THE SKYLINE 50: PART THREE

Part Three of our all-week series sharing our 50 favorite tracks to come out of the city this year.

Hearts Break – Hearts of Animals
Lemming Baby
We’re not entirely convinced that Mlee Marie didn’t just get dropped off by some well meaning spirit in the sky, complete with a back-story, back-catalog and pointy auburn guitar. A year ago, we didn’t know her from Eve, today, we can’t turn around without stumbling upon some new project she’s involved with. But this was the song that got it started for us – simple, sweet, coy; freight trains and hearts you really believe are broken. Yes, it's true, we made a Doctor and the Medics reference.


Hello Boss!!! – Fatal Flying Guilloteens
Quantum ****ing
Remember when you were a kid and there were still tapes and it always seemed like the first thing you did when you tore one out of its shrink-plastic was fast-forward it to the first song on the second side – like it was the FCC mandated position for the most bangin’ radio single of all times of that week. OH SNAP! MOTOWN PHILLY BACK AGAIN! Now somewhat older, possessed of more wisdom perhaps but less likely to act on it, we tend to listen to our records straight through. That’s why we love a break you off somethin’ lead off like this one. (Excluding the intro, of course. By the way, what ever happened to that original French Kiss name-checking intro that had the back bacon references?) A total next-level departure from previous Guilloteen full lengths is stuffed in the ballot box from the get go, and isn’t it great to hear McManus in action one last time?


Honesty – Papermoons
Papermoons 7”
Sitting on a grassy little embankement watching a girl you’ll never get teach the neighborhood kids how to play kickball is not how one should spend their Sunday afternoons. You should be at home with your mates planning a tour where you take a day off to catch the Superdrag reunion show and coaxing worthwhile sounds out of an accordion you bought for a dollar off the wall of a bootmaker’s shed at a flea market. Pinhole cameras, pinwheels on beachbikes and songs like this are antidote to the too much of anything we are all sometimes seduced into feeling. Grab your kite.


I Drempt of a Terrible Adieu – Listen Listen
Listen Listen
The Listen Listen ep is made of wood. The packaging anyways. Sometimes we wonder if perhaps this is because, once the recording was complete, they chopped their instruments up with axes so as to exile the demons that had no doubt taken residence inside during the creation of such a melancholy opus. Prolly the saddest song on our countdown (oh and bonus – suicide lyrical content), only a master along the lines of Kacey Kasem could ever segue between this banjo plucking dirge and, say, an Arthur Yoria song that happened to have the same instrument in the background.


I Told You Not To Write Again – Arthur Yoria
Handshake Smiles
Here’s a tip on how to get into this countdown every year. Be Arthur Yoria. Write a song about some impossibly common aspect of the human condition that had somehow not occurred to anyone was an impossibly common aspect of the human condition. Add some egg shakers. Play a banjo in the background. Arthur: please record another record soon, we need more insight into our own lives. kthanx


In Piles/Files – Bring Back the Guns
Dry Futures
ATTN T-PAIN: We got your next remix ring-tone right here. Piles/Files is a rock club shredertainer that is to the 2007 live show what apple is to strudel and unfortunate berry combinations is to Kosher wine. If this jam was cattle, it would be an entire cow made of whips pre-seasoned center-cut fillet (is that even possible?) served on a solid 28” platinum plate to Kanye West in his V inspired mothership hovering above the Source Awards. PARTY CALL ME.


James Ralph Brown Part II – Riff Tiffs
Afflictinnitus
Judging by the reaction of their fans to our review of their full length, there is an entire legion of the Riff Tiff Army that does not think it is a compliment to have your music designated as the eternal soundtrack to Puff Daddy’s voyages through the ocean depths should he ever be transformed into a Dolphin. Whatever. Those people have no idea what they’re even talking about. If they can think of a better song to glide along to should you ever awaken to discover you’ve been metamophesized into a marine mammal named Franz, we’re all flippers to hear what it is.


Legion of Serpents – Fatal Flying Guilloteens
Quantum ****ing
We heard this uncharacteristically long and tempoed song was the first ever Roy Mata Guilloteens composition. This is no doubt why we are so GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT. (rewind) GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT GET INTO IT (rewind). (Realize we have drive all the way to Juarez with this song on repeat when our intent was only to goto La Tapatia.)


Lonely Goodbye – Paris Falls
Lonely Goodbye (single)
It says something when a local band goes to the trouble of self-releasing a two-song single when they’ve just dropped one pretty aces full length and have a second all wrapped up and in shop-around mode. It’s a special song to them, to be sure - one they had to get out there in the intra-release interim for whatever reason (if we were a thoughtful site, it might have occurred to us to ask them before this moment what that reason might be). It’s a tender and warm lullaby; a blanket of leaves in a rural yard beyond the times. It’s why more musicians should get married and till death do they record.


Lucky – Paris Falls
Vol. I
Paris Falls has their own lighting rig, complete with the ability to trigger it for choreography with what they’re playing at the moment. If you have such a setup, you’ve got to bring the minerals to the water, or else you’re just going to be that group of wankers who thought they were too good for the illumination options the rest of the bands were ok with. But here’s the key – PF aren’t just great musicians and songwriters, they’re great showmen too. Not in the spandex pants kick and splits jump vein, mind you, but in the fact that they see a gig as more than just a thing – as something more akin to the original meaning of the word ‘show’. The whole thing tells the tale of a quartet who take things a bit further than just showing up. The same care went into their Vol I, and this song especially.

THE SKYLINE 50: PART TWO

Part two of our all week series of the best tracks to come out this year

Eight For Eight - The Dimes
Wires and Buttons (Grey Ghost #47)
We love the Dimes. We love this song. We love the man who recorded it. But treading as gently as possible on the feelings of all those involved, a much tighter version of it is begging to exist. The springing and sprightlyness of the guitar lead, which screams, “we may have developed a new form of cowboy rock” plays along like saddle soap with the souza march of the snare, both flowing well into the sort of SEND UP THE ROCK breakdowns we’ve come to expect from this soon to be differently-named foursome. But secrets – re-record soon.


Everyone is Gay – Black Math Experiment
All You Need is Blood
We hope that you never find yourself wandering aimlessly through the falling snow on the grounds of an empty ski resort in the Utah mountains, asking yourself if you have made the right relationship decisions and if maybe burying things in the snow to try and find later was a good idea. Never question yourself like that. You made the right decision. Put this song on repeat, go wander around in the woods for awhile and feel better. It’s so catchy and fun you’ll completely overlook the fact that it’s bemoaning how much other people do not rule, but you rule even less. But isn’t that the job of a good pop song? To confront you with temporary truths of your life and make you feel better about them?


Exist – Papermoons
Papermoons 7”
This is such a delicately beautiful song on such a delicately beautiful ep. Timid little guitar strokes and drums low in the mix, with vocals telephoned and dialed down to being barely audible during the breaks. On record, this perfect little warbler is a bird in the nest, asking why we can’t just live. On the stage, Papermoons are a rockier and a rollier, and this song tells you unequivocally that you are living, and that this is one of the best expressions of it you’ve heard all year.


Fire For Wings – Gretchen Schmaltz
Laced Up Tightly
Sometimes we wonder if the brushes in the opening verses of this song are on a drum, or maybe a little bit of percussive time-keeping a loathed step-daughter makes as she sweeps the cold and foot-worn wood floors; wanting release, wanting to let go, wanting to go to the ball. Making an afternoon of mope and the way the light filters through the blinds and dust into her own private waltz, Gretchen’s voice Huck Fins you into her chores with equal parts husk, soult and unknowing.


Goodnight, Goodluck, Godspeed and Goodbye – Listen Listen
Listen Listen
The Listen Listen formula for (whips!) songwriting is to start with an instrument raid on the store-room of the Grande Old Oprey. Make a getawy in an olde time medicine huckster’s covered wagon/traveling stage horse-drawn contraption. Trot lazily through the night, drinking every brown bottle of snake oil rattling on the shelves until you fall asleep. Pick up an extra few wandering musicians by the side of the road. Stop at a revival tent near dawn. Be forgiven. Sleep through the day in the light of the Lord.


Goons, Hired Goons – Blades
Who’s the Creampuff Now
Quick! Make for the exits! Lock the doors! Watch out for snakes! Beware the CBS Saturday Murder Mystery! This empire is not Holy, or Roman, or even an empire! Who’s the center square! Stay out of Wollworths! This song has a way of running its riffs through your memory bands, connecting one thought to another in ways unaccustomed. It’s a hard one to concentrate on any one thread throughout it. Presumably, it’s about goons – but there’s nothing particularly menacing about it. Neither does it lumber and disappoint like so many Homers. BEHOLD, THE FACE OF HELEN!


Granny Clampet’s Pure Grain Know-it-All – Dizzy Pilot
**** Out the Bones
ROCK YEAH! Lest the last few tracks make you think otherwise, we are into things that get the heart a pumping and fist a shakin’. We can’t make word-one out of the vocals on this banger, but we’re totally content with any song where the don’t put down the phone and spell things out to us. The perfect soundtrack for sketchy 80 mph cab rides down the back-streets of Lafayette, Louisiana in a car whose head-liner is being ripped away by the pummeling gust-stink from the open windows and which hasn’t been washed since the meter stopped working four years ago.


The Grey Call – benjamindavismurphy
Grey Ghost #43
One of the best things about the Grey Ghost series (there could be no one best thing, cause it’s about as whips an idea as soup in a breadbowl) is all the old tracks clamoring around on people’s four-track tapes that wouldn’t otherwise see the light of day. Like this minute and a half jangler from friend of the Skyline Ben Murphy, for example. It’s a reminder that the best chicken is nuggets, and that it’s generally pretty chell to go ahead and put your stuff out there.


The Guards – Gretchen Schmaltz
Laced Up Tightly
Were it not for this track (and, in fairness Elaine Greer as of late), you wouldn’t be able to ever convince us that there are any solo-flying songstresses out there that weren’t on the sad train to bummersville. Not that this sort of expression doesn’t have it’s place, but just like every rose has it’s thorn, so too must it want nuthin but a good time (and it don’t get better than this).


He’s Home With Bones that Grow the Way They’re Supposed to – By The End of Tonight
He’s Home With Bones that Grow the Way They’re Supposed To
To paraphrase our own review, it’s like a bunch of miscreant school-yard jump-ropers from planet Angry Purple Sun got together and tried to tell the story of the Bayeux Tapestry through a combination of freaking you out and stealing your lunch money to buy you pomegranates they later hide under your pillow. If this song was accidentally swapped out with whatever was on the phonograph record they put on the Voyager spacecrafts, an entire terrified universe is going to preemptively invade us just so their children can sleep at night.

AFTER FRIDAY, THERE’S EVEN MORE CHILL STUFF TO ENJOY

So, once Friday has finished destroying you and you’ve had your traditional Saturday breakfast of coffee and Steak-N-Eggs, what are you going to do with yourself?! Well, if you’re like us, you’re totally on top of everything and don’t even remotely need the weekend to accomplish such man-tasks as gardening, re-paving the driveway or dredging the moat. So, for those of you rudderless scooners out there, we’re more than happy to provide a keel and a compass for how the weekend should go down. Dig:

SATURDAY AFTERNOON: SECRET SATURDAY SHOW
This weekend is the first of what we are told by the mystery organizer (who, rumor and IP address has it, is none-other than local solo-rocker Broman) will be a weekly series of shows on Saturday afternoons at the Shady Tavern, a total neighborhood ice-house of a spot in the Heights. Every week they’ll be DJs (starting at noon) and 3-4 bands (starting at 2pm) – but who they are will remain a mystery until they hit the stage. Indeed, the bands themselves won’t even know who else is playing. The shows are free and 21+. We would say check out their MySpace page for more information, but not having any is kind of the point.

EARLY EVENING: PUNK HOUSE @ DOMY BOOKS
Writer/photographer Abby Banks brings her book and movie Punkhouse to Domy. Punkhouse, which was edited by Thurston Moore, “features anarchist warehouses, feminist collectives, tree houses, workshops, artists’ studios, self-sufficient farms, hobo squats, community centers, basement bike shops, speakeasies, and all varieties of communal living spaces.” So, sort of like if someone made a coffee table book about Nevada Street, Lamar House and Faegen House. They’ll also be acoustic sets from Tim Finden and Pat the Bunny. Good opportunity to pick up the next Grey Ghost release too(which is 13 new freaking tracks from Golden Axe!!!!). 7pm. Free.

NITE TIME: DON CABELLERO, BLADES, ANIMAL @ THE PROLETARIAT
Betcha thought we were gonna suggest the Bodog Battle of the Bands! You know us so well.

SUNDAY: FOG, LISTEN LISTEN, THE DIMES @ THE PROLETARIAT
The reason why The Dimes make sense on this bill: They are bad ass. Same for Listen Listen.

REVIEW: LISTEN! LISTEN! - LISTEN! LISTEN! EP

Any time truly spent in the splendor of the rural is precious. This is not a statement of urban fantasia regarding the clean air and hearty ethic of a life more pastoral. As a people, as a Nation, we have a wholly unique connection to the land; to what is now constructed as the Rural but what was once the West or the Frontier. This piece of God’s earth was de- and re-peopled by men of little means who owned land and profited (however little) from it, rather than being tied to and part of the profit of the soils that their forbearers worked in the Motherland.

(We should stop here and state, unequivocally, that this was by no means a universal experience. Many among us descend from those who had precisely the opposite of this experience – those whose ancestors related to the land in ways other than ownership and who were brought here to be made slaves to the children of serfs; to be part of the profit of the land. But so strong remains the hegemony of those descended from the Scots-Irish push Westward that even the most recent immigrant to our shores will find themselves quickly coated in this particular micah flake of American exceptionalism and will be near powerless to prevent its internalization.)

In the rural this connection remains. Profit is still made from the very vastness of the open dirt; from proximity to where God has hidden special abundance rather than through the urban proximity of man to man. In both places there is still toil and there is still struggle, but we view each other’s space, the Urban and the Rural resident both, as a refuge and a place to flee away from the particular way in which our experience breaks our backs and ruptures our hearts. As most of us now live within beltways and loops, a buckless hunt can be near antidote to the familiar struggles, scrapes and victories of a life where the number of bars on a cell phone matters.

And this distinction is in music too. Can we, the Urban, really move beyond the roadside attraction and old-timey good feelingness of a song like ‘My Oklahoma Home’ to understand how its narrative meaning is no less beat down than that of ‘Working for the Weekend?’ While each has a pop-protest approach to the particular condition that each man must make profit in order to live, the difference is in how this struggle is espoused, expected and experienced. In that sense, though their instrumental palette is straight from an old Kentucky home (along with the few flourishes that a musician was able to save as his gypsy ghetto burned), Listen!Listen!’s self titled ep is a wholly urban experience.

It is not bluegrass; it is not country, or not even particularly folksy – though they both use entirely the same set of strings and strums, this record will never fit comfortably in any playlist that also includes the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, or any variation on dueling banjos.

Unexpectedly rich and nuanced, it evokes the vastness of malaise rather than open air; It is the cramped beauty of a cameraphone shot of the endless grey of a cold parking-lot corner, but one that has been re-plowed and seeded because of the unexpected late-spring freeze. The lyrics, the meaning, the core of the message being communicated to you is common, and applicable and empathizable from your own city sickened experience; medications to be taken, eyes in backs of heads and all of that. But it is wrapped in so fresh a husk that it is as much an escape as waking from a slumber in a hayloft. This record made us go out and buy a banjo (seriously) and mega-dittos on feeling like no amount of our prose could do it justice. Just go buy this record – you owe yourself some peace in the valley.

Listen! Listen! release party for their self titled ep is Saturday, April 21st at Notsuoh with Jenny Westbury and Secret Sideshow also on the bill.

MP3: Listen!Listen! - The Winter of Two Thousand and Five
MP3: Listen!Listen! - Watching the Watchers Watch us Watching