past articles

26 November 06

Elf Power: A Lesson In Daydreaming For Those Incapable Many

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) Come all ye daydreamers, amateur dreamers and 40-hours-a-week dreamers and feast at this very table. Sit all ye hind ends down at the benches lining them, careful not to disturb the tablecloths and place settings as you pull yeselves close. If ye think to do it, arrive with ye PJs already on ye bodies, comfortable and soft – capable of yanking the winks out of you like the farmer pulls the milk from a full dairy cow. You might be in for a short meal and a long night that feels short because you’re nodding it away, dreamily living for hours on the other sides of your eyelids. Elf Power can be the tour guide you never knew you needed until you could sense yourself getting bogged down by the petty episodes in life, catching yourself stuck in a drab existence and seeing permanence in the drudgery that has enveloped your tattered excuse for spontaneity. It’s become similitude. All of it. Most of the dreaming you do now is done under a death glow of purplish-white fluorescent light, during your supposed productive hours, as the professor’s performing his droning white noise or the copy machine’s incessantly duplicating what needs to be duplicated. It’s being done in the center of the beehive, where the activeness shouldn’t be in doubt. This is how you get paid, drifting into thoughts of happy hour margaritas and bottomless tortilla chips and salsa. It’s about as far as your defeated imagination let’s you embark – tequilaed up drinks and hand foods. This needs to stop. It needs to be easier for you to take yourself someplace other than where you are and there shouldn’t be an obstacle in getting there. Lead singer Andrew Rieger conducts himself – on every one of the Elf Power albums – as if he knows the precarious importance of mind-body separation. It could just be that there’s little room in his life for situational comedies or dramas on television or the silver screen to make up for the adventures that he’s not having in his daily lives. It’s not his preferred method of escapism to tune in to what’s happening on “Two and a Half Men” or sinking into a sofa to absorb four quarters of the Patriots-Bears game. The way to do it is to be sucked into a ground portal, taken to a land of imaginary peoples and left to your own freedoms, not unlike the way Wonderland operated for Alice.more...

19 November 06

Tiger Saw: Making The Most Of An Indiscriminating Romanticism, Falling For Looks, Books And Shakespearean Theatre

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) Romantics pay the price for falling. This doesn’t even have to be about love, this falling, this head over heels consummation. It doesn’t have to be about people or ideals. It can be a swift tumble for a certain lick of prose or a dramatic production of a children’s tale, the feel of a note from old friends or the company of loved ones that strikes up the tumult of a spirit, giving one over to a life drenched in persimmon-tinged sunset tones that finds ways of radiating. Dylan Metrano, the man behind the ever-morphing collective he calls Tiger Saw, is quilted out of somberness. It’s been brought on by the many words and much music that has been introduced to him in ever manner and in every corner conceivable. It’s been encouraged to activate a sort of romanticism that doesn’t question the difficulties of simple pleasures or gratifying social undertakings, but there’s a consensus woven into the system of the search for them that respects that there are times when you’ll suffer for them and these times are the ones that you’ll remember so vividly to make note of them later. They’d make good verse and they’d help to form the composite of your cares, the romantic discernments between the way things are and the way you know them to be (read: the way they should be). Metrano can’t be boiled down or placed into a box. His romanticism is a wandering kind that doesn’t necessarily waver, but it grows, it strides and it keeps almost exclusively to itself when it’s been tuned down. It flashes itself, not reluctantly, but protectively in places, and then it slinks back into the shadows quicker than the start of an echo. Even Metrano’s friends see mystery in his ways. Casey Dienel, who occasionally plays piano and keyboards in Tiger Saw, tells that without Metrano’s persistence, she would have never recorded any of her songs – the fear too crippling and the purpose unseen. She basically compares Metrano’s likeability to someplace near the universality of coffee. Most everyone finds something in a coffee bean that’s easy on the stomach and as it is with the soft work of Tiger Saw, songs that meet the ear with an unfussy sales pitch, biding their time until you take them in – perhaps unknowingly – like a stray kitten found out on your doorstop during a rainy evening. They’ve been known to curl up with you – his songs have – and they stay with you, gathering compassion.more...

12 November 06

Sound Team: There Is No I In Sound Team – The Preoccupation Continues

Words by Sean Moeller //Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) Two things are paramount to giving Austin, Texas, band Sound Team the appropriate textural arcing and just the right amount of background to make all of the guesswork that follows stick. They have a why. They just have to get to a how to fill in the parenthetical, the breadth of sumptuous white noise or terrible cotton silence that exists in the place before a song gets its wings. They are gear heads, merciless pack rats and obsessives about long-discontinued models of everything aural. As engine oil can be found under the fingernails of every grease monkey (the automotive equivalent of the gear junky) day or night, in a more linear world with strict associations, all five members of the band would have analog tape, like oil, crescent mooning the tops of their 10 nails. They abide by their circuitry, which tells them to follow their ears, like bears follow their noses to honey pots and combs and earthworms gravitate to the slamming of raindrops overhead, forcing them uncontrollably out through the top crust of soil and into the storm. The correct piece to a song, the right dimension of that song, the crisp, the cool, the darkened function of each substantial ribbon of sound has to be discovered through unrelenting task mastering. They can’t help themselves. It’s more than an addiction because it can’t be burnt out of them. It can’t be cold-turkeyed away. They can’t be rehabilitated. They believe in the sum of the obsession that keeps them logging hours tinkering with knobs, knowing from past experiences that you can squeeze diamonds from bricks of coal if you’re patient enough. They believe in cassette tapes and bassist Bill Baird says that he thinks technology peaked in 1975. They are hopelessly romantic for the studious reclamation of out-dated processes and work tools because damn it, you heard what they once produced. That’s what’s still desired. Records aren’t supposed to be made the way they used to be, but they do it anyway. In more ways than one, the path that Sound Team takes with its creations is about discovery that is so engrossing, it just might get insufferable.    more...

5 November 06

The Subjects: Swigging From The Teat Of The Places That Are Hard To Return To Even With Great Directions

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Brad Kopplin Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) We as people are all afforded – each and every one of us – a certain volume of unspeakably crystalline innocence that gradually vanishes over the years, in smoky ribbons, as unnoticeably as a whisper giving birth. Its subtlety is its most notable form of transport and the way every transaction between the boy and the man or the girl and the woman goes. There’s talk that you can launder some of that non-tampered wonderment, but there’s always a hint of pink or light denim blue to the fabric, making it obvious that the colors ran at some point. They aren’t virgin by any stretch of the imagination. They’re sullied, but it might not be for the worse. It could just be that natural causes don’t allow one to remain stationary in that phase for a reason and it’s non-negotiable. It doesn’t have to preclude flashbacks or sprees where the safe’s combination is cracked and all is let out is a rush, filling the air as completely as the aromas of baking bread do a kitchen. We get to make withdrawals every so often, under the watchful eye of the invisible gatekeeper who gets to stand around, scowl some, scoff more and say, “Aren’t you too old for that?” And whatever “that” is, it’s taken back, replaced by the things responsibility forces you to make priority. There are worse things to have stolen from you than the myth that there’s a winged pixie that breaks and enters your room while you’re slumbering and leaves money behind for worthless baby teeth. The nights of fitful sleep and tear-stained pillows over that breaking news shouldn’t crash a man’s spirit, but what if the grim reaper came not for you whole, but said you could live as long as he could take all of your playfulness and all of the mystery that you’ve got residing up there or inside. What then? That’s the shit that’s worth a damn. That’s the shit that you’d get wistful for in a hurry, ranting and raving that it was your one true folly, giving in to the man in black when he laid out the bargain. All this grousing about maintaining an unfettered well of that innocence – as good as a booty of bricks from Fort Knox – brings us to Brooklyn four-piece The Subjects.more...