Current Oct2-16 Issue

Every good mix begins with some original work

In college, I had a friend who made mix tapes for me and others with great frequency. She even joined an international indie music swap but lagged on making and sending a tape to her chosen person in the exchange, so she made that person two tapes as a means of apology. I’m using that friend as a role model for the moment, as I find myself in the daunting but extremely exciting pilot’s chair for my own mix for a friend. But it’s not like I’m dragging ass stubbornly behind the times. I’ll burn the songs onto a disc.

This process used to result in one of the most pleasurable and simplest gifts to give a person. You rifled through your stacks of CDs, queued up the songs that you deemed necessary, and hit a record button. You got to spend a few hours listening to music you love, and you were doing something nice for the recipient of your mix. But how might that lucky recipient interpret your choices? What if the person dismissed that bouncy, cotton-candy picker-upper track you picked as brain-numbing treacle? What if your friend couldn’t grasp why that one Smiths song was important enough to put on the mix even though they play it on the “alternative” radio station at least five times a day? What if you crammed every second of space on your chosen medium with lyrics, instrumentation, and themes that mean everything to you but not as much to the person the mix is for?

First of all, you’d have some pretty classless friends if any of them flat-out told you these things. Those kind of people don’t deserve tapes or CDs or possibly even music in their lives. But the personalized music mix begs the question: Which person is the mix really for? I would always start my mix tapes and CDs with selfless intentions. John won’t shut up about the Hold Steady, maybe he would benefit from some historical background with the Replacements. Or Jane can’t stop listening to all those awful canned Top 40 beats, so she might enjoy that single from the Dirty Projectors that almost sounds like it could be a Top 40 R&B hit.

But as helpful as your musical education lessons might be, it always comes down to why you pick the songs that end up on your mix. To some extent, every mix you make is for yourself, even if you plan to give it away. The blank tape takes the form of your storyboard or your canvas. Every song is a statement to express your thoughts on a specific point in time or a particular event. Each track will say something about your feelings for the mix’s recipient, which are often hopelessly tangled with your feelings about yourself. Even a line of reasoning as uncluttered as “I thought this person would like this song” implicates both the giver and the giftee with characteristics and desires that weren’t completely articulated until the song played.

But all the same, I love mixes for the thrill of unfamiliar and well-loved bands playing surprising songs as well as favorites. In all the mix tapes I got from my college friend, there were always tracks I didn’t care for very much. At the same time, the tapes introduced me to artists I hold in high regard as well artists similar to them, in that unending web of musical connections that grows as soon as you hear a song that blows your mind.

Finally, a word for my friend, since it’s her departure that inspired this post. She is the Elle of Elle in Wonderland fame, or DK to her friends, and she will be missed tremendously as she works toward her masters in anthropology in Albany, New York. Through DK’s encouragement, I began this blog, and I’ve always valued her comments here, to say nothing the insights she’s offered into my considerably less tidy real life. Hopefully, some of the following songs don’t cause her dad to veer off the road as they make the trek across the country.

The Creation ~ Making Time

Backstreet Boys ~ I Want It That Way

To clarify, that one has a background. Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime, if you’re nice.

Seu Jorge ~ Oh! You Pretty Things

Grizzly Bear ~ Two Weeks

Lonely Island feat. Norah Jones ~ Dreamgirl

Chicharones ~ Taco Wagon

Loretty Lynn & Jack White ~ Portland Oregon

Cut Copy ~ Out There on the Ice

Jens Lekman ~ Pocketful of Money

Tori Sparks ~ Tall Towers

Throw Me the Statue ~ Lolita

Cake ~ Mexico

DeVotchKa ~ Along the Way

The Builders and the Butchers ~ Hands Like Roots

Magneta Lane ~ Ugly Socialite

Sin Fang Bous ~ A Fire to Sleep In

The Low Anthem ~ Omgcd

The Thermals ~ You Dissolve

Jenny Owen Youngs ~ Fuck Was I

Andrew Bird ~ Fake Palindromes

Flight of the Conchords ~ She’s So Hot (Boom)

Mandolin shred, courtesy of The Bay Bridged

If you’re a member of a well-regarded band and you’ve played hundreds of shows in a string of cities for so long you could be in your high school cafeteria for all you know, I can sympathize with a strictly-business ethic. Stick to the music, keep chit chat to a minimum, cut loose for your faster numbers but save a bit of energy for the inevitable three-song encore. It’s kind of sad, but a seasoned concert attendant can detect this kind of modus operandi.

That’s why it’s up to the new blood, the yet-to-breakthrough musicians to woo the fans curious enough to leave the safety of their living rooms, pay exorbitant prices for cheap beer, and cheer on the band through endless sound checks and waves of girls doing silly dances with their arms. That’s why a band like the Builders and the Butchers will do their best to leave you with that feeling, maybe three songs into their set, that you are a part of something unruly and bubbling and undoubtedly alive. Judging by the drums and coveted fish maraca that the band passed around for the throng to play with during their performance at the Wonder Ballroom, I’d say the wooing worked. But I could make this guess based on the fact that one individual whom I found myself standing two feet away from at the start of the show brought his own tambourine, for jingle-jangle purposes, I would think.

You might not guess that a band preoccupied with townships rotten at the core, devils in human clothing, and situations as thick and numbing as lake water would so adeptly invoke the vigor of a church revival. I wonder if the Builders and the Butchers’ overwhelmingly hopeless lyrical themes need their audiences to participate in order to keep the attendees from going home and talking about what a bummer the show was. Then again, the performance evokes an older era of music, when people came to concert halls to meet friends, dance, and be engaged with the band in a manner that anyone who has ever texted more than a single sentence during a solo can’t grasp. This is evidenced by a gospel choir cameo, four cellists, and the many talents of Harvey Tumbelson, who tries his hand at the banjo, bass ukelele, and dulcimer among other instruments on the latest album, Salvation Is a Deep Dark Well. It comes as no surprise that the album was produced by Chris Funk, a guitarist with fellow Portland-base anachronists, the Decemberists. Lead singer, Ryan Sollee, can even bray like Colin Meloy. So I’m a little conflicted. I hope that such a compelling local band becomes immensely popular, requiring bigger venues and having to work across a much vaster space to connect with a single audience member up in the nosebleeds. But should it happen, I’ll sure miss the romantic pull of the fish maraca.

• The Builders and the Butchers ~ Salvation Is a Deep Dark Well ~ Gigantic Music

Devil Town

Spoiler alert: My true writerly identity

Much hoopla has been made about the anti-writerly, anti-grammar practices reinforced by social networking. I don’t need to add much more to the peanut gallery, but I will instead quote Heather Havrilesky, authoress of the rabbit blog, who eloquently spells out the dilemma: “Why would we want the writer, dull know-it-all that he or she so often is, to go and pollute our lives with his or her steady stream of opinionated tripe?”

It’s been a thought that often crosses my mind when I sit down to produce and vomit my personal stream of tripe for all the Internets to peruse. Since the beginning of 2009, I have put myself and my handful of readers through this routine a total of 100 times. Some of these excursions into my musical and otherwise-minded psyche have been as painful and laborious for both parties as regular trips to bikram yoga. Believe me, I used to attend bikram yoga at least three times a week maybe five years ago. But ultimately, I hope that my best efforts, the entries I would actually be pleased to attach my real name on, leave you with a similar feeling of triumph and enlightenment that a good yoga workout imparts (albeit, a smug and entirely cerebral one).

Half the days I do this, I feel like a little girl playing dress-up with her mother’s castoffs in the closet. I’m not a real writer, but I might look like one. In the same vein, some of the criticism for networking sites like Facebook and Twitter involves the traditional and sometimes stodgy notion that writing honestly and thoughtfully about one’s life should not be an activity confined to 140 words, should not be something the writer does in easy bids for attention (unless your inner workings really bleed themselves out when you list all your potential lunch options), and should not be so readily, you know, shared. Because writing, at its black and coal-laden heart, is a solitary pursuit. You as the writer can forward drafts to friends and ask for feedback, but when the product meets paper, when you present your stack of papers to a publisher or a jaded editor, the effort becomes your property. You own it, no matter how much help you had along the way, because at its nebulous beginning, it was your own silly idea to make it a thing to be completed at all. And it’s yours to bask upon when it’s sunny and clear outside, as well as yours when the neighbors decry your use of prosaic analogies and obviously cheap paint.

Some make the argument that the act of listening to music went in the opposite direction. Historically, music was a social activity consisting of dances and big bands that infused a pulse into parties and events. But as musicians’ attention became primarily focused  on the wealth of tricks to be figured out in a recording studio, maybe around the time the Beatles became more Sgt. Pepper and less Meet the Beatles, music became a pastime any individual could easily enjoy alone. Indeed, some of the best moments of life have involved lone walks with my ear buds tucked into the appropriate canals and the songs that ushered me along that moment.

But somehow, this current writing exercise  has helped me feel more connected to a community than I ever have before. As a result of this blog, I’ve learned just how rich my cute , bridged city is in terms of musical entertainment and resources for emerging mods and rockers. I’ve communicated with a couple real-life musicians and found introductions to artists and songs I wasn’t aware of through other bloggers. As I continue to post here, I don’t always expect to write something of head-spinning import or humor, though I will continue to give it a shot here and there. But this intersection, this compromise between the writer and the music lover, has never failed to surprise me. There is so much music out there, and so many fans, and so many different interpretations of a time signature here and a lyric about eggs there. Even though the underslept loon hunched over a keyboard never really vacates the premises, she’s found a lot of like-minded voices to keep her company as she crazies her way through the bandwidth.

Or I guess I could have just said: Here’s a playlist – some new favorites, a few you’ve heard about here before, and a couple re-discovered joys. I’ve had fun, hope you have too. Thanks for reading.

June 2009 mix ~ It’s Sweat or It’s Songs

Harlem Shakes ~ Strictly Game

The Kills ~ U.R.A. Fever

Fol Chen ~ Cable TV

Lisa Hannigan ~ Lille

Andrew Bird ~ Fitz and Dizzyspells

Okkervil River ~ Unless It’s Kicks

Chicharones ~ Taco Wagon

The City and Horses ~ Little Finland

The Dodos ~ It’s That Time Again

John Vanderslice ~ Exodus Damage

Plushgun ~ Just Impolite

Department of Eagles ~ Teenagers

Dirty Projectors ~ Cannibal Resource

Neko Case ~ Don’t Forget Me [Harry Nilsson cover]

Otis Redding ~ These Arms of Mine [The link to this song has been removed by request.]

The Builders and the Butchers ~ Down in This Hole [Daytrotter session version]

Laura Gibson ~ Postures Bent

Apples in Stereo ~ King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 3 [Neutral Milk Hotel cover]

Bonus cool points if you can name the building in the back of the band

Speaking of band names I love, Autopilot Is for Lovers is headlining the Bladen County Records showcase at Holocene this Thursday. The quirky handle kind of makes sense to me in a free association sort of way:

God is my co-pilot > Dog is co-pilot > I love dogs > autopilot is for lovers (of dogs)

I didn’t say the train of thought made sense to anyone except me. But I like to imagine that the associative capacities of the band run in similar channels. Autopilot Is for Lovers plays a dreamy kind of music, rich with unhurried accordion and melodica parts, that makes your mind wander to far-off imaginative places. Singer Adrienne Hatkins possesses a bizarre voice that ripples with unexpected textures, sometimes sounding warbly and almost-out-of-control only to dip back to a soft and restrained hum. Maybe if Joanna Newsom decided to make Lisa Hannigan her vocal role model, as an experiment, she’d sound like Haskins. Then the famed and as yet non-existent Battle of the Independent Songbirds would take place, and the lasting effects from the sounds of all the smashed auto-harps would change the course of contemporary Americana folk forever.

Haskins’ bandmate is Paul Seely, who covers guitar and drums as well as the glockenspiel and horns when the occasion calls for them. The Salem, OR native also plays with fellow record label classmates, the Builders and the Butchers. According to Ryan Fish TV, Seely used to work as a bus driver in Lake Oswego, so beyond his considerable technical chops, he deserves kudos for not allowing those persuasive kiddos to lead him to a life of Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers.

Miley + Jonas Brothers > Sitting in a tree > Cut the rope > DEATH

Be lucky your mind does not go down these warped paths that mine does. But just in case you’re one of my kind and don’t know how else to spend five dollars in Southeast Portland this Thursday, you’d probably enjoy supporting this local band at their record release show. One more:

Local band > local business support > responsible recession spending > pat yourself on the back, good citizen, now go contradict your consumer ethos and buy yourself a Hamm’s

In addition to the aforementioned Holocene concert, Autopilot Is for Lovers will also play at the Doug Fir on Sunday, May 31. Y La Bamba and St. Frankie Lee will also play.

• Autopilot Is for Lovers ~ A Moveable Feast (a winter compilation) ~ Bladen County

Whalebelly

Holy frijoles, everyone. The 2009 lineup for the Sasquatch! Music Festival was announced today, and the acts read like a list of the tags on this blog. Just to skim the surface: Five of the bands mentioned in my Best of 2008 list are scheduled to perform. In and of itself, that’s enough to start tallying how many quarts of plasma I need to produce and sell in order to enjoy the full three-day weekend of musical, comedic, and shower-free stylings in the Gorge. But I’m also really stoked that the following Portland acts were put on the bill and get to showcase their talents to a wider audience:

Saturday, May 23: Blind Pilot

This band has had the Indie Rock: A New Hope expectation heaped upon them by a number of critics. They could have a legitimate claim to the title, with comparisons to the Shins and Arcade Fire. Personally, Blind Pilot reminds me a lot of the Lucksmiths, with their soft use of percussion and ability to fit a tight knot of words into an easy-flowing pop rhyme. This lyric: “Your breath was courage laced with alcohol and you leaned in and said, ‘Make music with the chatter you hear. Whisper all the notes in my ears.’” That lyric would make me hop on a plane to meet its author anywhere.

• Blind Pilot ~ 3 Rounds and a Sound ~ Expunged

Oviedo

Sunday, May 24: The Builders and the Butchers

Anyone who bought a wristband for Music Fest NW 2008 received a complimentary album compiled of the bands who played during the festival that year. Although I missed their live set, I sought out The Builders and the Butchers’ single on that CD consistently for a couple months after Music Fest had ended. Something about the tango snare at the beginning must have been pretty hard to keep away, not to mention how the sound goes full-on flamenco fueled by bathtub gin after the first singing of the chorus. This song is best shouted in the safety of your car or empty office. You can try it with witnesses, but there is no guarantee of a benign response.

• The Builders and the Butchers ~ Split 12″ (split with Loch Lomond) ~ Bladen County

When It Rains

Monday, May 25: Blitzen Trapper

I make no secret of my love for Blitzen Trapper. I think these boys are fabulous. I will continue to say this until I believe otherwise. For now, a single reason why: If a band can open with a line with as much potential weight as, “I can live with God and with suicide,” and still keep your foot tapping and shoulders bobbing as you mull it over, they have to be doing something right.

• Blitzen Trapper ~ Furr ~ Sub Pop

God and Suicide

sounds like: singing and shouting with guitar, bass, mandolin, banjo, accordian, drums, xylophone, bells, and washboard…a.k.a, awesomeness. this band seriously impresses me. hailing from portland, oregon and the amazing bladen county records, the builders and the butchers are an indie/folk band that i’ve been listening to for a bit now and i think they need more recognition. seriously check them out and go to one of their shows…i know i will be trying to…ferndale, mi december 2nd!

click here to visit the builders and the butchers myspace page!

It can be a little difficult to interview a band in the absence of the main songwriter, so certain questions about the slightly arcane, grotesque nature of the subject matter can’t really be put. Other rather brilliant ones can, though.

Like how on Earth the band ended up guerilla gigging the lines for other people’s shows early in their days. Apparently they’d just rock up to group of people queueing to get into a gig and play for them, and when I ask them about it they just shrug it off.

“We’d been practising for a while and we didn’t have any shows booked, so we thought ‘we wish we were playing this show’ so we would crash the show. And when there’s tons of people standing in line for a show, they’re already there for music and you can see what kind of a response you would get.”

I can’t quite imagine that sort of habit working very well in the drizzle of Scotland, but The Builders & the Butchers seems to have a pretty relaxed attitude to what constitutes a performance. The fourth wall barely seems to be there at all.

“We ended up playing on the street a lot in downtown Portland. Mostly just practising, we were just kind of playing, seeing what would happen with it.”

This kind of approach is probably related to the nature of their live shows, which are supposed to be raucous as hell. The footage here is dubious at best, and is from a gig they played as a support band at Portland Zoo. The stage was pretty big and the sound turned down far too quiet, so between that and the distance from the crowd it was impossible to really gauge anything much about them as a live act. The reports I have from regular readers Campfires & Battlefields and DC are really positive, as is this from Linda over at Speed of Dark. I am at once delighted to have had the chance to see them during our brief stay, and a little bit gutted that it wasn’t somewhere more suitable.

Quite how they made it from there to being named the best new band in Portland by Willamette Week seems a little higgledy-piggledy at best. Bladen County Records are one of the nicest, friendliest labels in the industry, but it is only recently that Matt has started to make that extra step to being a little bit more ambitious, both for himself and for the bands he works with.

“The label’s grown up so much since these guys started.” he says. “They were the first real effort, you know, for us to really say shit, here’s a good album let’s get it out there. We had no resources – nada – we grew up together in a lot of ways. I knew a lot of people so I introduced these guys to the right people and a lot of people fell in love with their music. A lot of things came together like that. It’s a small town with a lot of resources – pretty much anything you need to make things happen in music you can find here.”

I find myself reminded of Alela Diane, and her slow route from tiny runs of hand-made self-releases, to a deal with another Portland label, Holocene, from there to an equally small label here in the UK, Names Records, and eventually to Fargo for European distribution. She was essentially touring the same album for about five years, and there’s something a little similar about the Builders’ steady progress from the streets to the clubs of Portland and now beyond, to the rest of the nation.

“We’ve retired a lot of songs. Right now we’re playing a lot of new stuff. We recorded a new album recently, but we’re not going to release it before Spring. We’ve written some new songs since that, there’s lots of new stuff.”

Although, of course, the people in DC have only just recently heard the old ones, so the news ones are somewhat caught in limbo until the process of getting the name out there is a little more complete. Reigning in artistic energy is a dangerous thing though – you don’t want to smother it altogether.

Lead singer and main songwriter Ryan Sollee might be a little more focussed, and Matt Brown from Bladen County might have suddenly decided that it might be time to step things up a notch, but the guys in the band still seem able to take it pretty easy. Portland is such a musical town that more or less everyone has a couple of side-projects and other bands which they help out.

I wonder if there comes a point at which you realise that one of these four or five bands in which you might be involved suddenly and obviously becomes one that is going places. Can you tell that one is a cut above the others and might stand a genuine chance of going places? The consensus is that you can’t really, and there is no real desire shown to give up the side projects, although Harvey, the banjo player, confesses that he has somehow ended up giving up all his extra-curricular projects.

So by hook or by crook the Builders & the Butchers might end up being famous. I bloody well hope so, because this chatter may be amiable and harmless enough, but their music has genuine purpose and venom. A friend and I were recently discussing that what the modern folk revivial lacked, for all its fey obscurantism and prettiness, was someone with the bite and snarl of The Pogues. Then I played him this. Or alternatively you could just read this quote from Campfires & Battlefields from the end of his email to me after seeing their show in DC: “I said hello to Ryan for you after the gig, and he expressed much love for all things Toad. He signed my CD and tee shirt. I’m almost 40 fucking years old and there I was grinning like a kid while a rock star signed my tee shirt for chrissakes.”

The Builders & the Butchers – Black Dresses

MySpace | More mp3s | Buy from Bladen County Records

This is the podcast to accompany all the Portland and Pickathon things I’ve been slowly but surely writing up over the course of the last couple of weeks.  With all the video to edit it may take a while to get it all sorted, but just follow this Pickathon search and you’ll find it all.  My full review of the festival is here.

This is a musical journey through our trip, from the Shaky Hands and The Builders & the Butchers who got us out there, to Eef Barzelay who we saw in Portland, several bands from the Pickathon Festival and even a song from Ray Rude’s Gameboy pop outfit Operation Mission.

It’s rather shorter than usual, but that is part of a new strategy: shorter podcasts more often.  I am going to try and go for once a week, and make them a maximum of an hour long.  I can’t promise anything, but I am going to try, and I think this might be a better approach for all of us, frankly.

Toad’s Pickathon pictures | Toad Vimeo page | Other Pickathon Features

Toadcast #34 – The Portland Podcast

01. The Shaky Hands – A New Parade (2.20)
02. The Builders & the Butchers – When It Rains (08.47)
03. Eef Barzelay – Numerology (12.21)
04. Operation Mission – Aqueous (19.30)
05. Lackthereof – Choir Practise (23.22)
06. Langhorne Slim – Restless (31.20)
07. Bombadil – Cavalier’s Har Hum (40.47)
08. Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers – Beloved, We Have Expired (43.26)
09. Oz St. Fossils – Jeweller’s Daughter (53.54)
10. Loch Lomond – Tic (59.49)
11. The Cave Singers – Cold Eye (66.34)

DC is giving away all sorts of goodies on The Waiting Room this week. In fact, he’s giving away all sorts of things that I would rather like to win myself, bar a couple of things which I have already. I was supposed to write this last week, but given it appears I have some sort of Black Belt in Fuckwittery, I managed to miss it by a week. Idiot.

Anyhow, all you have to do is listen to last week’s episode and email DC with the weight, pounds or kilos, of his suitcase when he flew back from the States the other week. The podcast itself is mostly about that trip and the bands he encountered there, so there should be bags of good things to listen to. I’m just downloading it myself, so I’ll be listening in a wee while.

Last week’s Waiting Room – the one with the competition.

Anyway, the goodies to give away are as follows:

The Builders & Butchers / Loch Lomond split 12″ – signed by The Builders & The Butchers
The Builders & Butchers Debut CD Album – signed by The Builders & The Butchers
Samantha Crain & The Midnight Shivers T-Shirt – size Adult Medium (US)
Anni Rossi CD Albums Scandia + Insects Kissing
Parethetical Girls 7″ Picture Disc + CD Album Safe As Houses
The Jones Street Boys CD Album Overcome
Or, The Whale CD Album Light Poles & Pines

I can promise you, that Builders & the Butchers album is still the best thing I’ve heard since I tiptoed in to the blogosphere a couple of years ago, and Loch Lomond are brilliant. Samantha Crain is bloody marvellous too, and I’m really looking forward to seeing her at Pickathon in a couple of weeks, and to hearing her new album. When Mrs. Toad and I get drunk, The Builders & the Butchers is pretty much the first thing we reach for in the evening. The only row is whether to play Black Dresses or Spanish Death Song first.

The Builders & the Butchers – Bottom of the Lake