Cryptacize Bookery
20 August 08 
tell your friends...
Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Brendan Kiefer
Immediately, we were wooed by Cryptacize’s debut, last year, Dig That Treasure, and just as we thought that the Oakland band was fantastic, we hear the new material that they’re currently recording for a follow-up and we’re speechless. The songs – now primarily sung by Nedelle Torrisi – have taken on a different dimension or two in their maturity and in their creativity. They are a huge step forward and you’ll be able to hear four of them in a few weeks when the group’s debut Daytrotter Session posts here. It seems so ironic and coincidental that band member Chris Cohen contributes here a reading that explores a world that English schoolmaster Edwin A. Abbott created back in the late 1800s. It’s amazing and fantastic that things like shapes and numbers and realities are still such fascinating things to think let your mind get blown apart by, even now in a day and age of Wiis and other colossal distractions. Simple sights, sounds and figures are still what explode our senses more than anything and it applies to music just as much as anything – these instruments that have existed forever can still be played in different ways and combinations to make intriguing compositions. Cohen does a great job of keeping us in the know while reading the foreword to Abbott’s Flatland, cueing us when we’re being talked about (“The readers in Spaceland…that’s us…”) and informing us that the stranger in the prose is the sphere. When the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions are talked about, perhaps it’s the next line that provided inspiration for some of the new Cryptacize material – those dreaming of making those dimensions possible are “thereby contributing to the enlargement of the imagination” – or maybe it’s just a book.
Cryptacize MySpace Page
Asthmatic Kitty Records
Lackthereof Bookery
8 August 08 tell your friends...
illustration by brendan kiefer
Are you sitting down? Ready to be sucked into some sort of bizarre David Lynch-Samuel L. Jackson-via the “Pulp Fiction” monologues vortex that will make you its valentine and simultaneously freak you out of your socks? Too late. You’re going to get covered in apples if you’re sick of love. You’re going to be hypnotized by this whacked out reading/recording made by Menomena drummer and Lackthereof mastermind Danny Seim and when you awake from the trance – inspired by the piece to paint your body green, speed-eat a pork chop and four apple pies, caress a complete stranger and then cannonball into a quiet pool, bellowing, “Behold thou art fair,” in Latin or French. Though it’s not making any sense – for I rarely do – it will shortly when you give this a listen or three. It’s over 20 minutes in length and one of the most peculiar things I’ve ever heard. Seim asks to credit “Mr. Jim Fairchild as having played acoustic guitar on this recording. The reading/song is entitled “S.O.S. (King James Version)”, the subtitle out of respect for my guitarist.” This is all we know as Seim and all of the Menomena crew are interesting sorts full of mystery and intrigue. Just let them do their thing is what we should let them do. Seim’s Lackthereof deserves the kind of following that his now-day job band gets on a worldwide scale. His new record Your Anchor is poetic and ambitious and blends what we used to have in Midwestern indie rock in the early 90s with a tropical splash of electronic glue, warm and as humid as it can be. Could be one of the year’s sleepers. That’s for the people to decide. – Sean Moeller
Barsuk Records
Memomena’s Daytrotter Session
Rhett Miller Bookery
31 July 08 tell your friends...
Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Brendan Kiefer
One of the best movies from recent years — and we can quibble about it — is “Waitress,” where Keri Russell takes a turn as a pie-maker who hates her husband. She’s a character who fulfills herself in the creative pies that she concocts in her head — rummaging through all of her daily atrocities involving the man waiting for her at home who’s trapped her into an unloving life to find the ingredients, all meaningful ones. The way that everything fits together in her pies is telling and graphic, allowing all of her pains to be expressed through the sugar and the fillings. It’s one way to dispel aggression and general sadness. There are others out there. Rhett Miller, in this short story that he wrote for an issue of the beloved McSweeney’s, hates his husband too. He takes the women’s perspective in an abusive relationship and vows that he’s willing to bust the husband’s head in with a “fucking” rolling pin. It would do the job. He’s relatable and detailed in the same ways that Russell was in “Waitress.” It’s exactly the way the man makes music, on his own and with his old/still new band The Old 97’s — which just released Blame It On Gravity, a record that deals with so many people dealing with each other the best way they can and giving us the cribbed notes in that typically Old 97s alternative country stride.
Old 97s Official Site
New West Records
Bookery: Ben Lee
14 May 08 tell your friends...
Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Brendan Kiefer
Ben Lee’s been doing this a long time, thinking big humanity-pointed thoughts and bringing massive perceptions and foresight into his lovely, often quaint pop songs. He’s been the child prodigy, the flame of Claire Danes, the puppy dog, and the wizened man, who’s still no more than a youngster. He makes a case for old souls everywhere – the people you feel you can look into their eyes and see a crowded house, antiquated ideals and morals, white hair, wrinkles, a lifetime’s worth of pets and heartbreak, experiences that only come with having lives a few times. A song, “We’re All In This Together,” from the 2005 album Awake Is The New Sleep, has been used considerably on a television commercial for Kohl’s department store and its key line – the title of the song – is a simple revelation, but it’s the overwhelming focus of most of Lee’s charmingly sweet observations. He bodes well for general satisfaction and being at peace with the crud hands that might get dealt every so often, for things work out. Someone who’s got the wisdom of decades at his fingertips – or at least in his eyes – would know these things. Here Lee, who is still supporting his latest album Ripe, reads a short story by Donald Barthelme, which involves a big balloon that most don’t know what to do with. There’s hostility and questioning involving the hot air balloon and there’s much harrumphing and confusion regarding it. Favorite line could be: “As a single balloon must stand for a lifetime of thinking about balloons.” And he reads…
Ben Lee describes the text:
“My friend Matthew gave me a copy of “unspeakable practices, unnatural acts”, a collection of shorts by Donald Barthelme, when I was 18. It made a big impression on me. The mix of humour, philosophy and old-fashioned story telling was like nothing I had experienced before. The story “The Balloon” is my favourite. It serves as a metaphor for art, life, God, or whatever else you wish to imagine being described. It discusses the idea of subjectivity and personal perspective in a way that I find oddly touching. I love this story.”
Bookery: Les Savy Fav
29 April 08 tell your friends...
Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Brendan Kiefer
We should all be so lucky to be fueled by alcohol. There’s no foreign dependencies to worry about and the effects of this kind of transferable form of energy making wouldn’t bitch slap the environment all around. Les Savy Fav is when beer meets volcano and then the volcano gets scared by the delirious and beady looks in the Savy eyes. After The Balls Drop — the title of the band’s brand new digital release only live album that can go two ways – carries the kind of bruising and thought-provoking that the rest of the New York City group’s recorded efforts do, but this offers the huffing and the puffing and the unplanned banter and dialogue that are beneficial for keeping a resting heart rate up and skittering. Lead singer Tim Harrington – we know from history and vivid imagination – is bare-chested and fashionably tubby, sweating his sack off during the recording of this live performance at the Bowery Ballroom in the Big Apple – but the moistened and red enthusiasm is all there, stiflingly robust and dangerous. When Harrington sings, “See my shadow/Twice the mountain,” it comes across in the performance and when drummer Harrison Haynes reads from the epic liner notes that he penned for this digital album, noting the line, “Everyone was awake and happy,” it’s as if the brevity couldn’t have been any more sparklingly ideal. Haynes reads two minutes worth of the detailed jottings of jostlings, hot lights and libations.
Les Savy Fav
French Kiss Records
Buy Les Savy Fav’s New Live Record Here
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