Braden J McKenna’s newest album, as the title suggests, owes quite a bit not only to 70’s era Beach Boys but to Brian Wilson himself. Surfs Down, Smiles Up is full of wide-eyed statements that are profound in their simplicity and honesty. Wilson could turn a goofy, child-like phrase into a mantra for living. McKenna similarly gets at the heart of some pretty deep concepts by floating close to the surface. McKenna has never been one for obfuscation. The take-away points from this record are: follow your heart, listen to your heart, nothing but your heart can tell you who you are, live your own dream and there are no take-away points. In McKenna’s ability to mirror these sentiments with the music on Surfs Down, it is clear that these are not glib statements; rather this is McKenna actually following his heart, actually living his own dream. These empowering statements have been repeated so many times in greeting cards and pop songs that they have lost a lot of their meaning. Braden J McKenna, however, canonizes them. Sets them apart. Makes them holy. Just by, you know…following his heart.

We can follow McKenna’s heart (although this would be going against the album’s conceit of finding your own path and sticking to it) by tracing back some of the musical origins of Surfs Down, one of McKenna’s finest pieces of music - I feel like that should be stated here. Those familiar with the TOME will also be familiar with some of McKenna’s past projects. Braden has recorded under his given name, Navigator, WYLD WYZRDZ, Weighted Pines, etc and etc… McKenna’s first project Navigator was a delightful collection of bedroom freak-folk tunes (as much as we all hate that term) that gained some traction in SLC. McKenna’s drone/ alter-ego at that time was WYLD WYZRDZ which combined simple loops with shoegazey guitars. Surfs Down plays pretty close to the heart of Navigator. The songs are based around simple melodies plucked out or loosely strummed on an acoustic guitar with McKenna’s confident warble as the driving force behind these songs. The loops of light tabla percussion, field recordings, bells, pan flutes and washes of reverb on McKenna’s guitar that have characterized much of the Inner Islands discograpy are still there. There are new sounds here as well. The Hammond organ on “Watching” is especially well done, as is the lead guitar that swoops in on “A River Drifting”.

Where McKenna’s releases under WYLD WYZRDZ flow out like a delta, this is a self-contained river; Focused and linear. Much of the attention of this album is how to corral the free-floating nature of WYLD WYZRDZ into a more or less pop song format (the ten + minute “New Color” notwithstanding). With that said the album is still incredibly loose and breezy leaving plenty of room for crystalline loops and gurgling vocals. This is a perfect afternoon record. McKenna has put out several morning albums. This is an album for drifting; for watching shadows creep longer and longer across your front porch. I know we say this every time but could be the best McKenna record yet.

Ryan H.

Braden J McKenna Bandcamp

I am not the mayor of 7-inch City. I'm not even from there. But I've been having quite the extended stay, a nice little vacation if you will, and I've been selfish to not really invite you, you humble Tome readers, into this, the city of these little miniature albums with only but a couple of songs on them each. Ok, really what I just wrote was dumb and I've been amassing these things and having a hard time figuring out a good way to efficiently review them. You know the best way? SUPERPOST. Here's 21-inches of wax that have come in the ol' mailbox over the past few weeks that have caught my ears and I think will probably catch yours as well. Enjoy, and check back for more soon!

Crawf

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The Garment District

"Nature - Nurture"  [Sonic  Boom  Remix]  b / w  "Miraculous  Metal"  /  "Vigor"
( La  Station  Radar,  2012 )

For all intents and purposes, this was my first real introduction to the Garment District's Jennifer Baron, a Pittsburgh-based musician also known for work with a band called The Ladybug Transistor, which unfortunately I'm not terribly familiar with. I had heard a previous tape release (well, just the digital version) on Night-Peoples under the Garment District banner which was all well and good... but this, despite being a heck of a lot shorter, just has a more meat to it. These are still psycedelic pop tunes to put it simply, but here the band broaches the darker fringes of psychedelia while sculpting out deeper arrangements to give the music a much more substantial presence. Between heavenly buoyant verses that sway as rolling waves on a pensive sea, an emerald hue glows between the cracks, pulsing up with the plodding rhythm of electronic drums, etc. There is some mystic mystery hiding beneath these synth melodies and simple harmonic progressions, but it's not necessarily fantasy-based or science fiction, or... well, maybe it's a combination of a lot of things. I hear witches, robots, fauns, fairies, and aliens alike all bobbing their heads along at equal measure, everyone gather'd 'round ye olde turntable for a cup of hot chocolate and a quick enchantment from the sultry, silvery voice of singer Lucy Blehar. Be among them.

p.s. You read the title right, by the way... and you know you're doing something right if Sonic Boom's remixing your shit. If that happened to me, I'd lose my shit.

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Razor Blazers

"I'm Sick"  B / W  "Linear  Rerun"

( Self-released,  2012 )

Pretty cool, basic indie rock on this 7-inch from an Asbury Park band who has a total of six Facebook likes as of their joining the monstrosity back in 2009. They definitely deserve a whole lot more than that — although yes, I did say this is "basic," I kind of meant that in a good way: This is basically a really good band. Nice and tight, firm arrangements and the mix is drenched in etherealism via a healthy dose of reverb. Unfortunately, even though side B has a really nice build-up to an ultimate crumbling breakdown, the before & afters on this disc remain a little one dimensional. Nice singing from a female vocalist who nails all of the melodies, you've also got a prowling Interpol-style guitar and big booming bass drum pushing these tunes along. But they should be driving. I like the song writing itself, suitably dark and crawly, I just think the performance could dig these haunts a little deeper into the back of the brain. Regardless, it's a good disc, printed on blue vinyl and packaged in one of 500 unique sleeves designed by one of 50 different artists who contributed to this project, all of the proceeds of which go to "an elementary school in the Peruvian Andes which offers children from economically challenged backgrounds an affirming and holistic education." (via Bandcamp). Good band, good disc, good cause. Triple-win, dig?

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Ttotals

Spectrums  of  Light

( Twin  Lakes,  2013 )

No matter how many times I hear or read something like "we live in a genre-less time," Ttotals is there to slap me in the face with this "Outer Blues" thing. Feed it to me, shove it down my throat, and tell you what: I slurp up every bit of it, because it's good and healthy and it just feels right. The Nashville duo keep doing what they do best here only better on their brand new 7-inch, which looks WAY better in real life than the crummy Bandcamp image rendering does it justice. Gorgeously screen printed in an irridescent rainbow of color, this has to be one of the better 7-inch designs I've come across, maybe ever. Aside from that, the music is brilliant and badass, the two channeling vintage Spaceman 3 into a brooding blues form, bruised and battered, beaten up, but tough as nails almost begging for abuse. Brian Miles' voice is deep and soul-devouring, like Elvis beckoning evil spirits into your dreams to steal whatever pretty thoughts you thought you had left. Then it's Marty Linville and his stand-up trapkit, blasting the skins for explosive choruses. 

These dudes are down in Austin this weekend for Psychfest, by the way. If you live there and you're not there, you're dead, or I just don't like you.

It is difficult to describe what makes a good ambient-drone record. Granted, the barrier is set pretty high for those approaching these kinds of records. But after clearing the hurdle of listening to tones shift in and out of focus with the occasional sand blast of dissonance for hours on end, trying to describe the aesthetic qualities which separate the good from the monumental slabs of noise gets a bit tricky. Most of this review will be spent by me trying to unpack why I “feel” this is such a monumental record. Why I “feel” that The Choir, The Army puts Shiflet in a place reserved for the heavyweights of the genre. But so much of this will fall short of how I actually feel (unquotated) about this record. The sounds, the melodies, the perfect balance of beauty and dissonance, are all pitch-perfect, but somewhere, a strong undercurrent holds it together. And more than anything I can identify with this undercurrent. It feels familiar, sympathetic or compassionate in the true sense of the word. But approaching this as an abstract piece of work, The Choir, The Army isn’t something that stays on the wall, it is art, sure, but it is also something more vital, something living and breathing.

There is something unnamable beneath the way Shiflet sculpts viscous waves of sound, stretching and thinning them into a distant bass rumble or a sustained, unrepeating signal. Other times he bunches them together into short stabs of dissonance like a sudden spike on an EKG. There is much on this record that is unnamable, which probably says more about the listener than the artist. There is much, however, that can be named, that is readily apparent on the surface. There is much of this that contributes to the album’s success. The album is a cohesive shift from spectral to the structured to the unraveled and peeling. Tracks like “False Flats” and ”Inching” prop up the arching middle of the album’s tent with haunting, too-pure ambience. Stars of the Lid come to mind here in the lunar pull of a lonesome slide guitar, the gentle, few note strum, the upper register haunt and the low plod of the sustained drone. What is remarkable about these tracks is the wide-eyed expanse of West Texas after wading through an intense four minute jackhammer and traffic noise of the city in the aural attack of “Attrition”. It is moves like these that give the record a sense of catharsis. A sense of moving through physical locations through an aural medium.

Pure haunt gives way to two tracks that are just as evocative, but a bit more structured and under just enough static and dissonance to pitch a balance between the two sides of this record. “Omicron Serenade” and “Passchendaele” are tonal shifts, oscillating sirens stuck out of joint and stalking our plane. “Yonder”, which bears a striking resemblance to album opener “1917”, is old. A forlorn violin glides through 1930’s radio static and a thousand chiming clocks buried well beneath the sediment of the track.

And we are back from dissonance back into dissonance. From wide-lens landscape shots of West Texas to frantic jump cuts and the cocaine-jazz of the city. In both cases, The Choir, The Army feels like a reaction to something put upon. Someone working under oppressiveness of landscape. While Shiflet works as an expert sculptor, molding these into useful, often beautiful, shapes, you get the sense that Shiflet is always a half-step behind. His conscious reaction to it is what makes this a great record. It is because I can relate to it. I am always trying to get ahead of my environment, to get out from under the consequence of decisions not always consciously made. I guess that unnamable part of life comes from these efforts to keep up, to mold them into something useful, and sometimes beautiful.

Ryan H.

Mike Shiflet.com

Under the Spire

Volunteering in a foreign country and adapting to a new culture comes with an almost daily set of new disappointments. Disappointments that more people’s needs can’t be met because of your limited resources, disappointment that a crucial piece of information was lost in a missed non-verbal cue. Things like this happen all the time. Maybe I was at a low point but when I came across Goat Lightning’s “Sister’s Crystals” in the Tome’s inbox, I immediately thought of two things that have never disappointed me since I have been in Swaziland: goats and lightning.

The lightning storms in this country are unreal. When a big storm rolls in all of the power immediately shuts off and the village is completely black. The lightning turns everything from pitch black to mid-day bright in a series of split second strobes. People think we are nuts when Addy and I sit on our family’s veranda and watch the lightning like fireworks. Second, goats. Goats are relatively useless creatures here. They graze freely, wander onto your homestead, get chased by dogs, Swazis don’t milk them and only occasionally eat them when cows are scarce or the event does not warrant the expense of killing and eating one of your biggest investments. With that said, goat over an open fire is one of the best things I have had here. The lining of a cow’s stomach the worst.

“Sister’s Crystals” has yet to disappoint me. It helped that I pretty managed expectations about Goat Lightning. There is relatively nothing on the interwebs and, musically, cracking “Sister’s Crystals” open is a relatively easy thing to do. Looping crystalline synthesizers go up or down in repeating three note lines, beats are miles underwater or are in a weird syncopation that, while minimal, take up any remaining space between sounds. All of this is overlaid with just enough tape distortion to keep soft-playing drones warbled and sunbaked like a cassette left too long on the hot dash of a car. There are fragments of a human voice throughout the album either looped into the structure of the song itself, sung in a manipulated kind of wordless melody or muttered into a tape recorder with a solipsistic nonchalance.

With the lack of much factual information, the shape-shifting melodies enhance the album’s mystery. Pulsing, repeating tones stack and rearrange themselves to make melodic lines where no melody actually exists. Songs like “Later Visions” are like pointillist paintings. Given enough space it takes on meaning, get too close and the structure bursts apart into a million unconnected fragments. “Sister’s Crystals” is built from the ground up like this. A structural piece of work built loop by loop. The ribs are exposed. Beams in a timelapse photo watching the flesh put on brick by brick until it is a building. It is always very evident what Goat Lightning is doing, how he (or she) is doing it, but that never quite diminishes the magic of the finished project.

Ryan H.

Hoko Sounds