[Vinyl Vednesday is a weekly feature about three favorite vinyl finds. It’s not meant to be a dick-measuring contest, but it usually turns out that way. With Against Me!’s White Crosses due June 8 and their Philadelphia show with Silversun Pickups and Metric June 28, Vinyl Vednesday will be doing a month of AM! records… plus some extras in July. Yeah, I’m a super fan, even though Tom Gabel made fun of me on Twitter. E-mail pelonej1@gmail.com with your own big finds!]
Records: Against Me!’s As the Eternal Cowboy (2003) on black, “Cavalier Eternal” b/w “You Look Like I Need a Drink” seven-inch (2004) on pink marble, and “Sink, Florida, Sink” b/w “Unsubstantiated Rumors” (2005) on blue marble.
Place of Purchase: Hoo boy lemme think. Eternal Cowboy came from Repo Records. I scored “Cavalier Eternal” when I saw the band play with Blood Brothers at the Starlight Ballroom. I think I got “Sink, Florida, Sink” from the bargain bin at Hot Topic, but it might have been Repo again.
The singles for Eternal Cowboy put out alternate takes. “Cavalier Eternal” remains acoustic, but this version is a little less freewheeling, so I can see why the band chose the Original Cowboy take instead. “You Look Like I Need a Drink” is a different story, though. It’s one of the most furiously played songs on the album, but here it sounds so fucking ominous. Pulsing cello opens the track before the band settles into a midtempo strum reminiscent of the “Acoustic EP” era. Note to the kids: If you wanna enjoy the show you’re at, buy the vinyl at the end of the show. Yeah, the line will be longer, but you won’t have to worry about every person you bump into in the pit breaking your lovely multicolored wax.
Ah, who am I kidding? The merch table is always the first thing I check out.
The “Sink, Florida, Sink” single goes electric, thrillingly. “Sink” can also be heard on the Rock Against Bush compilation, but I heard it here first (well, minus every time I’ve heard them play it this way live). The artwork for this seven-inch is nuts – a gingerbread guy stabs another one, and when you pull his arm out to open the vinyl, candy guts shoot everywhere. WHY?! WHY GOD?! Steak Mtn handled the art. “Unsubstantiated Rumors” turns into a crazed rocker, crammed with gnarled guitar lines and handclaps and Warren Oakes trying to hold everything down on drums.
Just a year after releasing their excellent, dream-pop effort AZAR, Venice is Sinking is back with a third full-length fit for the masses. Sand & Lines finds the group yet again tweaking their sound, returning to the country-ish flavor of their debut Sorry About the Flowers while adding some more somber touches. It’s a little less orchestral indie, a little more country.
Part of this shift comes from the production techniques. The band opted to record the album at the GeorgiaTheatre under minimalist settings: Live, full band takes without overdubs would be recorded through two mics and mixed directly to 1/4” tape. The results are spacious and huge. Sand & Lines demands headphones to fully unveil its ominous, quasi-western gothic powers, which is a roundabout way of saying it sounds amazing. It’s a shame the GeorgiaTheatre was damaged in a fire, since the levels ViS achieve here – grainy yet warm, haunting yet alive – are perfect. Proceeds from Sand & Lines will go towards reconstruction, though, so there’s hope yet.
Still, the production would mean nothing without quality songwriting, which frontman Daniel Lawson and his band deliver. “Sidelights” opens the record with juxtaposition between Lawson’s lonely singing and the group’s relatively peppy playing. “The Grey Line” gets more delicate, while “Bardstown Road” is a rousing anthem. The catchiest tune is “FallsCity.” Drummer Lucas Jensen knocks out a nice groove building up to a chorus layered with intertwining vocals and strings. It’s beautiful for a moment before crashing guitars chase it away. “FallsCity” goes through so many moods, and each one is amazing.
Three covers round out the collection, each surprising in its own way. ViS tweaks Waylon Jennings’ “The Wurlitzer Prize (I Don’t Want to Get Over You)” ever so slightly. It’s faithful, but it weirdly recalls the Raveonettes at their most country, thanks to the ghostly vocals from Lawson and Karolyn Troupe. Galaxie 500’s “Tugboat” is a little less psychedelic, a little more explosive. Lawson’s singing voice is pretty clean, but those guitars and drums can shift into razor-sharp rock territory when they want. The most random pick of the bunch may be Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” Parton’s plea to the title character not to take her man just because she can (rhymes!) is made all the more desperate by the intense performance. It’s random yet beautiful.
Coming off of the meticulously arranged AZAR, Sands & Lines subverts everything the band accomplished last time out while still delivering everything fans can expect. This record might take a few spins to embed itself, but it will do so in time. A vein of indie music has been digging into country for a few years now, but Venice is Sinking does it more organically than most here. This one’s better than most of the albums to come out so far this year.
When confronted with the sum of the Rentals’ Songs About Time project (four albums, 52 short films and a metric shit ton of photographs all somehow tying back into the passage of time), it becomes clear that Matt Sharp is insane. I think he’s a genius, but dude could’ve easily just dropped a third full-length under the Rentals moniker and I would have been fine with that. Instead, he spent 2009 releasing movies, EPs and photos at a breakneck pace online. After a couple of production delays, the entire project is finally available physically via a boxed set. Coupled with 12 bonus tracks, as well as a soundtrack to all of the films, Songs About Time is an epic mess. The asking price is a bit steep ($125. $275 gets you an even bigger set with vinyl and undeveloped film from the Photographs about Days portion), but there’s enough material presented to validate the set for hardcore fans. Newbies would be better off with the digital download, though.
Photographs About Days is the most consistently rewarding section. Every day, Sharp shot a roll of film, then put a photo up online. That’s about 14,000 pictures. A hand-bound book comes in the set with 52 prints of Sharp’s strongest pictures, although the entire 365 run can be viewed on the accompanying Films About Weeks DVD. Both the photos and films are in black and white, which suits Sharp’s style.
Less successful is the Films About Weeks DVD. Fifty-two films is a hell of a lot of material, and for the first half of the DVD, they amount to little more than behind-the-scenes footage. Occasionally the band whips up a quick story, but more frequently it’s just shots of them recording. The series was broken up into three seasons, each with a different language (Japanese, then Spanish, then French), essentially taking the concept behind the “Friends of P” video and stretching it across a year. Sometime around July, the videos start to improve – the cinematography gets a little more ambitious, stories start to evolve. But it takes such a long time to get to that point that most folks will probably tune out.
The portion that could have stood on its own, with perhaps a bit of editing, is the Songs About Time set. Originally released as three EPs online, each EP is now supplemented with four bonus tracks, while a fourth disc, Tokyo Blues, provides the soundtrack from Films About Weeks. Even with the bonus material, the EPs’ quality remains the same: The Story of a Thousand Seasons Past is still the best; The Future is still the worst. Story contains the biggest hooks (“Song of Remembering”) and the most emotional songs (“Seven Years,” “All I Have”). The bonus tracks are likewise catchy, and come closest to harkening back to the Rentals of yesteryear – pounding drums, ringing synths, a heavy bottom. It’s Time to Come Home gets a bit schmaltzier, but that works to the group’s advantage on the French version of “Late Night Confessions.” Where the band falls apart is on the barely there third disc, The Future. The songs are too thinly sketched out, and the use of a children’s choir to fill in the songs is kind of laughable. Tokyo Blues is a little more successful, isolating individual movements from the series and recasting them as scores for Films About Weeks. It’s good background music.
Songs About Time is ambitious to a fault. There’s enough good material presented that I no longer regret paying the $125 price tag (Then again, I also preordered it over a year ago). But it ultimately could have been a decent full-length. Cut out the excess footage and songs, and there could have been a great 12-track album with maybe a bonus video or two instead. I respect Sharp and co. for approaching this project, but it’s so inconsistent and expensive that only the most fervent members of the Rentals cult may be up to the task of processing all of this material.
[Vinyl Vednesday is a weekly feature about three favorite vinyl finds. It’s not meant to be a dick-measuring contest, but it usually turns out that way. With Against Me!’s White Crosses due June 8 and their Philadelphia show with Silversun Pickups and Metric June 28, Vinyl Vednesday will be doing a month of AM! records… plus some extras in July. Yeah, I’m a super fan, even though Tom Gabel made fun of me on Twitter. E-mail pelonej1@gmail.com with your own big finds!]
Records: Against Me!’s The Disco Before the Breakdown (2002) on purple marble, The Original Cowboy (2009) on black, and White Crosses (2010) on clear red with these little black specks.
Place of Purchase:Disco came from Hot Topic (I has punk credz). Cowboy came from Shore Things in Ocean City, N.J.White Crosses was an Interpunk.com online exclusive.
Thoughts: The first Against Me! song I ever heard was “The Disco Before the Breakdown.” The song slowly builds into a rocker, and the horns are a nice touch. “Tonight We’re Gonna Give It 35%,” which Punknews.org still references all the time, is a little more raucous. “Beginning in an Ending” is one heck of a raw acoustic number about saying goodbye to an ex-lover. By this point, frontman Tom Gabel was already saying goodbye to anarchy, as lines like “Taking all I know about nihilism and trying to build it into a life” indicate and “This is everything up to now ending / It was nice to believe for a while” validate. Any or all of these songs could have been on Reinventing Axl Rose, which is a roundabout way of saying that they’re all perfect.
I hammed out my thoughts on White CrossesMonday night, but here are some leftovers: The first two tracks could have been on New Wave. “Because of the Shame” is the best song on the album, even though the chorus kind of sucks. Those verses simply hit too hard to ignore. “Spanish Moss” is pretty uplifting and hopeful, two qualities that AM! has rarely exhibited in the last few years. The rest of the album is OK, but I think I feel that way because I’m too close to the band’s music to write it off altogether. If a totally new band dropped White Crosses, I’d maybe be a little nicer in my review, but I’d sell the CD to a used record store afterwards. Instead, I’m treating it like a guilty pleasure, an album I’m disappointed in yet keep playing. My girlfriend swears by Tori Amos’ philosophy of “audio porn,” the idea that music should be clear at all times with all of the parts equally represented, and even if she thinks this album is too clean.
Grown Ups take Castevet’s post-hardcore noodling and wed it to Lifetime’s sweet, nasally hardcore jams, which is a roundabout way of saying that er’rybody needs to buy the group’s new album More Songs. These are two great tastes that rock faces together. While the album admittedly gets a little repetitive in the back-half, More Songs still serves up some quality jams just in time for summer.
“Weed Science” opens with Andy Tokarski’s booming bass, with drummer Jacob Bonham chomping at the kit to fire off some thunderous beats. Then the song pulls a surprise punch with the guitars. Instead of the typical distorted strumming one would expect, guitarists Doyle Martin and Adam Sheets bust out angular, intricate, dub-inspired licks. While the band certainly doesn’t sound like the more expansive Castevet, they are aesthetic siblings. Just as Castevet proved that hardcore can inject vitality into post-rock, Grown Ups prove that a little post-rock can bring some diversity to hardcore. Which is why “Weed Science” is such a brilliant opening track; it psyches out the listener, then reveals that the band has totally got this shit on lockdown. It also more or less represents where the rest of the songs go.
“Johnny Edwards” and “Orange Cat” slow the tempo a little, but for the most part, More Songs delivers fast-paced beats and gang vox a-plenty. It’s a welcome shift to a tried ‘n’ true dynamic, and at 35 minutes, it doesn’t overextend itself too much. Open-minded kids who dig Jersey’s Best Dancers and Some Kind of Cadwallader should want to get all up on More Songs.
Against Me! has been polarizing fans since they stopped using drums made from pickle buckets, so I suppose sooner or later they were going to leave me by the wayside. Nothing personal, artistic exploration, we’ll always have Reinventing Axl Rose. That doesn’t make it any easier for me to criticize White Crosses, the group’s second major label effort. It’s a logical growth from New Wave, with Butch Vig again manning the soundboards, but it’s one that I can’t grow with.
In the months since White Crosses leaked online, defenders have argued that the record is more of an alternative rock album than a folk punk one and that fans need to forget the old Against Me! in order to appreciate these new songs. Fair enough. I can support that and review the album on those terms, even though I often find myself comparing White Crosses to releases that came out before alt-rock was a tag.
Generally speaking, the band is running the Replacements’ playbook this time out. Specifically, the ’Mats once they signed to a major – the drums are huge, the guitars are pushed to the front, the vocals sound processed and needlessly multitracked into oblivion. Some tunes deviate. “Because of the Shame” recalls Bruce Springsteen circa The River. “We’re Breaking Up” and “High Pressure Low” weirdly recall the Psychedelic Furs right before they started to really suck. “Ache With Me” sounds like... well, to be honest, I can’t think of another band with the balls to attempt a chorus like “I’ve got no judgment for you / Come on and ache with me.”
Forgetting the group’s sonic shift, there are two major drawbacks to these songs. First, the lyrics sometimes stumble. The title track tosses out a handful of urban images without any real depth or connection. A few tunes expound on drug use/abuse and scene politics, two topics which keep getting old the older I get. But the music occasionally balances that out. The chorus to “Because of the Shame” is a little unwieldy, but the emotion and music make the story about a deceased former lover a standout track. The sterile production, however, often holds back the band. Even though I think “Shame” is one of the best tracks, I can still admit that the vocals, especially on the chorus, are too obviously auto-corrected and layered. It sounds unnatural hearing that many Gabels pushed together with obnoxious backing vocals (Check out those “chickuh-ah”s on “Ache With Me” for more evidence). And why the hell can’t James Bowman be higher in the mix? Vig and Alan Moulder often keep things too clean, something that needs to be kept out of rock ‘n’ roll.
Still, the record isn’t terrible, and it hopefully isn’t the career-killing debacle some are expecting. It starts and ends well enough; the middle is a little iffy. “Because of the Shame” and “Spanish Moss” are both ridiculously catchy, and even lesser tracks like “White Crosses” and “Suffocation” are worth a listen or two. But that’s just what makes White Crosses so disappointing: I’ve never thought Against Me! was only worth a listen or two. I used to swear by their songs. Now I just make up excuses.
Oh, and don’t bother buying the deluxe edition. All four of the bonus tracks are crap.
Massachusetts music maestros Maker deal in my kind of pop punk: Lifetime, the Movielife, the Wonder Years, etc, with a slight dash of early Crime in Stereo. Their new EP, I-91, deals out four fast ‘n’ catchy tunes about being young and forming new identities. The sound isn’t anything new, but the band’s energy sells the songs.
“Anything (Tour Song Part 2)” opens the seven-inch with a psyche out: cut time drums and a smattering of guitar bleed in for a bit before the band shifts into punk beats and gang vox. True to the title, it’s a tour song, and a fun one at that. The rest of the EP skips extended intros. “Calendars” takes maybe two measures to get to the point: missin’ somebody terrible. The title track proves that even when the band busts out breakdowns, they still keep things fast, and it even busts out a quick bass solo that would make any band Dr. Dan Yemin has ever been in proud. “Stand By Me” closes the wax out.
At 10 minutes, I-91 is a brief outing from a promising band, but a good listen all the same.
Thoughts: I was among the Against Me! fans who felt a little let down by Eternal Cowboy when it came out, so much so that it felt weird hearing people swear it was their highlight in the years to come. In the last year or two I’ve come around, but for a while it was the one AM! album I rarely played. I only kept about half of it uploaded on my computer/iPod. A lot of the songs are so short and rapid fire that they’re easy to miss, so in that sense Eternal Cowboy is their punkest album. Yet it’s also their most acoustic – “Sink, 
The singles for Eternal Cowboy put out alternate takes. “Cavalier Eternal” remains acoustic, but this version is a little less freewheeling, so I can see why the band chose the Original Cowboy take instead. “You Look Like I Need a Drink” is a different story, though. It’s one of the most furiously played songs on the album, but here it sounds so fucking ominous. Pulsing cello opens the track before the band settles into a midtempo strum reminiscent of the “Acoustic EP” era. Note to the kids: If you wanna enjoy the show you’re at, buy the vinyl at the end of the show. Yeah, the line will be longer, but you won’t have to worry about every person you bump into in the pit breaking your lovely multicolored wax.
The “Sink, 
