Jami Attenberg’s chain story collection, Instant Love: Fiction, tenderly showed three women and their search for love in any and all of its forms. Attenberg’s newest release, the novel The Kept Man, narrows that focus onto Jarvis Miller and her love for her painter husband Martin, who has been lying in a coma for the past six years.

Attenberg’s novel is simply beautiful. So much so that I’m reticent to say much else about it, honestly, as I feel I’d be doing the novel a disservice. It’s just simply breathtaking to watch Jarvis, so devoted to her beloved that she’s made the goal of her entire life to care for his body, go through such a range of feeling and torment as she decides that she still wants to live. She begins so absolutely crippled by the accident that sent Martin into a coma that she doesn’t leave the house. A visit to the Laundromat when her washer breaks spurs her desire for more, and she ends determined and content, nearly confident in all of her actions. Naturally, Jarvis makes the mistakes any half-widow would take, being so lonely for thinking kindness for lust and lust for love. And it’s in that journey that Attenberg is so successful.

Through all of Jarvis’s mistakes and joys, Attenberg makes every moment vivid and poignant, be it by her rhythmic syntax or the constant attention to something as simple as color. Attenberg connects the changes that happen in Jarvis’s Brooklyn neighborhood with the changes occurring in Jarvis. She allows Jarvis to find pieces of Martin in other people and realize that she can’t ever have him back whole. Attenberg forces the reader to feel empathy for Jarvis in every moment, be it trying to masturbate but failing because the eager husband in her mind keeps icing over, sleeping with a married man to get even with Martin after she realized he cheated on her, or simply waiting for something, anything, to happen. Attenberg shows so many aspects of love and what it can do to a person, how it can consume them but also break them. It’s all just utterly astounding.

Of course, Attenberg sprinkles the pop culture references we love throughout the book (including Pixies and The Who), but they don’t seem to matter much here. Attenberg’s detailed writing makes all the difference.

Buy The Kept Man from Riverhead.
Visit Attenberg’s site.

Eux Autres is a two-piece brother/sister duo out of the Pacific Northwest. Heather plays the drums while singing, and her brother Nicholas likes to play guitar while using his voice as well. They enjoy making pop-inflected rock and roll for your consumption, and this can be proven by the existence of their newest record, Cold City.

Sometimes the songs made up by Eux Autres are sung in french, (“Gratte-Ciel”), and often the songs are jangly (“When I’m Up”) with cute lyrics (“Molly”). Sometimes the group augments the simple guitar/drum tones with an organ and a bass guitar (“Anne Boelyn”) but other times they keep the proceedings lean enough to allow the listener to imagine what could have bee with a bit more orchestration (the first half of “Park Bench Vacation”). Their record is pleasant and short, tipping the scales at a respectable thirty-one minutes. I enjoy it when I put it in my compact disc player.

Cold City is a very nice record by two people that fight in rehearsal if their bio is telling the truth. I don’t hear animosity on the record, but perhaps they didn’t record it. I think it’d make it a bit more interesting. As it stands, they’ve made a fine pop record that has yet do me any wrong, and I think you’ll enjoy it. If you would like a copy of your very own, I’d recommend that you order it from Happy Happy Birthday To Me because they are a very nice pop label. Thank you and goodnight.

Eux Autres - When I’m Up.mp3

Just when I thought that WeePOP records had totally forgotten all about RetroLowFi, I get a wonderful package in the mail. Not only did said package contain the new platters by The Just Joans and The Darlings, but they sent us a fun little Christmas card and a candy cane, to boot! There’s no end to the amount of personalization that label masters Thor and Camila will put into every twee step that WeePOP makes, and these new-ish releases really drive that point home.

The EP’s are still coming in the form of 3” CD’s, and their new penchant for pressing the artwork on cardstock has continued unabated. With this label, the releases look uniform, and you know that the package inside will certainly deliver the pop goods, but you never know exactly what’s lurking inside of each individual release. That’s why we’re all so fascinated with the label, you know?

WeePOP!008: The Just Joans - Virgin Lips

Twenty-one minutes and nine songs. That’s DIY pop in a nutshell, right? In the case of The Just Joans, they’re an unpredictable duo with thick Scottish voices and even less predictable songs. Opening with the giggly title track (aka: the best song that the Vaselines never wrote), the Joans quickly shift gears into quieter territory with “Lookin’ Like Rain”, which coincidentally has a sequence of piano chords that the more astute classic rock fans among you might find to be incredibly close to that of Neil Young’s “See The Sky About To Rain”. Of course, that’s not even close to the only musical nod you’ll find on Virgin Lips, as the delicious “These Boots Are Made For Stalking” is set to the tune of the theme of the old Rugrats cartoon. And there’s also that twice-as-sad-as-the-original version of The Cure’s “Pictures Of You”. At first, one isn’t expecting the EP to be as deceptively downbeat as it is, but there’s so many musical references running amok here that you have to wonder if The Just Joans aren’t taking the piss out of ballads in general. The first pressing of this one sold out quickly, so you’ll want to snap up a copy real quick like, you know?

The Just Joans - Bellshill Station.mp3

WeePOP!009: The Darlings - Photo

So far, this one is running neck and neck with Bunnygrunt’s 1000% Hot and Desmond Reed’s Guinea Pigs as my favorite WeePOP EP yet, this one is an irresistible nine minute blast of pop bliss that’s only hinted at by the reserved opener “Anything You Want”. While that harmony-laden opening track is certainly a wonderful tune, it’s really the next two songs that bring home the proverbial bacon. First up, you’ve got “Emily”, which is really the type of pop song that would be number one in seventy-eight countries for forty-three weeks in a perfect world. An indisputable girl-pop masterpiece that lands somewhere between the perfectly self-deprecating writings of Kirsty Macoll and the effortless proto-twee melodies of the best Twa Toots songs. This unbelievable oughta-be hit is followed up by what stands as the best AC/DC cover I’ve ever heard in my life. Yessir, The Darlings turn in a finely downtrodden reworking of “You Shook Me All Night Long” that seemingly places the lyrical emphasis on the morning after a conquest and not the bravado of just getting laid that permeated the original barroom standard. Not that there’s anything wrong with the original, but… wow. The whole damned EP sounds effortless and literally asks you politely to play it over and over again. If I don’t get to hear a whole album by The Darlings soon, I might just explode.

The Darlings - Emily.mp3

As per usual, WeePOP! has yet again raised their own bar of excellence to unprecedented heights. Don’t come crying to us when these are out of print. Go to WeePOP’s website and grab your own copies before it’s too late!

Soul Merchants were a lo-fi “psychedelic death rock” band in Denver in the mid-’80s. They wrote and recorded about 100 songs from 1985-1987, and they released what they could on a bunch of cassette albums. During this time, Soul Merchants toured relentlessly for two years before promptly disappearing.

Now, Smooch Records is releasing a two-disc collection of 40 Soul Merchant tunes. It’s OK if you haven’t heard of this band. Those who live and die by the obscure more than likely don’t know about these guys either.

So why release such an overwhelming number of songs now by a band no one knows existed? What makes this band special? The simple answer is that it’s pretty decent goth pop, for what it is (the “death rock” moniker is, methinks, a bit of a heavy-handed misnomer). Soul Merchants were once described as a combination between The Doors and Sisters of Mercy, and truthfully, that’s pretty accurate. Although more on the moodier Joy Division, The Birthday Party, or even The Smiths side of things, the band certainly explores what keyboards are capable of, especially in the Ray Manzarek sense. The result is a collection of hazy, swirling songs that live in gloom but have their faces peering outward.

While, yes, the record is pretty unwieldy (again, 40 songs!), some unique moments definitely emerge. And, of course, we applaud the lo-fi aspect of it all.

Soul Merchants - Crown of Glory.mp3

Soul Merchants - Joanna.mp3

Stream the Soul Merchants record.
Check out the Soul Merchants record at Smooch Records.