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.

REVIEW: PARIS FALLS - VOLUME ONE

The West as it Was. A Landscape of awe, where only surroundings surround you – nothing that is made, only that which exists as God deposited it there. Mocha mud rivers cut the land, not the paths of men; wind folds the dirt-cum-dust, not the plow and the ox. Roasted red pepper soil courts patches of shade beneath the sage and her skeletons. Things that breathe and scuttle make violence on the beating heart; the fang of the rattlesnake, the mace of the scorpion; the tear of the tarantula. Men and families, prepared and horesdrawn, bring leather and burlap and iron and waste into this desert. A crucible to purify away the weak and unlucky from the caustic powdered success.

And a century and a half later, we sat, riveted, in front of Apple Computers and are enterstructed with glee about the Oregon Trail. And though they have nothing to do with one another, Paris Falls keeps bringing us back, mentally, to a place straddled by the very real blacksmiths and horseshoes of destiny manifesting and the 8-bit typhoid deaths of our youth. It’s as though the entire west needs to be discovered again, with loss, with heartbreak and with struggle, and this is the band that is playing in the wagon behind you. You’re upbeat, but you know that dysentery is killing a child at the trailing end of the caravan. You hear the music and fear in secret that their modest plateau of uplift might be the greatest steppe of joy that life, real deal life, can ever really spit up. You wear their dirges with heavy hooks in the ventricle. What if there is no Kublai Kahn at the end of the forded river? What if you never live to find out?

Nearly every review you will read of this record, Paris Fall’s first, will mention the Beatles. And why not, as there is more than a little rubber in their soul. Indeed, earlier tangents of examination focused particularly on this website’s fondness for Ringo Starr’s drumming, and the similar back-beating pleasure we encounter when listening to PF on record (work handled live until recently by Mikey DeLeon - Matt Tantillo is now filling his kicks and fills). However, a recent discussion on another blog rendered that line of thinking to the day late/dollar short bin. But to us. more than Fab, Volume One sounds dry, and deserting. Of a time when all the psychotrops have long given way to the cracked lake-bed beneath them. Metal hoops sinking into earth not ready to be tamed, but still turning. Forward. Reccomended.

Stream: Paris Falls - Various Tracks

LATE PASS: FGHOTS PHOTOS

Well, like we said, we didn't much have time to take any snapshots of the various goings on that took place a few weeks ago at the more-successful-than-the-George-Forman-Grill Feel Good Hits of the Summer Fest. Fortunately for us, and for you, a few people did. Please enjoy the following thousand-word encapsulments of a few of the day's performers, and don't forget to send any you might have hiding on your flickr our way. Also, please do not forget we are the kings of R&B. Just sayin.

WATERMARKS (photo by Mindy)


DIZZY PILOT (photos by Erica Cleveland)




PARIS FALLS (photos by Erica Cleveland)

WEEKEND WRAP-UP: FALLING ON OUR ASS EDITION

You may have heard, but we were a little busy this weekend. So much so that we let a number of things not get done. The fruit-fly population in our office kitchen is beyond epic, to say the least. But, back from a trip to Austin and with the planning and preping and decorating and stage managing and pure rockuledge of some festival or another behind us, we are stoked to be back on the job. Here's the dirt on this past weekend.

• The Feel Good Hits of the Summer Fest was a great time. A big thanks to all the bands, especially Paris Falls, who was kind enough to bring their lighting rig when some problems popped up with The Proletariat's array. The Western Civilization and The Watermarks both moved their cribbage piece up a notch in the category of ACES Local Indie Pop Band You Have Never See Live Which have a Definitive Article in Their Name (we should stop and point out here that Coach Springer, owner of more enviable records and listening taste than we will ever have and consulting muse to the Skyline Network seemed pretty stoked on The Watermarks' set). We could go on and on about all the performances - like whats up Kimonos, way to shred the heck out of a Zeppelin tune?! - but how about that decorating?!
  

• A big thanks again to all the bands, the Proletariat, Gilbert, Dunnock, the hard working folks behind the bar, and the door and in the sound-booth and all the people that showed up. With as much of a success as it was, very unlikely that this will be a one-off. Also, while we didn't see too many flash-bulbs throughout the evening, we did see a few - if you took some pictures, post links in the comments section.

• Speaking of Paris Falls, their first CD, the succinctly titled Volume One, was finally available at the show on Saturday. We picked up a copy and are looking forward to bringing our review of it to you soon.

• Speaking of the Kimonos, their next release is in the mastering stage and we are hopeful to have a sneak peak for you soon.
  

• Speaking of record reviews we are looking forward to bringing you soon, we've been blaring Wicked Poseur's 7" ep around the office for the last week, though sadly we were unable to come up with the words to describe it in time to share with you before his show with Dan Deacon at the Mink last night. We also were so flubterghasted from Saturday that not one of our correspondents actually made it to the show. Had we wrote about it in advance, we would have told you that, Mr Deacon, in an inspired moment, was the source behind the name for Jana Hunter's dance troupe, Bony Poner.
  

• Speaking of Jana Hunter, she left Sunday morning for the next stretch of her tour. Pitchfork has the dates as well as the deets on some other stuff she has going on. For this stretch of the tour she is joined by Ray of the Castanets as well as a photographer whose name we are completely drawing a blank on and cannot locate the napkin we used for notes.
  

• Speaking of people who practice in Jana's living room, we learned that Bring Back the Guns have been notified that they are up for a Houston Press Music Award; ditto for the Fatal Flying Guilloteens (we had previously reported that Something Fierce is also on the ballot).

• Speaking of things we are unable to connect to other things, we ran into Bianca of Heist at Hand over the weekend. She's moved back into town after a series of escapades we'd eventually like to get a summary of, and HAH is gearing up for some shows once again. Welcome back kid.

WEEK IN REVIEW: Other News

A Summary of our Other News links from last week.

• Matt Brownlie: RE: PHILLIP GLASS - HOUSTON IS RETARDED
• NonAlignment Pact on Sharks & Sailors, My Education and Red Swallows
• Billy Gibbons on next Queens of the Stone Age LP
• KTRU Battle of the Bands Tonight
• BUMMER: Visa Issues Force Jesu to Cancel Houston Appearence
• VIDEO: Something Fierce Live @ Beerland
• New Exhibition at Museum of Printing History Features Local Show Playbills
• Paris Falls Unveil New Track "Shelter"
• FREE: Sharks and Sailors' new EP
• Stream: Smoke Eaters playing Gouge Away
• DJ Claire Taylor Opines about KTRU

Does Your iPod Know: Paris Falls – Shelter

Occasionally, a song kicks us in all the right places and we can’t help but share it with you. Currently on repeat in The Skyline World Headquarters is ‘Shelter’, a preview track from Paris Falls’ latest round of recording. In much the same way the second American Analog Set LP's home recordings spelled out how the freedom of the infinite session can move a group from cake to icing, Shelter showcases a band that hasn’t just honed their skills behind the levers and knobs, but in their entire pop-craft as well. A coda loop that begs for a mash-up competes with a Midwest chorus to be the part you don’t much want out of your head.

Check out the now Mikey Deleon-less kids that count along with Spain Colored Orange and The Kimonos March 3rd at Galveston’s Balinese Room for the Sandblast scooter rally.

MP3: Paris Falls - Shelter

Spain Colored Orange, Paris Falls, The Kimonos to Play Sandblast Rally

March's Sandblast Rally, which is expected to draw scooter nerds from across the Lone Star state for a weekend of riding in Galveston, is set to include Spain Colored Orange, Paris Falls and The Kimonos on the bill for their Saturday night entertainment. From its perilous pier-perch over the Gulf of Mexico, The Balinese Room, whose stage was once graced by luminaries such as Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope, will soon be home to pretty much every band who might once have counted Erica Meowcifer as a member.

No doubt, SCO bassist and beard farmer Stephen Burnett had something to do with their being on the bill, himself being the owner of a number of scooters over the years, some of which are even rumored to have run. Uninterestingly enough, Burnett was once the bass player for The Kimonos, whose live shows have become as rare as the sushi rolls that no doubt kept me from going to work today. Rounding out the bill is fellow Rhodes scholars Paris Falls, who are forever dear to us for a note multi-instrumentalist Jennifer Brown left in a shared practice space asking if we might do a better job of keeping the floor clean so she could walk around bare footed "ya know, tiger style." Adorable.

More Info: Sandblast Rally