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1. MP3: Lizz King – Mr. Fella
2. MP3: Lizz King – Till They Do

Where do I begin? All Songs Go To Heaven was, to me, quite unprecedented. Honestly, I didn’t even know about its release until Greg posted a preview for Lizz King’s album release party at the Windup Space.

Shows how informed I am. I’m just glad to not have missed out. Now, although there are a number of routes I might take to describe the accomplishment that is All Songs Go To Heaven, none of the obvious directions sit well with me for more than a sentence or two. This record’s brilliance is an odd breed, and I’ve been hunching over my laptop for hours thinking about how I can explain that more substantially. I’m utterly baffled to this moment.

How’s this: All Songs Go To Heaven plays just as well as a singles collection as it does an independent piece of art. Normally that sentence would gather a few intrigued rereads, but what’s even more impressive is that Lizz King’s sound is anti-homogenous in the most extreme sense. And, it being the case that I can’t locate the words in me to present a bona-fide album review, I’d rather talk about how moving each of the tracks are standalone.

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MP3: Imperial China – All That Is Solid (limited time exclusive download)

Sockets is having a label showcase at the Black Cat Mainstage on Fri Jan 22nd including Imperial China, Hume, Buildings, The Cornel West Theory and Big Gold Belt.

First, let’s address the unavoidable: few can discuss any independent music act coming out of DC without mentioning Dischord Records. This is not without good reason since Dischord casts a long shadow, more a movement and culture than anything so narrowly scoped as a record label. Since its output, while significant, began to dwindle in the late 90s, there has been arguably no real engine of creativity to rival its explosive, pioneering hey-day. DC has steadily kept up with musical trends and , building a strong cast of devoted locals, but no real movement or creative hub has emerged. DC is a town in flux. This is something both artist and label are acutely aware in this situation.

With Imperial China’s signing, DC label Sockets appears well poised to step in and pick up the torch where Dischord laid it down. Preparing to catalyze a genuine movement again, they have amassed a strong roster featuring some of DC’s most exciting and ambitious music makers (notably Buildings, and Hume). All of their acts seem to be mindful of striking that careful and electric balance between experimentalism and accessibility, as well as being painfully aware of the Dischord void.

Imperial China debuts on Sockets with their full-length Phosphenes, a release I’ve had the luck of following throughout its life from birth through live performance, recording and refinement with Devin Ocampo at the famed Inner Ear Studios, to its completion and finding a home at Sockets. It swiftly became one of my favorite albums to listen to last year, so I am very confident it will be in my top albums of this new year (the year of its official release).

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MP3: Mopar Mountain Daredevils – Yeti Stomp

A 70s throwback with the sideburns to prove it, Mopar Mountain Daredevils create a swirling thicket of heavy psychedelia that has more to do with stoner metal than any current psychedelic rock trends. But where loud bands with less songwriting talent or imagination settle down with the almighty riff, Mopar Bloody Mopar remains unhinged throughout, careening from one passage to the next, never looking back.

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01. MP3: Lonnie Walker – Compass Comforts
02. MP3: Lonnie Walker – Summertime

As compelling as any album released this year, and possibly one with a chance to stand the test of time, Lonnie Walker’s These Times Old Times is easily one of the best albums I’ve been introduced to since I started reviewing music.   Read the rest…

If you’ve seen Built to Spill live in the last few years, you probably got a preview of a few of the tracks on There is No Enemy. “Good Ol’ Boredom,” “Life’s A Dream,” and “Done” are the kind of drawn out songs that originally had me suspecting the new album would follow in the vein of You In Reverse.  However, while those are some jammier tracks that probably needed road-testing, the band has largely reined in the more free-form, improvisation-based structures that carried the day on their 2006 release.  Instead, they have returned to the mastery of the sometimes overlooked process of recording and editing.  That same process set them apart from the alternative slacker icons who ruled the scene when they started (and have since become relics of the past).

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01. MP3: Hypnotic Brass Ensemble – War
02. MP3: Hypnotic Brass Ensemble – Sankofa

As a biologist, I think a lot about the future of mankind.  For example, genetic engineering: will it ever be useful, technically feasible, or morally acceptable to genetically engineer humans with a vast array of traits?

Then, I find out about projects like Hypnotic Brass Ensemble.  Inheritance of musical ability the old fashioned way: juice of the loins, incubate in the womb, pop out kid, pass down craft.  Phil Cohran did this times 8, to be precise.  His name may be more familiar to you in the context of the Sun Ra Arkestra (too crazy NOT to be true), where he played trumpet.

Hypnotic is a pure brass and drums instrumental band (8 horn players, all Cohran’s sons, and a drummer) forged in the fading flames of Chicago’s once fiercely active, and still ferociously inventive jazz scene.  In this context, the band’s sound and catalytic energy should be expected, but it still manages to take your breath away every time.  Look no farther than their collaborations with Blur’s Damon Albarn, Tony Allen or Mos Def for more vetting. Read the rest…

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MP3: Secret Mountains – Kaddish

The first eight minutes of Secret Mountains’ Kaddish EP are nothing short of breathtaking. You’ll find gorgeous crescendos shimmering on both opening tracks, “Kaddish” and “Gate/Gate/Paragate,” two undeniably Baltimorean songs operating on an EP that plays more like a dream than it does music. Like Beach House and Wye Oak before them, Secret Mountains replicate a peculiar brand of euphoria, one that strikes more closely at the vein of beauty and is in touch with pure, unadulterated splendor. What we have on our hands today is a pretty damn promising debut.

At it’s best, Kaddish is a powerful narcotic; Secret Mountains’ straightforward instrumentation raises the heavens with a blunt echo, their listeners need do little to follow suit. Kaddish’s masterwork, “Gate/Gate/Paragate” resides in this state as a force of nature, it works fundamentally around an earthy chic-beat and a progression rooted in old folk. The notes have a way of testing your confidence: each count becomes a new leap of faith, falling into place like a snowflake on a bed of winter dust.

“I Have Been Awake” is Kaddish’s easy anthem, lyrics somehow mightier than the bony post-primal percussion point up the track’s attention, “I have been awake today. What have I done? What have I done?” It’s about reconciling self-knowledge and human nature, personal right, social wrong, the various cycles of life. Heavy stuff. These themes aren’t merely skimmed throughout the remainder of Kaddish either.  In fact, most of the subject matter eagerly sisters with virtuous artistic abstraction. Gladly, and  surprisingly, Secret Mountains have found an amiable middle ground between overzealous conceptual wankery and transparent secularism. The polished production reflects a similar position, intuitively revealing their stargazing eye sockets equally as well as their soles, planted comfortably in the soil.

What’s really impressive is that, for a home-cooked gem, Kaddish is sequenced immaculately. Sure, you’ve got the occasional mistake littered about on the flooring (which only adds to how deeply personal the EP is), but for something so homemade to sound this unified is quite simply uncalled for. Each piece moves seamlessly into the next devoid of the slightest friction; Kaddish never loses momentum between songs or within. Never. And that alone is worth being proud of.

Label: Unsigned

Release date: Aug 2009

Track list:

1. Kaddish
2. Gate/Gate/Paragate
3. Countries
4. Growing Season
5. I Have Been Awake

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MP3: Béla Fleck – Djorolen (with Oumou Sangaré)

This is a special album, the likes of which you won’t get to experience many times in a cloistered, Western musical experience.

A little bit of backstory: Béla Fleck, everyone’s favorite (or least favorite, depending on your tastes and outlook) virtuoso instrumentalist takes a bit of a soul-searching journey. Fleck undertook Throw Down Your Heart, a project to create a movie about his travels and explorations through Africa, searching out the origins of his musical love: the banjo, and making some great music along the way. It is perhaps a little known fact that the banjo’s origins lay in Earth’s oldest inhabited territory, rather than in its more commonly known trappings as a staple of Appalachian and rural American music.

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MP3: Lands and Peoples – Bad Habits

This is only their second EP, and I daresay Lands & Peoples are one of the most intriguing new projects to sprout out of our city’s fertile musical soil.

There will undoubtedly be comparisons to other, more prominent textural haze-languishers on the scene, Beach House.  And there are definite similarities, as both make liberal use of echo-chamber vocals, warm and foggy aural landscapes, and a consistently slow-to-mid-tempo trot. Beach House reaches internally to wrangle dense and massive, backwards-gazing phantasmagoria, Lands & Peoples add a twist, willfully emerging from the haze for stark moments of lucidity.  In Beach House, I see awe-inspiring, almost otherworldly power whereas Lands & Peoples aims to better capture those more precious, personal moments.

Their sound is, in a sense, quite of the moment.  Tying together the threads of some of the most gorgeously couched pop in circulation today.  The intro track “Six Weeks” swells with a swirling, amorphous sound mass reminiscent of High Places.  Vocal oohs fade in and out eerily, looped electronic fuzz and delicate percussive lines slowly layer atop one another, like drizzling molasses coating everything.  ”Bad Habits” builds further on this, taking some cues from Beach House’s dilapidated melodic progressions and the lingering, full vocals.  The juxtaposition of simple, staccato percussion lines provide a great, propulsive foil.  Where Beach House often feels so big it is almost overwhelming, Lands & Peoples are more prone to receding into a more fragile and nimble beast.  But this is not to say that L&P play the role of the timid wisp, as “Bad Habits” eventually works up the nerve to become quite the lush number.

“Awake” starts with glitched-out, downtuned synth lines before Moore’s voice punches through like some vivid mirage through a desert haze as the synth loop churns ever forward, a persistent tide of somnambulence.  The track also showcases some nice vocal acrobatics and harmonies with Beau Cole. The gorgeously seductive “Isabella” is a mind-blowing shift, and far and away the best track on the album.  Well worth the price of admission, the sparse guitar lines and longing,  rich vocal harmonies loom hauntingly.  The vulnerable tone shift of the guitar and vocals from mournful to gentle, optimistic lullaby is inspired.  Nothing short of bliss.  ”Cars Like Waves” rounds out the EP first with a gentle instrumental half, followed by something like a distorted melody ripped from a children’s carousel or funhouse.

Lands & Peoples traffic in rich, tender aural textures with a distinctly personal element, churning out one of the most promising releases from the local scene this year.  Catch them tonight at the Talking Head as they return from their tour to open for Philly’s Kurt Vile.

If you like “Bad Habits” and what you’ve read, pick up the album on the group’s Bandcamp site.

Conflict of Interest: Caleb Moore has contributed to Aural States before, but I think I am pretty unbiased in my assessments.  I mean, look how badly I treated him during his short-lived stint as Thrust Lab’s lead singer.

Label: Unsigned

Release Date: Jul 25 2009

Track list:
1. Introduction (Six Weeks)
2. Bad Habits
3. Awake
4. Isabella
5. Cars Like Waves

In addition to the Stoop Storytelling Series, you can catch Caleb live at the Golden West this Sunday Jul 26th with DC’s These United States.

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MP3: Caleb Stine – Welcome to Rock and Roll

Country artists generally fall into two easily distinguished categories: the dominant is radio-fried country which is potentially more derivative than Top 40 pop in its most egregious recycling of predictable elements into formula.  Then you have the others, who remember that at one point in its history, country derived from true rural traditions of folk and Old Time music.  Generally speaking, it’s clear from the first note whether you are dealing with mere contrivance or something natural and organic.

With Caleb Stine, you never question his sincerity.  Every word and note feels like a naked, soul-bared moment. Caleb’s music is something like an oasis here in Baltimore, intensely warm and personal moments amidst the stark cold and disaffection of fast-paced urban life.  Instead of focusing outward on bewildering experimentalism, he focuses inward on stellar, precise and intimate songwriting.  From the piercing gaze Caleb shoots from the cover down to his steady cadence and tempo, his unfaltering vocals, everything about Eyes So Strong And Clean (his first solo outing, though many Brakemen make appearances) compels you to take pause, to contemplate and reflect.  And this time, packing a bit more punch thanks to a brand-new electric Epiphone.

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