Tomorrow night the Velvet Lounge offers a very special treat: Outsider folk hero Max Ochs will celebrate the release of his new album, Hooray for Another Day, which features all-new instrumental recordings and poetry from the 67-year-old Annapolis native.

Along with John Fahey and Robbie Basho, Ochs was among the East Coast Blues Mafia that ushered in the tradition of “American primitive guitar” in the ’50s and ’60s. Along with his influential recordings on “Contemporary Guitar ‘67″ — the first compilation on Fahey’s Takoma recordings — Ochs also composed a piece entitled “Imaginational Anthem,” released via the Fonotone label in 1969. The recording was unearthed by Tompkins Square label-head Josh Rosenthal, who contacted Ochs and asked him to re-record the track for a compilation honoring the American primitive guitar tradition, which would also bear the name Imaginational Anthem. Now in its third volume (the latest of which was released earlier this year, along with a box set containing all three), Imaginational Anthem offers a fascinating document of guitar music past and present, revealing the links between luminaries like Ochs, and the newer crop of pickers like Jack Rose and Cian Nugent.

I recently caught up with Ochs via phone to talk about the new record, his life in Annapolis, and his musical evolution over the years. You can read more about Ochs via the previous City Paper feature, written by Mike Keefe-Feldman in 2005, or chat with him yourself tomorrow at the Velvet Lounge. Details for the show below, Q&A after the jump.

Max Ochs
Skeleton$
Kuschty Rye Ergot
Chris Grier

Thursday, December 4th
Velvet Lounge
9:30pm
8$

Read More “Interview: Max Ochs” »

That’s right. Check them out at the top of the page, sharing the limelight with quirky jazzbos The Bad Plus.

I’ll admit, the arts section of the New York Times isn’t the first place I turn when looking for the vanguard of loud and filthy rock music. For chrissake, they wouldn’t even print Pissed Jeans‘ name.
But New York Times critic Ben Ratliff had some genuinely kind words about The Points new album.

“Their record has poor sound quality, bad graphics and crooked typesetting, and it’s nearly perfect,” says Ratliff.

The Points are, of course, no strangers to adulation from the press–having been covered in The Washington Post, The Onion, and this very publication you are reading now.

Love Is All were huge. They got some blog hype. Then, well, they made a follow-up LP–the just released A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night. I loved the band’s debut. I have yet to bring myself to listen to the new one. It scored pretty well with critics.

Should we care? I’m not so sure I’m gonna care or need to care about this album. In trying to figure out my top ten for the year, I’m overwhelmed as it is–with African comps, handmade drone tapes, and, of course, proper indie releases. But anyway, can you all listen and decide whether this new Love Is All deserves a few spins?:

Read More “Love Is All: Does Anybody Care About Them?” »

NME reports that the Shins frontman is set to star in a feature-length film titled Some Days Are Better Than Others. Director Matt McCormick says the film’s all about “lonely people trying to create their own abstract forms of communication.” Sounds pretty heavy. It’s slated for release in August 2009.

Over at MOG, Charley Rogulewski observes an uncanny resemblance between Mercer and Kevin Spacey. Shins biopic, anyone? I’d be down, assuming it doesn’t prevent Spacey from directing, producing, and starring in The Mike Huckabee Story. Both scenarios would offer the actor ample opportunity to indulge his well-established fondness for channeling musical personae.

McCormick and Mercer have collaborated on two Shins videos (see below): “The Past & Pending” (from Oh, Inverted World) and “Australia” (from Wincing the Night Away). If these are any indication, Some Days will probably involve a lot of abandoned farmhouses, an old-school camera, and balloon abduction.

Read More “James Mercer: Star of the Silver Screen!” »

If you’re confused, Volume 11 Tavern is not anywhere near D.C.; it’s a club in Raleigh, North Carolina, somewhat near where I spent my Thanksgiving weekend. I snuck out to catch Jucifer, a noise-rock/metal duo who play in front of a massive wall of amps and who will be destroying the Black Cat on January 2. Consider this your early preview of that show.

Jucifer’s latest release, L’Autrichienne, is a concept album about the fall of Marie Antoinette, which is pretty nerdy, but live they dispense with all nuance and nerdiness in favor of obliterating any and all eardrums in the vicinity. They do the noise thing very well indeed; a couple attempts at grindcore are less convincing on the record, but live they come off a little better. The fact that Jucifer managed to get a crowd of less than 25 to start moshing at 1am on a Thanksgiving weekend is indicative of the firepower they pack.

There were a bunch of local-ish opening bands that also put on real good shows, and the whole thing was a dream to photograph, so here’s a little photo dump—or you can check out the full set at Flickr.

Jucifer:

Black Skies (stoner metal from Chapel Hill, NC):

Transient (Raleigh, NC, more stoner metal type stuff):

Sloburn (Danville, VA “redneck metal”):

This week, Rolling Stone fronts a totally definitive list of the 100 greatest singers of all time. (Previous totally definitive lists include the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest songs of all time, and THE 100 IMMORTALS. But that’s just scratching the surface.)

Besides the inherent arbitrariness of the exercise and the fact that most casual listeners could write these lists in their sleep—along with the celebrity-penned panegyrics that accompany them—what tends to bum me out about these things is the complacency involved. You dredge up a ream of archival photos, solicit a lot of free content from celebs who want to align themselves with the legacy of a given “immortal,” and publish with maximum fanfare. Plus, to dig the entire list on the web, the reader has to click through ONE HUNDRED TIMES. (Surely this’ll crack the totally definitive list of the “100 greatest ways to phone it in while increasing pageviews…of all time.”) I mean, sheesh, at least Blender maintains a bit of irony about the whole list motif.

Still, the celeb encomia have their moments. Below are a few of the purpler, more platitudinous moments of pop pedantry. See if you can guess to which vocal titan each one corresponds.

(I’ll post answers on Friday. Or you can cheat by giving pageviews to the Stone. Either way.)

• There is a difference between people who sing and those who take that voice to another, otherworldly place, who create a euphoria within themselves.
• You know a force from heaven. You know something that God made. And [blank] is a gift from God.
• There’s a lot going on in [blank]’s voice. A lot of pain, a lot of life but, most of all, a lot of strength.
• [Blank]’s unhinged aggression presaged punk rock.
• I can’t compare [blank]’s voice to anything — [blank] had such an unusual breadth of influences, from Sonic Youth to Edith Piaf.

There’s lots of interesting info in an update posted Friday on Crooked Beat’s MySpace page: Vinyl is now the big sales driver for the store, which is now dialing back the new CDs it stocks and getting more selective with its used CD selection as well. Excerpts from the post below. (But go read the whole thing. Thanks to Don Carr for the heads-up.):

For the second year in a row (2008) New & Used Vinyl LPs have outsold CDs at Crooked Beat. LPs now account for around 70% of our total sales. We will be increasing our vinyl selection even more in the coming months.

New CDs: Crooked Beat will continue to stock New CDs but on a more limited basis. Effective Immediately: we will now only primarily stock CDs from indie and import labels such as Touch & Go, Matador, Dischord, Merge, 4AD, Sub Pop, Numero, Bomp, Damaged Goods, Cherry Red, Secretly Canadian, Ace, Bear Family, Soul Jazz, Anti, etc….

Used CDs: We will now only carry Used CDs that mirror our selection of New CDs. e.g., Crooked Beat always stocks New CDs by artists such as Built To Spill, Magnetic Fields, Cat Power. Therefore, we will usually accept them as USED trade-ins provided they are in good condition.

Rhythm Based Lovers, an alias of former Takoma Park resident and ex-Manhunter member Jason Letkiewicz, has just released a 7″ single on DC-based record label Future Times.

A machine may not be able to love, but in Letkiewitz’s hands it can at least be made to purvey cheap romance. Packed with lo-bit cowbell and analog bass squelch, “Boogie Vision” sounds sleazier than a date with Rob Lowe circa 1988. B-side “Snow Drift” has a B-movie-style synth melody that makes it a little more moody and less overtly sexy. My guess is that if Snake Plissken was going to make out, this might be what he would choose to put on.

You can preview both songs on Rhythm Based Lover’s Myspace page. If you want to purchase the physical artifact it can be had at the Future Times website.

Finding words to describe Vampire Weekend seems futile, since they’ve become the A-list blog stars of 2008. But in case your Internet has been disconnected since January, Vampire Weekend is the project of four Columbia-educated Upper West Side turned Brooklynites who play intoxicating indie pop imbued with Afro-beat inspired soukous rhythms and melodies. The band’s eponymous debut album was released in January and has become one of the most vibrant and refreshing albums of the year. They’re playing tonight and tomorrow at 9:30 Club with The Teenagers. (Sorry, kids, both shows have been sold out for months, but there’s still hope!).

Drummer Chris Tomson took a few questions from Black Plastic Bag before they electrify a sold out audience tonight.

Read More “Interview: Vampire Weekend” »

The Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music may have officially closed the curtain in October, but the noise is far from over. On Nov. 23, the Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center in Silver Spring played host to another event curated by the Sonic Circuits team with a CD/CD-R/DVD/cassette release party for local label zeromoon, featuring live video and sound manipulations by Dead Violets and Video Love.

Dead Violets is a collaboration between zeromoon head-honcho and Sonic Circuits curator Jeff Surak, Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words‘ Thomas Ekelund, and local vocalist (and newest member) Bethany Moore, birthing a black hole of lyrical mysticism and growling electronics. Their new 3-inch, YZMRHS, was released in early November—now available via the zeromoon Web site. Sunday’s performance revolved around Surak’s dense, digital choruses crawling under Moore’s incantations. The two worked together well, with Moore’s lines often getting played back into the mix and toppling over themselves while the surrounding static built to a climax. Check the video below for a snippet of the performance:

The highlight of the evening, however, came with Video Love’s intoxicating amalgamation of French synth-pop and live video samples, which mixed and solidified masterfully. Local filmmaker James June Schneider worked the video loops and sound samples — projected on two of the surrounding walls — while his wife, Elise Pierre, sang atop buoyant keyboard beats. The interplay between the two was remarkable; it took me two songs into the performance before I realized that half of the sound samples were being taken from the projected footage, looped beneath Pierre’s staccato French. Images of twitching cobwebs faded into cuts of a young girl pouncing on the camera with a giant net; a clip of a man’s head frantically submerged beneath the sea gave way to a barrage of water-filled glasses similar liquid-based samples. Such deft integration of video, electronics, and pop sentiments was a textbook example of how multimedia experimentation can be successfully wrangled and exploited.

Schenider’s newest film, 1,2,3 Whiteout (The End of the Light Age), was also released via zeromoon in early November, and features a collage of original footage, found clips, and a tailor-made soundtrack emphasisng an exitential tug-of-war between light, dark, and sound. You can find more info on the zeromoon Web site, or view the trailer below:

According to Surak, Sonic Circuits will continue to host a variety of interesting spectacles at Pyramid Atlantic, as well as other venues around the District. Last Sunday featured peformances by Dan Conrad (Baltimore), Janel+Anthony+Violet (DC), and Myo (Annapolis).