Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 63 i Under the Radar

One hundred and twenty miles north of New York City, Hudson, NY, sits quietly alongside the river with which it shares its name. Established in the late 1700s by merchants from Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard who needed an inland port for their whaling ships, the historic upstate locale has endured its equal share of anonymity and notoriety over the decades, at one point serving as a haven in the early 20th century for all manner of vice, including gambling, bootlegging, and an infamous red-light district. Today, the city’s sloped, downtown avenues are littered with antique and vintage clothing shops, boutiques, and art galleries—making it an increasingly popular retreat destination for weekend travelers coming from the five boroughs. It’s here, at a former industrial glue factory turned arts center called the…

Robin Pecknold comes from a breed of thoughtful, emotional Americana musicians who tread carefully with every word they offer. As the lead singer and songwriter of Fleet Foxes, Pecknold is well used to success. The Seattle-formed band were universally acclaimed with the release of their debut self-titled album in 2008, a soaring folk collection of close vocal harmonies and luscious pastoral scenes. Its 2011 follow-up, Helplessness Blues , was similarly critically-lauded. After a four-year hiatus, last year the band released Crack-Up , whose lengthy spirals are full of the literary references Pecknold picked up on his time out studying English at Columbia University. “While we were working on Crack-Up , it was the best I had ever felt about a set of songs that I had worked on,” explains Pecknold.…

Would you be open to having your phone and other technology implanted into your body in the future? Absolutely not. I’m paranoid enough as it is about my technology monitoring me, without it actually being underneath my skin. It’s bad enough that an iPhone is already like another limb and we’re so dependent on having them with us at all times, but at least we have the option to throw it off a cliff and remain some sort of anonymity if needs be. I find it fascinating that every sci-fi film or book presents a dystopian future borne out of humans taking technology too far, yet we’re still racing down that track knowing that it is fraught with danger.   If you could time travel what advice would you give to your childhood or teenage self? Don’t…

“Absurd”—that’s the word Phil Elverum uses to describe the last year. In early 2017, he released A Crow Looked at Me , his universally-praised examination of the devastation brought on by the death of his wife, artist and songwriter Geneviève Castrée. Everything since then—the glowing reviews, the crowded festival shows, the fact that crowds clap and cheer after he sings a song about his dead wife—has been absurd, he says. There’s a moment on Now Only , his follow-up, that captures the strangeness of his life now. Though the album is a natural extension of A Crow Looked at Me , continuing Elverum’s examination of grief and loss, it’s also different, more emotionally and texturally varied. On “Now…

“For the next record we should get together in a room, play the songs, record them in a couple of takes, and then go out on the road and play it how it is. That’s what bands are meant to do, but we’ve never really done it,” says Dave Maclean, producer and drummer for Django Django. The third album from the London-based genre-blurring quartet is anything but a traditional rock band record. “The way we produce music is like people making dance music in a bedroom. It’s broken-down and looped, and there’s over-dubbing,” explains Maclean. Marble Skies is an experimental showcase of the musical interests of each of its four members. Maclean has a background in DJing—“I was into rave, jungle, house, hip-hop, then onto reggae sound systems at college”—…

In case Mike Mogis happens to be reading this, the Söderberg sisters, Johanna and Klara, want you to know they “adore” you. It was simply time for something different. Otherwise known as First Aid Kit, the Söderbergs partnered with producer Tucker Martine for the first time on their new album, Ruins , after working with Mogis on previous hit releases, The Lion’s Roar and Stay Gold . Martine, who has produced albums for everyone from The Decemberists to Modest Mouse, was someone with whom the Söderbergs had wanted to work for some time. “We’d actually met up with him before a couple times,” said Johanna. “He was the first producer we really showed stuff after our first EP or our first record. He came out to our Portland show and…

For England’s Hookworms, putting their latest album together was a triumph. The five members of the band experienced enough to encourage them to throw in the towel. Lead singer Matthew “MJ” Johnson was at the center of the band’s bad luck—in 2015, his studio where the band recorded and rehearsed flooded from the bursting of the River Aire. Johnson lost his car, the band’s new material, and their back-catalog of music. At the same time, Johnson and the rest of the band—Jonathan “JN” Nash, Matthew “MB” Benn, Sam “SS” Shjipstone, and Johnny “JW” Wilkinson—lost close mutual friend and sound engineer Michael “Archie” Archibald to a rare form of cancer. After months of havoc, the studio was gutted and rebuilt—it ironically seemed to bring the band closer together. “It was just…

When Merrill Garbus began work on Tune-Yards’ I Can Feel You Creep Into My Personal Life in January 2016, she had a difficult decision to make. How should an artist—especially one who tries to use her life and work to contribute to dialogs surrounding difficult topics in her native Oakland, California—react to the era of Black Lives Matter and President Donald Trump? If she made an apolitical album, she would be ignoring the weight of the moment. But should she make an explicitly political album, she would have to wrestle with the reality that she was yet another white cisgender songwriter pontificating on oppression from a position of privilege. If she was going to make the most of her time and talent, perhaps she shouldn’t make…

Not every punk ascribes to the “disco sucks” movement. In fact, Unknown Mortal Orchestra frontman Ruban Nielson dives right into such highly danceable grooves on the new album Sex & Food , despite New Zealand-born Nielson’s neo-punk roots in prior bands like The Mint Chicks. Nielson says he and his bandmates in Unknown Mortal Orchestra drew inspiration from disco for the title track of their last album, Multi-Love, but Sex & Food turns that flirtation into a full on affair with songs like “Hunnybee,” the baseline and drums of which dazzle like sequence on a bell bottomed jumpsuit, with nary a pandering indie rock guitar riff in sight. Ruban Nielson recruited his brother Kody Nielson—who was his bandmate in The Mint Chicks, and began working with…

On the final track of Clean , the debut full-length album from Nashville’s Soccer Mommy (aka Sophie Allison), the ground opens up. Under the weight of the uncertainty and pain that Allison describes on the proceeding tracks, she imagines the ground buckling: “I dreamt the sidewalk broke in two. The earth was calling to me, a vine stretched out Fifth Avenue,” she sings on “Wildflowers.” Despite this dramatically negative symbolism, “Wildflowers” is an encouraging track. Through the course of the record, Allison is figuring out who she wants to be and by “Wildflowers,” it feels like she has taken great strides towards self-actualization as she sings, “I want to be who I wasn’t, I want to dance in that field of blue.” The 20-year-old started to…

Over Skype, Anna Burch often finishes her answers with an awkward giggle; as if she prefers gift-wrapping presents over opening them. The title of her excellent debut LP Quit the Curse strikes as a tongue-in-cheek bristle at romanticism and superstition. But behind its carefree dream pop-glistened framework, one can sense a sleight of hand. There’s calculated poise veiled beneath Burch’s devil-may-care demeanor. Her piercing eyes don’t scream “naïveté” as much as “mileage” and “self-possession.” Burch’s music sits contently in a defected and grounded state for the time being. Not that she hasn’t dipped her toes in the conceptual: when she took a break from playing with her alt folk-collective Frontier Ruckus, she attended grad school in Chicago, writing a thesis on Busby Berkeley’s choreographic relation with…

Courtney Barnett’s second full-length release starts in a dark place. Opening with the groan of a guitar being tuned, a soft gasp, and the growl of feedback, “Hopefulessness” is the sound of tension searching for a place to escape. “You know what they say, no one is born to hate,” Barnett sings over ominously askew guitar lines. “We learn it somewhere along the way.” Before the song is over it will turn personal, and Barnett’s moody lattice work guitar leads will disintegrate into peals of howling distortion and “empty bottle blues” will be rhymed with “sleepin’ different rooms.” Just like that, Tell Me How You Really Feel establishes a tone—a seriousness, a sense of danger—that does not appear on any of her other recordings. “No one…

Noel Gallagher did not set out to save rock and roll. In fact, when he started writing the songs that would become Who Built the Moon? —his third full-length album with his High Flying Birds—he had no idea what kind of album he was making at all. That’s a function of the way the album was recorded, he says, as the former Oasis guitarist and songwriter entered the studio with producer David Holmes with no songs and no direction beyond being open to exploring whatever sounded good. But Gallagher would not struggle long. Soon, after sampling a snippet of a tin whistle from obscure ’70s psych band The Ice Cream, he and Holmes built “Holy Mountain,” a good vibes, wall-of-sound anthem unlike anything his catalog. “The…

“I’m not naive: I knew what I had done,” says Charlotte Gainsbourg of Rest , her fifth album, her first in six years, and first as a lyricist. Rest is an album fuelled by grief even in its most beautiful moments, something Gainsbourg has had to repeatedly explain. “I have been talking so much about my sister’s death and my father’s death,” she says, though not tirelessly. “It’s a pleasure to talk about them, but at the same time it’s so intimate that by the end of the day, I feel so vulnerable.” For a long time, the actor and daughter of French music hero Serge Gainsbourg and British fashion icon Jane Birkin had hesitated about releasing another record with which she…

2017 saw sexual harassment and assault allegations against many men in the music industry, film industry, journalism, politics, and elsewhere (including Harvey Weinstein, Matt Mondanile of Ducktails and Real Estate, Brand New’s Jesse Lacey, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Charlie Rose, Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, Democratic Senator Al Franken, and others). Why do you think the floodgates opened in 2017 and do you think any meaningful change will come from it or will sexual harassment and assaults continue to be prevalent in certain industries?  I sincerely hope that meaningful change comes from it, but with so many of these social-media-fueled hot-button topics, I feel like it’s trending to put up a post asking for responsibility and then just go back to the scroll. Unless serious, legislative protections can be put…

America is angry, but Parquet Courts are here to provide a cathartic release.  “We were trying to convey anger and unrest, but not in a nihilistic way,” says Andrew Savage (aka A. Savage)—singer/guitarist for the New York-based, Texas-bred post-punk quartet—of Parquet Courts’ intent for their new album Wide Awake! With esteemed studio wizard Danger Mouse (born Brian Burton) producing the troupe for the first time, Savage and his bandmates (singer/guitarist/keyboardist Austin Brown, bassist Sean Yeaton, and drummer Max Savage) set out to make a record that would convey America’s sentiment in this tumultuous Trump age. But Savage says they never succumbed to any righteous fury, adding: “I wanted to do something more constructive, and veer on the side of optimism.” Brown concurs. “Anger and rage or a tendency toward violence, all these sort of negative emotions are really on the…

New Zealand singer/ songwriter Marlon Williams has no interest in being alone. While some long for solitude and the peace that it brings, it’s an unnatural state for Williams. When I ask if being alone scares him, Williams is quick to confirm. “[It’s] something that really terrifies me.” Williams’ songwriting affirms how much the idea of solitude bothers him. On his 2016 debut self-titled record, Williams shares a story of a father dealing with his son’s death (“Dark Child”) and of a man haunted by the ghost of his wife (“Strange Things”). The album opens with a narrative about a woman who personifies loneliness: “It’s funny how I lose my mind when you come around,” Williams cries on “Hello Miss Lonesome.” But the stories behind these songs are removed from…

Preoccupations’ drummer Mike Wallace once grimaced at the suggestion that the Calgary, Alberta band was part of a new guard in the post-punk/New Wave sound. Lead vocalist, bassist, and songwriter Matt Flegel finds this amusing but doesn’t mind the association. “If we have to get lumped into a genre, then sure, I’ll take post-punk. It’s a really vague term for a pretty broad spectrum of music. A lot of bands that don’t sound anything like each other still somehow fall into the category. I don’t know what else we would be. I usually tell the border guards that I play in a rock band”. Preoccupations’ gait through the shadowlands they inhabit has in some ways mirrored the raw post-punk progression into New Wave. On the new, lean-cut LP, the amusingly…

The first time I try to call Ezra Furman in Belgium, I’m greeted by his voicemail: “This is Ezra, leave a message. Don’t be shy, it’s just you and me.” I was , in fact, hella nervous: the gender-fluid frontman had directed several incarnations of his backing band for 11 years before I’d stumbled into his sphere. I was not worthy—and yet, before we’d even formally exchanged words, here he was, offering solace. At any rate, I shouldn’t have been concerned; his new album Transangelic Exodus invites a new kind of listener, anyway. Through a highway odyssey that follows two gay lovers in exile as they mutate into angels, Furman chopped and hacked at his old rock ‘n’ roll bravado until he hit a wonky new…

Listening to Yo La Tengo has always felt like coming home to a warm house in the country, filled with memories. A safe place to go, where variables don’t enter. Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew are fabricators of music that makes it feel as if you’re walking next to or sitting beside them. Such familiarity is what has sustained them through the years to where they now feel like old friends who come around every once in awhile with some songs you’re welcome to hear. Gradually over the five-year span from their last full album of original material, 2013’s Fade (2015’s Stuff Like That There was mainly a covers album), the instinct to weave together another collection of original material kicked in. “We tend to operate on a…

With over 2,000 handwritten pages, Lucy Dacus is currently on Journal #11. Since her days as a fifth-grader, the Richmond, Virginia-based singer/ songwriter has spent countless hours diligently documenting the minutiae of her everyday life. Even when you account for the fact that several years’ worth of entries were lost when someone broke into her car and stole her backpack, Dacus’ collection of journals make for quite the personal anthology. “I don’t make myself do it,” says Dacus. “It doesn’t feel like I’m dedicated to it, but it isn’t a struggle to convince myself to do it. There are some times where I haven’t journaled in a month or two months. And occasionally I miss content and I have to accept that my mind has let go of events that…

Kayus Bankole, one third of the Mercury Prize winning Scottish band Young Fathers, is on the phone from the studio in Edinburgh where the reception is, in his own words, “pretty shite.” But he’s battling through to talk about the trio’s third album, Cocoa Sugar . Having debuted the Mercury winning Dead in 2014, and White Men Are Black Men Too in 2015, not to mention two EPs, Tape One in 2011 and Scottish Album of the Year winner Tape Two in 2013, a new release is not uncharted territory. If he’s nervous, Bankole doesn’t let on. “You create something, you put it out there, and you hope people enjoy it.” The three-year gap between albums is their longest so far. Which is not to say…

Picture the opener of Caroline Rose’s new album, LONER : you’ve been invited to an old crush’s party, and you can’t relate to anyone in the room. The chicks hang back against the wall with their cutesy shorts and other clothes you definitely can’t afford, while the dudes slug beers and guffaw at the ping-pong tables. Why are you the only one dancing? Where are your people? When Rose found herself at that party several years ago, she didn’t know who her people were. Today, she flaunts cherry-red outfits, writes finger-flipping pop songs, and aspires to build her own production studio. But four years ago, as a guitar-toting vagabond from a small town in New York who ditched college for the open road, she hadn’t set…

Sons of an Illustrious Father’s 2017 single “U.S.Gay” may sound like an anthem for young, marginalized queer Americans. After all, the track (which is featured on their new sophomore album, Deus Sex Machina; or, Moving Slowly Beyond Nikola Tesla ), sports triumphant lyrics about having “a revolution in my bed.” But as much as it may inspire others, that wasn’t the exact intention when frontman Ezra Miller and bandmates Lilah Larson and Josh Aubin wrote and recorded the song. “We endeavor to express ourselves in ways that allow us to make it through any given day. The great byproduct of that expression is we can offer the same for others,” says Miller. The singer/actor has openly discussed being queer in prior interviews and is probably best…

Britt Daniel shrugs at the word “reliable,” although it’s the one that comes up from time to time. Spoon is, by any measure, one of the most reliable rock bands around, if that reliability takes into account 25 years of constant experimentation and excellence from Daniel, Rob Pope, Jim Eno, and Alex Fischel. From Telephono to Girls Can Tell to Gimme Fiction to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga to the band’s latest, Hot Thoughts , there’s not a single low point in the band’s catalog—a quarter century of year-end lists and critical acclaim. How does a band maintain such a brilliant streak? It’s not a mystery to Daniel, who is well aware of the consistent critical buzz earned by the Austin band over the last two-and-a-half decades. Spoon’s success can…

For Under the Radar’s 15th annual Artist Survey we emailed some of our favorite artists a few questions relating to 2017 and other matters. Visit www.undertheradarmag.com/artists/artist_surveys_2017 for even more surveys. Kelcey Ayer The alt-right/neo-Nazi/KKK rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the ensuing violence, and President Trump’s reluctance to condemn such hate groups further showed that racism is alive and well in America. What concrete steps can we take to improve race relations in America and the world at large? I wrote a lengthy post on Facebook about Charlottesville after it happened, and about racism in general, including a bunch of links to some videos and articles that have helped reshape my understanding of it all. For a long time, I wondered why I couldn’t join in and say the n-word like a…

Which Breakfast Club character are you most like and why? When I was a kid and watched this movie I always subconsciously aligned myself with John, Judd Nelson’s character who made rebellion and rejection of authority seem noble, and also really struck at the heart of what it feels like being and outsider to societal norms. But if I’m being honest I think I am probably most like Brian. That character is also on the perimeter of societal normalcy but rather than act out destructively and rejecting the system like John, becomes neurotically preoccupied with achieving, making good grades, accomplishing things in order to earn validation and prove his own merit. See the lamp monologue. The perpetually relatable depiction of the fear of disappointment as motivation. …

You pour your heart into it. You dedicate hours, long nights, lingering years to it. You strive until your muscles and mind and emotions sear from the strain. And finally, when it’s in your grasp, and yet you still have to wrestle with it… well, then what? For a musician as impassioned as Jenn Wasner, such struggles never seem to cease. The guitarist and vocalist for Wye Oak—a duo she formed in 2006 with drummer and high school friend Andy Stack—spent years pursuing success as a musician. But when that breakthrough finally came, via the inclusion of their song “Civilian,” the title track to their 2011-released third album, on the hit series The Walking Dead, Wasner’s demons didn’t die. She has now, however, turned a corner in that regard, which…

For a creative person, a shift in medium can open new channels of thinking. When Belle and Sebastian leader Stuart Murdoch temporarily stepped away from music to write and direct the 2014 film musical, God Help the Girl , the experience forever left a mark on the way he would approach composing. “If I was doing a record before, it was in two dimensions. A film was three-dimensional,” says Murdoch. “[Making a film] allowed me to step back and see a bigger picture, and paint on a bigger canvas. I think in a way the artwork for all the Belles records since then, and just the way they were conceived and put together, has felt easier and more complete.” A cinematic influence feels especially present in…

Alex Kapranos begins with a blank slate—an honest to goodness real blank slate. No preconceived ideas. No thematic direction. No cares or concerns for where Franz Ferdinand has gone in the past or where they’re expected to head in the future. The band, he says, has to be selfish that way. Nearly 15 years have passed since “Take Me Out” stormed up the charts and placed Franz Ferdinand squarely in the musical mainstream. In the time since, Kapranos says he’s learned to silence the critics as well as the praise. The band’s interest is the only influence worthy of their collective attention. “If it turns me on. It’s that simple,” says Kapranos about knowing which direction to go. The band’s fifth album, Always Ascending , is rooted in the band’s…

A little ways south of his longtime home of Portland, OR, Colin Meloy has spent the past four years living on a five acre farmstead with his wife and two sons. Listed on the historic registry, the property dates all the way back to the mid-19th century. Outside, roaming in their respective enclosures, live the farm’s resident livestock: two pygmy goats, nine chickens, a sheep, and two llamas (“Llamas are actually great guard animals,” The Decemberists frontman quips. “A llama can really fuck somebody up if they really wanted to.”). Meloy, though just having finished lunch, is already thinking ahead to dinner, prepping a mound of dough for a night of homemade pizza with his family. Listening to Meloy discuss the comfortable charm of his home and simple pleasures of…

A steep learning curve presents itself when your debut summits not only numerous year-end lists but is instantly immortalized on rankings labeled “Best Albums Ever.” For Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, the duo known as MGMT, the release of Oracular Spectacular thrust them into a curve to which they’re just now adjusting. Suddenly their time was not their own. Identities began to shift. The spotlight was real. Grammy nominations and global charts. Three albums later, MGMT has stopped asking so many questions, having moved through a toddler phase of incessant “whats” and “whens” and “hows.” “Because we’ve had songs that were popular or on the radio, we were asking, ‘Where do we fit?’ Especially on our second album and even into making our third album, we were still kind of…

Gaz Coombes’ grin is unmistakable. The one time frontperson for Supergrass, arguably the most effervescent group of ’90s Britpop, is taking a break from rehearsals for an upcoming tour supporting his third solo album, World Strongest Man . Coombes doesn’t look all that different than he did in 1995 at the time of Supergrass’ debut, the perennial I Should Coco . Sparkly eyes, facial hair mingled with that growing from his head, polite demeanor are all in place, but “world’s strongest man?” “I don’t mind if things have to be questioned or looked at or interpreted,” Coombes chuckles at the skepticism his album title might generate. “It’s this preconception about how one should be, what one should talk about, what one shouldn’t…

The third and final season of Netflix-original Love sees its protagonists—Gus (Paul Rust) and Mickey (Gillian Jacobs)—teeter constantly over the “will they, won’t they?” line. The rom-com is produced by Judd Apatow and created by married couple Paul Rust and Lesley Arfin. It’s as funny as it is warm-hearted, but so many of its episodes present its characters as distinctly irritating too. It’s a TV show about a TV show, or near enough: Mickey is a producer on a radio show and Gus is an on-set teacher for child actors, chasing his dream of being a screenwriter. As I speak to Rust, he is giving himself a driving tour of the city. “Right now I’m cruising towards the Sunset Strip,” he tells me. How very LA.…

Springing forth from the fertile South London scene, Shame formed during a long and listless school summer holiday in 2014 and, by chance, ended up rehearsing at The Queen’s Head in Brixton. This infamous pub, which laid the foundations for what followed, served as a no-rules headquarters for fellow squat-rockers Fat White Family and now, as is the way in modern London, no longer exists. This tapestry of social inequality informs much of what Shame create and represent. The quintet brandish a fierce strain of punk rock, filtered through a prism of post-punk drive which features dueling buzzsaw guitars (Eddie Green and Sean Coyle-Smith), slinking basslines (Josh Finerty), primal drums (Charlie Forbes), all of which are rounded off with dry witticisms and screams from frontman Charlie Steen. Billing them as…

On record, Orono Noguchi sounds so nonchalant that she almost seems bored of being in a band. In person, she’s nothing like that. We’re speaking in the middle of Superorganism’s first European tour and a packed day for Orono, the band’s lead singer, which has included a morning recording session, but she’s still animated and engaging. She assures me it isn’t always like this. “It depends, I’m actually kinda sad but when I’m doing an interview by myself, I have to do the job by myself so I get more motivated and excited” she tells me. “When I’m feeling like shit and I’m with [bandmates] Emily and Harry, I will not say a word at all. I wouldn’t even be looking at you. I’m very moody, that’s what I’m trying…

To conclude, we ask Will Sheff of Okkervil River some questions about endings and death. Sheff is the singer/songwriter/main creative force behind the band, which formed in Austin in 1998 and has had various lineups over the years, with Sheff the sole constant. The band’s third album, 2005’s critically acclaimed Black Sheep Boy , was their breakthrough release. Okkervil River’s latest album, In the Rainbow Rain , is their ninth full-length and their third for ATO. Sheff wrote the album right after President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. “If December 2016 was good for anything, it was good for writing songs,” said Sheff in a press release announcing In the Rainbow Rain . The album’s…