Folk – Page 4 – Audiofemme

LIVE REVIEW: Cass McCombs @ Music Hall of Williamsburg

New York City and nomadic guitar-man and songwriter Cass McCombs may seem mutually exclusive, but in fact, he used to live here, sometime between stints in Concord, California (his hometown), Baltimore and San Francisco. Throughout a seven-album-long career, McCombs has never settled. To listen to his songs, you might imagine him passing through somewhere rural and wide open, maybe in the West: a travelling performer with a pickup truck, a guitar, and not much else. You might conjure up images of McCombs as one of the last of the Dylan-esque romantic nomads, who spill out the contents of their hearts in their songwriting but, in life, choose the company of the open road to that of people.

Last October, McCombs put out his beautiful–if extremely long–double album Big Wheel and Others. Most of the songs off that release carried with them McCombs’ signature cyclical guitar strumming, touched with world-weary loneliness but also, more memorably, a spacey hypnosis that always draws attention to the small movements that take place in mostly-still spaces. His songs sound the way it feels to watch a sluggish breeze flicker through dry grass along a highway where no cars come. It’s like watching a deer that doesn’t know it’s being watched. The songs tune you into their rhythms, and it comes as a surprise when the music stops, and though you haven’t felt like you’ve been on a journey, you’re far from where you started.

It’s weird that the image of Cass McCombs so strongly evokes so many different images, because on stage at the Music Hall of Williamsburg last Thursday evening, he barely said a word. McCombs–along with Jon Shaw on the bass and Dan “Buddy” on guitar, who flanked McCombs on the left and right and could have been his brothers, with matching wavy hair, rumpled button-downs, and longs of closed-eyed reverential concentration as they nodded along to the immortal groove–was silent but by no means unfriendly. At one point, he paused to smile into the microphone.

Rhythm, looped guitar lines, and narrative-heavy lyrics were the main ingredients of McCombs’ performance on Thursday, which consisted mainly of songs off the new album. There were some exceptions– “Lionkiller Got Married,” off 2009’s Catacombs album, was a crowd favorite for what seemed to be an audience of mostly long-standing fans, who seemed especially enthusiastic for older material, though they gamely whooped for songs off of Big Wheel, too.

McCombs’ light installation–a row of twinkling panels that spanned across the stage, silhouetting the musicians–adds so much character to his performances that it seems almost like a fifth band member. The Yellow Book Strangers, a pair of light designers, built the installation for a tour in 2011. Shadowed in the yellow glow, McCombs bobbed back and forth between his loop pedals and the microphone, showing the rhythms due diligence. He looked suspended between being in spotlight and being obscured from view. This is a natural space for McCombs–it’s been his sweet spot as a performer for years, and at this show, he seemed totally in his element. The lights twinkled behind him, resembling the Manhattan skyline and a starry country sky in equal measure.

Here’s “Brighter!” off the Big Wheel album. Cass McCombs performed this song at the show on Thursday, and it was a sweet, and uncharacteristically simple, highlight of the performance.

VIDEO REVIEW: Cass McCombs “Unearthed”

The contents of Cass McCombs‘ long and winding double album Big Wheel and Others fall into one of two categories. About half are capital-s Songs, with verses and choruses, beginnings, middles, and ends. The rest of the collection expands, with mesmerizing slowness, to fill less rigidly constructed boundaries. These are not tracks, they’re drive-by moments that feel like scenes instead of performances, as if their gently cycling vocals and accompanying acoustic guitar lines had always been going on, and snippets of it happened to be recorded and tossed together into a collection. “Unearthed” falls into the second category

The video for the song consists of just two images–a wintery mountain scene and a climber crouching on his stomach in the snow–and for much of the song the shots stay so still that they could easily be pictures instead of film. Like the song, the video focuses on the small changes that take place in a mostly-empty environment, drawing focus to little shifts like the soft billowing of a cloud or small changes in the mountaineer’s gaze up the mountain.

Cass McCombs will bring his stark brand of musical hypnosis to the Music Hall of Williamsburg tonight, with Endless Boogie. Check back for my coverage of the show, but don’t stop there–you can still grab your tickets by going here. Watch the video for “Unearthed” below!

Unearthed by Cass McCombs from Eric Fensler on Vimeo.

ALBUM REVIEW: Melaena Cadiz “Deep Below Heaven”

Brooklyn-based singer songwriter Melaena Cadiz is a a great storyteller. This Michican native combines folk, country, and pop in her music to create scenes which showcase lonely lives across America. Her new album Deep Below Heaven, out May 20th, is what Cadiz calls a book of short stories. The title comes from a Sam Shepard story about a man who has the sense of being deep below heaven when he falls off of his motorcycle during an accident. Cadiz’s own collection of stories chronicles Americans who are all struggling in their own universe, but united in that space deep below.

Cadiz has a great voice, eloquent and elucidated. Though she tries to lend each of her characters the emotion and energy they deserve, she can come off as almost too cerebral, lacking a bit of soul. But a strong sense of wanderlust is palpable in the music, a good reflection of the words. These characters are all “striving for a better place in the world” or a way to “quiet the deep ache within their bones.” They attempt to find an escape from their inner demons, wandering around, searching, but not finding any true release. Everyone is in transit on this record, physically or mentally. The track “Home Town” is great example of this movement. It’s a very personal account of someone who feels alienated instead of comfortable in their home, someone who decides to travel West, and the catchy tune mimics the gusto with which someone might attempt such a feat.

At times, Cadiz falls into a more pop-oriented indie vibe, which can feel out of place. But for the most part, her voice and lyrics keep it all from becoming too generic or one-note. In the same way that she explores different people and parts of America, the music moves between genres. There’s the occasional rasping trumpet. Sometimes there’s a simple, classic country feel and Cadiz’s voice has the timeless echoes of Tammy Wynette. But other times it bursts with modern undertones, reaching toward something more thumping and lively like KT Tunstall. Her strong references to Americana roots haven’t appeared so dramatically on the indie scene since Saddle Creek’s days of shelling Bright Eyes or Rilo Kiley releases. Cadiz, however, is perhaps a bit too ambitious. She has wonderful, engaging ideas, but she fails to capture them in their entirety, especially in the music, and she doesn’t completely own them or make them fully hers. But ultimately this is a fun, thoughtful ride.

Listen to “Hometown” below and check out the rest of Deep Below Heaven May 20th!

TRACK REVIEW: Amen Dunes “Lonely Richard”

In 2006, during the Northeast’s creepiest and most beautiful time of year–fall–Damon McMahon started recording his tightly knotted, introspective guitar melodies in the Catskills, never intending them for public consumption. Thus Amen Dunes was born, and thus–essentially–it remains: the music is simple, lonesome and woodsy, with a healthy dose of the otherworldly-creepy sensation you get from spending a lot of time alone with the Hudson Valley’s sinisterly beautiful landscape.

“Lonely Richard,” off the forthcoming album Love (out 5/13 on Sacred Bones) illustrates McMahon’s penchant for interiority–his voice, small-sounding and thick with melancholy, takes a back seat to the guitars, which screech and whine and slide all over this track. There’s a folky simplicity at the heart of it, but much more immediate is the drone of the instrumentals–how the guitar lines repeat and loop over themselves, how the strings maintain such a constant pitch that they lose form by the end of the song, assuming an atmospheric presence that evokes wind, or clouds, or something else just as environmental. The track builds low and slow, then fades away just as subtly. It’s sort of an anti-social number, but the simple chord structure underlying it keeps “Lonely Richard” from being unfriendly.

In typical fashion, Amen Dunes have released a single that reveals practically nothing about the album to come–the track wouldn’t be gripping enough to save a lethargic album or to temper an overly sweet one, but by itself, “Lonely Richard” has a deceptively compelling low-grade catchiness that will, if nothing else, awaken your curiosity. Wet your whistle with “Lonely Richard,” via Soundcloud:

INTERVIEW: Juana Molina

Juana Molina’s music has an associative, evocative magic usually reserved for smells: it can time-travel you to different seasons, countries, and decades. She chooses rhythms over images, harmonies over words, and the spooky beauty of her albums etches out a world that feels familiar but that is usually only accessible through the subconscious. To call it electronic folk minimizes its strangeness. Molina’s records are feats of editing, but it’s difficult to consider them clinically as you’re mid-listen. That’s because each track is a fully-formed world, with not just characters and scenery but also laws of physics and tidal patterns of its own.

In the mid-nineties, Molina was a successful Argentinian television comedian with a hit sketch show called Juana y sus Hermanas. Her decision to begin making records in 1996 was unpopular amongst her fan base, who figured the music for a vanity project and refused to come see her perform. Outside Argentina, Molina’s recognition has come almost exclusively from her musical career for years, but within her home country, her sixth and latest release Wed 21 marks a milestone. It’s her most overtly danceable record to date, and also her most extroverted. Argentinian audiences have responded in kind, showing up for shows in unprecedentedly large, enthusiastic numbers. That Molina’s audience and her new record share a common mood–buoyant, joyful, and ready to be transported into the little world created by her harmonies–is no coincidence. Just as she tightly stitches her loops and melodies together without leaving a trace of their seams, Molina approaches each new record with her audience in the back of her mind. As the audience grows, the music gains momentum.

I called Juana Molina up last week to talk about Wed 21, her changing audience, and her intricate, solitary recording process. Molina spent her childhood in France and is trilingual, and she told me that the title can be pronounced three ways–she says the number twenty-one in Spanish, English, or French, depending on who she’s speaking to. Words have never meant much to Molina, but the way people experience her music always has, and so it’s fitting that Wed 21 holds different nuances in different ears. Read on for more:

AudioFemme: So, Wed 21 has been out for a little while. How has it been having it out there in the world?

Juana Molina: Well, we should ask the people, but I think it’s going well. I’m very happy with the response I’ve known about. I think it’s a very happy record somehow, without being too light. I don’t have–well, I shouldn’t say that, I do have preferences for my records–but I didn’t know that this one was going to be so well-received.

AF: Is this your favorite record that you’ve made?

JM: No, my favorite record is always the first one that I produced myself [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][Segundo], because I think that that record, which I made in’98, kind of set the course for the path I was going to take. It’s like the seeds for every record I’ve made since.

AF: Did you know how you wanted it to turn out when you started making it?

JM: No, not at all. I wasn’t even thinking about making a record. We had just moved to Los Angeles at the time, and I had a few things recorded from earlier, I think from ’97. So I bought a computer and I was trying to understand how it worked. After a few months, or maybe more, I had something that I thought was a demo. I thought I would record the songs again later, in a real studio. I didn’t realize that all the takes, everything I’d done, would be impossible to repeat with the same freshness. So I decided to use it as a record, even though the quality of the recording wasn’t excellent. There’s lots of haze–things producers would hate–but I took as more important the feel and intention of the moment that I made it. And I think that’s why I love it so much. I had done a previous record, three years before that, but that record [Rara] doesn’t really belong to me, because a producer took charge of the sound. And I think he did a very good job, especially because I didn’t know how to transmit what I wanted to do. It was a time when everybody thought you needed a producer to make a record, that it wasn’t possible to make one on your own, but then the sound of the record doesn’t really represent what I do. So that’s why I consider Segundo my first real record.

AF: Has your songwriting process remained the same since your first records?

JM: I think what’s the same about it is the fact that I get taken, absorbed–I can’t quite think of the word–by what I’m doing in a certain moment. I just start playing, and some things I record just take me somewhere else. Somewhere else totally. I am not in a room recording with a guitar, I am somewhere else. When that happens, I start working on whatever it was that absorbed me. Now, I also think about the listeners, which I didn’t do before. Somehow, unconsciously, the public and the audience is present. I can’t get rid of that presence. They exist. They didn’t exist when I was recording Segundo. They have started to exist since. When I have this thing that comes and takes me, it’s like I’m absorbed and totally taken into this new world, and I think that can happen also to other people, too. I know I’ve said this many times, but when [I get absorbed into this world,] thought and thinking disappear. You have the feeling of things coming to you, like animals coming to Snow White. It’s a very special moment and I love it when it happens; I think that when that happens you have found a truth.

AF: Is there anything except for songwriting and recording that makes you feel that way? Can you decide to get absorbed into that other world, or does it always happen by accident?

JM: No, it is absolutely impossible to determine how to get there. You can’t say, okay, today I’m going to get into the right mood to record. Once I’ve started making a record, I keep being in that mood because I keep working every day. I need space and time to dive in, like a tunnel. If I’m not playing, I don’t get into that mood. If I’m traveling, say, touring, I’m only playing the shows. It’s rare that I would play somewhere else than the shows. Sometimes I get ideas during soundcheck. I get a bit of a feeling–I wish I were home, so I could work on this–and I record it somehow, but I usually can’t really use it afterwards. I can’t get back to the same idea. But occasionally there are a few songs, “Bicho Auto,” for instance. That song was created (to use a big word) in soundcheck.

AF: You’ve said before that lyrics come last for you. I don’t speak Spanish, so I can’t understand most of your lyrics, but I’ve always thought the way the words sound is a huge part of your music. Is rhythm the thing you think about most when you’re coming up with lyrics?

JM: Absolutely. The thing is that I think lyrics are the disguise for the true melody. I make the lyrics totally fit into the melody that was there before. Lyrics have to respect–or, to submit to the melody’s desires. Sometimes I need to change letters around, because it’s not always you can find words that fit your melody, but in general they’re pretty similar to the original. That’s why they sound so organic in the song–because they were there from the beginning, even though I write them after I’ve finished the last beat of the last little note of the song.

AF: Why do you occasionally sing in English?

JM: Very occasionally. On the first track [“Eras”] I sing in English because that’s someone else saying that to me [The lyric is “Come, come quickly.”]. That person spoke English in the story. It’s not me talking, it’s the other person talking. And then…when I moved to Los Angeles in the late nineties I wrote “The Wrong Song,” in Segundo. It was a strange track because it was in English. The English is really wrong, that’s why it’s called “The Wrong Song.” Even though I speak English, I am in Spanish. I could do it in French and I actually have done it, because I lived in France when I was a little girl, so French is really my second language, and English is still a borrowed language. I can use words but they aren’t my own words. I sometimes don’t know if I should write in English or not. I have a very good friend, a musician, she’s from Canada. She told me once, “Listen, we’ve been listening to your music for so long. The least you can do is write us a song in English.” If I see it from that point of view, I thought it was a nice idea. So I wrote a song in English, but I didn’t dare to publish it. It feels weird [to sing in English], and I can’t really be singing if I need to think about the pronunciation. I wish I could do it. I think it would be a good thing to do. But I can’t.

AF: Four years passed between your last record (Un Dia) and this one. Why such a long break?

JM: I don’t know what happened. Just life. Love and despair. Sadness. These kinds of things get me away from recording. Then last year I thought, Oh my God, it’s been four years, and I really, really didn’t feel that four years had passed. So I started to work. I forced myself, I needed to make a record now. I started working on nothing. I just really wanted to have a record out.

AF: Do you find that your records reflect your personal life?

JM: I wonder. I don’t know.

AF: You were talking about sadness, but as you said earlier, this record is pretty joyous.

JM: Maybe I was happy because I had gone away from those feelings, and because I was making a record again. But also, playing live has changed the way I write. When you’re on stage in a standing venue and you play very mellow songs, people get a little disturbed. They need something that takes them. I’ve discovered that I really love playing standing venues more than anything else. There’s an energy there that comes from people standing. If they’re dancing, and moving, we’re all going to the same place together. Sitting venues, even if people are really enjoying the show, I need to drag them a little bit. That’s why, when a tour is coming, I beg the booking agents to put me in standing venues.

AF: And you took all that into account while writing the songs on this album?

JM: Yeah. The possibility of there being a show influences me to do something different. Also, the audience itself has changed a lot. It’s like a party when I play, especially here [Argentina]. And I’m so happy, because that didn’t happen for years.

AF: Are you becoming more well-known for your singing, as opposed to acting, in Argentina?

JM: Yes, but it took a long time. People just didn’t like that I changed careers. Press was pretty mean, and absolutely ignored all the work I was doing, as a punishment. I kind of understand, it’s not that I am resentful. I was really popular making comedy, and people don’t want you to change. People just didn’t come to my shows because they thought that, because I was an actress, what I was doing was shit. But in the past five or six years, that has changed completely. Over the years I have built a completely new audience with completely different people, and only a few are fans of both things.

AF: Would you consider doing both comedy and music?

JM: No. I did, but it was a mistake. It’s such a different mood, to make someone laugh or to make someone listen–or dance. A completely different activity. I was so vulnerable when I started to play music, because while I was acting I was impersonating a huge number of characters and making fun of them all, so nothing could hurt me because it wasn’t myself I was being. I was someone else. Being someone else allows you to act and react in a completely different way. Playing music, it’s exactly the opposite. That’s why I think they’re absolutely incompatible.

AF: Even though you’re more vulnerable, music is more rewarding?

JM: Yes, because the whole point is not to be strong. I’d rather die–we have a saying, “to die with your boots on.” You’d rather die in war than be hidden away in your house. Meaning: you’re a real soldier.

Visit Molina on Facebook, and get your copy of Wed 21 here! Check out the music video for “Eras,” off the new album, below:
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ALBUM REVIEW: crash “Hardly Criminal”

Awww yeah.

That’s my initial and abiding reaction to “Motion Animal,” the first single off Chris Richard aka crash‘s solo debut, Hardly Criminal. Crash, backup singer for the Magnetic Zeros and frontman for Deadly Syndrome, finally gets to spotlight his tenor at its sultry finest on this dressed-down soul track, and the motown gods are surely pleased.

Anyone familiar with the singer’s work would be surprised to see him stick fully in one genre for a full album, though, and Hardly Criminal expands satisfyingly from soul outward. Crash grew up in Louisiana, imbibing a country-fied blend of Americana, folk, and New Orleans street-performer blues, and he can do all those styles with equally endearing swagger. “Motion Animal” comes two tracks in and holds its title as the catchiest number through the end of this record, but we hear plenty of that danceability on the down-homier “If God Was A Cajun” and the string-happy “All My Friends.” What’s especially impressive about Hardly Criminal, though, is how well crash pulls off the slower, sweeter stuff. On the succinct “Song For The Birds,” crash keeps his oddball charm in the lyrics (“Was feeding you worms/but I forgot that you don’t eat them”) but strums introspective layers of round-like, repetitive acoustic guitar, angling his voice away from soul flourish and towards a simpler, more vulnerable croon. “Britches Catch Fire,” one of the album’s most impressive demonstrations of crash’s sheer power to sustain a high note, hints at gospel in the harmonies. His versatility looms large, and surprises again and again on this record.

All told, the quieter tracks add up to a majority of Hardly Criminal, and I would have liked to see the album filled out with a couple more swingers – “Motion Animal” left me jonesing for more groove – but both in terms of songwriting and vocals, crash skillfully pulls off every style he ambles into on this collection. No matter the flavor, every single track on Hardly Criminal is worth a replay. This cat is it.

Hardly Criminal drops May 6th. You can preorder it here, and check the “Motion Animal” music video below for a soulful blast of groovy get-down:

INTERVIEW: Willie Watson

Willie Watson recorded his debut solo effort, the straightforwardly-titled Folk Singer Vol. 1, over the course of two days at Woodland Sound Studios, the studio owned by Gillian Welch in Nashville, TN. In those sessions, he played whichever songs came to mind: the collection features some well-known numbers like “Midnight Special,” along with rarer inclusions such as “Kitty Puss” and “Mexican Cowboy.” The track list has sprawling origins, spanning blues, folk, and rock and roll as well as decades. Collaged together by producer David Rawlings, Folk Singer ambles through its ten tracks with the lowlight unadornedness of a late-night impromptu performance.

And in a way, it is. When Watson split from Old Crow Medicine Show, which he’d co-founded and been part of for a decade and a half, he wasn’t sure where he would end up next. Though he didn’t start out with the goal of making a record of traditional songs, it does seem like kind of a neat return to basics: after a long run with a band that helped define contemporary folk music, Watson’s solo career so far has been an opportunity to revel in the old songs that made him love old-time folk music in the first place.

A couple weeks ago, I got a chance to chat with Watson about his new album, the traditional songs on it, and how he came to love old-time music. Read on for more:

AF: What made you decide to put out a solo album after you left Old Crow, as opposed to forming another band?

WW: You know, it just sort of happened that way. I’ve been singing old songs–folk songs, traditional songs, whatever you wanna call them–for years. Once I was on my own, I wasn’t sure what my next move was–if I was going to have another band, or try to write a bunch of songs. At first, I did start writing songs, but I don’t think I was satisfied with what I was writing. I was starting to do some solo shows, and I had a few songs I’d written, and I would do a mix of those with old traditional songs, at those early shows. I was a lot happier doing those old folk songs, and I think the crowd was a lot happier, too. I thought those were great songs that people should be hearing, and that I wanted to be singing.

AF: You’re in a position to introduce listeners to those old songs for the first time, in many cases. How cool is that?

WW: Totally cool, and I’m happy if I can be that guy. Alternately, if they heard where they came from, they might not want to listen to me anymore. I would much rather put on Leadbelly singing “Midnight Special” than listen to me. It’s surprising, a lot of people might not even realize that these are old songs. I think if they have the record, Folk Singer, and they read the reviews and write-ups, they’ll get it–but I’ve played shows and had people think I wrote all those songs.

AF: You grew up in upstate New York, right? What was the musical community like there?

WW: Around Ithaca and Tompkins County–which is right next to Schuyler County, where I’m from–there’s a lot of old-time fiddle music. There was a banjo player named Richie Stearns and all those guys from Donna The Buffalo, they’re old-time players. There would be a weekly old-time jam every week up there. So I was exposed to that first hand, being around the scene and the music every week. Richie Stearns had a band called The Horse Flies, and they were a mix of old-time fiddle music with eighties pop. They had a drum set and they all plugged in, and Richie Stearns was playing clawhammer banjo. Judy Hyman played the fiddle and would dance around the stage, doing this headbang-y thing with her eyes rolling back in her head. I was about thirteen, and I would see this stuff and thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. It was dance music, and it really moved me in a big way. That was my introduction to old-time music. I knew it wasn’t bluegrass, this old-timey thing The Horse Flies were doing. It was something a little bit different, and it really stood out. I was already listening to Neil Young and Bob Dylan. Of course, at the same time I was also listening to Nirvana, too. They did that Unplugged thing, where he sings the Leadbelly song [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][“In The Pines/Where Did You Sleep Last Night”]. I knew my dad had a Leadbelly record in the basement, and I went and got it out. Really, that changed everything for me right there. It was all coming together at the same time.

AF: Were there other kids excited by old-time and interested in playing it?

WW: Yeah. I started a band pretty quick. A lot of the old-time players had kids my age, so they all had guitars. We started a band called The Funnest Game that was kind of the same thing–clawhammer banjo, electric guitar, drums. People liked that we were young and we were playing this stuff, so we started playing shows at clubs when we were about fifteen or sixteen. And they’d pay us. Which was nice! It was like, “Holy cow! This could be a job?!” So I quickly dropped out of high school when I was sixteen.

AF: Did you meet up with Old Crow Medicine Show pretty quickly after that?

WW: It was a few years. I had that first band, and then Ketch [Secor] moved to Ithaca when…I must’ve been seventeen or eighteen. Richie Stearns knew Ketch from the festival scene and he introduced us. Ketch moved up [to Ithaca] and then Critter [Fuqua] moved up a bit later. When The Funnest Game was about to break up, Ketch and Critter’s band had just broken up. They opened together for The Funnest Game and sang together, harmonized, did their duo thing. I was floored. As soon as they started singing, I immediately really badly wanted to sing with them. And so we made that happen.

AF: Looking back on it now, how do you feel about having been a part of that band?

WW: What can I say? It was everything to me, to us. That band was my whole life for almost fifteen years. I wouldn’t change anything. We just kind of grew apart. In the early days we played a lot of old music and not as many songs, although we were always writing. I don’t have any regrets, but I’m really happy that I’m where I’m at now. I’m playing the music I want to play, and it’s real simple, and I don’t have a big light show–I’m in a good place with that.

AF: Let’s talk about how Folk Singer became the collection that it is. Can you tell me the story of how one or two of the songs came to be included on the album?

WW: Anything in particular?

AF: How about ‘James Alley Blues?’

WW: Okay, yeah. That’s a Richard “Rabbit” Brown song, and I don’t know too much of what he’s done, I just know that song, and also he does this great version of the Titanic story. He definitely plays ‘James Alley Blues’ different [than I do], it’s more bluesy, and he’s got all that finger picking guitar stuff. I heard it and I knew my voice would be right for it, but I had to find a different way to play guitar, because I don’t really play blues like that. That open-tuning blues stuff. I knew I really wanted to do that song because it really reached out to me. I related to what he was saying, and what the song was about really hit home for me. So I just had to find a different way to play guitar, you know, find a way that the song could come out of me.

AF: Were there any notable exclusions? Songs you were sure you wanted on the album, but that ultimately didn’t wind up making it?

WW: We recorded over twenty five songs for this album. There’s still a whole bunch of stuff in the can. That’s where Dave [Rawlings] comes in. The idea was just to get in there and sing whatever was rolling around in my head. I had a little list of songs. Then Dave would say, “Okay, that’s great, but do you have anything in the key of C?” Some songs were totally off the cuff, and yeah, some songs didn’t make the cut. Like “Kitty Puss,” that song wasn’t supposed to be on there. When I flew to Nashville to record the sessions, I was listening to that on the plane before I landed. I’d never played it before. I got into the studio and they were adjusting the sound, and the guy was like, “play something,” so I just played “Kitty Puss.” That was the first time I played the song, so I remembered what words I could. I kinda rearranged the words, I think, just because I didn’t know exactly how the guy did it on the record. He recorded in the early twenties, before there were electronic microphones. Back then they were literally singing into a funnel. It was just him and a banjo, and he’d sing a lot of children’s songs and novelty songs. I’d been listening to it for a while. I didn’t expect it to be on the record, it just came out really good.

A great big thank you to Willie Watson for talking to us! Folk Singer Vol. 1 will be out on May 6th, and you can pre-order your digital or physical copy here. Watch Watson perform the first track, the classic “Midnight Special,” below:
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ALBUM REVIEW: Nathaniel Rateliff “Falling Faster Than You Can Run”

At eighteen, Nathaniel Rateliff moved from his hometown of Bay, Missouri, population 60, to Denver. He focused first on finding work, but after a mysterious bout of health issues forced him to take a break from his job at a trucking company, he slid into the indie folk scene sideways, quickly becoming a local darling of Americana and indie folk. American music, as Rateliff knows, comes from a patchwork of styles, half accidentally thrown together, half borne of different kinds of musicians playing together. Rateliff’s path into music reflected some approximation of this same amalgamation. He’s played in a number of groups, including folky rock group Born In The Flood and his more recent soul project The Night Sweats, and he released an early, homemade batch of recordings as Nathaniel Rateliff and The Wheel. Monikers and fluctuations of style notwithstanding, though, Rateliff is recognizable in any project he lays hands on, and that’s all due to the reedy, pulse-happy rhythms of his singing.

On his second full-length solo album, Falling Faster Than You Can Run, Rateliff takes us further down the direction of interior, quietly catchy songwriting he established on his Rounder Records debut In Memory of Loss, which came out in 2010. The two albums also share a penchant for bleakness. The acoustic spaciousness of the tracks on Falling Faster highlight Rateliff’s voice, and that voice often sounds pretty sorrowful: sharp, emotional volume spikes on the choruses make each song into a miniature nervous breakdown, with plenty of room for wallowing in the acoustic guitar line. Many of the tracks were written on the road, when Rateliff was touring, and you get a real sense of nomadic loneliness listening to this collection. The lyrics are songwriter-intimate but bear far remove, as if the songs look down at their subjects from thirty thousand feet.

Falling Faster‘s best lyrical moments come when Rateliff reveals the cheekier side of his charm, as is the case on the comparatively bouncy and lighthearted “Laborman” (“I’m begging your pardon if I kinda like the way it feels,” Rateliff sings, and you can practically hear him smirking into the microphone.) Those moments of sunniness serve the album well, and a few more would have not only expanded Falling Faster‘s range, but placed well-deserved focus on the gorgeous flexibility of Rateliff’s voice.

Watch the official video for “Still Trying,” off forthcoming album Falling Faster Than You Can Run, below:

ALBUM REVIEW: Barzin “To Live Alone In That Long Summer”

Though his songwriting dwells in intimately confessional territory, Canadian singer/songwriter Barzin Hosseini himself is a pretty enigmatic figure. Publicly, he appears as Barzin or Barzin H, with little biographical detail apart from what’s in in his songs. His presence as a songwriter, though, displays a poetics-heavy musical sensibility, with spotlight awarded to lyrical rhythms and manipulations. Instrumental lines—melancholic and cyclical—take their cues from the themes the words set in motion. “In this place, I’m loyal to memory,” Barzin sings in the fourth, and most urgent, track on his new album, To Live Alone In That Long Summer, “Stealing Beauty.” “You look inside houses to see how others live/ and you make the same mistakes, the knowledge comes too late.” Guitars dust pretty arpeggios over the track, always in support of the vocals.

If Barzin’s last release, 2009’s Notes To An Absent Lover, was a breakup album, To Live Alone deals with the reorganization of life after that breakup. The song collection plods through the process of re-learning how to live alone, and to that end, Barzin first envisioned an instrumentally minimalist album. That idea adapted, as his project took shape, to include input from a slew of musician friends. Bolstered by backup vocals from Tony Dekker, Daniela Gesundheit, and Tamara Lindeman, To Live Alone—while circling lyrical themes of isolation and loneliness—is Barzin’s most inclusive record.

Since its inception as Hosseini’s solo act in 1995, the project has regularly expanded to incorporate an array of musicians. Despite all those additions, alterations, and guest appearances, the group’s musical foundation hasn’t changed much. Although additional musicians make for a more filled-out record, you can hear the minimalist impulses behind Hosseini’s voice no matter how many people he’s playing alongside, and the melancholic lyrics and matching sad music that are the new record’s signature have been key to Barzin’s work from the beginning. It’s no surprise that, by now, Hosseini has mastered the turf. He’s able to more or less eschew over-sentimentality on this record, which is a feat considering how introspective and nostalgic the songs unfailingly are. That’s because, as much as To Live Alone becomes engrossed in remembrance, the album details an obsession with deliberate forward motion. Like stacking building blocks, the tracks take us through the work of building (or re-building) a life, and the anxiety of not being able to figure out how other people have successfully done so.

The record shows growth for Barzin in a few different categories—instrumentally, there’s a bit more dynamic range than on previous releases—but not as much as you might imagine, given that the outfit’s been around for almost twenty years, and that their last album came out way back in 2009. The guitar lines, though clean, are extremely repetitive—sometimes frustratingly so—and the songs’ build-ups come very subtly, with faint pay-off. The forward momentum of To Live Alone‘s moving-on idea is its most interesting component, and the biggest source of progression over the duration of the album.

To Live Alone In That Long Summer is out February 25th via Monotreme Records. Pre-order it here. Or, for a taste of the new album, listen to the first track “All The While” below via Soundcloud:

ALBUM REVIEW + ARTIST PROFILE: New Bums

Although Ben Chasny and Donovan Quinn’s initial dislike for each other when they met, a few years ago, was personal–not musical–it’s tempting to talk about, because their work together now is so dependent on their bond. They always liked each other’s music (Quinn released albums with Skygreen Leopards, Chasny with Six Organs of Admittance, Rangda, and Comets on fire, to name a few). When the pair formed New Bums, they entered into a collaboration that uniquely fused each member’s skill set into a partnership that couldn’t be broken in half. On their debut album together, Voices in a Rented Room, the group wears its intent on its sleeve: Quinn’s trademark folky lyric imagery seems to be emitting simultaneously and from the same point of origin as Chasny’s delicate instrumental ramblings.

The low-lit, husky vocals of the first song on Voices, “Black Bough,” immediately conjures a backdrop of moodiness and melancholy, and that aura stays strong throughout the album’s twelve tracks. Acoustic guitar-based melodies, bearing tight-knit likenesses to their lyrical counterparts, emerge over this backdrop, waxing and waning as the songs wear on. It’s dark, sparsely-laid stuff, with lots of chilly backup oohs and ahhs, that also brings some catchy phrasings–like the ones on “The Killers and Me”–that have kind of an old-time cowpoke feel. “The longest train I ever saw..” one line begins on “Town on the Water,” in un-showy evocation of the traditional–and great–“In The Pines.” In other spots, too, New Bums tip a quiet salute to Old, Weird America with ragged vocals and guitars that trill like mandolins. The band side-steps a direct descendant-ness from American folk, though, with switched-up rhythmic weight and a modern approach to lyrical metaphor. Though the music emerges from a couple different songwriting traditions, New Bums’ tracks are too interior, and too personally crafted, to really resemble anything but themselves. The influences are visible, but none will smack you over the head.

Separately, Chasny and Quinn have been associated with the new folk and acoustic-leaning psychedelic schools of music-making. This project’s most apparent deviation from their other lives as musicians is how dialed down the impulse to push into new, extreme turf feels on Voices. The music demands attention the way a whisper makes you quiet down to hear it. “I don’t know if anyone will notice it or care about it, but I like it because it’s sweet,” Quinn told AudioFemme last week, explaining “Town on the Water” is one of his favorite tracks off the new album. A lot of the songs on Voices, sweet or not, are like that, quiet enough to slip by unnoticed. Whether sighing like a woodsier, and slightly less devastated, Elliott Smith on “Mother’s Favorite Hated Son” or tracing the feathery, high-register melodies of “Black Bough,” Quinn and Chasny’s vocals yield more the more–and the closer–you listen to them. If you like your folk low and slow, your guitars sweet and your lyrics bleak, try Voices in a Rented Room on for size. The album’s out February 18th on Drag City. Check out the music video for “The Killers and Me” below:

Last week, I called up New Bums to talk about the recording of Voices and get some insight into their collaboration process. Turns out, there’s a mystery man named Willem Jones behind the duo, and he started it all–even directing the video you see above. The story of their initial dislike for each other became even funnier when, since the two band members were in different parts of California and I kept losing one or the other’s line when I tried to put them on conference call, they started ragging on each other like Jewish mothers. “I don’t think he has service,” Quinn said first. “Let me give you another number. Once Chasny was on the phone, Quinn dropped out. “He has a land line,” Chasny insisted. “Ask him why he isn’t using his landline.” The pair had clearly overcome their differences, and then some. Read on to discover how New Bums write their songs, where they got their name, and which of them is secretly a malevolent space alien just biding his time before pursuing world domination.

AF: We’ve heard your band is a “grudging match-up.” How did you guys meet?

Donovan Quinn: We had a mutual friend named Willem Jones and he brought us together. At first we didn’t get along for various reasons, but over time we started talking about music and different writers and found that we had a lot in common, but there are also a lot of differences to our approach. I’ve always been a fan of Ben’s music. I just jumped at the opportunity to work with him.

Ben Chasny: We had crossed paths at festivals before we started hanging out with Willem, and I think [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][Quinn] had a dislike for me from then. Apparently we had already met once, and then I ran into him while I was at Amoeba Records shopping, and he tells me that he came up to me and I didn’t recognize him. So he got offended and wrote me off forever.

AF: So you just got off on the wrong foot? Your differences were always personal, not musical?

DQ: Yeah, I think Ben is easily one of the best guitar players in the world. He’s a shredder. But he’s also a great songwriter, and songwriting has always been my main interest. We tried to make that the focal point of the group—as opposed to the other projects we’ve each been a part of—so we always try to start a song by having the lyrics and melody together, and then work from that.

AF: You guys are both veterans, you’ve each been involved in a bunch of different collaborations.

DQ: Yeah, we’re old. We’ve both been around for a long time and have done a lot of music. When we got together and decided we wanted to start New Bums, we really wanted to come up with an idea and an aesthetic that we hadn’t done before, that would be its own thing. We do benefit from having done different albums, been involved with different bands, but it was important to make sure we were doing something new with this project.

BC: An interesting thing I’ve noticed throughout the years, is when two people get together to collaborate, they kind of always want to do what the other person is doing. So if you have some guy—not me, but if I take this out of my perspective—who was doing a lot of heavy metal, and he got together with someone who was doing dance music, the heavy metal guy would start wanting to do dance music and the dance guy would be like, ‘Oh, no, I want to do what you’re doing!’ That’s what always happens to me when I collaborate. With Donovan, it was apparent pretty immediately that there was a certain middle ground we were going for. I mean, what we do separately isn’t so different in the first place.

AF: Where does the name New Bums come from?

DQ: I don’t know if Ben will remember this differently, but that’s another Willem Jones thing. We would get together at his parties, and we were the only people there under sixty years old, and we were called the new bums. It just stuck. I really like the name. I don’t know if it’s the best name, but for better or worse, we just became the New Bums.

BC: It came to the point where we’d try to come up with other names. When we tried to do that, nothing else made sense, because that’s what those guys were calling us. We don’t see each other that way, but we thought it was funny.

DQ: It’s really a partnership. We wanted to have a band where, with anything we put out, we couldn’t do it without the other person. Especially because now, if you meet a band, every single person in the band has their own thing, too. They’ll play drums, or whatever, but also have their own project. We wanted to try to get away from that auteur thing and have it really be truly collaborative.

AF: Do you write songs totally collaboratively?

DQ: Usually, one of us will have an idea, and then try not to develop it too much, so that the other person can have some input. It might just be a chord change or a couple of lines, a lyric idea, and then the other person will just jump on. An example would be “Your Girlfriend Might Be A Cop,” I started with the idea of hanging out with a new friend and getting the crazy paranoid idea that this new friend of yours actually might be a cop who’s gonna turn you in. Ben saw that in a notebook of mine and came up with a melody around it. He came up with this idea of the unreliable narrator, and it being somebody’s girlfriend. That’d be an example of how we would work—somebody comes up with an idea, the other one rearranges it, and it goes back and forth.

BC: Donovan’s really lyric-oriented, and I’m more driven by chords and music. He doesn’t work on chords as much, and I definitely don’t work on words as much. But it’s funny, on the record, the songs came in every different way. Some songs he wrote all the lyrics, some songs I wrote all the lyrics, on some songs the verses are half mine and half his. The music is written mostly by one person, though. Every song seems like it was created in a different way. Which is pretty exciting. We don’t have a template.

AF: Is that an example of what you were talking about before, about picking up on what the other person in your group is doing and wanting to get into that?

BC: Yeah. That’s the reason why I’m in this band. I’m in a bunch of bands, doing different things, but the reason why I’m in this band is because of the word stuff. This is my band to work on lyrics. Also, to have a good time.

AF: Even if you did get off to a bad start, you seem to have gotten very close. Is the music you’ve made a byproduct of your friendship?

BC: Yeah, I moved away from San Francisco for a while, and we would use the band as an excuse to get together. He’d say, ‘I’ll fly up to Seattle,’ where I was living at the time, ‘We’ll finish this record!’ And he’d come up and we wouldn’t even work on it, we’d just hang out. In that way, the band was more of a vehicle for friendship, but now we’re doing it more seriously.

DQ: Like I said, I was a fan of Ben’s. I think he has a great aesthetic and a great mind for music. We’d go to the bar and talk about Townes Van Zandt for hours. I just get excited about working with someone I can see eye to eye with, and who also has ideas I never would have. Even if there was no record, or shows, we would still have become New Bums and it would have been a secret band for our own enjoyment.

AF: It sounds like a really fun and easy experience for you, making music right now.

DQ: Our idea of fun may be different than some peoples’. Both me and Ben—we aren’t known for, uh, a relaxed demeanor when it comes to music. We’re both liable to have a total meltdown during any given moment at a show, but it does help to have somebody with you who you can kind of rely upon. It is really fun. Ben says that it’s kind of like a buddy film. We try not to be ever at all lazy with the music—have space and all that, yes, but we also take a lot of time to make sure that we can listen back to a song a thousand times and there’s not something in there that we think is shitty.

AF: How did that come through on your new album, Voices From A Rented Room? What were your goals for the record?

DQ: Every step of the way, the way we came up with the songs was a product of all these ideas and dreams we had and that we had talked about for years. We tried to get the feeling of the two of us in a room playing the song together, very loose and late-night feeling. I feel that a lot of new music is really built up. Whether it’s pop, or heavy music, or whatever, it’s really pushed up to ten—armored, in a way. I think that’s because it’s hard to get attention in the music world, because there’s so much music, and so many ways to hear it, that people really want to immediately make a big impression. We kind of want the opposite of that. We want to come across naturally, the way we would if you were in the room listening to us come up with the songs and jam.

BC: I was just happy to have songs with more of a narrative—an apparent narrative—as opposed to the kind of material I usually work with, which has more of a hidden narrative and fewer words. I think if New Bums has any philosophy, it’s just…um, to record songs ourselves and not spend a lot of money. True to our name. We tried not to be very extravagant, and at the same time, we wanted to take a lot of care and pay a lot of attention. I don’t know that we have a philosophy beyond that. If we do, it’s still in the works.

AF: The first track “Black Bough,” which you’ve released already, feels very pared down and sparse.

DQ: That was the first song that we wrote for the project. After we came up with “Black Bough,” it gave us a lot of confidence to go forward with the band. That song, maybe more than any other on the album, has all the ideas that we wanted to get across with the band. It’s sparse, and has a lot of space, which we always enjoy. It’s got the kind of space you hear in seventies outlaw country music, and early hip hop, too, where the beats are really spacious.

AF: What was the process of recording that song like?

BC: We were just trying to figure each other out, at that time. We lived really close to each other, and he would come over late at night. He had that song, and I remember just playing it my garage, because I was lucky enough to have a garage in San Francisco at that time. I remember drinking a lot, and not remembering how to play the song. It was a pretty fun song.

AF: It’s funny you should say that, because the song—and the whole album—also seems very melancholy. Do you both prefer darker stuff?

DQ: Yeah, me and Ben have that in common. We tend to do dark music. Different people have different things that make them want to write, and usually I write when I’m looking back on something. I write a lot of songs about relationships—romantic, family, friendships—but the point of view I find it easiest to write from is when it’s over, and you’re looking back on it, which is inherently sad. So that leads me into darker territory more often than not.

AF: What’s your favorite song on the album?

DQ: I have a couple. I really love “Your Girlfriend Might Be A Cop” and “Black Bough.” “Town on the Water” is kind of a band favorite. It’s one of those songs where I don’t know if anyone will notice it or care about it, but I like it because it’s sweet. It’s a kind-hearted song, which is hard for our band to write. We’re better at the dour, shattered songs. “Town on the Water” is about combing your hair to go out on a date, dancing in the hallway and stuff. I was really excited to have a song like that, that I thought my mom would like. In fact, Chasny gave his father the album and he said that was his favorite song. We were pretty excited about that.

AF: Earlier, Donovan, you mentioned that Ben kind of thinks of your band as a buddy film. If we were watching “New Bums” The Movie, how would that buddy film end?

BC: Well, I would hope it would be a sci-fi buddy film. Donovan would definitely end up being an alien. Or one of us would, at least—much to the surprise of the other one. Not a nice alien. A real mean alien. But an alien that wouldn’t harm the other band member. It would be like—oh wow, here is this creature that’s usually really mean, but it’s been nice to me this whole time.

AF: So Donovan the Alien would wreak havoc on the world, and then spare you?

BC: Maaaaybe. It would be a big question mark. Just like The Thing, at the end. Would I actually be spared, or not? In fact I think there’s a good chance that that’s actually how the band is gonna end. Maybe without the alien part.

AF: Well, that leaves room for a sequel.

BC: Precisely. A big question mark.

Many thanks to Ben Chasny and Donovan Quinn for entertaining our questions! Once again, Voices in a Rented Room is out 2/18/14 via Drag City; you can pick up your copy and learn more about the Bums here. Listen to “Black Bough,” the first track off the album, via SoundCloud:
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TRACK REVIEW: MT WARNING “Midnight Dawn”

“How would a song sound from a man sinking into the ocean?”

This is the question that prompted MT WARNING’s Mikey Bee and Taylor Steele to write the story of life, from beginning to end, into all of their music. They put particular care and thought into making songs emotive – relaying the sweetness of youth and the disillusions of growing old – and engaging – through intimate moments Mikey shares with his audience.

MT WARNING’s new track “Midnight Dawn” begins with a soft, potent twang out of an Old Western. When the guitar and drums kick in they pick the song up out of its ambience. But its the vocals that really transform it into a delicate, but relentless chant (even when Mikey is just “ooh”-ing). There’s some nature imagery that keeps the Old Western feeling fresh. “We don’t know where we’re goin’ / But we know where we’ll end up” is the line that’s repeated. This has the double effect of seeming positive (in that this journey “we” are on is difficult and confusing, but we have a place to be, which is comforting and satisfying), but also incredibly dark (well, we’re all going to end up dead, aren’t we?). At three and a half minutes in a female singer enters, crooning gently, only for the lead vocals to return fiercely with a strain, an overwhelming ache that provides it an emotional context that catches the listener off guard. At four minutes and some seconds the vocals slowly trail off into echoes.

I’m not a big fan of anthems or epic songs (especially after F.U.N.’s boom), but, though this song is dynamic in a fairly obvious way, there’s an emotional quality to its turns that is very endearing. There’s a delicateness, a rawness underlying everything that goes back to MT WARNING’s original idea of sinking into the ocean. With some knowledge of that in mind, this song is equal parts lovely and daunting.

Listen to “Midnight Dawn” off of MT WARNING’s debut album Midnight Set, to be released this March:

ALBUM REVIEW: Farewell Young Lovers

Todd Gautreau, the man behind Crushed Stars, left behind electronic music for more melodic, folky sounds demonstrating his exceptional talent as a singer, multi-instrumentalist and composer along the way. Crushed Stars released its fifth album, Farewell Young Lovers on January 21, 2014. Its nine tracks feature poetic, descriptive lyrics, intricate melodies and unorthodox instrumentation.

In Farewell Young Lovers, Crushed Stars draws from a number of musical genres to create its own unique sound. Gautreau extracted elements of folk, rock, jam rock, and even jazz, when creating this strangely complex album. Upon first take, the its overarching qualities consist of Gautreau’s haunting, deep and mumbling (often to the point where it’s inaudible) voice, spacey instrumentation, catchy melodies and guitar hooks. Take a harder listen and it’s clear that Gautreau’s unique combination of instruments with rich and textured instrumentation are common motifs throughout. Understated and unassuming, Farewell Young Lovers is definitely a slow burner, with Gautreau challenging you to fully grasp all of the intricacies of his music.

“Haters” and “Flowerbomb,” the album’s featured tracks, manage to balance mellow, ambient underpinnings and guitar-driven uptempo beats, while Gautreau’s signature haunting, deep and echoing vocals are showcased in full force making them both the most instantly accessible songs on the album.

With the whammy filled guitar part, the jam-band esque guitar solo, and Gautreau’s breathy and mumbling (often to the point of incoherency) vocals, “Our Interest in Claire” is one of the spacier tracks on the album, ending on a psychedelic note, with extended and mellow instrumentals. “Our Interest in Claire,” even more than the other tracks on the album, is able to exist without moving towards any final destination. “Fly” is one of the few tracks that’s truly anchored in melancholia from the onset. The piano enters about 30 seconds in, producing a chilling melody that interacts with Gautreau and the female vocalist’s accompaniment. The result is gorgeous. The textured, multifaceted and unconventional instrumentation on “Fly” makes it by and far the standout track on Farewell Young Lovers.

Gautreau’s electronic roots are most easily detectible on tracks like, the understated and mesmerizing “Poppies.” With a-typical instruments, Gautreau employs repetition while constantly adding new variations and intricacies to the music. “Supernova” is a mellow folk pop song, and the most “jammy” track on the album, complete with a meandering instrumentals that conclude the song–a perfect track to wake you up on a Sunday morning, perhaps.

On Farewell Young Lovers, Crushed Stars isn’t trying to be anything, but rather lives in the moment. We can all take a page out of Todd Gautreau’s book, and just put some music on and chill out.

TRACK REVIEW: Angel Olsen “Hi-Five”

“I feel so lonesome I could cry,” Angel Olsen half warbles, half snarls on “Hi-Five.” The new single off her forthcoming album, Burn Your Fire for No Witness, blasts by in just under three minutes . Olsen’s voice bristles with clarity, striking a shimmering balance between vulnerability, earnestness, and rock and roll swagger. Pegged as an early frontrunner for a 2014 favorite, Olsen released her debut, Halfway Home in 2012. The first album favored folky acoustic guitar stripped down to spotlight the singer’s voice—one worth spotlighting, with a barreling, Southen-tinged electricity to it that ultimately overpowered its acoustic backdrop.

Nothing could make Olsen’s voice sound bad, but “Hi-Five” is flattered by its harshly lo-fi backdrop. Swampy guitar lines seethe in reverb, prolonging their high notes in the same way that Olsen draws out the highlights of her vocal lines. One of the singer’s many talents has always been an elegant lyrical handling of angst; her songs deal with isolation, betrayal, and being unable to speak one’s mind. The vocal lines double back on themselves too quickly to be mistaken for self-pity, the dejection cracks a smile, and on “Hi-Five,” Olsen follows up the crooning “Are you lonely too? Are you lonely too?” with an unsentimental “High five, so am I.”

The new album is a more rugged approach to familiar material, but that doesn’t mean Burn Your Fire will lose the intimacy of Olsen’s previous work. Although the increase in guitar work can make it seem, on first listen, as if Olsen is abandoning the folky stylings we saw so much of in Halfway Home, it’s really just a punchier interpretation of the same gorgeous, forlorn soul music. Instead of a new direction, Olsen’s recent singles seem to better encapsulate the goals she’s always had.

Burn Your Fire for No Witness will be out February 18^th on Jagjaguwar. You can listen to “Hi-Five” below via SoundCloud, and click here to watch the video “Forgiven/Forgotten,” the first single off the new album.

VIDEO OF THE WEEK: Cass McCombs “Big Wheel

Back in October, enigmatic folk artist Cass McCombs released his seventh full-length, Big Wheel and Others, a double album that led us through hypnotic rhythm cycles and tangential, but beautiful, guitar passages, intimate if shadowed vocal lines, and lyrics that fit together like a Rubik’s cube—the meaning behind them was always there, but eluded direct visibility even when the text was at its most confessional. A meandering intricacy has always graced McCombs’ work.

Cass McCombs seems to belong to another era, one without modern video or recording technology, so it’s a little disorienting to realize that his songs have music videos. But so they do: the video for the (almost) title track of the new album, “Big Wheel,” premiered from Domino Records today courtesy of McCombs’ friend and collaborator Albert Herter, who shot the footage in New York, California, and China. “Big Wheel” opens with a foreboding, cyclical guitar line that speeds up at the pace of a rumbling freight train. In the video, these first bars are accompanied by a procession of slogans: large, all-capitol letter words like “JUSTICE,” “MASTER,” and “EVERYTHING” appear on the screen, over backdrops of a closeup of a chicken’s face, a lit-up building facade at night, or a basement door that’s opened when the song’s drums kick in. What follows is a busy psychedelic collage, montages intersperse with home video clips, with all the bleak grandness and obscurity of the song itself.

Images of cities, surreally collaged-together kaleidoscope imagery, and clips of talk show hosts with black ovals pasted over their faces aren’t what immediately comes to mind when you listen to Cass McCombs, whose music more closely embodies a grainy picture of solitary travels through America’s West. The cuts in this video are diverse—a grainily filmed dog coming towards the camera, a surreal, abstract, colorful backdrop with the word “WOMAN” written over it—and a lack of linear development makes the video seem a little unpredictable, even threatening.

The range of the collage is wide, and their apparently random sequence heightens the violence and surreality of the images, but this video is held together by a strange and distinct perspective. Many of the actions are filmed from the point of view of the viewer; in one recurring clip, a hand that appears to belong to the person holding the camera reaches out to open a door. The doctored visuals, the words that flash onto our field of vision as we watch the imagery unfold, puts us in the mindset of a personality that remains constant throughout the video. The only sense the chronology makes, by the end of the three and a half minute “Big Wheel,” is that established by the perspective from which these images are filmed. True to McCombs’ aesthetic, we’re not given an image of this video’s protagonist, but we’re given a detailed tour of all the scenery inside his head.

Watch the video for “Big Wheel” below, and learn more about Cass McCombs’ latest album, Big Wheel and Others, by going here!

FLASBACK FRIDAY: T-Bone Burnett

I’d love to say that it was Bob Dylan who got me into T-Bone Burnett. Burnett toured with Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue for over a decade. I wish I could credit a cross-contamination between Burnett and Tom Waits (a cover of Waits’ “Time” appeared on Burnett’s 1986 self-titled LP). And I’d be relieved if I could claim that my discovery of T-Bone Burnett occurred during another rummage through Dad’s record collection. However, none of these scenarios would be true.

In actuality, I found out about T-Bone Burnett via the band I scapegoat as my token guilty pleasure: The Wallflowers. Now, before you retroactively discredit any knowledge or opinions I’ve espoused on Audiofemme, hear me out. I’m not going to try to convince you to like The Wallflowers (yet) or the solo work of Jakob Dylan and his unassailable dreamy-ness. However, if you were forced to listen to every Wallflowers album and pick the best one, you’d be hard-pressed not to select their second full-length release, Bringing Down The Horse. The reason this album received so much acclaim in my opinion was due to the producer, Mr. T-Bone himself.

So as 17 year old me purchased every Wallflowers album on e-bay (most going for 50 cents a piece) and implored my friends to give the band a chance, I found a tour date for Jakob Dylan, opening for none other than T-Bone Burnett. It was only then that I noticed the production credit on Bringing Down The Horse. The next step was to consult the internet, (which divulged Burnett’s connection with Papa Dylan) and eventually my father; had he ever heard of him? Of course he had.

Sure enough I found two T-Bone LPS in the late B’s of my Dad’s collection: 1986’s T-Bone Burnett and 1987’s The Talking Animals. I was more entranced by the former, with its sweet and eerie country ballads. Burnett’s vocals are clean yet honeyed–like Roy Orbison’s humble younger brother, perhaps. The record is melancholic at times, like on “River Of Love” and “Time,” but Burnett’s sense of humor breaches with his acerbic rendition of Elmer Laird’s “Poison Love.” To boot, the entire album is carried by phenomenal pedal-steel croons.

I’d bought the ticket to see Burnett, so I figured I’d better buy the tour’s accompanying album. It was 2006 and Burnett had just released The True False Identity, his first full-length record since 1992. I bought it on a family vacation in Portland, and it was the soundtrack to our drive home. The record is a swampy, deep-south, voodoo-soundscape with a progressive agenda. The influences on this record are far more bluesy and psychedelic than his earlier country work, and lyrically the album relays Burnett’s unflinching wit and poignancy regarding the contemporary political climate.

But why bring up Burnett now? So what if he came out with a record I liked in ’06? I suppose the desire to mention him is two-pronged: the initial reason is the same as always, namely, to shed light upon an artist who’s spent so much time making other people’s music better, that he is often overlooked himself. Though the more relevant incentive is that T-Bone is out with a new project; his fourth collaboration with filmmakers Joel and Ethan Cohen on their latest: Inside Llewlyn Davis.

Burnett put together soundtracks and scores for The Big Lebowski, O’Brother Where Art Thou? (for which he was heavily awarded) and The LadyKillers. He worked alongside Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon in Walk The Line, and co-wrote “The Weary Kind,” the theme song from 2009’s Crazy Heart.

Burnett has produced dozens of records, including those by Elvis Costello, Tony Bennet, Alison Kraus, B.B. King, Elton John, and Roy Orbison, to name a few. He’s 65 years young, looks like a younger, slightly more devilish Tom Wolfe, and is releaseing and producing records to this day. I can’t wait to see, and hear what he’s cooked up for the new Cohen Brothers film, which is out now. But before you see it, school yourself on some vintage and recent T-Bone.

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FLASHBACK FRIDAY: Karen Dalton

Karen Dalton’s mystique, largely a product of her personal misfortunate, makes her an easy candidate for legend: it’s fun to imagine her, half Irish, half Cherokee, in a wooly, bohemian large-pocketed coat, Dalton had thick dark bangs and two missing bottom teeth knocked out when she got between two fighting boyfriends, and spent the sixties wandering Greenwich Village, palling around with Bob Dylan and enchanting tiny apartments full of literati with her banjo and her incomparable voice.

Most often liked to a folksy Billy Holday, Dalton’s voice is bluesy and husky, perfectly timed, but especially haunting for the sadness behind it. Dalton was criminally overlooked during her lifetime, and barely recorded, both because of her inconsistencies with the kind of pop music that got signed at the time and because of her own stubbornness and famous refusal to perform. The story of how her debut album, It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best, was made has become a legend unto itself:a friend tricked her into playing the songs, and secretly recorded the performance. Dalton released that album and one other, In My Own Time, and then disappeared off the scene. She struggled with drug use until her death from AIDS in 1993.

In My Own Time, released initially in 1971 and then again in 2006, epitomizes something of the intimacy and romance that had haunted her voice on It’s So Hard. The record was undoubtedly more comfortable, and Dalton’s experiments into the bluesier aspects of her voice (“When A Man Loves A Woman”), which even switches some of the lyrics of that song around to fit a female protagonist, feel natural alongside the beautifully archaic banjo-based tune “Katie Cruel.” Then there’s “Take Me,” a simple, heart-shattering song built around fermatas and soul, that hits a new peak of earnestness in Dalton’s career. However, the most memorable track on this album, for me, is the first one, “Something On Your Mind.”

The mythologizing of Karen Dalton, as much as it skews the life it imagines, lets you take the music for your own, and so it is with this song. “Something On Your Mind,” honest and comforting, utilizes a set of lyrics just vague enough to apply to anything—Yesterday, anyway you made it was just fine/So you turned your days into nighttime/Didn’t you know you can’t make it without ever even trying? And something’s on your mind, isn’t it—and cutting enough to feel like a conversation. More than thirty years after the song was recorded, “Something On Your Mind” is balm for the wounds of the lonely two thirty AM subway rider, the recently dumped or the recently unemployed, the weary traveler, or the woolen-jacketed wanderer through a snowy Greenwich village. Her voice, an acute blend of lonely weariness and deep strength, sounds like nothing to come out before or since.

Take a listen to “Something On Your Mind,” off In My Own Time, below:

AF LIVE: Spike Hill 12/18

Ooooh, we’re having a showcase! Please join us on 12/18 at Spike Hill in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and peep some local bands who we believe should be heard and seen. Doors are at 730 and the show is free. Below please find artist profiles of the talent we booked. We hope to see you there!

8PM: Wildcat Apollo

Formed in 2012 by Alex Margolin and brothers Taylor and Aaron Eichenseer, with lead singer Cat Tassini completing the indie rock/synthpop band a few months later, Wildcat Apollo released their debut full-length in October of this year. The 12-track eponymous record combines elements of garage rock and dancey shoegaze, full of catchy bass lines and innovative guitar hooks.

AF: We read that you guys are planning to make a permanent move to Austin, TX to join your bandmate Aaron. How do you anticipate that move influencing your sound, or inspiring each of you musically?

Cat: Well, we’ll all be together, so we’ll be writing together and growing together musically and just feeling more like a unit. I think Austin’s more relaxed vibe will definitely sink into our skin and come out in our music. It’s Aaron, Taylor and Alex’s hometown, and even though it’s not mine, I love it there, and I think we’ll all feel really comfortable and confident. And of course all the festivals and venues there will inspire us to be on top of our game.

AF: You all seem to share a lot of instrumental duties within the band (Cat and Alex both doing percussion and synth, Taylor and Aaron both on guitars). Do you also share songwriting duties? How do you generally go about collaborating as individual artists to create your music?

Taylor: Everybody in our group contributes to the songwriting; there’s certainly no set process as to how we develop a new song. It’s a mixed bag. Sometimes there is an independent writing process going on, where one member will come to the group with a decently formed concept and everybody else is left to fill in the blanks. Like when I was working at an after-school program and the fourth graders would take pink highlighters and glitter and brown and purple crayons to sketches I would do in my notebook. Collaboration breeds magic. You can’t be afraid to let your vision grow into something bigger. But we also do a lot of jamming and recording of jamming with a loop pedal or on a computer. This is great because it lets the music be the guide and you can turn your brain off and just let it flow and figure out what happened after the fact. It’s how we express ourselves, by shutting up and playing. Also, that everyone is artistically motivated in our group is a real blessing, because we hold each other accountable to be our absolute best.

AF: Where’s some of your current inspiration coming from?

Cat: I’ve been listening to Lorde, Miley Cyrus, and Sky Ferreira all week. Taylor: Brutally honest self-reflection.

AF: Cat, you’ve said you had no previous experience being in a band before you joined Wildcat Apollo last year. What are some of the things you’ve learned along the way, so far?

Cat: The biggest lesson I’m learning is giving up control. My artistic life before the band was dominated by directing. I was doing performance and video projects where I would handle almost everything and I’d just work with a friend or two on it. I came up with the idea, figured out all the details and made sure it all happened. So I didn’t have to depend on anyone else. But I missed the camaraderie of being a part of a cast and a crew. And eventually I felt limited and wanted to work with more people, people who were better than me. And in my the rest of my life, I was traveling and trying different jobs, floating around in the post-collegiate nebulous phase, just being totally free and independent, but also feeling confused and angsty. And then I got drawn into the band, which sort of came out of nowhere, but gave me a great sense of belonging and gave my life a direction. But I had to learn how to be a part of a team again and do it in a brand new context. And that context was a group of guys who had been playing music together their whole lives, so that was intimidating. Also I tend to have really strong artistic visions, so I had to learn to trust my bandmates and not just reject an idea because it’s different from the idea in my head. It’s something that I’ll have to keep learning over and over again: how to disregard my perfectionist control freak instincts and just trust the process and the people around me. Also, I recently co-directed one of our music videos and worked with Bull Moose Pictures on it, and it was a wonderful experience. So I’m learning and I’m happy the band is giving me an opportunity to experience that.

AF: Since it’s the end of the year and all, what are each of your New Year’s resolutions?

Aaron: To really push boundaries sonically and to embrace new technology in the song writing process.

Alex: To find a job.

Cat: Mine is always to be better with time and money.

Taylor: To release another, better record by year’s end.

Wildcat Apollo wishes to thank you, Annie, and everyone at AudioFemme for the tremendous opportunity to take part in your monthly showcase, especially considering the abundance of great music in Brooklyn and on the internet at large.

*Aw, yr welcome, Wildcat Apollo. Can’t wait to hear you play tonight!

Listen to “Gotham”, here, via Bandcamp:

9PM: New Politicians

New Politicians have been building some great hype with their two EPs, Alpha Decay and Drag A City, both released earlier this year. Their self-described post-punk sound has a gritty and straight-forward aesthetic, paired with melancholic lyrics. The four piece band are set to accomplish a lot more in the coming year.

AF: How did you guys come together as a band? Are you all still based out of New Jersey?

Gian: All four of us are currently based out of New Jersey. Around the time the band was formed though, I was living in Philadelphia attending college and Renal was working in Manhattan. We would share files via email and then come home to Centerville on the weekends to jam. As brothers, Renal and I have always connected over music and have been writing together since we were young. Winston and I went to school together and had been playing in a few projects before the idea for New Politicians was formed. When I tracked the demos for some of our first songs, I brought it to them and we decided to form a band around it.

Q: Your two EPs were released about 6 months apart. How do you think you developed as a band in that time and in what ways are the two releases unique from each other?

Gian: Well, since the release of Alpha Decay we’ve had a lot of opportunities to play live in New York and New Jersey which has given us plenty of experience playing together as a group. We recently recruited a new drummer, Chris, who allowed us to implement a pretty rigorous practice schedule that’s been refining our skills collectively and individually as well. From the song writing aspect I think there is a continuity between the songs on both EP’s. The only major difference is that Drag a City was self-produced at home in our apartment where we didn’t feel the restrictions of time and money during the process. That allowed us to take control of our sound for the first time and we ended up with a record that we’re really proud of.

Q: Your most recent EP includes a song titled “Are We The Dining Dead?,” presumably a reference to the Eternal Sunshine line. What other non-musical sources do you draw inspiration from?

Renal: Why yes, it is a reference to Eternal Sunshine. At the time of writing the lyrics to that particular song I had finally gotten around to watching the movie from beginning to end. Lyrically, I tend to draw most of my inspiration from life experiences as well as books and movies. Finding connections between my life and what I am reading or watching helps me generate multiple perspectives. While we were writing for the Drag a City EP, I had just finished reading Tender Is the Night and “Winter Dreams”, both Fitzgerald stories that served as a catalyst for my ideas.

Q: What’s the story with your band name?

Gian: Renal came up with the name New Politicians and when he brought it to the group we immediately liked the irony of calling a rock band “politicians.” It’s more tongue-in-cheek than it is a deep statement or anything. However, a lot of truth is said in jest.

Q: What are your plans and goals for the upcoming year? A full-length release, perhaps?

Gian: We’re planning to play as many shows as we can in support of Drag a City as well as continue to promote the record with the goal of receiving some label attention. So far there’s been a lot of positive feedback on our social media sites and we hope to continue to gain new fans throughout 2014. A full-length isn’t completely out of the question but we feel we don’t currently have access to the resources necessary to make a quality debut record. Regardless we will continue to write, record, and build our song catalog so who knows what the future holds for New Politicians.

Listen to “The Length Of Our Love” here, via Bandcamp

10 PM: Wild Leaves

This folksy five-piece and their “sun-drenched harmonies” sound like a far cry from Brooklyn’s cityscape, but the fresh local band is making waves with their debut EP, Wind & Rain. The 7-track release is a confident showcase of their wispy, nostalgic melodies, which are sure to bring some comfort and warmth to our showcase!

AF: How and when did you guys come together as a band?

WL: Wild Leaves officially formed as band in January of 2011. But its roots run much deeper. We had the pleasure of being friends in college, moving to Brooklyn together, and experiencing a similar struggle to find our respective places in the world. The band formed in the midst of that struggle as we began to articulate the challenges we experienced, through songs. Starting with intimate two-piece performances in our Crown Heights apartment, and growing into regular gigs, across the city, as a five-piece.

AF: What are you focusing on right now? Any plans in place for 2014?

WL: We just recorded a new batch of songs a couple weeks ago so we are mixing them now. This is a fun part of the process because a lot of the pressure is off (temporarily) The songs are what they are at this point and we get to just focus on putting the whole presentation together. We’re looking to do a release in early 2014 followed by massive amounts of touring. We’ve got people to see all across this beautiful country.

AF: Seven tracks is a good amount for an EP. Why did you decide to go with an EP release and not a full-length album debut?

WL: Ultimately it came down to releasing something that encapsulated a moment. We had a bunch of songs that didn’t make the cut because they felt ancillary to the place we were in. Recording those seven songs was a turning point in our collective time together in this city. A lot of work had gone into our transition and the songs were a away of acknowledging the past, while still embracing the future.

AF: What are your long-term goals for the band? Where do you anticipate going from here?

WL: Our long-term goal as a band is to write songs powerful enough to change the world. One of the major driving forces in our creative process is the open conversation we maintain with the people we come across on the road. Whether its through lyrics, a performance, or a conversation after the show, we view each experience as an opportunity to exchange ideas and hopefully make the world a better place.

AF: What are your New Year’s Eve plans this year? Any parties, shows, etc?

WL: Our new years plans are to lay low and spend some quality time with our loved ones. It’s been a wonderfully busy year. We played something like sixty shows, made new friends in many new places, but didn’t spend a lot of time at home. Winter is the perfect time for reflection and recuperation.

Listen to “Everyone”, here, via Bandcamp:

After the live show, stick around for dancing, courtesy of the ever-wild, B-Tips, who’ll be spinning all your faves til late.

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Tag: Folk