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Skeletal Lamping, the latest full-length from Athens’ whimsical art-pop ensemble, and CL’s Nov. 5th cover artists, Of Montreal is holding strong as the #1 record on CMJ’s Top 200 list for its forth week in a row.
Click below to see the group’s current round of U.S. and European tour dates, which include two performances at the 40 Watt in Athens on Dec. 30th and 31st.
This week NPR’s “All Songs Considered” posted a stream of last week’s Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise tour stop at The Bottom Lounge in Chicago on Oct. 21. The stream of the concert features the large ensemble’s two-and-a-half hour performance plus an interview with Julian Koster of Olivia Tremor Control, the Music Tapes.
To listen to the concert click here.
The pairing of Athens stalwarts Vic Chesnutt and Elf Power yields lingering, autumnal melodies and songs that elude expectation. Dark Developments sways with a natural and stylistic drift toward the melancholy side of Chesnutt’s allegorical songwriting. But the buoyant pop rhythms and mellow psychedelic textures of each number tussle with nihilism, culminating in a gray and wintry body of songs. “We Are Mean” is the album’s Rosetta Stone, laying out the tensions that arise when these vibrant songs are brought to a point by such a dreary narrator. “The Mad Passion of the Stoic” and “Phil the Fiddler” unfold at the lumbering and difficult pace of the greatest Southern authors. As such, Dark Developments is as spectral and haunting as William Faulkner when he was on point, or Flannery O’Connor when just skirting the dark side.
Dark Developments is an album where indeed the sum is greater than its parts, and the album’s cover art bestows just as much meaning on the release as the music itself. The cover features a painting, titled Through the Garden, by sometimes Athens resident Terry Rowlett.
Rowlett’s images are lush and allegorical scenes that depict both strange and all-too-familiar characters traversing all sorts of scenarios that exist in their own time and place.
Chad Radford: How Did your painting end up on the cover of Dark Developments?
Terry Rowlett: Andrew Rieger wanted to use it for the front cover of it and I eagerly jumped at the chance to be on the cover of one of Vic’s album’s. I have always liked his music. Andrew had been thinking about the image and the music for a while and everyone agreed. The painting is seven or eight years old.
Did you go to college in Athens?
Yeah, I got a Masters in 1995. I showed up here in ‘92 and have been around town since then. I’ve spent some time in New York. I was living in Woodstock until January 1st. Right now I’m living on Orange Twin, on this little farm compound.
Who are the character in the painting?
Metaphorically speaking I think the guy in the red robe is us, you and me at the end of our lives … People going through life and then all of the sudden you’re dead. He’s everybody, generic people. I tried to put a real tranquil spin on it. It looks to me like he’s in a Purgatory moment, that kind of quasi real world moment, but not really in the real world.
Casper & the Cookies have unveiled three songs as a sampling of their forthcoming album, Modern Silence. This is the group’s follow-up to ’06’s The Optimist’s Club. The album is the product of nine months spent working alongside Bill Doss (Olivia Tremor Control, Apples in Stereo, The Sunshine Fix).
Each week during the month of October Casper & the Cookies are releasing one previously unreleased song form Modern Silence unto the blog world.
Frontman and principal songwriter Jason NeSmith offers this cryptic statement on the album: “Modern Silence: a phrase that evokes a number of themes. We used most of them: awkward long distance phone calls — language barriers — social anxiety — absence (or a general lack of presence) — a sudden numbing realization that one can no longer think of oneself as a good person — extraterrestrial friendship — and of course jazz-mime.”
Last week Three Imaginary Girls featured “Little King”. This week Optical Atlas will release “Sunshine Girl” on Friday, October 17th. You Ain’t No Picasso will do the honors on Oct. 24th.
(Photo by Courtnie Wolfgang)
In celebration of Music Tapes‘ For Clouds and Tornadoes, and the release of the long-awaited film, Major Organ and the Adding Machine, many members of the famed Elephant 6 collective will converge for a variety show tour in October. Julian Koster, William Cullen Hart, Scott Spillane, Laura Carter, Eric Harris, Nesey Gallons along with The Singing Saw, the 7 Foot Tall Metronome, Static the Television and many others will host what Julian Koster describes as “a big orchestra, variety show, silly happy thing.” The large gathering of E-6 members will be playing numbers from the catalogues of the Music Tapes, the Circulatory System, Scott Spillane, Gerbils, Elf Power, Olivia Tremor Control, Nana Grizol, Nesey Gallons and more.
In addition, Orange Twin Records has announced the imminent release of Major Organ and the Adding Machine, a short film by Joey Foreman and Eric Harris. The film is nearing completion and will premiere during the E-6 “Holiday Surprise” shows in October. The film is currently being submitted to film festivals and will be coming out as a CD/DVD set in the fall of 2009. Accompanying the Orange Twin DVD edition will be the expanded version of the film’s soundtrack, originally released in early 2000, that includes several unreleased bonus tracks and new liner notes by co-director Harris. The film and album feature musical and theatrical contributions from Jeff Mangum, Kevin Barnes, William Cullen Hart, Julian Koster, Andrew Rieger, Dixie Blood Moustache and other participants from Athens music scene of the late-90’s.
After touring extensively behind their 2005 release, Electrified the flashy and flamboyant Elephant 6 descendants Dressy Bessy took some time off. During the down time, vocalist / guitar player Tammy Ealom penned a whole new bunch of songs that bring the group’s blend of ultra-vibrant power pop tones full circle to embrace driving rhythms and organic simplicity.
For this round, Ealom began with the drums, and after banging out a few keepers at home, she built melodies around them, and constructed the completed songs from there, which culminate on Dressy Bessy’s fifth album, Holler and Stomp, due out Sept. 30th on Transdreamer.
Dressy Bessy will be passing through town to play Smith’s Olde Bar on Tues., Oct. 7th. Click below to read more tour dates.
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According to a Myspace blog post from Of Montreal’s frontman Kevin Barnes, the group’s new album, Skeletal Lamping is recorded, mastered and ready for a projected October 2008 release date on Polyvinyl Records.
In his post, Barnes states, “i am so bored with art that makes sense and ‘works’. i wanted to do somethings that didn’t ‘work’.”
To read the rest of Barnes’ post, click here.
It’s hard to know what to make of all this romanticizing of dysfunction and disconnect. As both a long-standing fan and critic of the group, OM’s previous release Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? was a difficult one. The album is a conceptual take on Barnes’ descent into the role of a villain, and he spells out his life’s dramas with the willful and sickening cries for attention of a reality TV show — via a very dark conceptual trip.
On paper it sounds great, like an obscure, Roald Dahl novel set to music. But the album is impenetrable and somewhat unapproachable. Hissing Fauna is an insider’s look at a train wreck in progress. So what happens next? We’ll have to wait until October to see how Skeletal Lamping sifts through the debris.
Tentative song titles include:
“Exquisite Confessions”
“Feminine Effects”
“Mingusings”
“Our Last Summer as Independents”
“Softcore”
“Tender Fax”
“Paradigm Kisses”
“Plastis Wafer”
“Play With You”
“Jasmin’s Car”
(Photo by Rennie Solis)
