(from page 28 of Inpress magazine, Wednesday 9 November 2011, issue 1199)

There’s resignation, defiance, and practicality in the way Ray Davies assesses his career these days. Of course the onetime leader of the Kinks would rather be writing, recording, and playing new music than revisiting songs he wrote 40 years ago. Of course he’d rather focus his time on albums like Other People’s Lives and Working Man’s Café, the two barely heard records of new material he’s released since 2006. But fans want “You Really Got Me.” And “Lola.” And many of the other songs Davies stamped in the rock & roll history books.

That’s why, after launching his solo career in earnest five years ago with two albums of new songs, he’s revisited old Kinks favorites on his latest two albums, 2009′s The Kinks Choral Collection and this year’s See My Friends. “These things didn’t happen by design,” he says. “It seems like they did, but they happened quite casually. They weren’t deliberate.”

Still, Davies refused to just go in and rerecord his old songs. He says he was hesitant to undertake either project at first, but eventually settled into concepts – working with an orchestra on the former and duet partners on the latter – he could live with. Davies then arranged blistering garage rockers and paisley-textured nostalgia to suit their new settings.

The Choral Collection mixes classics “Waterloo Sunset” and “All Day and All of the Night” with deep-album cuts like “Big Sky” and “Do You Remember Walter?” See My Friends taps big stars Bruce Springsteen and Metallica, along with newcomers like Mumford & Sons anda couple of artists you never heard of. “The secret to this kind of album is to let it be a collaboration album, let the artists have their way,” says Davies. “It’s important to keep that.”

Davies’ current tour skips the projects’ revisionist approach, instead stripping old and new songs to their original foundations. The Los Angeles quartet the 88 (which plays on See My Friends) backs Davies onstage. In a way, the show takes another glance at Davies’ storied history, this time through a relatively clear filter. “It’s more of a journey,” says Davies.

Even though the past couple of years have been dedicated to the two projects, Davies has been writing “bloody simple songs” for a new album. He’s even working with original Kinks drummer Mick Avory on some of them. But Davies adds, still flashing that ornery spark that’s a big part of the band’s turbulent history, “he’s not the greatest drummer in the world, but when he’s right, he’s perfect for my kind of narrative.”

No surprise then that you probably shouldn’t hold out for a Kinks reunion anytime soon. Davies blames his guitarist brother Dave for holding out. “I don’t know what he’s holding out for,” he says. “Life’s too short. I’d love to work with them again, but really, there’s not a chance.”

The Border Project’s latest theatre work is an interactive experience that lets the audience control how the story unfolds.

Half-Real, which showed at the Malthouse Theatre as part of the Melbourne Festival, is part-game, part-performance. Each audience member is given a wireless controller called the Zigzag, which they use to vote on how they want the play to progress.

This is not the first time The Border Project, an independent theatre group based in South Australia, has used the Zigzag technology. It was first used in their 2008 show Trouble On Planet Earth and then again earlier this year in Escape From Peligro Island, a choose-your-own-adventure format show aimed at children. However, Half-Real differs in structure from The Border Project’s previous works.

“We were interested in going, what if it wasn’t about the audience steering the choices of the characters, but … the audience was actually able to make decisions about what they discovered within the performance itself?” explains Sam Haren, director of Half-Real and founding member of The Border Project.

“That lead us to an interest in something that we viewed as more like a game format, with the idea of it being a mystery and the audience being positioned as investigators.”

The premise of the show is that a woman, Violet Vario, has been murdered, and the audience must investigate suspects and clues to try and find out who the perpetrator is. Scenes reveal the events that took place prior to Violet’s murder and the suspects’ possible motives.

The set consists of two connected blank walls upon which video and images are projected. After each scene, two or three options are projected above each suspect or certain objects — a cracked window, a mysterious photograph, a bloodstain on the door — and a voice over prompts the audience to vote on the option that interests them most.

“The 3D projections were brilliant in creating different atmospheres, settings and characters. The mapped projections following each character were very clever and fitted perfectly with the video game feel,” says Daniel Coghlan, theatre reviewer for Beat magazine.

Besides the three suspects, there are no other actors in the play. Supporting characters — a psychiatrist, a director, a prostitute — are simply silhouettes cast onto the wall, with whichever actors not on stage speaking the character’s lines from the side of stage.

“We thought that it was fascinating to put on stage two characters and have one of them as a silhouette because it focuses the audience’s interrogation on the suspect in question in a way that you may not have done if two or three characters were all in the space acting the scene,” says Haren.

“Half-Real was really a unique experience. I wouldn’t say it was a regular theatre performance, but more of a fragmented performance piece that offered fun without much substance,” says Coghlan, who was drawn to the show because of its interactivity and incorporation of unique technology.

“If shows like Half-Real can merge new technologies with traditional theatre then it may just introduce a whole new audience to the performing arts scene.”

Through combining more traditional aspects of theatre with innovative technology and audience participation, The Border Project aims to make the live performance a more thrilling and accessible experience.

“We’re interested in ways that we can bring in technology that can make a really awesome live event,” says Haren.

“Our company’s always been driven with a passion to engage a diverse audience; particularly people who don’t traditionally go to theatre or aren’t engaged by traditional theatre. We were interested in how we could bring a kind of playful approach to how theatre as a live event could work.”

The Border Project is currently working on a performance installation in collaboration with the Adelaide Zoo, titled I Am Not An Animal. It will premiere at the 2012 Adelaide Festival.

As you board your train, your phone starts to ring. You reach into your pocket to pull it out, accidentally bumping the man behind you. While you answer your phone, he turns to you, looking angry. “Sorry,” you mouth to him, still on the phone. He rolls up his sleeves and shoves you, then grabs your phone out of your hand and throws it into the ground. The other train passengers look uncomfortable and avert their eyes. You try to defuse the situation, but before you know it, you’re on the ground and being punched repeatedly. Suddenly, the man morphs into a ferocious bear. The train pulls to a stop and the bear drags you out of the carriage.

This is one of the three confronting scenarios you might find yourself in if you participate in Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine’s newest interactive art installation It’s A Jungle In Here, which is showing at Screen Space as part of the 2011 Melbourne Festival. It sounds violent, but it’s actually a stop-motion animation made with cardboard cut-outs; it’s darkly whimsical rather than disturbing. Knowles explains that she and Sowerwine decided to use a train setting because “you’re going somewhere and it traps you for a time, but then you’ve got these timed openings where you can escape.”

The installation consists of a wooden booth that seats two. After donning headphones, theparticipants place their faces in cut-out holes to view the video and—through a live feed that maps their faces onto the animated characters—are forced to take on the roles of the attacker and the victim. The victim’s side of the booth contains a microphone that they can shout into to protest; there are two potential outcomes in each scenario, depending on whether they make noise or not. The attacker is provided with a button that has to be pushed to make the scenario progress.

“We wanted these subtle, realistic situations that started off quite neutral and then escalated into something more intense,” says Knowles. The scenarios were drawn from both Knowles and Sowerwine’s personal public transport experiences and observations.

They initially used the face mapping technology in their 2010 interactive art installation You Were In My Dream, which won the Premier of Queensland’s National New Media Art Award 2010). But whereas that was set in a literal jungle, It’s A Jungle In Here is a metaphorical one, where people turn animalistic and social expectations crumble during unsettling encounters with strangers.

“We are building on the same technological experience with the face being transposed into an animation, but the real impetus for the work was creating a dramatic tension between two viewers,” says Knowles, who began collaborating with Sowerwine in 2001.

“I think that’s really the most important part of it, getting the two people to have this experience together and be sitting next to each other in real life, but having this relationship imposed upon them that they haven’t really got any control over. You find people that feel like apologising to the other person because they really do feel implicated! It’s almost like a performance between them as well.”

As it happened, I viewed the installation with Screen Space volunteer and Masters of Curatorship student, Lisa Gluck. We played along, acting out our given roles with appropriate facial expressions, until Gluck took on the character of a man who began groping my character.

“I wanted to participant in the animation, but eventually I actually took my face out and didn’t finish the scene because it was very awkward!” says Gluck.

“It was quite a confronting thing to have my face there and obviously not want to be doing that, but feeling as though it was happening.”

While many people who see the installation bring a friend along, Knowles says, “Two strangers is definitely the most confronting way it can be experienced. There’s definitely something about making strangers interact that’s really interesting.”

Is it perhaps because then the experience is more realistic and therefore creates more of an impact? If the idea of It’s A Jungle In Here is to emulate a sort of human jungle, then incorporating a sense of unfamiliarity and unpredictability makes sense.

“We have this social etiquette that everyone knows and as soon as you start breaking out of that, something about your personality has to revert to this animalistic thing,” says Knowles.

“If you’re being attacked, you’re going to have to respond to that in some kind of way, and a lot of the time probably in an instinctual way.”

The fight or flight response is inbuilt into all animals, humans included, and is another notion that It’s A Jungle In Here explores. When a situation deviates from what is socially acceptable, it can be hard to know how to act or how to neutralise hostility or discomfort, simply because there is no predicting how the other party in the situation will respond to your actions.

 “When you’re dealing with somebody who’s not working the same rational state as you, you don’t know how your actions are going to affect it,” says Gluck.

Similarly, in the installation, participants don’t know how their actions will affect the animation’s outcome. While Gluck’s character was harassing mine during our viewing, it began morphing into a couple of snakes. I shouted into the microphone, which caused the woman my face was mapped onto to morph into a tortoise that withdrew into its shell. Knowles tells us that had I not shouted, the snakes would have crawled into the woman’s clothing.

The technological side of the installation also holds a lot of meaning. It’s A Jungle In Here was supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, who presented Knowles and Sowerwine with a Digital Culture Fund. According to their website, the Australia Council is interested in funding “artists and audiences co-creating new forms of live experience; experimentation across platforms and to engage diverse communities with creative practice; [and] inventive strategies for live collaboration, presentation and distribution of artwork.”

Knowles compares the idea of having your face mapped onto a multimedia animation to your online persona. When we’re on the internet, with our computers acting as a barrier, we may choose to act differently than we would in real life.

“We’ve set up this thing where it’s just a button click to keep aggressing. We’ve made this very attractive booth and attractive animation that’s inviting you to do these horrible things!” Knowles says.

“It’s very easy to go on Facebook and write something horrible; it’s your self-control or your personality that stops you doing that. It’s a public forum and people are not being responsible, because you’re in your bedroom on your computer and you just feel like it’s you and some words on a screen. Suddenly our tiny little bedrooms are becoming this global public space.”

It’s easy to compare this to the false sense of privacy we feel when we’re on a train withheadphones clamped firmly over our ears, our chosen music drowning other sounds out. In the animation, you can see the other train passengers taking notice of the confrontation, but they never interfere. It echoes the real world, where many people are unlikely to react strongly to something unless it directly involves them.

“Everyone is keeping to themselves and has this insular kind of world around them. Your space is just you and whatever you’re affecting directly around you,” says Knowles.

“When all these online communications first started, it was a bit more of ‘oh it’s just online,’ but I think over the past five years, it actually has become [reality],” says Gluck.

Since technology is becoming so ingrained in all aspects of people’s everyday lives, and art is often a reflection of society, it’s only natural that contemporary art includes technology in some way. Even more relevant is the art or theatre work that aims to bring people together in a collective experience. As Knowles describes it, it’s “the power of everyone being connected all the time and that becoming part of mainstream culture.”

It’s A Jungle In Here is a psychodrama, social experiment game and multimedia art piece that explores many topical facets of modern life with an animation that’s all at once confronting, humorous and visually enticing.

http://www.isobelknowles.com/
http://www.vansowerwine.com/

Being a buzz band sucks. Sure, the first four or five months can be the most awesome time of your life, as every Pitchfork-aspiring blogger on the planet strains to find new ways to say your band totally rocks. But then the backlash starts. And then people start hating you. Then they forget about you. And then you release your third album and nobody buys it. And suddenly, maybe being a buzz band for four or five months wasn’t the best thing for your career after all.

Welcome to the world of Cold War Kids.

Six years ago, right around the time the internet started ejaculating loads of praise over bands you never heard of, four guys from California released a series of EPs that stirred a little interest in the indie-rock community. In 2006 they released their debut album, Robbers & Cowards, and suddenly Cold War Kids were, if you believed the hyperventilating basement bloggers who deemed themselves music critics, the best band ever. Better than Nirvana. Better than U2. Better than the fucking Beatles.

But quicker than you can say Cold War Kids are more popular than Jesus, the backlash started. Word got out that they were a Christian band, which no one bothered to verify but must be true since three members attended the super-evangelical Biola University. And if there’s anything indier-than-thou types hate more than artists who sell records, it’s artists who like Jesus. In no time, Cold War Kids weren’t the best band ever. They were a bunch of God-praising phonies. Besides, did you hear about Grizzly Bear? Now there’s a great band.

Kids frontman Nathan Willett still feels the sting that killed his band’s buzz. “We were too careful about how we dealt with that situation,” he admits. “We didn’t want to be the loudmouths. But that kind of below-the-belt criticism … I just wished they just would have said, ‘We don’t like these guys. We just don’t like their band.’”

So Cold War Kids decided to go bigger and wider on their third album, Mine Is Yours, which was released in January. They replaced the shattered, piano-driven stories about alcoholics and other desperate folks on their debut with vibrating guitars, epic soundscapes, and a grander sense of purpose – sort of like Kings of Leon without the douchey side effects.

But the record didn’t sell. College radio barely touched it. And the increasingly fickle blog community completely ignored it. “I don’t think it was understood in the way we would have liked it to been,” says Willett. “I was disappointed that it wasn’t noticed more. But we’re going to put out another one after this and keep on going.”

This leaves Cold War Kids at an impasse regarding their future and with a question that may not have an answer: How does a former buzz band get people to pay attention again? Or at least how does it live down its cursed past? “We didn’t have a model or somebody we could learn from,” says Willett. “People are still figuring that out. So many of those bands aren’t around anymore. It’s not sad that you’re waiting tables. It’s sad that you had the opportunity and you let it pass.”

There are way too many bearded folkies either holing up in cabins deep in the woods to make records these days. Either that or they’re decking out the studio to sound like they were holed up in a cabin deep in the woods. But only Blitzen Trapper could truly pass themselves off as a band from the 1970s. There’s a strong scent of Laurel Canyon smoothness to the Oregon quintet’s laid-back hippie grooves that can never be mistaken for fleet or foxy.

For the past few years, Blitzen Trapper frontman Eric Earley has been hitting a dustier trail for his band’s albums, starting with 2008′s Furr, continuing with last year’s Destroyer of the Void, and ending up with American Goldwing, which came out last month. They all lead to the same tuneful Americana, told with banjos, harmonicas, pianos, and, occasionally, fuzzy guitar. Despite the feedback freakout that starts their sixth album, they really don’t tramp any new ground here. But once you’ve finally settled in a good groove, there’s no rush to get out of it.

“I like classic guitars,” says Earley somewhat sheepishly. “I really wasn’t thinking about doing a new record. It started as a solo thing, since they’re more personal songs. But when I got in the studio, they started sounding good. So I brought the other guys in. Each record is like a snapshot of where I am in my life.”

On the earlier albums, the first three before Furr got the buzz rolling, Blitzen Trapper sounded like a band stumbling for some direction. There were signs of what was coming, especially on 2007′s Wild Mountain Nation, but it wasn’t until Furr that Earley hit on something. He got about as close as he could to making a Dylan/Dead/Band record without actually inventing a time machine to transport himself and his band back to 1970.

Destroyer of the Void was more ambitious, and maybe just a little predictable. It stepped away from the group’s holy trinity of influences to find some identity with a mix of double-tracked guitar runs, tiny synth burps, and spacey time shifts. It was all rather epic-sounding, even if the album lacked actual songs, coming off more like a series of elaborate multi-part suites with no direction home.

American Goldwing, the third part of this don’t-call-it-a-trilogy, scales back a bit. “There’s a simplicity to the new record,” admits Earley. “It’s pretty stripped down. There’s not a lot of extra fat on these songs.”

Like the artists he famously borrows from, Earley has no idea where he’s going next. Of course it will probably sound like something from the late ’60s or early ’70s. And of course it will probably come with faded nostalgia and a slight twang. “I listen to a lot of hard rock and country music,” he says. “But I don’t like a lot of folk music, to be honest.”

Family figures into The Way from so many directions, there’s no getting around it. The movie, which opens Friday, is directed by Emilio Estevez. It stars his dad Martin Sheen. It was partly inspired by Estevez’s daughter-in-law, and partly inspired by Sheen’s father, who the film is dedicated to. And the whole movie hinges on an overseas death that sends an American to claim his son’s body.

The Way is about the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage that starts in France and ends in Spain. Thousands of people – including the wife of Estevez’s son – walk the path every year, in hopes of finding some sort of spiritual or personal enlightenment along the way. It’s not an easy trek; in fact, it can be downright brutal, as grumpy optometrist Tom (Sheen) finds out after he gets a call informing him that his son Daniel (played by Estevez in flashbacks) was caught in a freak storm and died on the path.

Tom goes to France to bring home his only son. But once he gets there, and after some reflection, he decides to stay and complete the pilgrimage, with Daniel’s cremated remains – which he sprinkles along the way — in tow. “I had this image of it growing up,” says the 71-year-old Sheen, who, along with Estevez and the rest of the movie’s cast and crew, traveled more than 200 miles on the Camino de Santiago during filming. His dad often talked about the path but never got a chance to walk it.

As one character tells Tom in the movie, “Religion has nothing to do with this.” Both Sheen and Estevez stress this point at a joint interview during a recent stop in Cleveland. “It’s appealing to agnostics, Catholics, believers, nonbelievers,” says Estevez. “It’s about [common] struggles and the disconnect between community and faith.”

That sense of community is evident throughout the movie. Reluctant to talk about his son, or anything for that matter, Tom sets out on the path alone. But midway through he’s picked up three traveling companions, all with their own stories to tell. “You do this for yourself,” says Sheen, echoing his character’s arc. “But you’ll create your own community on the path.”

The Way is a quiet movie. Not much happens – which is probably an accurate summation of the Camino itself. It’s all about what you learn along the way. And there’s plenty of time for reflection, as folks move from one small town to the next, stopping only to sleep and eat at the various inns catering to pilgrims. It can be a tough journey, as Sheen was well aware of when his son asked him to star in the movie. “I had some anxiety about doing this – an old guy walking and carrying a bag,” he admits. “A certain amount of discipline is necessary. ”

Despite all this, the movie is inspiring people to walk the path. Or at least they’re talking about walking the path. “Just be sure to bring some Vaseline for the blisters,” Sheen says with a laugh. “And good shoes.”

There’s no getting around the whole supergroup thing with Wild Flag. You don’t want to bring it up, but you can’t really talk about the band without getting into the four members’ pasts and how awesome it is that they’re all getting together for this new project.

This summit of some indie-rock’s most kick-ass women – Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss, the Minders’ Rebecca Cole, and Helium’s Mary Timony – could easily have turned into Sleater-Kinney minus singer Corin Tucker, since Brownstein’s distinctive vocals and guitar slashings, as well as Weiss’ solid drum fills, anchored one of the Pacific Northwest’s best indie bands.

But singer and guitarist Timony adds another level of guitar fury to Wild Flag that twists many of the songs on their excellent self-titled debut album into glistering, propulsive bundles of energy that often go beyond Sleater-Kinney’s femme-punk workouts. Whether or not it was their intention, Wild Flag flip the concept of both girl groups and supergroups.

“It’s different than any other band I’ve been in, where the songwriter brings the song,” says Cole, who plays keyboards and, like all the ladies, sings. “We all work together here. You want your bandmates to be honest with you — ‘Rebecca, that song kinda sounds like Rick Springfield’ – but it can be sad. ‘Oh, I just wrote a Rick Springfield riff.’ But I’m glad they’re hearing things I’m not.”

Buzz has been building for Wild Flag since early this year, when the band hit the road – including a stop at South by Southwest – to test out their songs. By the time they stepped into the studio, things had been hammered out and nailed down to the point where the album could pretty much be recorded with minimal overdubs. “I enjoy the process of giving a song life by playing it live over and over before we commit it to record,” says Cole. “It’s hard to see what sticks when you’re in a little eight-by-eight practice space.”

It helps that all four women played major parts in their former bands (in addition to their main groups, they individually have ties to Quasi, Bright Eyes, and Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks too). Wild Flag pulls from all of their experiences — from songwriting to recording to compiling set lists. They’ve all been through this before.

So, you see, there’s really no way around the Wild Flag-are-a-supergroup issue. But Cole insists that Wild Flag differ from other supergroups, from Blind Faith to the Traveling Wilburys, because they plan to stick around a while. It’s everyone’s new full-time gig. “We all put a lot of effort into this,” she says. “The idea is not a one-off record. This isn’t a side project for any of us.”

I’m a girl who’s down with particularly good horrific suspense… reading it, that is. Spare me the legions of chainsaw-wielding, lip-sewing stalkers of screens both silver and small, but if your writing can thrill me past any temptation of sleep, keep me pacing, prompt my fumblings for a totem of familiarity, or rip a gasp out my throat, then you’re good. The real question I ought to ask Jason McIntyre, author of Thalo Blue and The Night Walk Men, weaver of wickedly unsettling prose, then, is this: “Just how afraid should we be about your latest literary offering, Bled?”

Tell us, Jason… how much blood are we really in for? Should I be wielding my special anti-sanguinary parasol, for good measure? Here’s his response.

Why is blood so creepy?: discussing my new book, Bled

There’s no denying that there’s blood in my new book. After all it’s front and centre: the title is Bled, after all. And there’s a big dab of it right on the cover, hot red against stark white.

So what’s with suspense and horror writers’ fascination with the stuff? It’s visceral, I suppose. It’s the stuff we are all made of. Pumping in all our veins is this common material. Without it we would die.

And if we see some of it (or lots of it, as the case may be) it probably means we’re on the very cusp of dying. Or hurting. Since suspense is often about what it is to hurt, and horror is often about what it’s like to have hurt inflicted, it makes sense that blood would be bound up in these kinds of fiction.

But how much blood is in my new book Bled, anyhow? Is there just gobs and gobs of it? If you read this story, will you have to get on your waders and dive in?

I can tell you that it’s not gory for the sake of it. There are some difficult scenes but my catalogue would never be called gratuitous. Nor would Bled.  In fact, I would venture to say I’m not a horror writer at all. Bled is much more about the human condition, much more about facing imperious odds and seeing if one can come out alive. If there’s a lasting legacy with the story, if readers can remember something other than the bloody cover, I do hope it is this: people can push back when they’ve been pushed too far.

So, what do you think of the title and cover? Does blood make you squeamish? Does it excite you? If it does, I might be tempted say you do like horror. But I bet you’ll like this book anyway.

Ah, yes. That’s the sound of my parasol billowing open to meet the wind. While I wrestle on a spatter-resistant raincoat, have a look at this spine-tingler of a teaser trailer, then tell me you’re not all the more intrigued. I was.

If that made you hungry for more than a minute’s revelations, sink your teeth into this description.

Bled: About the Novella

She only wanted to leave. But he took that option from her. Now she wants it back.

Set on the same island as the reader favorite Shed, the latest literary suspense novella from bestselling author Jason McIntyre picks up the Dovetail Cove saga with this story of one lonely woman… trapped.

Tina McLeod is on the cusp of a new life. Extraordinary change is rare in her world but this newsflash means she can finally leave her small island town for good. No more pouring coffee for townsfolk in Main Street’s greasy spoon, no more living under the weight of her born-again mother. That is, until Frank Moort comes in for his usual lunch and dessert on an ordinary Friday in May.

Bled sees things turn backwards and upside down for each of them. Their encounter is prolonged and grotesque, the sort of thing splashing the covers of big city newspapers. Both are changed. And neither will come out clean on the other side.

A story about taking what’s not yours, Bled explores pushing back when you’ve been pushed too far. It paints in red the horrors from our most commonplace of surroundings: right out in the open where nothing can hide behind closed doors and shut mouths.

About the Author

Jason contemplates labelling all Bled proceeds as blood money.

Jason McIntyre has lived and worked in varied places across the globe. His writing also meanders from the pastoral to the garish, from the fantastical to the morbid. Vibrant characters and vivid surroundings stay with him and coalesce into novels and stories. Before his time as an editor, writer and communications professional, he spent several years as a graphic designer and commercial artist.

McIntyre’s writing has been called darkly noir and sophisticated, styled after the likes of Chuck Palahniuk but with the pacing and mass appeal of Stephen King. The books tackle the family life subject matter of Jonathan Franzen but also eerie discoveries one might find in a Ray Bradbury story or those of Rod Serling.

Jason McIntyre’s books include the #1 Kindle Suspense, The Night Walk Men, Bestsellers On The Gathering Storm and Shed, plus the multi-layered coming-of-age literary suspense Thalo Blue.

I’ll be reading Bled this weekend, garbed in all my protective gear, clot-resistant umbrella at the ready. Can I withstand the carmine-coloured assault and remain untouched? More importantly, why would I ever want to? Bring on the psyche-unravelling, spinal-tremor-eliciting, literary maelstrom.

You can purchase Bled directly from Amazon, here. Peruse the Bled feature over at Books, Personally, hosted by my dear friend Jennifer, here. Stop by Jason’s website, The Farthest Reaches. Follow him on Twitter, and ‘like’ his Facebook fan page. With all that virtual love, perhaps his next book will be about fairies and unicorns, and blithe forest creatures of eternal light? No, probably not.

A free electronic copy of this novel was provided by Jason McIntyre to the reviewer.

Short stories are brilliant at capturing the crystallization of a moment, an encounter, a single, sustained emotion, feeling or thought that lingers long after the reading. The best can render us speechless and lightning-struck in a handful of pages. They are ideal conversation fountains, and enrich us with minimal time dedication on our part. Perhaps most significantly, they are valuable gateways into the world of reading, for those who are bookshy.

Ellen Rhudy, of the marvellous book blog, Fat Books and Thin Women, runs a weekly feature dedicated to the enjoyment and analysis of one short story at a time. Its tagline is “Always short stories, always ones available online for free”, and I’ve admired the accessibility of this for quite some time. I’m pleased to announce that, with Ellen’s blessing, I’ll be participating in the Story Sundays feature, every week at Novel Niche, adding to the enthusiasm reserved especially for coffee, cigarette or evening-length reads. Ellen’s story this Sunday is “Fire” by Chelsea Laine Wells.

I’m happy to launch the feature with the work of another colleague of mine, the writer Jason McIntyre. Here are my musings on his novelette, The Night Walk Men, which, in the spirit of the free-to-access segment of Story Sundays, he has graciously made free to download. You can access it in the format of your choosing at Smashwords, here.

“Death has no prejudices. None that I’m aware of. Well, unless of course you count a discordant bias for the elderly. Or that heaving soft spot for the unhealthy and for the careless.”

Jason McIntyre continues to write fiction I like, in a genre I’ve always avoided. Reading his work has proven to be a reliable barometer by which to mark my preconceptions, as well as a reminder of the successes that can accompany fictive genre-melding.

The Night Walk Men, a novelette offering from the author of Thalo Blue, is no exception. It is a curious tale of justice, mediated by non-human hands, narrated to us by Sperro, a Night Walk Man, a character who waxes cryptic and revelatory with each of his admissions. He tells an eager, unidentified listener (for all you know, it might be you) of his brotherhood line, of the life-altering, reality-shaping work they carry out, and of an important young girl, affectionately dubbed ‘Gabriella the great’, over whom two prominent Night Walkers fundamentally disagree.

There is no other personage in The Night Walk Men from whom I would have preferred principal narration. Sperro’s encouragingly irreverent demeanour makes the work that much more readable. He spends much of his time on the page protesting that we don’t really want to hear the story he has to convey, though we protest that we do. His  list of metaphors for pain, which introduce us to the novelette proper, are achingly valid, all of them aptly delivered without trite flourishes:

“This is going to be coming down from on high. Or finding your spouse in bed with another. Or murder-suicide. Or heavy metal from the neighbour at three in the morning. This is going to be the doctor telling you it’s inoperable. Or a chemical burn on flesh. Or pepper spray and a wrongful conviction. This is going to be a fire eating your life’s work. This is going to be Your First Time. Or Your Last Time.”

There is something in the way that Sperro speaks to the reader which recalls all the meaningful conversations in your life, the ones that span hours, undivided, or ford the rivers of rushing years with their implacable necessity. If you haven’t had conversations like that, there is an arena of your life that’s not yet been fiercely assaulted with investigation, and more’s the pity. I imagine it would be a worthwhile experience to talk to all of the Night Walk Men whom we meet: flinty Sperro, sad, weary Obsidion, unyielding and resolute Montserrat. These three shadowy, solemn figures each merit our attention, elicit our sympathy, and prompt discussion with fellow readers.

Perhaps less engaging is the character of Braille the Rail, a blind, affable saxophonist whose own life imbricates meaningfully with Gabriella’s, at a crucial juncture. I don’t think he’s poorly done, necessarily; I’m quite certain he’d induce me to hunker down on the floor of the train station and belt out a rousing duet with him—after all, he’s written that way. Still, there is something in him that resembles residual stock quality. He almost reads as a composite of every emotionally sensitive, mentally attuned blind man with a penchant for music and wise ruminations we’ve encountered in works of fiction. The constraints of the novelette form may not afford him the same room in which to take root. Nor do we learn much of Gabriela that emotionally binds us to the promise of her slumbering greatness. Perhaps we are meant to empathize far more with the guardians who struggle, labouring beneath the yoke of their extraterrestrial vocations… and if this is McIntyre’s purpose, it is handsomely achieved.

There is something maddening about reading a fictive work that lingers perpetually on the precipice of a big reveal that is never revealed, isn’t there? Many of the questions this novelette raises do not answer themselves. Unless McIntyre is brewing a sequel, the only responses to your burning queries about Gabriella’s fate, or the continued role of the nocturnal sojourners, might well be the ones your own imaginative speculation furnishes. In some instances, this unresolved tension is indicative of nothing so much as authorial laziness or indecision, in the mode of “I didn’t know where to end it, so I just… ended it.” Thankfully, McIntyre’s writing does not give rise to this breed of suspicion. Indeed, the lack of comforting closure by the end of Sperro’s grim discourse could be interpreted as a quiet affirmation of the fact that tidy, linear endings rarely exist—a reality within which the Night Walk Men must function, or else perish.

An hour’s read as cerebrally provocative as it is solidly presented, The Night Walk Men distinguishes itself from normative crime-suspense-thriller dross with its decidedly literary cast. Shot through with shades of the metaphysical, the bleakly humorous and the wildly speculative, if it doesn’t at least make you wonder… then I’m coming straight to your door for the answers.

Jason was gracious enough to answer some questions I had on The Night Walk Men; here’s a transcript of our interview.

The writer, giving his best Sperro impersonation?

‘The Night Walk Men offers us your perspective of eternal guardians, watching over the realms of the living, acting on orders from a source on High. This isn’t necessarily a unique concern (but, of course, these days, what is, right?) What do you think sets your treatment of this archetype in literature apart from the rest?

The candy coating. Don’t laugh; I’m actually being serious when I say that. Let me explain. Most books and films that personify death do so in one of two ways: either showing it as a harbinger of black, horrific nightmares plus all the bad stuff we associate with leaving this world, or as benevolent angels doing everything they can to make our exit peaceful and meaningful in a dramatic way.

The Night Walk Men is about the blue collar working class who are charged with dealing Death. And Life. These people are doing their job. They get orders from a boss in a figurative corner office, whose motives they don’t always understand. These are assembly-line figures who do everything short of punch a clock. Our narrator is bitter, embroiled in a centuries-long tenure he feels is important but that no one fully appreciates, that no one really understands. He and his kin are the writhing, unwashed masses of his occupation. And he is desperate to leave some kind of understanding behind to those he feels might be, ironically, incapable of understanding.

Plus, he’s a sarcastic, heavy-handed fellow. I can’t help but love his brutal honesty, can’t help but love him—warts and all, as the saying goes.

As you know, I enjoyed reading Thalo Blue, one of your full length novels, which I reviewed on Novel Niche in June. If you had to single out one thematic concern that unites Blue with The Night Walk Men, what would it be?

Writing decent fiction is similar to good songwriting. There’s power in the silences, those moments between chords, those moments between melodic movements. If the writing is good, the reader will skim across character, detail, plot and everything else that’s left deliberately out then come up with a result somewhat unique to them, possibly akin to their own sheer imagination, or to drag out my analogy, akin to a melody heard inside one’s own head.

I believe this is why you can see drastic, bi-polar reviews for the same book; some hate it and some love it. If everyone had the same look at the same book, then it would likely be called “Sweet Vampiric Stereotypes Volume Thirty-Nine”.

As for thematic parallels, I must say that all my work, Night Walk Men and Thalo Blue included, deal with the idea that we are not above anything. There is something at work on our lives and in our world that is trying to harmonize with us. Is it a spiritual undertone? You might interpret it that way. Is it a supernatural or paranormal presence? That’s also a valid interpretation.

Will I be so overt as to say what I believe? Perhaps in time. For now, though, I’ll probably just explore these ideas through more stories and see if I can use this exercise as a way to establish what I do believe. And what does make sense to me.

The names you’ve chosen for this novella are spot on! I’d like to know a bit more about what goes into your naming process; has any name you’ve given a character been arbitrary?

They’re all completely arbitrary. What? You thought there was some magic there? Some divination? Nope. None.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I do give great thought to character names. Have any been without some level of forethought? Sadly no. And when writing—since I write in an entirely linear fashion, despite the sometimes non-linear stories—I will often find myself at a dead stop for fear of introducing a new character called by the wrong thing. I can’t go forward until the name is right.

The process starts in the cranium. I draw ridiculous associations with names that I’ve heard, people I have known, or those from other stories and films. Then I do research and try to combine given names and surnames with some sort of semi-obvious tone to them. I don’t want them to be outright and obvious but perhaps they can be let to stew in a reader’s mind as they read the book. Then, Eureka!, I know why he named her that!

So you’re sitting opposite a stranger on a park bench, and she’s reading “Sweet Vampiric Stereotypes Volume Fang-fourty”. Tell her something about your work, The Night Walk Men in particular, which will make her drop the smut and run to Amazon.com/Smashwords/the other fine e-stores your writing is sold.

Well, I imagine, knowing my own character, I would probably converse with her about anything other than my writing. I might enquire as to what she finds so titillating about the smut, as you call it. But all the while, I’d probably never ‘fess up that I have written anything. In truth, if she’s reading that, she’ll likely never care to give anything of mine a chance.

However, to play along, I’d probably say that this young author is writing something like contemporary baroque lit-fiction, often but not always, with tinges of the paranormal. His characters explore their world with innocence but the world in these books is anything but.

I like to say that my role as a writer is to break your heart, utterly and completely shatter it to pieces. Then, bit by bit, my next task is to put it back together again.

I’ve quoted a set of lines I especially like, to preface my thoughts on your novelette. If you were going to excerpt some of your favourite lines, what would they be, and why do you love them so?

Tough question. I do like the ones you’ve chosen as well.

My feeling is that the more melodic bits can only exist if there are, as I said before, empty spaces around them. If there is too much of this melody, then the whole thing falls under the weight of its noise.

I like many. Some include:

“It’s a strange thing: I suppose a body gets used to laying under a sheet at night and when it doesn’t feel the familiar weight of fabric pressing down over it, it can suddenly feel exceedingly unnatural.”

from Shed, 2010

It’s not written particularly well, but the sentiment is a strong one. Not only does it work well in the story, but it says so much about the human condition.

Another from The Night Walk Men might be this entire paragraph:

“I should tell you that I’ve seen Death. I’ve seen Death nearly every day. Just today, in fact, I witnessed Death walking down McMurchy Street. In what city, I cannot recall. And for what purpose, I cannot tell you. But at what time, that I do remember. It was just before high noon, and He was there, moving south, determined. If you had eyes and were at my side, you’d have seen Him too. He might have been searching for a sick child, might have been looking for a young fellow who didn’t look both ways before crossing.”

Why do I like it? It does a solid job of personifying Death. It is mythical in its quality and I believe every reader will understand the notion of Death seeking out sick children or some young one who didn’t heed the words of his parents while trying to fetch a stray ball.

I’m deeply grateful to Ellen for her consenting to my adoption of the Story Sunday meme; I fully intend on doing it justice and continuing to contribute in the fine style that Ellen’s established (with my own, Novel Niche-esque quirky flair, of course)! I’m also appreciative of Jason taking the time out to respond so thoughtfully and thoroughly to the questions I posed. I look forward to seeing his writing career evolve. His finely articulated, synergistic style is a worthy platform from which many lofty fictive trees can be grown; so here’s to reading in that particular forest… and here’s to countless Sundays of short fiction splendour!

Story Sundays was created by Fat Books and Thin Women as a way to share appreciation for this undervalued fiction form. All stories discussed are available to read free, online. Here’s Fat Books and Thin Women’s Story Sunday archive, and here’s mine. Want to start up Story Sundays on your blog? Yay! Email story.sundaysATgmail.com for details.

Click twice to enlarge.
(from page 34 of Inpress magazine, Wednesday 14 September 2011, issue 1191)

We’ll spare you the details about how Australian duo An Horse got its name. It involves a grammar argument that singer and guitarist Kate Cooper had with her sister, and it’s really not that exciting. Cooper herself would rather talk about something else, like her band’s new album Walls or how she spends her downtime on tour. “It’s so brutal talking about that,” she laughs. “Thank you for not being that guy.”

It’s a typical indie-rocker response. And exactly what you would expect from someone who met her future bandmate in an indie record store. Like an Australian version of all those American-bred boy-girl indie-pop duos, Cooper and drummer Damon Cox, who were playing in different groups at the time, immediately formed a bond and started a band, with her out front writing, singing, and playing guitar.

An Horse’s first album, Rearrange Beds, came out in 2009 and echoed the ragged, spare, but hooky music played by Mates of State and Matt & Kim. It’s sparkling, literate indie pop that never really goes so deep that you can’t appreciate it on its own terms. Lyrically, it can be confusing at times, but don’t sweat the details. Even Cooper admits that when she’s stringing words together on songs like “Swallow the Sea” and “Trains and Tracks,” Cox is often left scratching his head. “He actually has no idea what I’m singing about,” she says.

There are many catchy and likable moments on Walls, especially the ones where Cooper doesn’t get too caught up in the words she’s singing. She stretches her syllables, guiding songs through the occasional volume boosts. She also has this little thing where she repeats key lines before pulling back right at the second you’re getting tired of them. That’s when An Horse truly find a groove.

“The first [album] wasn’t really meant to be a record,” she says. “They were demos, not a cohesive project. But the second time around, we had more time and people to bounce ideas off. It was actually a band making a record, not two friends recording songs and accidentally getting a record deal.”

Walls is a bigger and fuller-sounding album than Rearrange Beds. But Cooper and Cox have no intention of expanding An Horse, not even onstage, where an extra pair of hands or two could come in, um, handy once in awhile. Plus, additional bandmates could probably ease some of the offstage tension that’s inherently part of the duo setup. “We’ve gotten better,” says Cooper. “We actually have a pretty good relationship, where I can say, ‘You’re a fuckwit,’ and he can say, ‘No, you’re a fuckwit.’”

Still, even after acknowledging the limitations of a two-person band, Cooper wouldn’t have it any other way. She points to her solo demos as an example. She says they sound like country songs until Cox comes in and adds some rock & roll muscle. Anyone else in the mix would just muck it up. “It’s a good process we have,” she says. “But we do need to be more creative. I hope I’m a better songwriter now. I mean, I couldn’t have gotten worse, right?” 

Mark Oliver Everett is finally finding some peace.

Twenty years into his career, the frontman for Eels, who goes by the stage name E, is putting to rest the demons that ran through two solo records and six band albums. And it took a trilogy of concept albums that explore the burden-carrying themes of desire, loss, and redemption for Everett to get to that place.

In a way, these three albums – Hombre Lobo, End Times, and Tomorrow Morning – exorcised parts of Everett’s past that he had wrestled with ever since the first E record came out in 1992. Electro-Shock Blues, the second Eels album (from 1998), is the obvious starting point here. Written and recorded following his sister’s suicide and his mother’s diagnosis of cancer, the record is a tough listen, a deep and often brutal look into Everett’s fractured psyche. It remains his best work.

The next few Eels albums, especially 2000′s Daisies of the Galaxy, which included the hopeful “Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues,” slowly brushed away the fading smell of death around Everett (among other things, his cousin was a flight attendant on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11).

By the time he began work on End Times, the first album recorded for the trilogy but the second released, Everett was a relatively happy dude, picking away at the records’ themes with an open-minded and objective perspective, rather than a pained and personal one. “They were all ignited about something going on in my life,” he says. Surprisingly, each song ended up on the albums it was originally intended for. Or as Everett says, “Nobody hopped ship.”

Everett started the trilogy in 2008. Although recorded separately, all three were completed by the time Hombre Loco, the seventh Eels album and first in four years, was released in 2009. A little more than a year later, both End Times and Tomorrow Morning were out. The rapid release schedule isn’t all that unusual for the prolific Everett. Still, he says, “I wanted to make up for lost time.” But, he adds, “nothing ever goes as planned. Part of the fun of it is all the happy accidents along the way. It’s a good feeling having three aces up your sleeve.”

From the start, Everett has been a one-man alt-rock show. “Hello Cruel World,” a minor modern-rock hit in 1992, was pretty much a truly solo Everett. The earliest Eels records – including the breakthrough single “Novocaine for the Soul” in 1996 – featured little input from other people. (To this day, Eels are a revolving-door band, with other musicians coming in and out as they’re needed. On their current Tremendous Dynamite tour, Eels are a seven-piece.)

Then again, Everett didn’t need anyone along for the ride to hold his personal baggage. Despite their ubiquitous appearance in 75 percent of the Shrek movies, Eels’ songs are like scars, the result of scraping at years-old wounds. Everett’s 2007 autobiography Things the Grandchildren Should Know scratched even deeper. You don’t need to drag anyone else through this kind of hell.

But sometime around the end of the ’00s Everett exhaled. He cleaned out his closet with a pair of compilations gathering his best-known songs and rarities. He grew his hobo beard to awe-inspiring lengths. And he toured, effectively putting an end to his band’s first decade.

This is where the trilogy comes in. It was originally conceived as a two-part project. Hombre Lobo was added later, written and recorded as “a prequel that’s about the thing that gets you into this trouble in the first place,” says Everett. “But I always knew they all went together.”

Fittingly, Hombre Lobo, End Times, and Tomorrow Morning can be seen as the end, or the start, of a period in Everett’s life that’s now, like the psych-ward blues of a decade or so ago, in his past. He doesn’t mind looking back. But “I’m kinda superstitious about talking about my future,” he says. “I don’t want to paint myself into a corner. I often change my mind at the last minute and end up doing something else. And then it becomes this lost thing everyone asks you about for the rest of your life.”

After three albums of breezy, brazen Britpop – in which frontman Eddie Argos discoursed on everything from his favorite breakfast cereal to why DC comic books are better than all the rest to how much he loves ’80s shoulda-been-bigger rockers the Replacements – you knew Art Brut would eventually come to this. The good times, the fun songs, the fucking around for fucking-around’s sake – they weren’t going to last forever.

It’s time to get serious.

Serious as in songs about funerals. Serious as in a heightened sense of structure to all the noise bouncing off the pub walls. Serious as in – gasp! – Argos taking singing lessons and actually weaving his way in and out of tunes rather than speak-shouting his lyrics like an Anglo, harder-to-understand version of the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn. Yep, it’s all come to this.

On their just-released fourth album of smart-ass indie rock, Brilliant! Tragic!, Art Brut tone down a notch or two their caustic jabs at rock stars, hipsters, and post-ironic douchebags. The British quintet is still a barometer for pop/junk culture and still finds room for songs like the one about Axl Rose (“When the world has got you by the fucking throat, who do you want in your corner? Axl Rose!” goes the chorus).

But there’s also a dense fog hanging over some of the tracks, like they knew that you knew that they were going to have to move on eventually. After all, as much as we love 2005′s Bang Bang Rock & Roll, 2007′s It’s a Bit Complicated, and 2009′s Art Brut vs. Satan, can anyone really pick out what’s different about them?

Brilliant! Tragic! will at least be distinguished as the Art Brut album on which Eddie Argos learned how to sing. “I never even really attempted to sing before,” he says. “I mean, I still can’t sing. But I’m trying now.”

The Pixies’ Black Francis produced the new album, and just like he did on Art Brut vs. Satan, he slaps a we’re-going-to-hell-anyway-so-why-not? buzz-saw whir on top, below, and to the side of everything. The guitars are sharper, and the whole thing sounds like it’s one bowl of Cocoa Puffs away from collapsing. Argos likes that about the album. “We recorded the last record in one take,” he says. “We had a bit more time this time to try different things. But we’re both a bit manic about things. We’d text each other late at night: ‘We should try this!’”

The song about a funeral, “Ice Hockey,” isn’t as mopey or as self-reflective as all of the group’s newfound gravity may imply. In fact, it’s typically Argos in the way it, and he, finally gets around to making a point. “The joke is, when people ask me what I want played at my funeral, I can say ice hockey,” laughs Argos. “It’s a bad joke, but I thought it would be nice to write a song for my funeral. My friend died last year, and I started thinking about that. Everyone always has ‘Over the Rainbow’ or something sad like that. I thought it would be nice to have a song about me going into space. But I really didn’t think this one through. I don’t want to be playing a song for my funeral live all the time.”

Don’t let all this talk of dying and singing lessons and working overtime on the new album steer you away from Brilliant! Tragic!. Truth is, if you’ve stuck around long enough to hear Art Brut vs. Satan, there’s probably a few things you’ll like about it. There’s nothing as sharp, smart, and revelatory as “Formed a Band.” And the quick hits found in “DC Comics and Chocolate Milkshake” and “The Replacements” kinda lags in the new songs.

But Argos’ exasperated, detached, and bored tones haven’t given way to the real thing yet. “The lyrics are less direct this time,” he admits. “But I love writing about mundane things, like reading comics, and making them exciting, like, Let’s go have a drink and talk about Superman. That’s what I love about songwriting – it can be about anything. I write about what I hear on the train or read on someone else’s Facebook: ‘Oh, what’s going on in his life?’ Being nosy inspires me.”

The last time Cake made an album, in 2004, it seemed like one final grasp at recapturing their mid-’90s spirit and success. But the alt-rock smartasses didn’t really sound into it, and the record, Pressure Chief, quickly sank from the charts and people’s memories.

So when the Sacramentoquintet got around to making their sixth album last year and releasing it during the second week of 2011, nobody had much hope for it. Unlike the band’s previous three albums, Pressure Chief didn’t go gold or platinum and, worse, it couldn’t even spawn a modern-rock radio hit.

But something happened with Showroom of Compassion. It debuted at No. 1. Granted, it was the lowest-selling album to ever debut at the top spot, selling only 44,000 copies, and it dropped to No. 25 the following week. Still, after seven years and pretty much left for dead by record companies and fickle music fans, Cake were No. 1. (Their chart record was short-lived; just two weeks later Amos Lee debuted at the top by selling a mere 40,000 copies of Mission Bell.)

“I don’t think Cake is a band that’s supposed to be No. 1,” laughs frontman John McCrea, who formed the band 20 years ago. “I’m going to get one of those big foam hats.”

That break for most of the ’00s was part accidental, part intentional. In addition to the usual label hassles (Cake started their own record company in 2007, after leaving the majors they’ve been on from the start), the band converted its studio to solar electricity and just took some time to regroup and rethink what it means to be a band in the 21^st century. They bridged the gap with B-Sides and Rarities, which included live songs and covers of Black Sabbath and Barry White tunes.

And it wasn’t like music totally disappeared from their lives during their seven-year absence. “I think about quitting every day of my life,” says McCrea. “That said, we knew we would make another album. But I think it’s gratuitous to have a sense of duty to change, like to make a thematically defined album. Each song should be its own universe, and the laws of that universe should only extend as far as each individual song.”

Showroom of Compassion sounds like a Cake album. Actually, it sounds like a Cake album made by older and maybe a tad less-wiseass guys. There’s still understated nose-thumbing at the world around them (“Federal Funding,” “Sick of You”). There are still tossed-off cover songs (“What’s Now Is Now,” originally recorded by Frank Sinatra and way more sincere than the band’s past covers). And there’s still Vince DiFiore’s trumpet punctuating many songs.

Best of all, Cake are still indifferent to everything else happening in music. During their best years – the era of “The Distance” and “Never There” – they were smartass jokers jabbing scowling grungemeisters in the gut. McCrea still sees the group as outsiders taking the shit out of self-serious rock stars. “The band started as a reactionary gesture against some of the music going on at the time,” he says. “We had this aggressive gesture of smallness. Instead of turning our amps up to 11, we were saying ‘fuck you’ by turning our amps down to four.”

In the years since they were modern-rock radio regulars, Cake somehow managed to attract a new, younger audience – fans who weren’t around the first time (indeed, many of them weren’t even born when “The Distance” broke the Top 40 in 1996). It’s not nostalgia. It’s more like a kinship with McCrea’s occasionally goofy, always twisty wordplay. Their songs have shown up in commercials, movie trailers, and most prominently, their 2001 single “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” is the theme song to the TV show Chuck.

“There isn’t the usual distancing by the youth of the music that came before,” says McCrea. “That whole sort of dance doesn’t seem to be happening with us. There is a surprisingly number of young people who are OK about the fact that people of different age categories like us too.”

He pauses for a couple seconds, maybe for effect or maybe he’s really contemplating the notion. Then he says, “Or maybe they just don’t know yet that old people like us.”

If you wanted to get all psychoanalytical about it, you could say Kevin Barnes’ soaring falsetto is a mere manifestation of his restlessness. And all those words he crams into Of Montreal’s songs? Same thing. The dude feels he has so much to say and so little time to say it in that he spits them out a mile a minute as his voice reaches Dirty Mind-era-Prince heights.

Check out this line from “Our Riotous Defects,” one of the best songs from last year’s False Priest: “My God, I should’ve realized on our second date when you dragged me into the bathroom at Tameka’s house and screamed at me for like 20 minutes because I had contradicted you in front of your friends/I was like, Oh/And then later that night at my apartment, as punishment, you killed my betta fish/You just threw it out the window.”

Whew.

At times, Barnes is a marvel to behold. Other times he verges on annoying. Either way, no band has made a transformation quite like Of Montreal over the past 14 years.

On their 1997 debut, theAthens,Georgia, group distilled many of the same influences as other bands in their Elephant 6 collective, making a sort of artsier version of Beatlesque indie pop. But they’ve evolved – sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly – over the years, until they ended up what they are now: a theater-like troupe of funky performance artists made up of more than a dozen members. “I view it as a life form that has its own trajectory,” says Barnes. “I think back to [those first albums] and I don’t really identify with them, like a completely different person made them. It’s like a typical human evolution: The early albums are very sweet and naïve but they evolved into something more mature and sexual.”

The evolution began in earnest with Of Montreal’s ninth album, 2008’s Skeletal Lamping. That’s when Barnes (who plays most of the music on the band’s records himself) let his R&B-singing, cross-dressing alter ego Georgie Fruit take over for an entire album. False Priest is a bigger and tighter version of its spazzy predecessor, using live instruments instead of synths, and singers Janelle Monae and Solange Knowles (Beyoncé’s sister), who add sweetness to the sometimes sour mix.

“I wanted to make something that was more accessible and immediate,” says Barnes. “I have a tendency to put too many ideas into my records. Any song can go in so many directions, and there’s that tendency to just take it there.”

Just as Of Montreal’s music has gotten more ambitious, straying outside its comfort zone, same goes for the feather-boa-wearing man behind it. False Priest is the first album Barnes recorded outside of hisAthens studio (it was made inLos Angeles) and the first time he’s worked with a producer.

Jon Brion (who’s helped shape albums by Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, and Kanye West) arranges sounds that Barnes just kinda threw out there before. The post-disco beats running through songs like “I Feel Ya’ Strutter” and “Our Riotous Defects” lead to messy, glorious trips. “There are so many different ways to listen to music,” says Barnes. “There’s so much going on in Stevie Wonder’s records. When you dissect them in your head, you hear all these things going on. That’s the great thing about music. It can be very complex but also very sneaky.”

Barnes’ continuous restlessness yielded thecontrollersphere EP last month. He calls it a folk record, but that genre tag is debatable, since the  highlight — a sprawling and amp-shredding five-minute workout called “Black Lion Massacre” – is the noisiest thing Of Montreal have ever recorded. “I’m never really satisfied with the things I do,” says Barnes. “I never feel like I’ve accomplished anything, so I’m always looking for the next thing.”

Thecontrollersphere isn’t baroque pop or funk machine or anything else, really, found in the group’s bag of sounds (even though most of the songs are False Priest leftovers). It’s Of Montreal between stages, once again, and is likely a sign of things to come. “It’s a bridge,” says Barnes. “It’s noisier and more cacophonous, which is where I’m heading. But it’s hard to say where you are in a moment. I really don’t know where I’m at right now.”

Many things qualify Sam Beam as one of the most awesome men on the planet. He can grow a hobo beard that falls somewhere between hipster-cool and serial-killer-crazy. He’s raising five young daughters with his wife outside of Austin. And, despite the sometimes gloomy nature of the music he makes as Iron and Wine, he ends approximately a third of his sentences with a laugh.

But the one thing that makes Sam Beam more awesome than anyone you know is his rooster. The bird interrupts our conversation at least a dozen times with its loud, screeching crowing. Beam tries to get away from it, but the rooster follows him like an attention-starved dog. “This fucking rooster keeps trying to scratch my kids,” Beam chuckles. “I don’t know how much longer he’s going to last. Do you know if you can train a rooster?”

Beam sounds pretty laidback on record. In real life, he’s even more so. He talks about music, family, and his fans with the same slightly twangy, no-worries tone. You get the impression that a life-or-death call to 911 and one to Domino’s for a large pizza would sound pretty much the same. It’s just the way he is. “I don’t write my songs to piss people off,” he says. “I’m not provocative.”

Iron and Wine’s latest album, Kiss Each Other Clean, is filled with Beam’s usual themes of relationships, politics, people, and sex. It’s a funkier album (by white-guys-with-acoustic-guitars-and-plaintive-voices standards) than Beam’s other three records. “It was the most fun record for me to do,” he says. And it sounds bigger. “I never go into an album with an agenda. But this record was a way to include more stuff that I listen to. On the first record or two I was trying to stamp an aesthetic on the thing. Now it’s more freeing to include a lot more and see if that old aesthetic holds up.”

At times Beam sounds like a pre-“Footloose” Kenny Loggins, all soft-rock-‘70s (that’s the bad part). But his post-hippie idealism comes naturally, so his musings on religion and the rustic life never sound artificial (that’s the good part).

Kiss Each Other Clean has lots of sounds running through it. The usual mandolins, fiddles, and banjos you find on Iron and Wine records are here. But so are R&B horns and keyboards, dropped in from the mid-’70s. It’s a layered, multi-textured record that sounds unlike any other in Beam’s catalog, even though you can instantly peg it as an Iron and Wine album. “I like the idea of a cohesive record,” he says. “Even though I never write with that in mind. I put my head down and work on the one that I’m in, pull my head up, and notice that I’ve done sort of the same thing I’ve done in other songs.”

The new album was released at the end of January. It debuted at No. 2 a week later. Nine years ago, when Beam put out the first Iron and Wine album, The Creek Drank the Cradle, he was 28 years old and a film professor living in Miami. There weren’t too many bushy-bearded neo-folkies around back then. But as 2004’s Our Endless Numbered Days and especially 2007’s The Shepherd Dog expanded Beam’s audience, so grew the number of bushy-bearded neo-folkies.

(Iron and Wine also increase onstage. Beam does almost everything on the albums by himself. His current tour includes eight musicians, from the usual rhythm section and a keyboardist to a horn player and backing singers.)

Beam still finds inspiration in the same things he cared about back when he first started making music. Kids, a major-label record deal, and a very loud rooster haven’t changed him much. “I still like love and death and sex and God and all that fun stuff,” he says. “Because images can have a different meaning from song to song.

“My songs are more like poems than journal entries. I don’t use them as therapy, I’m not working something out. It’s not like Plastic Ono Band by any means. I just like to make things. I just have a lot more poetic license in a song than you could in a painting. You can say “yeah, yeah, yeah” in a song. That’s more sexy.”

Let’s get this out of the way: Neko Case is part of the New Pornographers’ spring tour, which kicked off a week ago and comes to town this weekend. So yes, the most famous and popular member of the Canadian group that rarely includes all eight members onstage at the same time will be in Cleveland.

Of course it matters to fans. But it doesn’t matter so much to the band, which could just as easily swap another member to sing Case’s parts. Still, it’s always a good thing when the core Pornographers are on the road together. And during this run of the tour in support of last year’s Together, all but Dan Bejar (who’s touring with his other band, Destroyer) will perform.

Holding it all together is Carl Newman, the group’s main songwriter who founded the New Pornographers more than a dozen years ago in Vancouver with a bunch of musicians who shared his love of chewy power pop and melodic indie rock. “Nobody here has to be the person in charge, they can just be a band member,” he says. “If everybody had only one band and that one band is their only creative outlet, that’s when frustration sets in.”

It’s tough keeping these Pornographers straight. Everyone has something else going on. Case, keyboardist Kathryn Calder, guitarist Todd Fancey, and Newman have all released solo albums. Bejar, bassist John Collins, and drummer Kurt Dahle play in other bands. And synth player Blaine Thurier is building an extensive filmography as a writer, director, and editor.

Newman’s job is to bring all these different voices together and to figure out who’s doing what and which songs they’ll record. With so many songwriters and singers and personalities buzzing around, it’s not easy to define the New Pornographers’ sound. “I listen to demos I made and I think, Is this a Pornographers song? I don’t know,” he says. “We definitely make [a certain] kind of pop song, but we’ve also gone into weirdness and really quiet ballads. I’m never quite sure what the New Pornographers are.”

Their fifth album, Together, came out last May. It’s the group’s most aggressive-sounding record, a reaction of sorts to 2007’s Challengers, the group’s most laidback record and the first that wasn’t universally adored. Newman’s still not sure what happened with that album. “The other records got such a good reaction, I figured I’d continue doing whatever the hell I wanted,” he says. “So I thought, I’m gonna get mellower. And that’s when people said, ‘Hey, you’re too mellow.’ That was the first time I realized that everybody doesn’t love every single thing I do.” Still, Newman says “it’s the record we needed to make.”

Together is crunchier, ballsier, and way more forceful in the way it shoves its 1970s-style riffs at you. If Challengers is the calm before the storm, Together is the raging tempest uprooting you from your seat and whipping at your head 120 miles per freakin’ hour.

Newman says he set out to write “pompous rock riffs and make them into orchestral pop songs.” And if there’s one thing distinguishing the New Pornographers from their indie-pop peers, it’s these orchestral flourishes that surge through so many of the songs. Electric Light Orchestra comparisons often come up, but they go deeper than that.

Newman looks back on the Pornographers’ catalog – Mass Romantic (2000), Electric Version (2003), Twin Cinema (2005), and the two recent albums — with few regrets. He thinks Mass Romantic sounds “too tinny.” Electric Version is “too upbeat.” And he believes Twin Cinema “is when the floodgates opened.” But Newman is always thinking about the band’s next move.

He’s currently sifting through a bunch of songs he wrote to figure out which ones will go on the next Pornographers album and which will likely end up on his third solo record. More than anything, it’s about finding the perfect sound, the one that nails the very essence of the band — even if even he’s not sure what that is. “When I think about a New Pornographers record and what we’re going to do next, I think, Should I try to be sounding like the New Pornographers?” he says. “Or should I take the New Pornographers on a completely new journey? It’s a tough one.”

You may be surprised to hear this, but no drugs were used during the making of the Black Angels’ Phosphene Dream, one of 2010’s druggiest albums.

According to singer Alex Maas, the kaleidoscopic swirls of reverb-soaked guitar, the psychedelic haze hovering over the foggy production, and the deliberate drawl of his vocals are totally substance-free creations, inspired and shaped by the band’s natural artistic instincts. “I’m not an advocate of drug use,” he says. “I think it’s ridiculous to think you have to take psychedelics to make psychedelic records.”

Of course Maas is more than aware that the majority of the Black Angels’ fans are baked to the gills when they listen to his music. Songs like “Bad Vibrations,” “Haunting at 1300 McKinley,” and “Yellow Elevator #2” practically shout, or actually they muster a mumbled, “Hey, man, why don’t you smoke, snort, or drop some of this, and take me for a spin?” Just look at Phosphene Dream’s cover, with its mind-blowing squiggles expanding like a massive bong hit.

“There are so many inputs that go into art,” says Maas. “You don’t need to have drugs or alcohol as an ingredient. I’m not a square at all, but there are so many things that go into a record. I try to put as many influences into the music that I can.”

Either way, the Black Angels are one of the best bands making psychedelic music these days. They trip back to the late ’60s, when groups with names like the Electric Prunes and the Chocolate Watchband we’re turning on a bunch of burned-out kids. The Angels’ songs are both spacious and claustrophobic; there’s a sense of calmness that gives way to a bad feeling that shit’s about ready to cave in any second now.

Maas says Phosphene Dream, their third album and most tuneful, is just the beginning of the sonic explorations they plan to mine over the next few years. “We wanted to try different sounds and influences this time,” he says. “It leaves the door open for the next record. We can do whatever we want on the next record.”

The Black Angels formed seven years ago in Austin, home of one of the premiere psychedelic bands, the 13^th Floor Elevators. (The group backed the Elevators’ mind-wrecked frontman Roky Erickson on a 2008 tour.) The Angels’ debut album, 2006’s Passover, is filled with muddy dirges that never quite find momentum in the cloudy mix. Things sharpen a bit on 2008’s Directions to See a Ghost. But last year’s Phosphene Dream is where the band finally sounds committed to making music that not only sounds great when you’re high, but also if you’re stuck in traffic or even working out.

“There’s still a paranoid kinda thing happening,” says Maas. “But it’s also about finding hope when things aren’t so hopeful. You’re reaching a paranoid level, but you come to a hopeful ending. The overall theme of the record is seeing light when light isn’t present. I like evil music with happy lyrics.”

Phosphene Dream is the first Black Angels album recorded outside of Austin with someone other than the band producing: it was made in Los Angeles with Dave Sardy, who’s worked with stoner-rockers Wolfmother. Maas says Sardy’s input was crucial to the band’s growth. He pushed them, offered ideas, and vetoed songs he thought sounded too much like cuts on their other two albums. “We wanted to challenge ourselves,” he says. “It’s great to have another mind in there to get you out of your comfort zone. We were all working for the songs.”

And now that they’re moving forward, the Black Angels’ nostalgic mind-warps (which evoke everyone from Black Sabbath to the Doors to the Velvet Underground) should get even more crazily complex and wide open. That’s the plan anyway. “I don’t think we’ll ever make a hip-hop record, but I would like to continue researching all minds of music,” says Maas. “I want to fill my mind with music and good vibrations. We’re moving into a healthy marriage between getting lost in the spiritual part of our music and bringing it to the audience and then letting them trip on it.”

Jack Lawrence does triple duty as the bassist for the Raconteurs, the Dead Weather, and the Greenhornes, the garage-rock band he co-founded 15 years ago in Cincinnati. He never forgets which band he’s playing with on any given day, but you can forgive him if he ever does.

Before they released their fourth album, Four Stars, last year, it had been eight years since the last Greenhornes record. Shit like that happens when you’re busy touring with your pal Jack White’s two side bands. Still, it’s not like they weren’t recording, says Lawrence. They made an EP with Brendan Benson (another Raconteur) and added some new songs to the 2005 Greenhornes compilation Sewed Soles. “Then we decided to take a little break,” he says.

It’s been a busy decade for Lawrence. In addition to playing in the aforementioned groups, plus getting married (at White’s house, in a double ceremony that also included Jack’s former White Stripes bandmate Meg White, no less), the 34-year-old multi-instrumentalist joined another band, Blanche; played on Loretta Lynn’s 2004 comeback record Van Lear Rose, which was produced by Jack White; and was part of the Karen O & the Kids project that provided the soundtrack to Where the Wild Things Are.

All those experiences come together on the new Greenhornes album, says Lawrence. “You pick up little things here and there when you’re playing with other bands,” he says. “You learn from who you’re around. You get to see how other people do things and take it back.”

Not that there was too much prep required for Four Stars. After all, the Greenhornes are a garage-rock band. It’s not like there’s much involved in the primal bashing of three chords. Write songs, practice songs, record songs – that’s about it. Lawrence says things moved quickly once he and his bandmates – singer and guitarist Craig Fox and drummer Patrick Keeler – reconvened.

“We had no plan at all,” he says. “But this is the first album where almost all of it was written in the studio. That turned out to be great for us. We do what we do. There’s not a lot of thought about it. It just happens.”

The songs on Four Stars don’t stray too far from the template the band set with its 1999 debut, Gun for You. It’s an album filled with kinda dippy, often trippy ’60s-style psych-rock — the sort of guitar-driven retro-leaning rock & roll that the White Stripes grew out of around the same time Jack became a rock god.

“We’re getting a younger crowd now,” says Lawrence, who credits the audience’s age shift to his higher-profile gigs in the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather. “It’s neat to have young kids who have heard about us. We didn’t have that before. We were playing in bars.”

After 2002’s Dual Mono, the Greenhornes temporarily disappeared. They never meant to be away from each other for long, but various side projects kept the guys busy. (Keeler is also a member of the Raconteurs; Fox plays guitar in a handful of other Cincinnati bands.)

When they finally got back together a few years ago, they started pooling the songs that ended up on Four Stars. “We didn’t have much time, and we work kinda fast in the studio anyway,” says Lawrence. “But that’s where we can really get down and venture out more with the songs. Live, what you see is what you get: three guys playing.”

You don’t have to listen too hard to hear the Kinks, Who, or other classic guitar rockers in Four Star’s best songs (like “Saying Goodbye,” “Better Off Without It,” and “Song 13”). It’s not the freshest record to come out in 2011, but it is the Greenhorne’s best, and it’s way more fun than the last Raconteurs album.

“The great thing about this band is that everything comes together so easily,” says Lawrence. “Hopefully there won’t be another eight-year break. None of these other projects got in the way of the Greenhornes, but things happen and just get away from you. But who knows? I could get a call in two months and be another band.”

For a bunch of women from Los Angeles, Warpaint sure sound like a bunch of guys from Brooklyn. The kind of guys from Brooklyn who down-tune their guitars, hunch over their instruments, and make the sort of murky dream-pop that falls somewhere among “artsy,” “pretentious,” and “totally fucking awesome.”

On their debut album, The Fool, which came out in October, the four women in Warpaint – singers-guitarists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman, bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg, and drummer Stella Mozgawa – make a pretty, soothing racket that waits until your guard is down before landing an intense punch to the gut. Strong stuff for a bunch of girls.

“We’re musicians and we just happen to be girls,” says Mozgawa. “It’s a factual thing we can’t get upset about it. But those clichés – ‘Oh, I’ve never seen that before’ – tend to change as different versions of bands and sounds and aesthetics are presented.”

The dreamily chaotic sounds on The Fool sound like they were born in a deep, dark, cold place, not in sunny L.A. The songs drip with an icy chill that forms jagged layers over surfaces. In the album’s first single, “Shadows,” Wayman sings about Los Angeles: “The city I walk in, it feels like it swallows.”

“We’re all influenced by the things that occur within this city,” says Mozgawa. “But that’s natural — you get that everywhere, even suburbia. But it’s totally amplified in the city. You’re going to be expressing a level of that frustration you feel day to day. L.A. is a pretty weird place to live, no doubt, but it’s a universal thing. We’re not trying to re-imagine the California sound. We’re just making music in a city, which happens to be Los Angeles.”

The songs on The Fool lean toward art-rock. There aren’t too many hooks here. The album is more about mood — building it and sustaining it. And then peering through the sludgy darkness. “When we went into the studio, it was very scary and very exciting, because we didn’t have a huge idea of what we were going to do with every exact moment,” says Mozgawa. “It was such an experimental process with the recording that a lot of the takes that you hear on the album are the first times we figured out the arrangements.”

Warpaint first came together in 2004. Actress Shannyn Sossamon (who was in A Knight’s Tale and The Rules of Attraction, and who also directed Warpaint’s video for the song “Undertow”) was a member at one point. So was current Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer. They released an EP, Exquisite Corpse, in 2008. A year later, Mozgawa, who’s Australian, joined.

Even though she came a little late to the game, Mozgawa says all four members contributed equally to The Fool’s style and sound. “A lot of things changed when we started playing together,” she says. “They let me do whatever I pleased. We all trusted one another.”

The Fool created lots of buzz when it was released. For a period last fall, Warpaint were all over indie-rock blogs. But now the band is getting down to the nuts and bolts of promoting the record on the road. Mozgawa sounds a little tired, but recent shows have been ideal showcases for the band’s music, which tends to open up and breathe more onstage.

At the very least, touring motivates the women and gives them something new to write about. “We’re inspired by the force of the four of us, the things that occur naturally when we’re all playing music together,” says Mozgawa. “There’s a communication that occurs. We’re exploring that more and more and trying to harness it.”

The long summer on the road should prove way inspiring. Warpaint will be playing some festival shows, overseas dates, and occasional club gigs for most of 2011. In between, they’ll write and hopefully record some songs for their next album. “We’ve been performing a lot of jams, and we’re trying to come up with new songs based on those,” says Mozgawa. “We’re definitely not going to make a concept album, or at least one that I’m aware of. There really are no rules with the band.”

Clevelanders know Danny Greene as the Irish mobster who was blown to bits when a car exploded in a Lyndhurst parking lot in 1977. Jonathan Hensleigh – the director and co-writer of Kill the Irishman, a biopic opening this week – sees a different Greene. “I don’t think he was a sociopath,” he says. “He had a specific moral and ethical code.”

Greene’s fatal flaw, says Hensleigh, was his hunger for power. And that ruthless ambition is on full display in the movie, which stars The Book of Eli’s Ray Stevenson as Greene, Val Kilmer as the cop who both befriends Greene and wants to bring him to justice, and Christopher Walken as rival gangster Shondor Birns.

Kill the Irishman traces Greene’s life from the early ’60s – when he worked as a longshoreman on Cleveland’s docks – through that fateful day in October 1977, when Greene was assassinated after a car parked next to his exploded in the parking lot near his dentist’s office.

Along the way, Hensleigh and co-writer Jeremy Walters (working from Lyndurst Police Chief Rick Porrello’s book To Kill the Irishman) chronicle Greene’s rise from union boss to associate of gangster John Nardi (played by Vincent D’Onofrio) to becoming both a neighborhood hero and a power-hungry tough who rubbed out anyone who got in his way.

“It’s a spectacular story,” says Hensleigh, who also directed The Punisher, but is best known as the screenwriter of Armageddon and Die Hard: With a Vengeance. “I didn’t know the specifics of the story until I read Rick’s book. I tried to read everything that was written about him at the time. But a lot of it is based on street rumors, anecdotes, and legend. The historical record is skimpy.”

Obviously, Cleveland plays a big part in Kill the Irishman. Only thing, it’s actually Detroit standing in for Cleveland. The monetary benefits offered by Michigan helped offshoot the film’s tiny budget. “I would have loved to shoot the picture in Cleveland,” says Hensleigh. “We worked as hard as we possibly could to replicate Cleveland.”

The movie certainly captures the look of the era. Guys walk around sporting manly mustaches, and they drive cars almost as big as city blocks. Kill the Irishman is more biopic than gangster pic, but there’s plenty of mob-style murders to keep genre fans happy. Hensleigh is just relieved the movie is getting a proper release, since it looked like it would be going to straight to DVD at one point.

“I truly fell for the story,” he says. “I think Danny Greene was quintessentially American. The history of America is a violent one, particularly the history of immigrants jockeying for power. It’s emblematic of the entire 20^th century. Did he commit murder? Did he commit crimes? Was he living outside the law? Yes. Was he an admirable man? Not necessarily. But at least his crimes are understandable. And that’s a big difference.”

Taylor Momsen knows what you’re thinking. Why is a cute 17-year-old blonde star of a hit TV show playing loud and nasty rock & roll music? Isn’t she supposed to be singing electro-generic pop songs written by a 40-year-old Swedish guy?

No way, says Momsen, who plays Jenny Humphrey on Gossip Girl. Her four-piece band, the Pretty Reckless, is a reflection of all the music she loves and has loved since she was a little girl: the Who, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and, especially, the Beatles. With that background, no way she’s gonna sing about the dreamy boy she sits next to in math class.

“I grew up with the classics, and once you go classic, you can’t go back,” she says. “A lot of different artists influenced the record over time, but not so directly. It’s more of an overall picture that’s hard to define. It would be a lot easier to write a fucking record if you knew where to look.”

The Pretty Reckless’ debut album, Light Me Up, includes a mix of rock styles from the past 40 or so years: blistering guitar workouts, fuzzy-crunchy punk, bluesy sex jams, even pretty acoustic ballads. But mostly it’s amp-shredding rock & roll siphoned from the rougher branch of ’90s alt-rockers, like Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Hole.

“It’s such a pop-oriented market right now,” says Momsen. “But this is very much a song-driven rock & roll record. Everything started with the songs, not the production. Everything was written on acoustic guitar.”

Though Momsen won’t straight-up admit it, there’s lots of Courtney Love in her songs and in her act. Lots. The way her voice tears as it reaches the furthest regions of her range. The way Light Me Up barrels through its songs with little regard for melody. And the way Momsen dresses onstage like a skanky Lolita – raccoon eyes, short skirts hiked above black stockings, unbuttoned shirts that reveal lacy black bras.

Yes, Momsen plays a hard-ass on record. She shows some vulnerability (“Make Me Wanna Die”) and disappointment (“Zombie”) from time to time, but most of Light Me Up’s songs – all of which she co-wrote — trash (“Miss Nothing”), bash (“Light Me Up”), and offer no apologies (“My Medicine”).

World-weary stuff from a 17-year-old girl from St. Louis who got her start playing little Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas 11 years ago. “In one sense, the songs are very much about me,” says Momsen. “But in another sense, they’re very much metaphoric. As much as I’m going to give my life away is in that record. But I’m going to leave some stuff for myself. It’s an honest record, but some names have been changed to protect the innocent.”

Light Me Up was released in the U.K. in August. It debuted in the Top 10. U.S. fans had to initially settle for a four-song EP. The entire 10-track album finally hit digital outlets last month. The record is still waiting for a physical release here. “I’m not the one in control of that,” sighs Momsen. “I just make the music and hope it gets released.”

Which brings us back to people’s expectations. Momsen admits that some of Light Me Up’s jagged little thrills are direct reactions to that whole you-should-be-making-perky-pop-songs way of thinking. “There were definitely struggles in making a rock & roll record in the industry right now,” she says. “But I don’t write for any market or to fit in anywhere. I just wanted to write great songs.”

Either way, Momsen says this is where her career has been heading for the past decade. Given the choice among her acting (she’s on hiatus from Gossip Girl right now), modeling (until recently, she was the face of Material Girl, the clothing line started by Madonna), and kick-ass-frontwoman gigs, she says it’s an easy decision.

“Music, I can never give up, but acting … ,” she laughs. “I consider myself a musician who also acts and models. I started acting at a young age, but I didn’t choose that. I didn’t wake up one day and say, I want to be an actress. I woke and said, I want to play in a rock band.”

Florida punks Against Me! are in a bit of a predicament. After nudging the mainstream in 2007 with their major-label debut — the excellent New Wave — the band followed it up last year with the solid White Crosses. Within a few months, their record company dropped them, just as they were about to launch a world tour in support of the album.

Against Me! are now back on the road with Dropkick Murphys. But they have no record company, and they’re pushing an album that nobody but the band seems to care about at this point. According to frontman Tom Gabel, for the first time in a decade, Against Me! don’t really have a plan for the future.

“It’s weird,” he says. “We’re still in the mindset of promoting this record that the record company has stopped promoting. Your attitude has to become, ‘Well, fuck you.’”

The group’s break with Sire Records is a familiar story these days: The label (which is distributed by music giant Warner Bros.) recently cut a huge portion of its staff. Along with employees, several artists were let go. Against Me! signed a deal for only two records, so it wasn’t that big of a shock. Still, says Gabel, they’re on tour with no label support – not exactly an ideal situation for any band, let alone one hoping to ride some well-earned buzz.

Despite these hurdles, it’s business as usual for Against Me! They’ve spent the better part of the past 10 years on the road. Gabel doesn’t see that changing anytime soon. Plus, White Crosses – the group’s fifth album – is still a relatively fresh work, he says. And no matter what his old record company thinks of the record, he’s happy with it.

He should be. White Crosses starts with big, anthemic marching drums and ringing guitars. It’s a triumphant-sounding record, as Against Me!’s rousing punk gets more refined (like New Wave, the new album was produced by Nevermind mastermind Butch Vig) and Gabel settles in as a sharper and more melodic songwriter.

“When you first start out making records, you’re intimidated by the studio,” he says. “You have this sound in your head what you want your record to sound like, but the first time you go in the studio, you come out with something that doesn’t sound like that. We got closer to the sound we were going for with each experience.”

Like the Gaslight Anthem’s Brian Fallon, another tattooed punk, Gabel is a huge Springsteen fan, and there are plenty of times on White Crosses where he lets his Bruce flag fly. (Against Me!’s current drummer, Jay Weinberg, is the son of the E Street Band’s Max Weinberg.) White Crosses is about growing up, but it’s also about growing out of the occasionally stifling punk scene they came from.

In the album’s first single, “I Was a Teenage Anarchist,” Gabel asks, “Do you remember when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire?” before coming to a conclusion: “The revolution was a lie.”

The 30-year-old Gabel still clings to parts of his younger, idealistic self (he’s vegan, and his songs’ politics still lean radical), but “my views have changed on some stuff, and you learn as you grow,” he says. “My horizons have only been expanded. It’s never been in a negative way. But as far as my interests and passions, I’m still doing what I did 10 years ago.”

Gabel is a husband and father now, so there’s some shift in perspective there. Plus, there was a lot of backlash against the band after it released New Wave and scored a radio hit with “Thrash Unreal.” Fans who claimed they were with Gabel from the start – when Against Me! was the name of his Gainesville solo project at the start of the ’00s — called him a sell-out. “We’ve sold out 20 or 30 times now,” he laughs. “We knew, coming from the punk scene, there were going to people who were going to have problems with it no matter what. They weren’t judging it on the music.”

That kind of talk brings out the old punk in him. Those Springsteen similarities? The big, classic-rock crunch on White Crosses? They’re deliberate. “We were a band that started out in a definite scene,” he says. “But once you’re exiled from that scene, you feel like you’re involved in a debate. If someone tells me not to do something, I’m going to do it.”