past articles

29 October 06

Of Montreal: Whether A Muse Does Or Doesn't Wear A Red Dress And Smell Like A Stripper, You Listen

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley_ Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) An open letter to an androgynous muse would be confusing, surely, and it would be a mess of uncertain pronouns and potentially unwelcome advances. It would crescendo near the bottom with the one requisite line that a letter of such purpose must ask: Who are you…really? It would bluster and ramble, with the writer going on and on about who he or she thinks you are. It would raise twice as many questions as could or ever would be answered by the addressed. A muse, like a magician, never reveals its secrets. Most of the time, said muse will refuse disclosing its intentions, its motives and its hand. It’s just smoke, the sprite of a crystal chandelier – a ghost of fair-weather vigor and ruminative valor. It throws the gunpowder into the bottle and boils up all of the pressure behind the cork. It throws itself out onto the floor with the part of the drink that springs itself over the rim first, and then it is as gone as two days ago. The author of a letter such as this would be Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes, largely seen as the closest example of the guy that wears the genius pants in the household of indie rock. With each new album, Barnes and his collection of wayfaring Georgian bandmates/bad dressers, become more feminine and more masculine, trading blurry insinuations for blurrier ones and making gender of the gaiety unable to be placed. Barnes streaks his songs with such sophistication and melodic buoyancy as would make the jewelry of the gods look like fool’s gold. He takes his cues from some netherworld cursor, which allows his choices in every way to reflect delirious infallibility, where no decision feels out of place. He can be man, woman, freak, philosopher, disco dancer, chic, collusive, fragmented, whatever he needs to be to feed the fertile urge to always be resplendent, always be mysteriously shifty and as of late give everyone more than enough reasons to consider his band crush-worthy. An Of Montreal album – a Kevin Barnes album to cut right to the jib – is no dog and pony show. You’ll need your visa to get to that place somewhere over the rainbow.more...

26 October 06

Langhorne Slim Essay Contest

This is something Langhorne Slim might say, “The world could turn to hell, but at least we’ll never run out of Jack and thank mercy for buttless chaps.” This is something Langhorne Slim might do: He might build his own very caboose and cell phone tower out of popsicle sticks and over-chewed Hubba Bubba. This is something Langhorne Slim might raise: a jackalope. He’s a story teller.more...

22 October 06

The Never: For Hope And Humanity, The Hooks Sink One Closer

Words by Sean Moeller //Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) The very last line of the storybook that accompanies Antarctica, the debut offering from North Carolina’s The Never, reads, “Fall in love with this world.” It sure seems to be a funny time for notions such as that one. It’s too late, one would think, for falling in love with this world, one that certain others have targeted for annihilation. Why get attached to a place that, with a swift flick of the right switch, could turn into a smoking cloud. A big red “X” has been painted on its side and it’s been selected for the chainsaw. We are in the throes of something that looks like a crisis. This world – the one that we’re trying not to get too attached to because we’re afraid of it—is locked between what used to be prosperity and what might soon be nothingness. All it would take would be questioning the wrong person’s dick size (figuratively speaking, of course – or is it?) and a few manmade thunderclaps could level it all to rubble. At that point, the world, love and all those capable of it would be non-existent, so we wouldn’t need a reminder. An article by Bill Powell in this week’s Time magazine, entitled, “When Outlaws Get The Bomb,” is accompanied by an illustration of cuckoo Kim Jong Il, the leader of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, where he’s got two black nuclear warheads for eyes, broken matchsticks for a nose and is holding a mushroom in his right hand. The piece details how the most frightening and possibly unavoidable effect of North Korea’s adamant desire to possess the power of atom bomb technology and its recent test bombings will come when every other country feels the urgency to do the same – the law of the jungle sets in and the kill or be killed mantra takes hold. There won’t be any world left to love and this – in a roundabout way—is addressed in Antarctica, oddly enough. The protagonist Paul – a naïve boy from the forest – finds an atomic bomb in the meadow and feels that the best place for it is in the city, so he straps it onto a Radio Flyer and begins pulling it into town. How he got the heavy ass thing onto the wagon…not addressed…but there’s no mistaking the impending doom and you instinctively hedge that the city’s going down.more...

16 October 06

P.O.S.: Choking Out Borrowed Time, Appeasing The Here And Now With A Figurative Stick-Up

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound Engineering by Patrick Stolley Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) Everybody’s trying to find themselves—picking through books, taking internal dictation, posturing, un-posturing and throwing more and more things against the wall, knowing that sometimes what sticks is still just a phase that’s being worked through. Whatever it is will wear off too, like a sidewalk chalking of a rocket or it will bleed into the skin like a 40-year-old tattoo of an anchor and an old flame’s rusty name. Very few things in life can have or will allow for any semblance of permanence. This makes the search for the self something of a serial expedition that doesn’t really give itself over to absolutes, but offers these opportunities to be stuck in a windowless room—with the person you are at that given moment – allowed the “as good as any time” chance to walk around, deconstruct everything visible and then fire as many questions at it as time might allow. It’s how a great song starts and then is. It doesn’t overstep any bounds. A song that achieves this kind of status doesn’t usually work when the artist is thinking about much more than what’s happening in the immediate sense. Reflection is good, but impulse knows best. Show the hand as it is, not how it was five minutes ago or how it’s anticipated to look in an hour. Stef Alexander – or P.O.S. on record and in Doomtree lore – has found what he is today on his spectacular sophomore album, “Audition,” a piece of art that’s a tour de reckoning, with plenty of force to keep it company.more...