after she had already gotten a standing ovation performing at Under the Radar’s official showcase the night before at Central Presbyterian Church). “I went on and I tried to play fast songs…

It’s always striking when such frenzied on-stage performers speak in such a perfectly collected, hushed manner. Yak’s Oli Burslem has earned himself a reputation as a captivatingly unhinged frontman—often locking into visceral repetitions so deeply that he seemingly forgets where he is, chanting arbitrary expressions mid-song, hurling his organ into drummer Elliot Rawson’s kit or letting loose on the poor thing with his swinging guitar, leaving both in pieces. “I like it when people don’t know what to expect,” he says with a smirk. It’s more than just recycled rock frontman discourse, though: Burslem genuinely revels in uncertainty. Yak’s live sets often end with mammoth improvised organ freakouts, which don’t always work out. “Sometimes it sounds alright and sometimes it sounds shit, you know,” he admits. “It’s good to leave…

When WU LYF finally collapsed in November of 2012, bringing to a close four years of breathless “next big thing” predictions and escalating disenchantment among the Manchester band’s four members, vocalist Ellery James Roberts was ready to move on. Announcing the band’s demise on their YouTube channel with a 200-word letter to his bandmates, he described the emptiness and irrelevance he felt had come to define his experience in the band. He needed to live a “life that was true,” and that wouldn’t include WU LYF. Three years later, in the summer of 2015, after an aborted solo album and a stint working in his dad’s construction business, Roberts had written a song that he realized was too quiet to fit with his raw-throated yowl. As his girlfriend, Dutch audio-visual…

It should have been a joyous occasion, but Big Thief’s SXSW debut was instead fraught with difficulty for frontwoman Adrianne Lenker. Not long before the Brooklyn-bred indie rock quartet’s first shows at that massive Austin festival this year, Lenker all but lost a crucial component of being a musician: her ability to hear. The threat of deafness occurred during an intimate set at a small club shortly before SXSW. In fact, the quarters were so tight in the venue that Lenker was forced to spend much of the gig next to the house speaker, feeling the full force of guitarist Buck Meek’s revving riffs and James Krivchenia’s combustive drumming, both of which turned out to be earsplitting in every sense of the word. “The sound had nowhere to go in…

You don’t have to wear floral shirts and flares to record your guitars backwards, just ask Sunflower Bean’s Jacob Faber. His band owe more stylistically to the black-clad cool of The Velvet Underground than Woodstock ’69, and they make some of the most arresting psychedelic rock of recent times, but Sunflower Bean don’t have time for revivalism. “We think of psychedelic rock as just creative rock music, really,” Faber says, “just trying to move things forward in any sort of way.” It shows. Their debut album, Human Ceremony , is one of the more inventive and worthwhile records to deal with reverb-laden nostalgia and hazy production in the last few years. It’s a record birthed from a time and place, not trapped in it. “We all…

“D im the lights,” says John Carpenter, revered filmmaker and musician. “Put the album on…. Close your eyes and just let your mind go. Tap into that invisible movie that plays in your head. Let it flow, and let our music be your soundtrack.” Like the opening page of a screenplay, Carpenter sets the ideal scene in which to listen to his latest record, Lost Themes II. Sporting a roman numeral—like one of the many sequels to the director’s genre-defining 1978 slasher film, Halloween —this album is a direct follow-up to last year’s critically-acclaimed Lost Themes. With more than four decades of filmmaking behind him, the 68-year-old filmmaker suddenly finds himself enjoying his new life as a late-career rock star. “All creativity has similarities, but this is very different,” says…

Painting of a Panic Attack , the fifth full-length from Glasgow’s Frightened Rabbit, comes on strong with the stately grandeur and confidence of a group in absolute control of its faculties. From the first notes of the opener “Death Dream,” these songs are soaked in self-assurance. They’re built on the foundation of 2013’s Pedestrian Verse and principal songwriter Scott Hutchison’s solo album as Owl John, but manage to push beyond the boundaries of that previous work. They dive deep, thoroughly investigating themes of illness, aging, alcohol, and love. And, with the help of producer Aaron Dessner (of The National), the band has swung into more ambitious sonic territory, incorporating a host of samples, synths, and strings as well as using Logic and Ableton to…

It feels like an eternity since Captured Tracks head Mike Sniper surreptitiously stumbled across Wild Nothing, the one-man band of Jack Tatum (then living in Blacksburg, Virginia), on a late-night Myspace listening session back in 2010. Since then, Tatum has released a debut album (2010’s Gemini ) of what were essentially those demos , recorded a series of stopgap EPs, and hit his apotheosis with the sensational Nocturne , voted album of the year by Under the Radar’s staff in 2012. There’s a tinge of irony that Tatum now calls L.A. home, given the crepuscular nature of Nocturne and its late-night NYC recording binges. “Living in NYC for four years, I never…

When Caveman frontman Matt Iwanusa takes a listen to Otero War , the New York-based band’s new album, he can’t pinpoint any weak points. That’s because he went into the project fully focused and ready to spend time perfecting the songs. Iwanusa, the main songwriter in the band, put more effort in writing “basically finished songs” to share with his bandmates to make “sure we got things done right.” Once shared, they recorded and reworked demos in their practice space until they got the best version of each song. As a result, unlike 2013’s Caveman , they had the new songs basically ready to record before they got to the studio. “The songs wouldn’t be what they are if we didn’t play…

Alex Turner is desperately searching for a signal. “I always get worried that you can’t hear me,” he says hesitantly, wandering around his hotel in the British seaside town of Brighton. His call has already dropped a number of times in mid-conversation, and each time it does he couldn’t be quicker to apologize when he reconnects. Turner’s connection issues begin and end with your phone call, though. Eight years after the first Last Shadow Puppets record, The Age of the Understatement , Turner and longtime friend and collaborator Miles Kane’s innate affinity is showing no signs of distorting as they return with their sophomore album Everything You’ve Come to Expect . “Alex has challenged me to lyrical ideas that I would not have had before,” says Kane. “Essentially, there is…

Gil Carroll didn’t set out to make one of 2016’s most buzzed-about dream pop records. Yet he and the other members of Living Hour seem to have done just that, despite the fact that he adamantly says, “When we started this band, I didn’t even know what the term ‘dream pop’ meant.” The Winnipeg, Canada foursome are, by this point, huge fans of that subdued, atmospheric niche of indie rock. However Carroll, the band’s guitarist, says there is so much more to Living Hour than that. For instance, Carroll points to singer and frontwoman Sam Sarty, who also plays trombone on the band’s self-titled debut. Sarty’s trombone “adds this new unique element to the music,” Carroll says. “If you saw us live now, you wouldn’t immediately say it’s dream pop.…

“I was reading Carl Jung’s Synchronicity while writing a lot of the songs,” Annelotte de Graaf aka Amber Arcades explains. “It’s a cool book. In theory, the power of positive thinking is a very nice idea—shaping your own life—but I also can’t help being a little cynical towards it. You can think positive all you want if you’re born in Syria or other warzones but it’s not gonna get you anywhere. I’m not sure if it actually works, though often I feel it does.” This Dutch native’s road to making her first album, Fading Lines , in New York City with Ben Greenberg and getting signed to Heavenly Recordings has been full of the coincidences and magic she’s been reading about. “The phrase ‘Amber Arcades’ is…

If Charlie Hilton’s solo debut album Palana brings to mind a certain iconic 1960s singer, know that you’re not the only one to notice the similarities. The Blouse frontwoman recognizes her untraditional vocal phrasing (“My vocal delivery style sometimes sounds a little funny!”), puts her in line for Nico comparisons. But, she admits, her admiration of the German chanteuse doesn’t run in the family. “I distinctly remember one moment, when I first started becoming obsessed at the end of high school, we were sitting down to dinner, which is actually very rare of my family,” she recounts. “I was like, ‘just a moment,’ and I went and put in The Velvet Underground CD that I had. And my dad was like ‘I hate this shit!’” She…

There’s a moment near the end of Next Thing— the second studio album by Frankie Cosmos—that perfectly encapsulates the disarmingly conversational spirit of Greta Kline’s music. It comes halfway through “Outside With the Cuties,” a playfully longing ballad with oohing backing vocals. “I haven’t written this part yet,” she coos as all of the instruments fade out under a cloud of echo. “Can you help me write it?” Such fourth wall breaking is not uncommon in Kline’s work. The daughter of actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, her songs are striking in their unstudied immediacy, and her authorial voice is instantly identifiable as a result. In fact, the tracks on Next Thing are so effortlessly executed that it’s easy to understate how delicate a balance the…

To conclude, we ask Kristin Kontrol some questions about endings and death. Kristin Kontrol is the new solo project for Kristin Welchez (born Kristin Gundred), who is also known as Dee Dee, the frontwoman and main creative force behind Dum Dum Girls. Kristin Kontrol’s debut album, X-Communicate , is being released by Sub Pop. It was originally intended to be another Dum Dum Girls album, the follow-up to 2014’s Too Pure , but then Welchez decided to adopt her new stage name to free her from any preconceived notions listeners might have had if the album had been released as Dum Dum Girls. X-Communicate is more open than any Dum Dum Girls record, embracing the ’80s pop music…

Losing a longtime band member is often a tough pill to swallow. When Black Mountain bass player Matt Camirand left the band, they had to scramble to find a replacement. Fortunately for them, veteran bass player Arjan Miranda (formerly of S.T.R.E.E.T.S, Children, and The Family Band) stepped in as the band prepared to record their new album IV . Drummer Joshua Wells says Miranda helped jolt the band back to life and motivate them in the studio. “Arjan is a fantastic all-around musician,” Wells says. “He really kicked our process into gear, as we were reeling for a time, trying to figure out how to work after our bassist Matt left. He brought a real atmosphere to many of the songs, creating the sheets of ebow…

Despite dating and making music together for several years as Cat’s Eyes, last summer was the first time Faris Badwan visited Rachel Zeffira’s tiny Canadian hometown, located some 10 hours outside of Vancouver. Zeffira’s wash of emotions, generated by the experience of bringing her boyfriend back to her childhood home, was captured in the swoony ballad “Everything Moves,” found on the duo’s sophomore full-length, Treasure House . But Badwan, who hails from England, confesses that the journey had its share of cartoonish and apocalyptic moments as well. “There were all these forest fires around town,” The Horrors’ frontman declares, wide-eyed wonder implied in his voice. “Huge forest fires. A surface area bigger than the size of London got burned. It was black all around. It drove…

In the opening seconds of “The Last Thing on My Mind,” the lead single off The Joy Formidable’s third album, Hitch , listeners are provided an ears-only glimpse of the band before the final count in to the song’s thumping, ever-present riff. While much of what plays out on the tape is simple warm-up, the most memorable part of the recording comes when frontwoman Rhiannon “Ritzy” Bryan, in response to some indiscernible comment from either bassist Rhydian Dafydd or drummer Matthew Thomas, jokingly says she’s just going “play the melodica for the next 20 minutes by myself in the corner.” “There’s a lot of shit-talking that goes on,” says Bryan, explaining these exchanges. “You have to kind of keep your sense of humor when you’re locked…

Burnt out after spending the better part a decade on an unending tour cycle, Yeasayer retreated to the rural Catskills to write and record their follow-up to 2012’s Fragrant World . While the rustic setting proved a fruitful place for the band to escape the distractions of city living, they were faced with an unexpected hurdle when a rainstorm—and a leaky roof over the control room—destroyed much of their tape. While many artists would have viewed such wholesale destruction as a setback to their process, Yeasayer’s creativity was sparked in a new direction. “We were forced to go through what we had and rebuild it,” says Chris Keating, explaining how the band returned to Brooklyn to sift through the wreckage. “We sampled what we recorded, and…

“T his is an arrival album, not a transitional album.” To listen to frontman Warren Spicer explain where exactly Plants and Animals have landed on Waltzed in From the Rumbling is to hear of a land of creative freedom and newfound energy. It’s a land free from pressure and expectation. It’s a world apart from their previous album. “The truth is that The End of That was not a particularly gratifying album to make or support,” says Spicer of their 2012-released third album. “Everything about it was rushed and uncared for. In the end, we felt trapped by it and it took everything we had in our hearts to get through it.” Spicer didn’t detail the band’s specific battles, only referring to “personal turmoil and tragedies,”…

Karl Hyde has been keeping an online diary for 16 and a half years. This medium is a great storage space for Hyde, who as Underworld’s frontman is known for his fractured, stream-of-consciousness lyrics. For Underworld’s latest album, Barbara, Barbara, we are facing a shining future , Hyde’s daily posts—which are housed on Underworld’s site—served as a handy exercise allowing him to practice writing lyrics fast, editing and revising up to four drafts in under 30 minutes. These entries are always accompanied by an image, and sometimes what Hyde is listening to, neither of which appear to have any direct connection to his writings. “The connection is only me,” says Hyde, whose regular speech isn’t miles away from his head-scratching lyrics. “Life is often presented as…

Charles Bradley tells a story about when he was asked by Daptone Records head honcho Gabe Roth to perform at Sharon Jones’ 50th birthday party in 2006, and he was given a song to memorize. But try as he might, the lyrics wouldn’t stick. He liked the song, but the words just didn’t feel true to him and the experiences he’d had in his life. When he finally took the stage, he ignored the lyrics and just sang from the heart, letting the words come to him in moment. “And the audience loved it!” he recalls. “Gabe said, ‘Charles, you didn’t sing the song you’re supposed to be singing.’ I said, ‘I just couldn’t get into those lyrics.’” “I’d never heard that song,” Bradley admits. “I never knew who the…

“B reaking up the band was made a bit easier because I never really liked the name Hooray For Earth,” laughs Noel Heroux, the former frontman/main creative force behind said band. The NYC via Boston act released three albums and an EP from their inception in the late 2000s. Interpersonal band dynamics played a role as they typically do, and having their record company (Dovecote) go out of business sealed the deal. So Hooray For Earth called it a day. With a bunch of new songs written, Heroux, who’d been speaking with Sub Pop over the past few years, saw the perfect opportunity to keep going musically and signed with the ironic Seattle-based indie label under the moniker of Mass Gothic. “It was originally intended I’d be ‘solo’ to some…

Though he has spent most of his life preparing for a career in music, Chris Duncan (who uses “C Duncan” as his stage name) was nonetheless surprised by how quickly he realized his potential. Raised in Glasgow by classical musician parents, he’d been working on songs since his teenage years, further honing his craft while earning degrees in composition at The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. By the time he gathered the courage to send a gently tumbling pop ballad titled “Four” to FatCat Records, he had cultivated the ability to craft elaborately arranged pop songs, but not the confidence to believe anyone would care about them. Much to his surprise, the folks at FatCat were instant fans, signing Duncan immediately and offering to put out his debut once he finished…

Marlon Williams has a towering presence wherever he goes, in more than one way. The 24-year-old New Zealand-born singer/songwriter is a lofty six foot three inches, although he thinks his skinniness makes him appear even taller. “I’ve probably lost more brain cells as a result. I always hit my head on things,” Williams says. “I’m always in trouble when I’m flying and your legs are up and your knees are up by your face. It’s kind of a drag.” Some of these flights have led him here to the U.S. to perform and unleash his commanding bellow to audiences. Williams, who recently released his self-titled solo debut in America, is able to wail and howl away like the best of them, and his voice soars so gallantly into the rafters…

On March 1, 2015, Anthony Gonzalez released his first new M83 single in three years. It was a deliriously odd glamdance track that sounded unlike anything in his catalog of music, titled “Do It, Try It.” The reaction was swift and not entirely encouraging. “I understand the need to embrace new directions and sounds, but this thing is not M83,” wrote one fan on M83’s official Facebook page. “It’s just the first song on the album...let’s hope the rest isn’t like this,” wrote another. Some offered defenses of Gonzalez’s right to explore different stylistic forms. Others unleashed their inner music critics, providing detailed critiques of the song’s processed vocals and keyboard textures. Most just repeated how much they loved his other albums and lamented that this new song didn’t sound…

“If Justin Bieber shows his nipple, no one cares. If a woman does it, then it’s shocking. I just don’t get it.” – Barði Jóhannsson One of the first words Starwalker (Air’s Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Bang Gang’s Barði Jóhannsson) use to describe their efforts is “spacey.” The term makes sense. Awash with vintage synths and vocoders, the pair’s hypnotic pop seems blessed with an extraterrestrial grace. But as for actually checking out the cosmos themselves? Both artists quickly veto the idea. “I’m afraid of flying,” Jóhannsson confesses. “I can go in space in my mind, so I think that’s enough.” “Me too,” Dunckel adds. “I don’t want to vomit in my helmet.” Although it wasn’t clear that they could work together right away, both musicians knew they wanted to…

To conclude, we ask Kristina “Teeny” Lieberson of TEEN some questions about endings and death. TEEN also features Teeny’s sisters Katherine and Lizzie Lieberson, along with Boshra AlSaadi. The quartet’s new album on Carpark Records, Love Yes , is their third full-length and their most confident record yet, an eclectic collection that mixes ’80s pop with jazz flourishes and electronic textures. Teeny partially wrote the album in a small lakeside cabin in Morehead, Kentucky and the band recorded the album at the Old Confidence Lodge in secluded Riverport, Nova Scotia (the Lieberson sisters originally hail from Halifax, Nova Scotia). Daniel Schlett produced Love Yes , which was surprisingly recorded live in the studio. Read on as Teeny discusses her favorite endings to…