Tissø Lake’s Song Of The Black Dog is the kind of record you’d make in a house you’ve just moved out of. The rooms are totally bare, the acoustics are impeccable, and the only thing you’ve got in there are some microphones and the surrounding memories. You’d probably be in a really tender and reflective mood, and heck… you might even call some buddies to come and record with you.

Now, I don’t know if that’s how Ian Humberstone went about making the newest Tissø Lake platter, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The music is spare for sure, but each instrument used on the LP is only approached when there’s a definite need for it. The predominant sounds come from softly fingerpicked acoustic guitars, but each gentle piano wash is perfectly placed, every drumbeat carefully hit as not to impede on the overall feel. Occasionally an accordian or singing saw drops by for atmosphere, but nothing feels premeditated here. The tracks feel natural enough to all be perfect first takes.

I can’t possibly recommend this gentle album highly enough to you, and I implore you to pick up the vinyl edition if you can. Even though the first side is dreamy enough to lull you to sleep, you get a quick minute-long snapshot of an accordian stomp to open the second half, but really… I can’t explain the album any better than Humberstone does lyrically in the closing “Heath Fire & Waltz”"

“This is why we made it / Originally / Not for a club / Or for groups of more than twenty”.

Perfectly intimate and wonderful. I can’t recommend this album highly enough.

Tisso Lake - The House By The River.mp3

Hear more Tisso Lake at their MySpace page.
Order Song Of The Black Dog from Mathilde like… now.

Nik Freitas “Sun Down” (Team Love 2008)

Oh, how lovely this record is. Lo-fi phenom Nik Freitas has put together an elegant folk piano-pop record that, like the last edition of Short Takes, owes a lot to Paul McCartney, not to mention a heaping spoonful of Paul Simon. Sun Down is alternately altogether jaunty and positively delicate. And it’s all gorgeous. “All The Way Down,” with its choir and dancing pianos, is your favorite Billy Joel song that you can admit to still enjoying. In “What We Become,” Freitas plays add-on, building from a miniscule piano chord progression, gradually adding in vocals and a gently thumping drum machine, and though it’s a lengthy pop song, it never gets boring. Again, this record is just gorgeous.

Nik Freitas - Sun Down.mp3
Nik Freitas - All The Way Down.mp3

Buy Nik Freitas’s Sun Down before you do anything else today.

Andy Mitchell “Less Talk, More Static” (Self-Released 2008)

Andy Mitchell, a college student living in Middlesbrough, England, sent us his debut lo-fi indie rock record. Titled Less Talk, More Static, the album was recorded in his dorm room during the early morning hours, a time he calls the best part of the day as well as serving as the thematic structure of the album. Mitchell certainly likes Radiohead and the Smashing Pumpkins, and those influences are abundantly clear here. In fact, the album sounds like a Smashing Pumpkins title I wouldn’t throw across the room, which around here, is truly a compliment. Occasionally, Mitchell gets carried away with layering, especially with synth, when more simplistic arrangements would better serve the songs, but he’ll figure it out; the guy is loaded with potential. While Less Talk, More Static has a tendency to sound a bit samey from song to song, it’s definitely enjoyable and certainly isn’t bad by any stretch. Trust us on this one, we’ve received plenty of terrible debut records over here.

Check out Andy Mitchell at his myspace page.

As a band, I’m not really sure what to make of No Age. They’re really just a couple of skate punks that make noisy songs, but… there’s gotta be more to it than that. The tracks on their new album Nouns vary from barely contained sound collages to bashing garage stompers, but it’s consistently enjoyable, confounding and above all else: interesting. And let’s face it. Sub Pop releases as of late haven’t exactly blown the proverbial roof off of the sucka. It’s been a whole lot of people that wouldn’t have record deals if they weren’t affiliated with Band Of Horses or Wolf Parade for the past few months. So this begs me to ask: do I actually like this new No Age album or am I just pleasant surprised that it’s a really good Sub Pop album?

I think the verdict is both. I’m excited to see Sub Pop digging themselves out of a rut, and I’m happy to hear a band that is equal parts Psychocandy, Black Lips and musique concrete. I like how on the opening “Miner”, everything is given such an equal place in the sound field that I can’t tell how many guitars are there, I’m not sure if I can hear a tambourine or not, and I honestly can’t tell if more than one person is singing or not. That might sound sarcastic, but I like a not-so-obvious album here and there. And then there’s bits like “Keechie”, where it’s just a big pastoral and echoey mess of guitars framing a rhythm track made up of hiss that slowly opens up and goes away. No chorus, no vocals. Just a neat little recording experiment that gives you a quick break from the mid-range pounding that No Age seems to revel in.

On the other hand, I’m glad that Nouns barely lasts over a half of an hour, as it’s not the type of noise pop that I could handle in large doses. You have to understand that the guitar tones often fall somewhere between the I-Doser experiments and the sounds produced by that guitar pedal that Buzz Osbourne made as a joke for DOD back in the day. I’m willing to bet that this band would own you live, though. It sounds like even this relatively lo-fi production is barely able to contain them.

Hats off to Sub Pop for unveiling such a daring signing. Other articles of clothing off to No Age for rocking out with little care for the rest of the world. They sound like they’re having a blast, and it’s contagious. May you never lose your youthful exuberance, and may you always be there to surprise me when I open the RetroLowFi mailbox.

No Age - Eraser.mp3

Since you need Nouns in your record collection anyways, you might as well click here to by it from Sub Pop!

I’d been meaning to read Drugs Are Nice ever since I saw it in an Atlanta bookstore a few years ago. I kicked myself for not buying it then; for some reason, I’ve had the worst time coming across it again. But I’ve finally caught up, and I can say without hesitation that I am absolutely terrified of Lisa “Suckdog” Carver. Again, this is a good thing.

Carver was an important figure in the ’80s post-punk movement, rising to fame after meeting GG Allin, who inspired her to form the “band” Suckdog, even though she had no musical talent. She started making noisy tapes with her friend Rachel and later turned to performing shocking art pieces that involved intentionally humiliating herself, her very likely mentally ill French husband Jean Louis Costes, and her audience (an infamous event involved her pissing into a litter box onstage and throwing the clumps at stunned audience members as they tried to leave). Carver later started one of the first zines, Rollerderby, in which she gave visibility to Bill Callahan, Vaginal Davis, Dame Darcy, Cindy Dall, Boyd Rice, Costes, Nick Zedd, GG Allin, Kate Landau, Queen Itchie & Liz Armstrong. She also had a child with neo-nazi Boyd Rice (industrial musician and member of Church of Satan), leaving him after years of abuse. Her son, Wolfgang, was born with a genetic deletion.

Some people have called Carver and her writing style the female Hunter S. Thompson, but while Carver is just about as insane, I find her a thousand times scarier. Instead of enjoying your drugs and being entertainingly nuts, Carver calculatingly loses her mind. And she does so with a sense of knowing naivety. Carver goes on about how she wanted to live authentically, appreciating the grime and insanity of those around her. She was empathetic toward these people, so it made sense to her to do such insane things as well and to revel in them. She shocked people because she liked to see people horrified. She became a prostitute because she liked the idea of trying on other people’s personalities (and later didn’t have a single negative thing to say about it–a rare occurence. This also came from a person who was terrified by sex.), and she became involved with a neo-nazi because she wanted to figure him out.

While it’s debatable as to whether Carver actually had all of these adventures, it’s also difficult to doubt her. Carver writes with such an excitable, childlike tone (soooo many exclamation points) that you want desperately to believe her; she’s so enthralled to be involved in such debauchery simply because it’s the opposite of boring, and she ignores things that most people would call the cops over, such as her husband (who at the time was in his late 30s) beginning a relationship with a 12-year-old girl. Her answer to all of these events is to essentially shrug it off and try on a new persona. Throughout all of this, Carver expresses an obsession with her father (whom she lived with when she was 15, right after he got out of jail for murder), a sort of Elektra complex she subconsciously tries to sort out with all of the older, twisted men she is linked with. Because of this troubled idealism, at times I felt like I shouldn’t be reading the memoir, that I was reading the writings of a woman not altogether there, that I was intrigued by her misfortune and lack of understanding.

However, Carver’s writing style and tone completely change after she gives birth to Wolfgang. Of course, motherhood brings a certain sense of responsibility, but this shift is drastic. Carver realizes that she’s been self-destructive her entire life and needs to create a safe environment for herself and her child. She then comes to terms with her relationship with her father, and even though she admits how difficult it is to raise a sickly child, becomes a dedicated and careful mother. At this point in her life, Carver becomes a bit moralistic in her writing, but it’s difficult to chide her for doing so. It’s not like the girl hasn’t been through hell and came out all right. The wonder felt in the first half of the book might be replaced by a sense of “we’re going to make it, baby and me,” but it’s also quite tragic, given everything that’s preceded this time. Besides, I don’t think anyone would be satisfied reading this if she were to revert back to peeing in people’s mouths to watch them squirm.

Today, Carver writes a sex column for Nerve.com. She lives in Dover, New Hampshire.

Check out Rollerderby, the infamous underground zine.
Go buy Drugs Are Nice from Soft Skull Press. It’ll do ya some good.

No use pussyfooting around about this, so we’ll just come out and say it: RetroLowFi is gonna be going through some changes.

While these changes occur behind the scenes, you may notice the amount of articles slowing down a bit. We’ll still be the lovable lil’ website that could, but there will be some big differences soon. We’ll be adding some categories while dropping other ones altogether. And we’ll also be implementing some semblance of a rating system shortly. We feel that this will only make the site more exciting, and trust us… you’ve never seen this rating system before. We hope.

Possibly the biggest change coming: we can no longer guarantee that anything you send us will be reviewed. This is going down for the following reasons: We’re getting too much mail and when you have a higher quantity of records to sift through, the more mediocre they tend to become. No offense. But if you send us a mediocre record, we’re gonna write a boring review. Who wants to read boring articles about things that the writers couldn’t care less about?

So from now on, it’s this simple: if none of the RLF writers have a strong opinion about what you’ve sent us in the mail, we’re not gonna talk about it. Plain and simple. And in turn, that means that if we give you a birght and shiny recommendation to the blogosphere at large, you can sleep well at night knowing that you’ve just pleased some of the toughest web critics around!

Don’t worry. If you’ve sent us an album, a book or a film that’s been postmarked by today - April 30th - it’ll likely get reviewed, and we’ll at least be civil about it. We might do it in the short takes category, because we’ve got quite a few things to get to. And it’s not as if everything we’ve been sent recently is bad or anything, but… man, you’d think some people would at least *look* at our site before deciding to stuff their record into a padded mailer.

So, now the challenge begins. Do you think you’ve made a phenomenal piece of art that will turn the world on it’s ear? Great! Send it to us, and we’re gonna tell the world about it. And keep in mind: we still do not review albums sent to us in an mp3 format. If you don’t think enough of your album to go to the post office so it can be heard, we’re not interested in it either. Unless you’re, like, sending us unheard Kirsty Maccoll recordings. In that case, send us all the zip files our inbox can handle.

Other than that… our ethos is the same, and we still have one goal in mind: telling you about the things we think you will like. As an editor here at RetroLowFi, I can’t thank you enough for all the support you’ve shown us in the last few years. Above all else, we’re here for you… and we thank you for being here for us.

Captain Wilberforce - Everybody Loves A Villain (Blue Tuxedo 2008)

This isn’t a band. It’s an outlet for british singer/songwriter Simon Bristoll to get his Jeff Lynne on. His new album, Everybody Loves A Villain is a slick and smart pop record. Tightly compressed electric and acoustic guitars bounce off of mutli-layered harmonies ripped straight from McCartney’s best solo years. The guy has a real knack for melodies, even if the songs themselves can be a bit predictable. And speaking of this cat’s McCartney-isms, when the album gets sappy, it gets really fucking sappy. I’m not turned off to that sort of thing, but tracks like “The Girl Who Broke Her Own Heart” are seriously treading on a darkly mutated version of the Goo Goo Dolls ballad territory. But that’s par for the course in pop artistry nowadays, especially for the folks like Bristoll that buff, shine and compress every single instrument to a sparkling and mistake-free polish. But those are the only gripes I’ve got with Everybody Loves A Villain. When it’s good, it’s really good… and it’s a damned sight better than whatever you’re hearing on your local “modern rock for people with kids” radio station. Simon Bristoll has the chops to knock one out of the park one day, and the title track proves it. Check it out:

Captain Wilberforce - Everybody Loves A Villain.mp3
The official Captain Wilberforce website should be helpful if you’d like to buy Everyone Loves A Villain

The Night Marchers - See You In Magic (Vagrant/Swami 2008)

John Reis = the guy from Rocket From The Crypt, Drive Like Jehu, The Hot Snakes, and The Sultans. Now he’s in a band called The Night Marchers, and he’s already got a built-in fanbase. Besides being an utter demigod in southern California, he’s such a well-respected indie rocker that mere mention of his name around a hipster will only result in hours of stories revolving around the time they got laid to Yank Crime. And those people will buy this album no matter what I say about it, positive or negative. I could tell you that it’s the best straight-up garage rock record I’ve heard in years - which See You In Magic is - or that’s almost disappointing in Reis’s newfound mastery of melody and dynamics compared to his noisier earlier projects - which the album isn’t… for me at least. What’s important to know is that Reis and his current band have been around the block a few times, and they don’t just crap out material, no matter how ragged the exterior might seem at times. This is damned good rock record.

Night Marchers - I Wanna Deadbeat You.mp3
Buy See You In Magic from Vagrant!

Forever The Sickest Kids - Underdog Alma Mater (Universal 2008)

I’m simply at a loss to explain why Universal keeps sending us this Warped Tour stuff. I’d like to think that we aren’t snobs at RetroLowFi, but that even a cursory glance around our website would clue you in to the fact that exactly none of our writers are gonna be into emo-pop. So maybe Universal knows we’ll hate it and is taking the “bad press is still good press” route, hoping we’ll tear the album apart and then get attacked by kids in mascara. Too bad. You lose, Universal. Epic fail on your part. We simply aren’t gonna give an opinion on it. Same goes for that Between The Trees album you sent us last month. Unless you wanna buy our blog. We’ll be in touch soon…

Out of all us RLF writers, I probably own the least amount of vinyl. But for some reason, rather than vary up my listening habits, I tend to gravitate to one particular record, especially every day I come home from work: a beat up old copy of Adam Ant’s Friend or Foe that I bought at a record show a couple of years ago for about two bucks.

It might have been the best two bucks I’ve ever spent on music. I mean, come on. These days, two bucks can get you two tracks of cheerfulness on iTunes. But this record brings me more completely not guilty pleasure than I can even express.

From the first sounds of the title track, we get everything we love about the eighties. Frenetic drum beats, played mostly on snare rims, spastic and elastic bass, and repetitive lyrics. The sound of the record as a whole is very much of its time, but it doesn’t seem to lose any value today. Take the second track – “Something Girls” – the singable (and whistleable) melody with that seems to lilt heavily back and forth like a pendulum and the simplistic arrangement. And you’ve even got a ukulele playing in the back here.

What I love about this record so much is not only that it’s popariffic, and encapsulates so much of what I love in pop music of this era, it’s also very, very smartly done. Sure, some of the tracks start to sound the same after awhile, but 30 seconds into each of them, they become distinct earworms. Particularly in terms of arranging and producing, Ant knew what the hell he was doing.

I also have a problem with vinyl – I am very prone to picking up the needle and dropping it back on the same place. Again, more so than any other record I own (even the B52’s, who I’m convinced were meant to be listened to on loop), I do this with Friend or Foe. I start Side A, and I think, “Oh man, I love this song! I have to listen to that again!” But then the segways keep me pushing into the record, particularly that between the title track and “Something Girls”. I want to put every song on repeat ad naseum.

And then we get to “Desperate but Not Serious” (again, the transitions between tracks cannot be duplicated in any other format but vinyl, one true reason to hold the medium dear). I start bobbing my head and I’m transported away to nights in a smoky local alterna-bar, where only the hippest of the hipsters are dancing to this track. Following this is a surprisingly genuine track about being a one-hit wonder, “Here Comes the Grump”. The song is so thickly layered with hooks and melodic lines it’s impossible to escape.

The biggest hit Ant was known for in the 80s (the one on all the compilation CDs) doesn’t arrive until Side B, but as you move further through the record, you realize that “Goodie Two Shoes” is not the best song on the album. Not by a longshot. “Crackpot History and the Right to Lie” could beat it up on the playground after school. You get to “Try This for Sighs”, and you think you’ve had enough, but no. The hooks take over your being and force you to at least wriggle. Seriously, I am puzzled as to why every song on this record was not a huge hit each time I listen to it.

Of course, this excludes the ends to both sides – Side A ends with quite possibly the most unnecessary cover of all time, a hokey “Hello I Love You” including that signature all the way up and all the way down the guitar neck sound. The second side ends with an instrumental track that tries to emulate Morricone, “Man Called Marco”. Meh. Some of the whistling wishes the listener adieu on the right notes, but still. I’m not really a fan of pop instrumentals – if I want to listen to instrumental music, I know of better places to find it.

Other than that, the more I look back to some of the one or one plus the songs that were played on whatever constituted alternative radio in the 1980s (I was at maximum seven years old throughout that decade) and the albums that supported them, I appreciate Friend or Foe even more. I mean, seriously – how many Human League or Soft Cell albums can you make it all the way through? 23 years later, I still salute Ant for this little poppy gem, and will keep it spinning until I get violently ill from it. Which I think will be never.

Pulitizer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri is well known for delicately and masterfully handling the struggles of Indian immigrants as they attempt to bridge the culture of their home country with that of American culture. While Unaccustomed Earth deals with the same issues, this time that juxtaposition is not the focus. Instead, Lahiri delives into the more complicated, private family issues, with expert results.

Eight lengthy short stories make up Unaccustomed Earth; several of those stories are linked. Most stories involve an interracial couple–which automatically creates tension in Lahiri’s stories–but again, that dynamic is not the focus of this collection. Here, the characters try to establish sound relationships with those closest to them, never fully realizing that the other person is not aligning with them. The title story involves Ruma and her father, who is vacationing in her home. Traditionally, Ruma knows that she should be inviting her father to live with her following the death of her mother, but she is reluctant to ask him. Her father enjoys the company but is anticipating waiting for his stay to end so that he can see his secret girlfriend. While Ruma believes the two are connecting, her father is only connecting with Ruma’s young son. In “Only Goodness,” a sister tries to support her misfit brother through his alcoholism, which their parents choose to ignore. The brother tries to overcome his disease and reconnect with his sister after years of pushing her away. The linked stories involving Hema and Kaushik take them through childhood until death; never once do they fully realize the effect they had on each other.

Again, Lahiri’s sense of understatement and reservation pervades the collection, making her characters’s stilted emotions all the more powerful. And of course, her elegant sense of language continues to transcend the scant plotlines she creates. If anything negative could be said about Lahiri’s writing, it would be that she repeated herself with her first two books. However, yet again, she effortlessly crafts the way people attempt to connect and largely fail in the most eloquent ways possible.

Buy Unaccustomed Earth from Knopf.

A few years ago, another RLF-er and I were discussing a trend that seemed to be emerging in indie rock. A lot of bands seemed to be using a hyperactive, rather atheletic drummer - the type of drummer you’d typically hear in a metal band. The recent Broken Social Scene and Annuals albums are perfect examples, where the efforts of the drummer(s) seem to be what makes the record ebb and flow. Using such a drummer isn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless, of course, that is the only appealing aspect of said band.

Canadian indie pop band Tokyo Police Club seems to be following this trend. Listening to the band’s debut full-length, said drumming is certainly impressive and beyond acrobatic. The rest of Elephant Shell is tightly knit as well, with keyboards that weave their way between pulsating Strokes-style guitars. The singer is droll and nasally, with a penchant for literary lyrics.

This combination should make for a golden pop record, by all accounts. However, I found it a bit bland. While the 28-minute-long record certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome, each song is a bit too same-y to be great. It’s like a great two-minute pop song repeated ad nauseum. Even with its enjoyable moments, it gets dull after a while. Given that, I can certainly see why the band’s 15-minute EP, A Lesson in Crime was so successful. Elephant Shell, however, could use a bit more diversity. But Tokyo Police Club is an extraordinarily young band, having only formed three years ago, so we’ll see what happens.

Stream more Tokyo Police Club songs.
Buy Elephant Shell from Saddle Creek.

You know, we don’t get to cover a whole lot of hip hop here at RetroLowFi. Not a whole lot of rap CDs show up in our mailbox. I understand. We don’t really look much like a site that would dig such lyrical flow. Well, if you’re assuming that we don’t like rap just cause we like Fishboy or something, you’d be incorrect. Just try to keep me away from Miami on August 2nd. I normally avoid that city like, well, things I don’t like, but I’ll gladly make an exception for this festival lineup:

A Tribe Called Quest
Nas
Mos Def
De La Soul
Rakim
Method Man & Redman
Raekwon & Ghostface
Immortal Technique
Dead Prez
Murs
Spankrock
Kid Sister
Santogold
The Cool Kids
Jay Electronica
Kidz in the Hall
Amanda Blank
Flosstradamus
Wale

Oh, and some “special guest” group called The Pharcyde. The Pharcyde!!!!

Seriously, all those other festivals look okay, but… dude!!! Look at that lineup. If I come out of the venue alive, something went wrong. Hopefully you’ll be near one of these cites on these dates (all Saturdays and Sundays):

7/19 - Chicago, IL
7/20 - Toronto, ON
7/26 - Boston, MA
7/27 - New York, NY
8/2 - Miami, FL
8/3 - Philadelphia, PA
8/9 - Los Angeles, CA
8/16 - San Francisco, CA
8/23 - Denver, CO
8/30 - Vancouver, BC

So, yeah, good God. We’ll be there with, uh, bells on? That was horrible. Regardless, you’ve been informed. See you in Miami, suckas.

Listen to each of the performers and get ticket info at the Official Rock the Bells website