Crib Notes

For Today’s Roll Call we call out Adron.

Who are you?
Adron and Adrienne McCann. My broham calls me Binky.

Describe yourself in three words.
Paradeluvian, teleotropic, onaneiric.

Who — dead or alive — would you most like to meet?
David Foster Wallace.

Who would you most like to slap in the face?
People who smoke cigarettes and tell me that Veganism and psychedelics are unhealthy.

What song do you wish you had written?
“Ave Maria” by Franz Peter Schubert.

Elvis Costello or Elvis Presley?
Emphatically Presley… “In the Ghetto” is the most bitchingly god blessed dive bar jukebox song ever… Also probably my #1 choice for any karaoke performance… I also tend to refuse dates from people who are more than a little Costello-inclined.

LP, CD or MP3?
LP for at home. MP3s for cinematic dusky walks with headphones.

If you could start one trend, what would it be?
Institute “time off” one day per week at least, for 3 hrs. where everyone turns off lights and appliances and hangs out in the dark and tells ghost stories or something.

If you could end one trend what would it be?
Flashy, impeccably clean and expensive new pan-Asian bistros with their names in Papyrus font.

With whom would you most like to play a game of spin the bottle?
Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as they appeared in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.

Adron plays the Star Bar tonight (Thurs., Jan. 29th) w/ Trapper’s Cabin, Zano and Madeline. Free. 9 p.m. The Star Bar, 437 Moreland Ave. 404-681-9018.

(Photo by Victor B. Bicycle. Video courtesy of Digital Arts Entertainmentl Laboratory)

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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.

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