Anthony's Alternative Music Blog

All Tomorrow's Parties —a 'boutique' festival curated by headlining artists, and held in an ever-changing array of holiday camps on varying continents— will make its maiden voyage to Australia in January. After the recent success of the first-ever ATP New York (helmed by shoegaze kingpins My Bloody Valentine), come the early ought-nine the fest will sail from its home, in England, to its farthest colonial outpost. And curatorial reins have been handed to Nick Cave, the devilish renaissance-man whose stature in his hometown, Melbourne, is something close to godly.

ATP will hold a fully-fledged two-day summer camp-out, on January 9 and 10, at Mt. Buller Ski Resort, roughly three hours outside of Melbourne. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds —currently finishing off their first North American tour in five years— are, of course, the headliners.

And, as programmers, Naughty Nicholas and co have picked a particularly eclectic mix of artists: legendary synthesizer trailblazers Silver Apples, recently-reformed kraut-rock supergroup Harmonia (populated by members of Neu! and Cluster), doped-up gospel-psych institution Spiritualized, British wall-of-sound noiseniks F**k Buttons, and shamanist Japanese psych sisters Afrirampo amongst the ranks.

The following weekend, January 17 and 18, ATP will stage the same single-day festival, on back-to-back days, on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour (with free ferry ride to the islet included in ticket price!). And, in between the two outdoor-concerts, from the 12th to the 16th, a series of ATP-themed shows will take place in Brisbane's Powerhouse, with a larger-scale outdoor jamboree planned for January 15 at the Riverstage in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens.

For abundant, in-depth details, one need turn only to the informative ATP website, which is, quite amusingly, already hawking 'earlybird' tickets to ATP NY 2009 (only 11-and-a-half months to go!).

Photo © [Polly Borland]

Chad VanGaalen is a poster-child for recycling. The 30-year-old Canadian is a notorious homebody, forever tinkering away in the basement of his Calgary house. There, when not beavering away at, say, the three albums he’s released on Sub Pop, VanGaalen can be found tending to his collection of self-built instruments, which he’s fashioned from society’s refuse as part of an art-world-inspired, trash-as-treasure aesthetic.

VanGaalen's brand new album, Soft Airplane, is a lyrical study on death, which also makes it about recycling: the natural world's continuous loop of death, decomposition, and rebirth lingering in his often odd tales.

I recently interviewed Dr. VanGaalen, who discussed his days busking, his work with fellow Calgarians Women, and the influence of the lo-fi movement on his embrace of at-home practice and archaic tape-machines.

The self-styled songsmith's peculiar brand of ad-hoc pop is ripe for some free-like sampling at Sub Pop HQ, too. Whilst a legally-admissible MP3 of the sweetly banjo-pluckin' ode-to-dying "Willow Tree" is a fine score, those wishing to truly get a handle on VanGaalen's ways should open their eyes to the lurid video for "Molten Light." Animated by Chad himself, it serves as a direct, disturbing window onto the grotesqueries of the songsmith's subconscious.

Photo © [Marc Rimmer]

Slowburnin' Baltimore duo Beach House play music that's all syrupy and narcotic, languidly laying out notes in an oozing, opiate haze rich with golden auburn notes. Across their two records, the two not-lovebirds —vocalist/organist Victoria Legrand, slide-guitarist Alex Scally— have evoked classic comedown icons like Nico and Opal, fashioning an insular world in which to lure the listener.

Thus far, their output has been wholly of the compact-digital variety, but the band have just announced their virgin vinyl pressing: a 7" entitled "Used to Be," to be minted upon Carpark Records. The title-track is a brand new jam, but its flipside is a super-early four-track recording of "Apple Orchard," a song found on their first, self-titled disc. Meaning: this record backs the brand new with the really old, provided a potted history of the pair on a single wax platter.

Though they've spent most of '08 tripping across both hemispheres, on tour, Beach House will prepare some public more performances in support of the single, announcing a new run of dates. And, for those wishing to dig up more dirt on the dreamy dream-pop duo, Scally recently took part in some sweet interviewing, where he, amongst other things, clarified that there are no actually beaches in Baltimore.

Bostonian songstress Casey Dienel began the year with a bang, issuing Phylactery Factory, her first album under the name White Hinterland, in March. She's now set to end the ought-eight in similar style, following on with an extra-playing five-track set sung wholly in French.

Her October 21-due EP is entitled Luniculaire. If you're scrambling for your French dictionary, fear not; Luniculaire is not a French word, but a portmanteau wedding together "lunaire" (lunar) and "funiculaire" (funicular, as in railway).

Along with two Dienel originals, penned in French, the 23-year-old has the sand to tackle tracks made famous by French icons Françoise Hardy ("Mon Amie La Rose"), Serge Gainsbourg ("Requiem Pour Un Con"), and the incomparable Brigitte Fontaine ("J'ai 26 Ans," from her legendary LP Comme à la Radio, an unhinged collaboration with Areski and the Art Ensemble of Chicago that I'm saving a place for in the Definitive Albums section).

Dienel and crew recently visited the Daytrotter studio to lay down a sweetly set of live-ly songs. And, Rocktober will find her taking the White Hinterland show on the road, with Dienel's first-ever European Tour, which culminates, fittingly, with shows in Paris and Brussels.

Luniculaire Track List
1. "Requiem Pour Un Con"
2. "Chant de Grillon"
3. "Mon Ami La Rose"
4. "Lunirascible"
5. "Orphaned"

Photo © [Tod Seelie]

Eight years and four albums into things, New Yorker moodists The Walkmen are in career form. Their latest longplayer, You & Me seems, with every successive spin, to be firming as their best-record-yet. It's certainly been their most successful; its spike of digital sales on its initial online release helping the record bother the Billboard chart (#29 digital! #71 regular!).

The quintet's 2008 has also included a couple of visits to Daytrotter HQ in scenic Rock Island, Illinois. After knocking out a set of Leonard Cohen songs early in the year, last month the Walkmen dusted off a foursome of tracks pulled from the fearsome, track-marked back-cat of gonzo Royal Trux/Howling Hex honcho Neil Michael Hagerty.

Given how good things're going, Hamilton Leithauser has every right to strut. The Walkmen's dude-ish, hoarse-throat'd vocalist —so peripatetic during their anthemic liveshows— sat still long enough, earlier this week, to field a session of searing questions. Read on, gentle children.

In 2003, Max Tundra told me: "I’m fairly insecure about my music at the best of times." Clearly, for the artist actually named Ben Jacobs, the past six years haven't been the best of times. Since releasing his ridiculous(ly good) Mastered by Guy at the Exchange album in 2002, Jacobs has been slaving away at his next effort. The years ran like rabbits, he started suffering carpal-tunnel syndrome, and found himself so derailed by rampant second-guessing that many assumed he'd become the Kevin Shields of manic tweelectro-funk, lost in the eternal torture of the impossible follow-up.

It's with no sense of small wonder, then, that I'm currently listening to Parallax Error Beheads You, the forthcoming third album from the tiny Londoner. The 10-song set —whose photographer's-injoke title evokes, for me, Alan Pakula's prescient mid-'70s paranoia thriller The Parallax View— is a lurid collection of hyperactive pop-songs on which Jacobs draws influence from Frank Zappa, Prince, and old-school computer-programming. Suggestive of its long, troubled gestation, it turns out to be a lyrical study in mortality, climaxing in a frenetic, autobiographical, guitar-solo-ing 11-minute opus named, no less, "Until We Die."

The folk at Domino, positively kvelling with marketing pride, are serving up a steaming-hot special-edition of Parallax Error Beheads You. Inspired by the line "a pint of chicken soup comes falling from my eye" from one of the many death-centric odes herein, "Number Our Days," they've cooked up one cockeyed idea: the 'kosher' format.

Thus, a limited edition 'soup can' version of the album will be released. By which I mean: an actual soup can. In some sort of inversion of Warhol, Max Tundra presents you not with a representation of the object, but the object itself; Domino offering a Tundra-themed can of heat-at-home Kosher Chicken nosh that comes replete with download-codes for the songs. The album will be unveiled, in both broth and non-broth versions, at various points of the remaining ought-eight around the world (October 11 in Australia, the 20th in the UK, sometime mid-November in the USA).

Parallax Error Beheads You Track List
1. "Gun Chimes"
2. "Will Get Fooled Again"
3. "Which Song"
4. "My Night Out"
5. "Orphaned"
6. "Nord Lead Three"
7. "The Entertainment"
8. "Number Our Days"
9. "Glycaemic Index Blues"
10. "Until We Die"

Mogwai are a curious musical proposition: talkative off the pitch, traps shut on it. Those kings of post-rock favor an intense instrumentalism that, when played on stage, rarely finds them saying a word. On albums, guest vocalists have popped up on occasion, but for the most part the Scottish quintet have displayed a considerable consistency: they play music, not sing songs.

Yet, away from their brooding, epic, wordless works, Mogwai have earnt a reputation for being needling pranksters, publicly ranting about such dubious cultural institutions as Blur, Test Icicles, and Pitchfork Media. Not to mention the comedy that comes from naming their subject-free songs things like "I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead," "I Am Not Batman," and "Punk Rock/Puff Daddy/Antichrist."

Before this weekend's All Tomorrow's Parties festival in New York —which will find Mogwai playing at the same jamboree as their heroes, recently-reunited shoegaze originators My Bloody Valentine— I spoke to Mogwai founding father Stuart Braithwaite. Across the course of our conversation, he shared such sage wisdoms as: "A lot of people who write instrumental music, if they were being honest, would have to say their music wasn’t actually about anything. But a lot of people lie!"

The chit-chat comes in anticipation of the next-Tuesday release of Mogwai's sixth studio album, The Hawk Is Howling, by the morally-upright upright mammals of the Matador Records clan. Thanks to said label, curious listeners can try before they buy, too, with a compressed audio file of the surprisingly bubbly "The Sun Smells Too Loud" being blithely bandied about. So, stick a sock in it and soak it up.

Photo © [Steve Gullick]

Justin Vernon —the bearded, blue-eyed-soul balladeer whose bruised tunes trade under the faux-French moniker Bon Iver— has had a year of much unexpected success. Buoyed by the impossibly-romantic making-of back-story behind his Bon Iver debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, Vernon has struck a note with critics and audiences both, and looks likely to be a fixture of many a 2008 Best-of countdown.

Having broken up with both band and girlfriend in North Carolina, Vernon returns home to the woods of Wisconsin, lives off the land in a snowbound log cabin, and pours out his heartache onto rolling tape. Over the course of one snowy winter, Vernon becomes a new millennial Thoreau, a manly minstrel able to shoot deer, chop wood, and gently strum a guitar with the one set of hands.

Continuing his infiltration of the most overground of pop-cultural institutions, Vernon and his on-the-road Bon Iver band recently recorded a live 'session' for Rupert Murdoch's ever-popular social-networking/data-mining internet behemoth, MySpace. At the website's Transmissions hub, there's both video of Vernon being interviewed —recounting, oncemore, that much-loved tale of how he spent his "wilderness time"— and of the band playing the songs.

Less fleetingly, there's also the please-thieve .zip of the session's four-songs here, meaning you can bypass the whole MySpace machinery, and just treat it as some free virtual EP, with permanent playback of every croaked falsetto note that pours forth from Vernon's throat.

Oh, and PS: That whole unending Bon Iver world tour he started in July still hasn't ended.

Photo © [Sarah Cass]

To begin this all too neatly: Portland's Parenthetical Girls sound like a marriage between the neo-pop orchestrations of Final Fantasy and the sexually-ambiguous audio perversions of Xiu Xiu. Over the years, forever-warbling frontman Zac Pennington has slowly turned his project into a wholly-orchestral outfit, assembling a crew of classically-trained, multi-instrumentalist, string-playing types to help him author his ditzy symphonies.

Their latest longplayer, Entanglements, is released today on hipster German imprint Tomlab. And with nary a hint of reservation I can proudly proclaim it one of 2008's most charmed and charming albums, destined for a position near the pinnacle of many a best-of list come year's end.

In digging for dirt on the genesis of this genius compact-disc, it was only natural to turn to the man who stands out front of these Parenthetical Girls. The resulting conversation, with Pennington, makes for the rollicking read, no?

Photo © [Sarah Meadows]

Death Vessel sounds like the name of a marauding metal combo. And, given the flowing mane of DV main-man Joel Thibodeau, immediate metal misconceptions are given a vote of tonsorial confidence. But even the briefest of listens to Death Vessel reveals something most un-metal.

Thibodeau plays gentle, folksy songs, preferring a more delicate aesthetic than turning things up to 11. And the tiny man with the big hair has one distinctive musical quirk: his voice. Going above and beyond even Geddy Lee's dreams, Thibodeau sings in a high, clear, choirboy's voice, getting routinely mistaken for a girl.

Sub Pop recently released Thibodeau's second Death Vessel album, Nothing is Precious Enough for Us, and the songsmith is currently in the midst of run of North American shows in support of it. Before he set out a ramblin' on the road, I spoke to Thibodeau about life as Death Vessel, his new disc, and, of course, his ultra-unique voice.

Photo © [Lisa Corson]