Canadian Audiophile’s Mishaps and Misadventures

I have this recurring dream where Paris Hilton is getting her ass kicked while trying to sing “Stars Are Blind” to a crowd of a couple hundred confounded onlookers. The Heiress is trying to make her way through the ironic line “Some people never go beyond their stupid pride” with that silly backing track coming out of a tape recorder perched on the stage behind her when she’s knocked right square in the face by a Converse shoe. In my dream, someone roundhouse kicks Paris Hilton in the face. It’s the single greatest visual I’ve had of her that didn’t take place in night-vision green.

When the dream ends, I have no idea who roundhouse kicked Paris Hilton and I wake up with a Cheshire cat grin on my face. My wife gives me a look and says “You had that dream again” and I nod.

One day while making my way through MySpace, I came across FARCHILD and knew instantly that she was the owner of that Converse shoe. Something about the way she looks, about the way she appears to defy convention by her very existence, tells me that she’s the one who roundhouse kicked the Heiress.

Now after checking out her debut, Chivalry Has Died, I’m more than convinced she’s the one. FARCHILD (or Jane C.) is the personification of the do-it-yourself grassroots indie artist. She is the executive producer and the sound engineer. She wrote, produced, arranged, programmed, and engineered all of Chivalry Has Died. She plays guitar, keys, drums, bass, and electronics. She sings, raps, screams, and growls.

FARCHILD does it all.

Chivalry Has Died contains music written and created between 2006 and 2008 and represents the arrival of FARCHILD as the quintessential ass-kicking female out of Seattle with a story to tell and an attitude that chews up pop princesses and spits them out. Her lyrics are audacious and clever, providing a nice breather from the usual worthless pageantry. When someone can use words like “lascivious” without flinching or sounding glitzy, something special’s going on.

The musical tapestries of Chivalry Has Died are incredible. Songs emerge out of the fog and contain walls of sound and stunning pieces of melody. Tunes dip in and out as FARCHILD experiments with the disposition of her instruments, never scared of venturing outside the box and always adeptly toying with the elements. The album is bookended with a couple of instrumental tracks (“Quite a Bomb” and “Peter Piper”) which add a sense of obedient ambiance to the project.

With just eight tracks, Chivalry Has Died is unhappily a touch on the short side. Luckily it doesn’t lack any of the impact of a full album and FARCHILD manages to say in eight songs what many artists couldn’t say in twenty.

The striking and haunting composition “Red Moon” sets things in motion and FARCHILD’s dazzling vocals intone such poetry as “Now so potent, skulking stale scent nestled under my tongue” with philosophical openness.

Other songs are a bit more mischievous, like the standout “Ey, Papi.” The track takes aim at the club pick-up game, with FARCHILD steadily in control of the game and threatening to knock some poor sap’s tooth out if he doesn’t submit to her demands for respect and honesty. “I am anything but docile, so don’t bend me,” she says.

FARCHILD takes aim at consumerist culture and quick fixes on tracks like “Timmy’s a Rebel” and “Quo,” the latter of which describes people who go to great lengths to cheat Father Time but couldn’t care less about the state of the nation as it sinks beneath their feet.

FARCHILD means business and she demands your attention but won’t beg for it. A thrilling project with equal parts art and accessibility, Chivalry Has Died contains a literary compendium of lyrics and a vigorous dose of attitude wrapped up in vastly entrancing compositions. Jane C. is a remarkably gifted individual with a lot to say and an unbending attention to detail that allows her to turn out some of the most compelling music of the year thus far.

Chivalry Has Died is available for purchase through FARCHILD’s website and you can drop by her MySpace page for a glimpse into her mad, mad world. Watch out for her Converse, though. I hear she’s got a lethal fucking roundhouse.

8.5/10

Picturing some Nashville bank teller with slick horn-rimmed glasses, a kitschy red sweater, and exorbitant amounts of make-up and perfume is probably a good way to distinguish Darla Farmer. Having drawn the name from a bank teller out of Music City that most likely matched that description, Darla Farmer is an unusual seven-piece collective with a job to do on Rewiring the Electric Forest, its full-length debut on Paper Garden Records.

I’ve had more genre discussions about bands like these than I’d care to remember. Sliding an album into the player and having friends walk in and wonder “What the hell is that?” has often been a significant part of my life and Darla Farmer would be sure to draw out a similar response. As such, I decided to tuck myself away for this one.

Good thing I did. Rewiring the Electric Forest is an enormously peculiar merger of frantic energy, folksy bedlam, and…yes, carnival rock. Reading the press release, I saw the term and laughed aloud, spitting milk everywhere.

Upon hearing “The Quotient,” I knew what they were on about. No sense cryin’ over spit milk, after all.

Remember having visions of those tiny cars and about 50 clowns packed in? That’s what comes to mind with Rewiring the Electric Forest and its eclectic liveliness.
When the first track pops open, it’s like a jack-in-the-box with a dorky smirk has just burst out of some hidden corner in your mind. Singer Clint Wilson bounds about like a ringleader to the most chaotic carnival freak show ever. The rest of the band stacks bleats of trombone, trumpet, piano, and guitar around Wilson’s wildness.

Wilson lisps and rambles tenaciously through “History” and other songs like it with the mumbling-and-stumbling delivery of a drunken circus clown with a bottle of Jack Daniels in the back pocket of his huge polka-dotted pants. Somewhere, Darla Farmer is giving someone the right change.

The contrast is funny, but entirely precise. Darla Farmer melds madness with modesty to form a fluent blend of Arcade Fire-meets-Frankenstein’s bride lunacy.

There’s a constitution to the carnival rock, as skilled work stretches the rock seams of “Mechanical Thoughts” to enchanting levels beyond the emblematic call-and-response that the song previews with its intro.

Other songs teasingly bound and fuss about, like the feverish “The Strangler Fig” and the Mexican hat dance from hell found on “Dirty Keys.”

The chaos doesn’t mean that Darla Farmer doesn’t have a strong sense of gorgeous melody, however. Tracks like the dazzling and hilariously-titled “The Cow That Drank Too Much” and the pensive “The Vigilant Mr. Lynch” show the band’s softer gentler side. The instruments come together admirably, slowing things down under the Big Top.

Still, Darla Farmer isn’t for everyone. The album reads like a frenetic admonitory tale of a carnival funhouse that eats its guests and then falls in love with them. The vivacious and often startling efforts of Wilson and Co. are always fascinating, never inert, and constantly sprouting from song to song so that Rewiring the Electric Forest feels like a journey of progress and yearning.

8/10

Berkeley hip hop and indie rock artist Yoni Wolf is the core of Why?, an abstract-hip hop-indie rock-folk band whose flair for blowing through genres is unmistakable on their latest release from anticon. Alopecia, possibly named for hair loss and possibly named for nothing at all, is the band’s third LP.

It’s easy to peg Why? as an alternative rap group, but the work on Alopecia extends so far beyond one tangible genre that pegging the music is an impossible mission worthy of the A-Team or some other crew of badasses more suited to solving impossible missions.

Wolf’s erratic use of rap vocals and singing wreaks mayhem all over Alopecia, uncompromisingly spewing his stream of consciousness smartass lyrics without a break in the action.

In other words, forget all about genre categorizations with Why? because it won’t do a bit of good.

Of course, trying to place Why? can be helpful in describing what comes out of the speakers during a spin of Alopecia. Is that a lovely poppy tune? Or is that a dark ominous backdrop? Say, is that a standard hip hop verse spliced by an abnormal background of keys and guitar? Is that moody ambiance? The answer is, of course, a big fat reverberating YES.

Alopecia begins with a solid example of Wolf’s release, as he rap-sings over the life-size bass and hand-claps of “The Vowels Pt. 2.” He pours over the track like he’s running from something, letting off bubbly “Cheery-ay, Cheery-ee, Cheery-ii, Cheery-oh, Cheery-you” bleats as the song pulsates through its chorus. Sound outlandish? It is. And that’s just what’s enthralling about this record.

Why? also features Yoni’s brother Josiah and Doug McDiarmid. For Alopecia, the band is joined by Fog’s Andrew Broder and bassist Mark Erickson to create a fuller sound. That chock-a-block sound is used to most impressive levels on “The Hollows,” a roomy guitar-rock track that still somehow works over Yoni’s often awkward delivery.

On “Good Friday,” his voice drops to the depths for an almost bored-sounding delivery that calls up bits of Beck during some verses. The track finds Yoni running the litany of deplorable sins, using the track as a confessional of the weird and spewing lines like “playing lead lay in a bad way on Broadway” and “using Purell till my hands bleed and swell” with derisive delight.

And that’s generally the way things go with Alopecia. It’s like Yoni’s cracked his journal open to a random page and started spitting the speckled results in front of a backing band, choosing to sing when the mood hits him and lighting up the mic the rest of the time. For those who can take such a shuffling and contemptuous disposition, Why?’s Alopecia will probably fill a void long since left empty by other half-assed efforts from lesser monsters.

“I can decide/while I’m alive I’ll feel alive/and what’s next/I guess I’ll know when I’ve gotten there.”

8/10

Kayo Dot’s Blue Lambency Downward isn’t really a collection of songs insomuch as it is a single composition. Sure, the music is divided into tracks (I prefer to suggest they’ve divided the music into movements), but the overall sense of this 2008 recording from the masters of experimental psychedelic metal is that it demands to be heard as one inclusive work.

To say that Kayo Dot bridges the gaps between genres is quite accurate, as defining one tangible sound to slip the Boston band into is a awkward proposition at best and a fruitless operation at least. Hell, when their 2003 debut record is released on John Zorn’s label, you know there’s going to be trouble at the henhouse when it comes to traditional genre placements.

Fast-forward to 2008 and Kayo Dot hasn’t compromised a damn thing. Using instrumentations related to classical music and improvisational jazz, Toby Driver and Mia Matsumiya have upped the ante with Blue Lambency Downward.

Now signed to juggernaut Hydra Head Records out of Los Angeles, Kayo Dot’s multi-instrumental saturation bombing conjures up musical influences from just about every corner of the globe and channels them into one gratifying wall of sound.

To provide an indication as to the sound of Blue Lambency Downward, a quick list of the personnel on the record should do. Driver plays acoustic, electric, 12-string, baritone, and bass guitars. He also plays soprano clarinet, piano, organ, gamelan, analog synth, and toys with a laptop mellotron. Matsumiya wonderful violin is present, of course, but she also plays synth bass and mellotron.

Adding to the standard players, Blue Lambency Downward features the services of Charlie Zeleny on drums, Skerik on tenor and baritone sax, Hans Teuber on alto sax as well as soprano and bass clarinets and flute, and Dave Abramson on gamelan and additional percussion.

This orchestral line-up uses every inch of every instrument, providing a winding and complex work that pins five shorter pieces between two ten minute bookends to formulate a complete work of art. The shifting time signatures and elegant song structure used here is often very bizarre, but ultimately very satisfying.

There are moments of psychosis to Blue Lambency Downward, just as there are moments of reflective harmony and serenity. Compositions erupt into bedlam (“The Awkward Wind Wheel”) and fall apart into unusual waltzes (“Right Hand is the One I Want”). Others play with tempered noise and deep guitars (“Blue Lambency Downward”) while some (“Clelia Walking”) stroll through crisp guitar terrain using clarinets and Mia’s lovely violin as a guide.

This is a complicated, needy record. It demands several listens to explore the dark corners of the music and requires a vigilant ear to determine everything that is occurring within this monstrous composition. At the conclusion of several listens, however, it becomes evident that Kayo Dot has constructed something beautiful, haunting, delicate, and extraordinarily exquisite.

Call it a forward-thinking masterwork. Call it ahead of its time. Call it an unclassifiable tour de force. Call it Blue Lambency Downward.

10/10

How does one describe Japan’s legendary noise-rock outfit Boredoms? The short answer is that it can’t be done safely without venturing into some pretty complex ground. Composed of unequal parts ambiance, noise rock, minimalism, tribal music, and anything else Yamantaka Eye can get his hands on, Boredoms simply exist as an endless “band” of players and noisemakers.

Super Roots 9 is a decent place to start for those who don’t know where to begin. This recording comes eight years after the last Super Roots EP and fits somewhere in the band’s utterly confusing discography. Explaining Super Roots 9 is a difficult task, as is explaining Boredoms in general. It’s a little like explaining sound without allowing the listener to hear it, as the words will never do it justice.

Comprised of one track and one track only, Super Roots 9 features “LIVWE!!” as a live recording from a 2004 Christmas show. As the 40-minute track unfolded and expanded and contracted and breathed its way through walls of percussion and rhythmic choral singing, I had to keep reminding myself that Eye was doing this live. It is a simply astounding musical experience.

“LIVWE!!” is an ultimately relentless piece of work. Performed live by three drummers, a turntable, three DJs, and a twenty-four piece choir, this is experimental music on an epic scale. Voices shout in the background, cuing the percussion and the ceaseless drummers to new heights of the composition. Once the percussion and tribal drumming begins, it never stops. It is astonishing.

What makes Super Roots 9 a demanding experience is the notion that Boredoms never give up, never slow down, never quit. The drumming is absolutely unrelenting and never gives up ground to the choral arrangement, almost doing battle with the 24-piece choir live on stage in front of a crowd of dazzled onlookers.

Naturally one problem with a 40-minute composition is that it can get rather repetitive. The changes in the music are delicate and ever-so-slight, leaving little room for variation. Instead, Super Roots 9 seems like an exercise in stamina as Eye rams his percussionists and his composition to the breaking point for a steady 40 minutes of lunacy and the odd moment of poignancy.

There are a few abrupt moments of silence in which the crowd becomes an instrument all their own, offering up heaps of praise to the performers and preparing themselves for more insistent noise. And the last three minutes of “LIVWE!!” are unspeakably beautiful, as the falsetto of the choir brings the relentless gait of the piece to an oddly restful and tender conclusion.

Super Roots 9 is certainly not a piece of music for everyone.

It is not something one puts on behind a party or in the car on a road trip, although one could argue that the passing trees on a long journey might be marvellous accompaniment for what Boredoms pull off here. Regardless, Super Roots 9 is certainly a musical accomplishment that deserves recognition. It is a stunning feat of sound, pulse, and simplicity that never lets up.

7/10