Bob Degen, Catability

In his singular yet unassuming way, pianist Bob Degen has been putting out compelling jazz trio albums for more than 40 years. He doesn’t record often, though, so each album is something to be highly valued, and Catability may be his best yet. In bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Bill Stewart, the pianist has found a rhythm section with a nearly preternatural instinct for what his music requires. For listeners geared to standard piano trios, Degen may seem a bit idiosyncratic in his phrasing and choice of notes; he doesn’t come directly from any particular school (his closest musical brethren are Paul Bley and possibly Keith Jarrett), and he’s not a virtuoso. His chief virtues are his crystal clear tone, his profound gift for melodic improvisation, and his resistance to predictable rhythmic routine. If his playing veers toward the contemplative, there’s nonetheless a vein of optimism running through it. If he eschews peaks and valleys dynamically, there’s a universe of information within his circumscribed boundaries.

There is great satisfaction to be gotten from someone who can produce something so beautiful from such a contained vocabulary; a haiku. Like a lot of thoughtful albums, Catability may best be taken whole. But it’s worth pointing out some of its high points. “Courage,” the opener, is one of the album’s more propulsive pieces, largely as a result of Stewart’s aggressive snare work and meticulous high hat accents. Formanek understands how to set up a pedal point and then move a line forward, which creates an effective tension/release. This is exactly the kind of cushion that Degen thrives on; it gives him the freedom to play as much or as little as he wants.

It’s a test for any trio to take on oft-covered jazz standard; a substantial tune to begin with, “My Old Flame” is given a further makeover here. I don’t remember hearing a more persuasive version. Degen, while respecting the melody, seems to simultaneously tap into the emotional jazz history of this song, now more than 80 years old. “Sophie” is yet another example of the responsibility with which Degen entrusts Formanek and Stewart. By having them set up an elegant, breezy swing, he can superimpose highly vocalized single note lines or guiding chords. It sounds, at cursory hearing, like a straight ahead tune, but it’s anything but that. While listening to Degen’s solo, think Ornette Coleman; the concatenation of sing-songy lines, adding up to a logical whole, comes from a similar system of construction to the saxophonist’s. And what to make of the gentle waltz “Ode to Sammy Davis, Jr.?” There appears to be no irony attached to the tune, but who would have ever imagined that a Vegas icon would be the beneficiary of such a wistful and tasteful tribute?

Toy, Toy

When Toy were first scoped by the wider public as handpicked tour support to The Horrors in October 2011, they seemed almost too good to be true. Sallow of complexion and extravagantly hirsute, they resembled five psychedelic love-children spawned from Mick Jagger’s pervy basement in Performance.

They sounded even better: twin feedback guitars with droning echoes of My Bloody Valentine; horizon-fixed motorik beats à la Krautrockers Neu!; a variety of sounds (elegant strings, lunar bloops, etc) from a vintage Korg Delta synth; all topped off with intriguingly downbeat musings from frontman Tom Dougall on romance mislaid, getting wasted and other delights. Less than 12 months later, the four-boy-one-girl quintet from Brighton, now relocated to East London, have accrued enviable media hype, but they fully deliver,with a 58-minute debut bursting with memorable tunes, FX and ideas.

“Colours Running Out” introduces a sound-palette of heavily-treated shoegaze-y guitars, rooted by quietly metronomic drumming and an irresistibly acidic vocal melody. Through the ensuing tracks, the listener is tossed between poppy bliss and trancey disorientation. “Lose My Way” and “My Heart Skips A Beat” verge on a New Order-esque stateliness, bittersweet reflections on love gone wrong couched in beautiful, ineffably catchy music. The eight-minute “Dead & Gone,” by contrast, initially cracks along at a euphoric motorik clip, but soon drifts into vague uncertainty, only to kick back in with redoubled, amps-at-11 glee. “Kopter,” similarly, closes out on a lengthily plotted, but ultimately sky-scraping high.

Though it’s centred around those seemingly opposing poles, Toy somehow adds up to an integrated whole — and an unremittingly thrilling one. It’s a full-tilt lysergic trip whose repercussions remain with you long after its last deafening chords have died out. In a word: invest!

Who is Arif Lohar? And Why Does He Have 9 Million YouTube Views?

Diminutive, rotund Arif Lohar looms large in the global pantheon of unlikely pop stars. Like his father, the renowned Alam Lohar, the Pakistani star sings Punjabi folk songs and ecstatic Sufi devotional music such as qawwali. In 2010, however, Arif Lohar’s career took an unexpected mainstream turn when he appeared on Pakistan’s hit the Coke Studio TV music series to perform a transcendent classical-pop fusion version of the Sufi classic “Alif Allah Chambey di Booti” (God’s Name Is a Jasmine Flower) with singer-actress-model Meesha Shafi. Since then, the duo’s video has racked up nearly 9 million YouTube views, dozens of which I proudly take responsibility for.

Currently in its fifth season, Coke Studio mixes classical and folk stars like Lohar and Abida Parveen with younger and hipper Pakistani musicians, with results ranging from pretty good to great. Unfortunately, fear of terrorism has effectively shut down the live music scene in Lahore, Islamabad, and elsewhere in Pakistan and, for all its popularity, Coke Studio isn’t quite the real thing. Lohar, who has reportedly recorded some 125 albums, now spends much of his life on the road, which brought him to New York’s Asia Society in April 2012 for perhaps the most literal and enjoyable take on give the people what they want this side of a Madonna nipple flash — except that Lohar’s crowd pleaser lasted much, much longer.

Born in 1966, Lohar shifts codes with a particular South Asian alacrity as he works both inside and outside Islamic forms. His sextet wore matching long black velvet coats that bore faux military insignia vaguely reminiscent of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album cover, only with odd colonialist overtones. His guitarist chewed gum as he played thin fizzy solos, and a long-haired young dhol drummer wore Doc Martens and a T-shirt that spelled out “Calvin Klein Jeans” in silver sequins. In the back, though, was 80-year-old Allah Ditta, who played percussion and algoza, a pair of wooden flutes blown together with nonstop circular breaths.

In his black turban, dashing mustache and dainty slippers, Lohar conveyed an unexpectedly mischievous charisma you might recognize from countless Bollywood romantic leads. He dominated the stage like a rock star once he picked up his chimta, a pair of long metal tongs affixed with cymbals, which he slapped with as much authority as any tambourine-wielding gospel singer. After a slow warm up with “Qissa Mirza Sahiba”, a Punjabi folk narrative about a woman so captivating that nine angels die upon witnessing her beauty. Having established his old-school bona fides, Lohar, eyes twinkling, began to sing the slow opening stanzas of “Alif Allah Chambey di Booti,” which he’d develop over the next 40 minutes into a volcanic miasma that eventually had everyone in the hall, from expatriate South Asians to cultural voyeurs, in its grip.

A 17th-century poem by the Sufi mystic Sultan Bahu, “Chambey di Booti” contains verses like “None of the countless books you’ve read in your life has destroyed your brutal ego/ Indeed, none but the saints can kill this inner thief, for it ravages the very house in which it lives.” But for Lohar’s purposes, the song is all about the chorus, which repeatedly invokes “jugni-ji,” or “spirit-being.” Jugni’s literal meaning is “female firefly”; it also signifies a Punjabi narrative form that makes funny, sad, and bittersweet observations on the spiritual essence of daily life. Lohar worked “Chambey” like a conductor — adjusting tempos, cueing solos, and bringing everything to a halt only to launch an even more triumphant chorus. It was his hit, he knew it, and he played the hell out of it. When it was over, the group played another traditional Sufi rave, “Dama Dam Mast Qalandar” (The Divine in Every Breath of Mine) and “Jugni,” the powerful opener of his 2006 hit album 21st Century Jugni. And what better encore than yet another couple of choruses of “Chambey”?

It would be a mistake to think this the only trick Lohar has in his suitcase. His repertoire includes the long-form Sufi poetry of Saif Ul Malook, the updated Punjabi folk music of Dhol Vajdaand the upbeat technobhangra jugni of, well, “Jugni.” [www.emusic.com/album/arif-lohar-bushra-sadiq-mahiye/jugni-vol-5/12740159/] Intensely aware of his audience(s), Lohar is a crossover dream and, if his MTV Iggy appearance was any indication, could well be the first international star to emerge from South Asia since the late qawwali star Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Are you listening, Peter Gabriel?

Race Horses, Furniture

A young band hoping to make its mark upon the world is well-served by a taste for high drama, and Cardiff-based Race Horses pricked up a few ears with the theatrical flair of their 2010 debut Goodbye Falkenburg. Furniture takes their pop adventuring further, singer Meilyr Jones’s excitable yelp guiding songs that hark back to the other side of Britpop: not parkas and desert boots, but satin trousers and lots of glitter. Although the jovial experimentation of “Mates” or “Old And New”‘s cosmic balladry bear the marks of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and Super Furry Animals — and not merely because they are Welsh — Race Horses display a melodramatic touch that those bands never really possessed. The influence of Sparks and Roxy Music is palpable on these songs, and at times — on “Sisters,” for instance — they just about manage to cram themselves into Jarvis Cocker’s cords. Race Horses are best, however, when they go a bit more free-range (or deranged): On dark electro-pop fantasy “My Year Abroad,” Jones plays a businessman desperate to hit “the sinful lights of Tokyo,” while “See No Green” starts clammily lo-fi before oozing into a self-flagellating torch song: “I’m just a hotel/ I’m just a place you stay.” On this evidence, however, Race Horses wouldn’t want you to get too comfortable.

Interview: Patterson Hood

It may have ended up a lyrically rich and musically rugged bit of Americana but, in its earliest stages, Patterson Hood’s second solo album, Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance, was meant to be a book. On the epic tour Drive-By Truckers undertook to support their back-to-back albums The Big To-Do (2010) and Go-Go Boots (2011), the singer found himself reflecting on his late 20s, a period in which his life might have gone off the rails had his dream of being in a successful rock band not come true.

“Writing songs on the bus is hard because of the music and noise,” Hood explains. “So I thought I’d write a book. It was loosely based around this dark, fucked-up period when I was around 28 years old, and my idea was that every chapter would include a song about that period. Eventually, I found myself liking the songs better than the book.”

Despite the gloomy subject matter, Hood describes the recording of Heat Lightning… as “A lot of fun — one of my favorite experiences.” His backing band included various combinations of most of Drive-By Truckers, two members of the Texas group Centro-Matic, Kelly Hogan — on “Come Back Little Star,” a gorgeous elegy for the late Vic Chesnutt — and Hood’s father David, the legendary Muscle Shoals bassist.

The songs feel something like a conversation between Hood and his younger self — which is to say between two men who do a lot of the same stuff, though one of them has got better at it. They reflect on touring (“Leaving Time,” “Fifteen Days”), drinking (“Better Than The Truth,” “Betty Ford”) and relationship dysfunction (“12:01,” “Better Off Without,” “After The Damage”), an eternally bountiful source of inspiration for the songwriter.

The key line on “Heat Lightning…” may be one from the title track, where Hood describes himself as somewhere “Between anguish and acceptance.” eMusic’s Andrew Mueller talked with Hood about his troubled 20s, and what he has learnt since then.

Lesson #1: Two beers will do

I don’t think I’ve ever had a real problem with drinking, but if a healthcare professional was to analyze my behavior, I’m sure they’d worry. When I was younger, I was unhappy sober, therefore I drank. It didn’t make me happy, but it made me happier. I actually think drinking was part of what kept me alive.

But I’ve never been a destructive, blackout drinker — or when I was, it wasn’t because of drinking, but because of my own self-destructive tendencies. I’m pretty damn self-aware. I keep a close rein on what I do and how much of it I do, mostly for fear of having to give everything up.

I’m more of a buzz drinker now. I like my two beers a night. I don’t get really drunk anymore. I’m too old, and I don’t have time. I can’t afford to be hungover for two days.

Lesson #2: Don’t stay away too long

I still love playing shows. I love the Drive-By Truckers rock show, and I love the solo show, though it’s very different. It’s much quieter and more intimate. But now that I’ve got kids, I try to tour in shorter bursts. The irony being between this album and trying to keep Drive-By Truckers together, I’m about to tour for longer than usual. So I’ve made a record about being homesick, and now I have to leave.

I take a bit of time to adjust when I come home from tour. The last thing I want to do is get up the next morning at 7 a.m. to get kids off to school. I mean, I love being with my family, but it’s hard to shift from tour mode to daddy mode quickly. It takes a while. And I’m not a morning person.

Lesson 3#: Not everyone survives heartbreak

In my late 20s, I had a relationship that broke my heart, but I got past it. But the Billy Ringo character who appears in two songs is somebody real from my past who didn’t quite make it. He left behind a kid who is now a teenager, and I never quite figured out how to approach that in the book. I live in a small town, and I didn’t want to cause any more grief for that family. That was a big part of me putting the book down.

I’m married now, and I have a stable, loving relationship. Though if Rebecca split tomorrow, I’d have a lot of heartbreak, so I hope that’s not gonna happen. And she better not leave me — we’ve got these damn kids.

Lesson #4: Be honest about yourself

I only pull back from confessing stuff in a song when I’m afraid of it being hurtful to people around me. But I feel like I’m fair game. I’m comfortable with my life to the extent that I don’t mind writing about the bad stuff — cheating on my first wife, our divorce, how miserable all it was, how I drank too much and drugged too much. Even the suicidal tendencies part. I devote a lot of time to Nuci’s Space here in Athens, Georgia [a resource centre for musicians, providing counseling for suicide prevention], so I feel like being candid is something I need to be able to do.

Lesson #4: Weird kids make interesting adults

“Disappear” and “Betty Ford” are songs about my childhood. As a little kid, I was often pretty unhappy. I was a misfit, I hated school, I got bullied a lot, and there was a lot of strife and anguish at home. But then I’d go to my great uncle’s farm on weekends, and have this incredible, idyllic life from Friday to Sunday — that’s where all the photos on the album cover come from. So I had that mix of wonderful weekends and terrible weeks for a decade of growing up. At school, I convinced myself I could become invisible. If kids were making fun of me, I’d disappear and hear the songs in my head. Which made me seem weirder and made me more unpopular. At home, I’d raid Dad’s records, put on a headset, disappear again. As an adult — as a husband and a father — I have to remind myself not to do that.

Interview: Patrick Somerville

Patrick Somerville’s fourth book, This Bright River, is one of those novels that’s epic and intimate. Written from multiple first-person perspectives — all of them dead-on, authentic and hilarious — the novel tracks mysterious pasts, families in distress, substance abuse, and a favorite topic (rightfully so) of any novelist: social awkwardness. The story is mainly told by Ben, a brilliant, recovering drug addict, and Lauren, a doctor escaping a tragic marriage, who are former high school classmates now returned to their hometown of St. Helens, Wisconsin. Somerville (The Cradle, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature) has a blessed gift for sharp, witty dialogue, and the plot zooms, which makes This Bright River an ideal audiobook experience.

Somerville talked with eMusic’s Jami Attenberg about writing 454-page novels in long-hand, an inspiring reading by Ilya Kaminsky, and how to annoy co-workers by playing Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young too much.

This is the first time one of your books has been made into an audiobook. Have you heard it yet?

I haven’t heard the audiobook yet — just this little snippet of it — but I do want to hear it, as I love them and am fascinated by them. I always want to know what my writing sounds like in the heads of people who are reading; this is the next best thing.

When does it serve a purpose for you to listen to an audiobook versus reading it?
The last one I listened to for a specific purpose was A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I had read it before and taught it before, but I was teaching it again and wanted to review the text for class. I thought it’d be a good way to get it into my brain and sort of refresh it for myself, you know?

What turned out to be totally fascinating to hear, though — beyond the incredible performance by Roxana Ortega, the voice actress who seemed to really love the text and perform it with gusto — was the Powerpoint section. You wouldn’t think something so visual and non-linear could be translated back into linear text, but it works really well. They used a slide projector sound effect and different actors for the different voices, which I found to be totally simple and successful. Hearing it read, start-to-finish, you could also sort of hear the audiobook people trying to figure out what order to read slides in. The way in which different readers choose those different orders is one of many brilliant things about that chapter, I think, and the audio version highlights it when you’d think it would obscure it.

Do you ever read your books out loud when you are writing them? You write in so many first-person voices I wonder how you keep them all straight. I guess what I’m trying to say is: Do you hear the voices in your head, Patrick?

I don’t ever read them out loud to myself, although I probably should, considering how firmly I believe that it’s a different psychological experience to hear a text than it is to quote-unquote see a text. We’re all oral storytellers, even literary novelists, right? I think I might be too embarrassed to do it, as I often write in coffee shops. I am unprincipled in this way.
I do hear the voices in my head, though, when I write. Especially for dialogue. To this end, I usually end up feeling like I’m having most of the conversations my characters are having.

You’re about to do some touring for your book. Do you enjoy giving readings? Have you ever witnessed some really inspiring readings? I know a lot of people find them boring, but a good one can really change your life, I think.

I once saw the poet Ilya Kaminsky give a reading in Vermont. It was at the Vermont Studio Center, in this little church, and it was one of the strangest, most captivating, incredible readings I have ever heard. He is almost entirely deaf, which impacts his reading, certainly, and what’s more, English is his second language. So he distributed the text of the poems before the reading itself, and I was sitting there thinking, “What the F is this?” And then he began to read in a big way, using his arms and his body, using volume like I’ve never heard anyone use volume before. At times he was up there screaming at us. It scared the shit out of me. By the end, I felt like a medieval peasant must have felt at the end of a long morning at the church.

I’d love to talk about music a bit, and how it plays into your work. Do you listen to it all when writing?

I definitely do not listen to music while I write, which seems crazy to me — I would never be able to concentrate, I don’t think. I can barely even deal with the sound of someone eating an apple within 30 feet of me while I’m trying to write. I can’t imagine what music would do. But I do listen to a lot of music before and after I’m writing, especially when I’m trying to find the right emotional balance and the right tone for a section or a voice. To me, music is the most immediately emotional of the arts. I think writers are wise to heed how good music handles emotionalism. I think literary writers are often so afraid of being schmaltzy that they won’t do big scenes, but music is almost never afraid to go big.

And what exactly is your relationship with CSNY? They pop up a few times in the book.

I have liked Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young for a long time, but at some point I made my protagonist, Ben, obsessed with them, and it just kept coming back up as I was writing. I listened to them every day in my car when I was writing this book; I once listened to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” so many times on repeat, trying to get into a Bennish mood, that my co-worker eventually came over to my desk and asked me to move on to a new track. I do love their harmonies, and I love how Steve Stills writes.

I’m interested a bit more in your process because I remember you telling me once that you handwrote it on legal pads first, and when you were finished you had a stack of them waiting to be typed up. This is unfathomable to me because I’m so into knowing exactly how many words I’ve written at the end of the day, possibly in this OCD way. Do you do any original writing on the computer or is it all transcribing?

I wrote This Bright River by hand for one pretty simple reason: When I’m on a computer I have a habit of circling back and working on the opening, obsessively, and therefore not pushing forward. I wanted to just have to go, especially for this book. I usually like computers better and have always written on computers. This was a good exercise, but I don’t know if I’ll keep doing it. The transcription alone took me months, and while I did edit as I went, I’m not sure I liked all that added time.

It didn’t hurt that I had no browser open beside me as I was writing, although I also want to go on record as saying that the internet is fine and not a huge distraction and totally manageable. I don’t like the sound of an apple, but for whatever reason, I’m fine with the noise of surfing.

Gallows, Gallows

You have to wonder if the A&R man who handed Gallows a £1 million record deal in 2009 is still in a job. Wary of potential accusations of a sell-out, the London hardcore punks gave their major-label paymasters a bile-laden, state-of-the-nation rant of an album named Grey Britain, sold less than 50,000 copies worldwide, and were promptly dropped. The uncompromising rage-rockers have since lost their talismanic front man, Frank Carter, replacing him with Wade MacNeil of Toronto thrashers Alexisonfire, but neither of these setbacks looks to have dimmed their creative fervor. Back on an indie label where they always belonged, Gallows once again hit us with the sharp end of their visceral, serrated racket.

A riot of belligerent guitars, temper-tantrum percussion and MacNeil’s asbestos-throated growl, this follow-up is less politicized than Grey Britain, save for “Last June,” a piquant take on the police’s role in summer 2011′s global riots: “Pigs is pigs, I can’t relate/ You represent everything I hate!” Guttural, inchoate tracks like “Outsider Art” and “Vapid Adolescent Blues” could be the work of a 21st-century Black Flag, while “Everybody LovesYou (When You’re Dead)” lauds the late Lux Interior, Johnny Thunders and Joe Strummer. It’s short on nuance and subtlety, sure, but as an adrenaline-drenched example of 21st-century UK punk, this is nigh on impossible to beat.

Remembering Joe Strummer

The next to last time I saw the man who put the strum in Strummer, it was nearing afterhours at a Lower East Side bar in New York City, somewhere around the turn of the century. Despite the approaching dawn, Joe was ready to keep on the move, full of restless energy, praising the accessibility of techno music, of all things, and talking about how the computer was putting the means of production into the hands of the people, a do-it-yourself ethos not far from the wellsprings of the Clash.

The last time I saw Joe was in full band flight at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, lunging and spitting at the microphone and leading the charge of his young Mescaleros with a fist-clenched ferocity. The music touched on rockabilly, reggae and classic rock ‘n’ roll — all the grand rolling r’s of the genres he loved — and after, backstage, I watched him surrounded by his crew of New York misfits and miscreants and misses, clustered around because he was them, and me as well, going over to give him a hug and a shared embrace, battle-hardened warriors of the Two Sevens Clash, when rebel musics took on Babylon, as they did these 35 years past, and will always again.

To look at the legacy of the Clash is to appreciate the idealism of rock in action. Incredibly prolific, reveling in their own ambitions and electric energies, they wielded a social conscience that harnessed the violence and contradictions inherent in the glory that is punk rock at its most confrontational. Believing in music’s possibilities for self-invention and inspiration, their offer of hope and rejuvenation stood in direct opposition to punk’s nihilism and penchant for self-destruction.

As a musician, John Graham Mellor came of age in the 101′ers, a pub-rock combo that immediately preceded the upheavals of punk. He might have stayed in revival mode — pub rock, in the form of Dr. Feelgood and, especially, the chop-shop chords of guitarist Wilko Johnson, was all about a return to roots. But the oncoming of punk, whatever form it took, with its sense of renewal and wiping the slate clean of the excesses of the past, gave Joe an opportunity to make a fresh start. More, he took readily to the political implications of the music, its’ embrace of an Us vs. Them class struggle, its revolutionary fervor and crash-and-burn ideology.

There were no halfway measures for Joe, such was his commitment to the music. He was a believer, and the more the Clash took up their opposition against the music establishment, an artistic call to arms that gave their music a high-minded sense of purpose, the more they catalyzed and proselytized; and the more their renown spread. Strummer, who had gotten his stage name from the vigorous way he scrubbed “Johnny B. Goode” on the ukulele in the London subway as a busker, could be alternately articulate and overwrought. In the Clash’s triangle of guitars, Mick Jones would become the musical adventurer, appropriating any worldbeat genres that came into his questing range, the slice-and-dice that would result in such sprawling masterworks as London Calling and Sandinista!; Paul Simonon, besides providing bedrock bass underpinnings, helped create their look, as befits the visual artist he is today, beginning with his own chiseled instrument; Joe was appointed Clash spokesman.

There was nothing pristine about the Clash’s debut album, all rabble-rousing anthems with Joe’s vocals shouted down the awaiting gullet of a microphone, guitars bristling with aggression and tension and tube overload, and lyrics that seem all too eager to storm the barricades. They grow up in “Garageland”; they have no “Career Opportunities”; they want a “White Riot” of their own. In America, the emphasis of punk was on cultural revolution. In England, the social and political situation came to the fore, and so did a more rigid sense of style and subculture, the arcane rituals of spitting on performers, pogo-ing, donning black motorcycle jackets and bondage trousers.

The Clash were often unfairly criticized for side-stepping the strictures put upon them by the parochial punk community, adding rap or even “pop” into their mixage. Joe was aware of the inherent paradox of being in a band that advocated freedom, even as he had to continually fight to maintain his independence and sense of purpose.

For me, all this comes together in “White Man In Hammersmith Palais,” Joe’s telling tale of a night he spent at a reggae show in which the performers seemed bent on showboating in a way that negated the revolutionary power of Jamaican song stylee. Reggae, another music built on resistance and ritual (“Pass the duchy to de left hand side”) was the soundtrack for punk’s spiritual transformation, proclaiming an underclass Rastafarian creed at once alien and yet all too alluring to those seeking to overthrow — at least metaphorically — the oppressor. More, he looks into his own mirror at his pale skin, an outsider and perhaps even an usurper, and questions his own place in the equation: “You think it’s funny?/ Turning rebellion into money.”

Throughout the subsequent history of the Clash, up to and including their slot at Shea Stadium opening the Who, and only a shortest time later, Joe wandering England as a street singer with the remnants of the Clash (none of the original members) by his side, he would feel these opposing forces at work (and play), the extremes of celebrity and artistry, and his desperate attempt to reconcile both in the words of a song.

It’s Joe’s post-Clash career that I find most endearing these days, when the Strummer persona that he’d created found outlet in film, such as his sterling turn in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, and as he followed his own heartfelt inclinations. He sang with the Pogues and was a BBC disc jockey with a program appropriately titled London Calling. The Mescaleros kept the clattery feel of the Clash’s surround-sound, and the albums he made with them have a respectful integrity, acknowledging the gifts of music that allowed him such a rollercoaster ride.

But it’s “Know Your Rights” that I will be playing when I celebrate what would have been Joe’s 60th birthday this year, when I take a moment to raise the flag and salute a fallen comrade. “You have the right not to be killed,” he proclaims, and I wish it were true for him as well, since there was so much more to come, including, perhaps, a reunion with his brothers-in-arms, and a consequent storming of the battlements. I can hear his voice at full throttle, the strangled shout that always seemed on the verge of shredding his vocal cords; the conscience, the loose cannon, the oversoul of the Clash.

Mount Eerie, Ocean Roar

Taken in tandem with the partly cloudy, wandering woodsman anthems of Clear Moon, Phil Elverum’s second Mount Eerie LP of 2012 (the aptly titled Ocean Roar) is like slathering a slice of multigrain bread with chunky peanut butter and shards of sea salt-dusted glass, then slapping a roughly sanded block of wood on top. Which isn’t to say that the two don’t go well together. They’re just a dizzying combination, with Elverum’s latest fully embracing the experimental flourishes of his last album and delivering eight distinct dream sequences. Many of which start and stop abruptly — the bittersweet title track and its playground sampling chaser, “Ancient Times”; the shifting perspectives of “Pale Lights,” which flips between demented power chords and a claustrophobic confessional; and the closing instrumental that begins like a Burzum song, then stops abruptly and turns off completely, running time be damned. (We’d explain the effect this has on you as a listener more fully, but that’d ruin the fun.) The most satisfying moment on here has to be “Engel Der Luft,” though. The Popol Vuh cover ignores the original’s queasy Fitzcarraldo melodies and sprints straight into a sunset of scorched black-metal riffs, smothered drum beats and violent, backspun vinyl. This, apparently, is what happens when you spend winters under blankets of snow and clear skies.

Who Are…TEEN

“I’ll do it better, I’ll do it better, I’ll do it better than anybody else,” sings Teeny Lieberson just 90 seconds into In Limbo, the first proper full-length from TEEN. As it turns out, that line is a feint; the group may open In Limbo with forthrightness, but the rest of In Limbo is full of bewitching misdirection. Just one song later, Teeny is singing “Come back, I don’t wanna sleep another night alone” while her sisters and bassist Jane Herships “shoop-shoop” woozily behind her like a haunted-mansion version of The Crystals.“Charlie,” the song that follows, swoons and moans like the slow dance at a Twin Peaks-themed prom. That spookiness is part of makes the aptly-named In Limbo so alluring. Produced by Sonic Boom of Spaceman 3, the album feels like a 3 a.m. drive down a deserted highway, full of dense fog and strange shadows. There’s a surreal, dreamlike quality to the Liebersons’ harmonies that adds to the feeling of weightlessness, and the songs drift by like odd, spectral apparitions in the evening sky. That Teeny was once the keyboardist for the spry rococo pop group Here We Go Magic just makes In Limbo‘s marvelous moodiness that much more surprising.

eMusic Editor-in-Chief J. Edward Keyes talked with the group about their shared history and their love of Broadway showtunes and wide open spaces.

On Performing at Lieberson Family Cocktail Parties as Children:

Teeny Lieberson: Our grandmother was a ballerina, she had this amazing house in New Mexico and had this beautiful piano, and before dinner —

Lizzie Lieberson: — during “cocktail hour” —

Teeny: — Mom would get us to sing. She’d be like, “Sing ‘Lost in the Stars’!”

Katherine Lieberson: I would highland dance sometimes, which is like Scottish dancing, and we would sing Broadway songs, and our dad would play piano. We used to sing “People Will Say We’re in Love.”

Teeny: I was always the girl and Katherine was always the guy and Lizzie was always the weirdo. She would play Judd [in Oklahoma!], the strange, creepy handyman.

Katherine: Doesn’t he try to kill her? Or try to rape her?

Lizzie: Yeah, Judd was a bit stalkerish. He’d watch the main girl in Oklahoma. He was the handyman on the farm. There’s this song called “Poor Judd is Dead…”

Katherine: Because Curly is trying to convince him to kill himself.

Lizzie: [suddenly shocked] Is that what’s happening?

Katherine: Yes! He’s trying to convince him to kill himself so he’d be this martyr.

Teeny: Is that what that’s about?

Katherine: Absolutely that’s what it’s about! So, yeah, we’d sing, and then we would do really weird skits. Like, you know when kids do this? [puffs her cheeks out] We’d do that —

Teeny: We called it “The Chubbies.”

Katherine: But Lizzie would stretch her face out instead of puffing her cheeks.

Lizzie: I was the quiet little sister, and there was never a character for me, so I always ended up doing my own thing…

[pause]

Teeny: Well, also, I think it didn’t work as well because you were already chubby.

Lizzie: I wasn’t chubby! I had baby fat!

Teeny: And we loved your baby fat.

Lizzie: I was, like, four! Every kid’s chubby at four!

On being a family band:

Katherine: Well, the three of us are sisters, and Jane is like the fourth sister. We are a family, and it feels like family. In a lot of interviews we’ve been talking about the people we’ve been working with, and it all has a family feel to it.

Jane Herships: We had all played in Amazing Baby together. I was the original bass player. My favorite story is that I had been practicing with that band, and we were about to have our first show. And on the record there were all these insane harmonies. And I was like, “Who’s gonna do these harmonies? We have a show, like, tomorrow.” And they’re like, “Oh, the Liebersons will do them,” and I was like, “Who the hell are the Liebersons?” And then they just came in and just blew it out of the water.

Teeny: And I definitely went into this record thinking, “I want them [her sisters and Jane] to be heard on this record a lot.” I definitely wanted singing to be a huge part of it. You can add so much texture and beauty with voices that you don’t need to do with instruments. I think that we try and do that a lot.

Lizzie: You refer to our vocals as being the “fifth member” of the band. It’s an instrument on its own.

Teeny: Sure. I mean, if you listen to the Beach Boys, there’s amazing arrangements everywhere on those records, but you just listen to the vocals, because the vocals are always moving and shifting and there’s so much personality in them. And we definitely wanted to make a pretty psychedelic record.

On the benefits of country life:

Teeny: [Former drummer] Maia [Ibar]‘s family has an amazing converted barn in Waterford, Connecticut, and it’s huge. So we could sleep there and hang out and cook there — it just felt very conducive to making the record. I gravitate toward places like that because I like to have space to think, and I feel like I can’t think here [in New York]. When you’re trying to create, it’s hard to do that in New York. I’m feeling much more drawn to that kind of environment now.

On being in limbo:

Katherine: I feel like my life for the last couple of years has been constantly in limbo — just not being anywhere at all. Before I was doing this, I had a regular full-time job. Then our dad got sick and passed away, and I started playing music. It just felt very groundless.

Teeny: I was still in a working band [Here We Go Magic], and when I left, we needed time to develop. So [In Limbo] is an honest record. I was kind of in a relationship, but not really — it was very back and forth. And not knowing what was going on with Here We Go Magic at the time, and feeling really torn about that, and then our father passed away. I feel like when something like that happens, you’re like, “OK, we don’t get that much time. It’s time to start doing things.” So I knew it was time to make the next step, and I knew I wanted to have people [involved] that I trusted and that I knew closely.

Katherine: We’re really open with each other and we talk things out. It feels really safe creatively. I’m new to my instrument, Jane’s sort of new to her instrument, and it just feels like a safe space to learn.

On the upside of the indirect route:

Jane: People are always asking what we sound like and what kind of music we play. I feel like early on, somebody somewhere used the term “genre-defying,” and that kind of sums it up.

Teeny: Being somewhat mysterious is intentional. I like to make things a little more abstract, because I think it creates a sense of mystery. That’s always my thinking behind it. Because the songs are so simple, and sometimes the ideas are so simple, it always comes back to arrangement — that’s where I feel like we’re trying to take something simple and turn it into something new.

Jane: We actually had a song we ended up not putting on the record because it ended up being too straightforward.

Teeny: Yeah, when things are too straightforward they drive me crazy. “Why Why Why” was difficult, because if it’s played straight — I was listening to Neil Young when I wrote it — it’s almost like a folk tune. We reworked that one a ton before we recorded it. And the song “Charlie” — there’s actually a double meaning to that song. Originally it was written about someone I was dating, but their real name just didn’t work in the song. And then Maia’s boyfriend Charlie passed away a couple of years before that, so it worked as a kind of dedication for him. It became a much more personal thing.

Frank Wright Quartet, Blues for Albert Ayler

In describing his music, the late tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler said, “It’s not about notes; it’s about feelings.” Fellow tenor player Frank Wright was a contemporary of Ayler’s, who lived in New York City at the same time and played with many of the same musicians, and he takes Ayler’s axiom seriously on Blues for Albert Ayler. He may incorporate some of Ayler’s feeling into the music, but he doesn’t spend much time here emulating his notes, form, or compositions. Assisted by guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer, bassist Benny Waters and drummer Rashied Ali, Wright puts together an album closer to gritty urban blues than the kind of “energy music” for which the dedicatee was known. The tribute is clunky, imprecise and garrulous, but it absolutely works through its passion and general hue and cry.

Wright himself is an oddly affecting player. Neither a good technician nor blessed with the kind of enormous screaming sound of some of his contemporaries (Pharoah Sanders, Peter Brotzmann and Ayler himself leap to mind), he is persuasive by dint of pure conviction; there is the strong sense of a man using the language he has to say the things he needs to say. And, because Blues for Albert Ayler puts him in the company of high-powered colleagues like Ulmer and Ali and a reliable bassist in Waters, the result is very satisfying.

There was a second-tier language during the ’60s and ’70s among musicians who weren’t fluent in conventional jazz theory. Without reference to the traditional markers, the players figured out new ways to cohabit space, churning away singly but with a sort of spiritual solidarity. Ornette Coleman’s Lifetime bands still occasionally use this approach. Blues for Albert Ayler is essentially a suite in six parts. It begins with a three note theme, vaguely reminiscent of a Coltrane motif, but approached differently by Ulmer, who uses chromatic chording and disruptively choppy phrases to give things a lot of bite. Ali thrashes around effectively underneath. A long drum solo dominates the second part, and it’s surprising to hear how Rashied Ali, so strongly identified with energy music, plays like a Max Roach-Elvin Jones hybrid. Things heat up in the third part, with Wright wailing, Ulmer moving to various effects, and Waters rumbling ominously underneath while Ali blasts away.

Benny Waters is given his space in part four. He’d been listening to Jimmy Garrison’s arco solos with Trane, but there’s a lot of Alan Silva in there too. The solo also serves to bring the pace down briefly, providing some effective breathing room. His solo continues into the more meditative part five, which features a surprisingly fluent flute solo by the leader. The section is the closest thing to conventional jazz on the album, as Ali and Waters play a simulacrum of straight ahead time with walking bass. By the midway point of the section, Wright is back on tenor, and Ulmer is cranking out a Sonny Sharrock inspired accompaniment. The final section is a recapitulation of the opener, played harder, pushing the dynamics more, upping the emotional ante. It’s period music, without question. But it’s a particularly vivid reminder of what was happening with some forwarding-thinking musicians living in New York City at that time.

Megson, When I Was A Lad…(A Collection of Children’s Folk Songs)

Stu and Debbie Hanna, the married duo from Teeside known as Megson, have been charming the British folk scene for nearly 10 years now. Their music always sounds as though it is sung from the heart, even on the traditional numbers that make up part of their repertoire. Over three albums, Megson have won acclaim (and awards) by taking old music and making it sound new, fresh and relevant. So perhaps it’s not surprising that after taking a year off when their daughter Lola Wren was born, they have returned with an album of old and new children’s folk songs.

The idea might sound twee, but the resulting album is surprisingly full of light and shade. There are references to drunkenness in “Dance To Your Daddy” (a piece that dates back to 1840), while the Megson-penned “All The Shops Have Fallen Down,” is about how the local shops on our high streets have been replaced by chains.

But there’s also the absurd joy of “Baby & the Band,” the soft lullaby refrain of “Bee-o,” and the rough and tumble of “Jenny Jenkins.” No children’s album would be complete without a riddle song and the one here (“The Riddle Song”) is a tender little teaser that dates back to 1430. “Oats & Beans & Barley Grow” is a fiddle-led hoedown, complete with a seed-shaker backing beat, while “My Father’s Farm” is a possibly a variation on “Old MacDonald.”

There’s genuine joy in every performance, as the two voices wind around each other playfully over a collection of acoustic instruments, from mandolin to shruti box. When I Was a Lad brims with childlike energy and joy. It’s children’s music for grown-ups, too.

MONO, For My Parents

Experimental noise rock has long been a prime commodity on the Japanese music scene, its roots going back to Keiji Haino, Boredoms, Ground Zero, Boris and more. And while the four members of MONO certainly draw part of their sound from that well, what really slakes their thirst is a Mogwai-indebted sense of sweeping melody and slow-motion dynamics. For My Parents is their first album out from under the wing of Steve Albini since 2002′s self-recorded One Step More and You Die, but in recruiting producer Henry Hirsch (known for his work with Lenny Kravitz in the ’90s) and taking over the cathedral space at Hirsch’s Waterfront Studios, the scope is more oceanic and echo-drenched, and the pace is stately to say the least; the shortest cut here is “Dream Odyssey,” which clocks in at a blistering eight minutes and change. At times the band calls up the neo-classical bluster of the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed — especially on the string-soaked treacle of “Nostalgia” — but with just about everything from the ’60s being open season these days, it’s a nerdy and decidedly un-psychedelic twist that encapsulates the single-minded Shibuya take on post-rock: no matter the artistic risks, you can’t own it if you don’t fully commit.

Tin Hat, The Rain is a Handsome Animal (17 Songs from the Poetry of e. e. cummings)

Tin Hat, formerly the Tin Hat Trio, is a quartet here, but this remarkable album has a fifth collaborator: the poet e. e. cummings. The Rain Is A Handsome Animal is a song cycle comprised of settings of cummings’s poetry by all four members of the group (there are also three instrumental settings), and features the earthy, distinctive voice of the group’s founding violinist, Carla Kihlstedt. Like all Tin Hat albums, this one offers a contemporary acoustic take on Americana, chamber music and jazz. And while their previous albums have included one or two vocal tracks, with guests like Tom Waits and Willie Nelson, this is the first one to make Kihlstedt’s vocals the center of attention.

The choice of cummings is a natural one for Tin Hat; the American poet held the classical forms of poetry in high regard, but not so high that he neglected the sounds and rhythms of vernacular American English, and the blues. For the musicians in Tin Hat, which includes Mark Orton on guitar and dobro; Ben Goldberg, clarinet; and Rob Reich on accordion and piano, cummings must have seemed a kindred spirit. Elegantly woven through a fabric of typically quirky instrumentation, those texts lead the quartet in several directions. “anyone lived in a pretty how town” is the most clearly rooted in traditional American music, with the poem’s bluesy/folksy quality echoed in Rob Reich’s setting. “Buffalo Bill,” an elegiac text by cummings, is perhaps the most poignant, culminating in an emotional, if ambiguous, brass choir. “little i,” a Kihlstedt setting, features the silvery tone of her e-string violin (a fiddle with four high, thin e-strings that suggests the sound of the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle) and some of her most appropriately tremulous singing.

Michael Nyman, Nyman / Greenaway Revisited

English composer Michael Nyman can’t complain when people call him a Minimalist; after all, in his early days as a music critic, he helped coin the term. And since those days in the late ’70s, he has been perhaps England’s leading purveyor of that alleged style. While his later works — especially since the success of his score to the film The Piano — have been more Romantic, lush and orchestral, the “classic” sound of the Michael Nyman Band is one of primary colors splashed upon the canvas — the sound of single strings, lots of horns, keyboards and electric bass. That sound, which could be brash and exciting but also surprisingly poignant, was used to great effect in the films of Peter Greenaway throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, and this collection presents what Nyman calls “the composer’s cut” — i.e., concert versions of the film scores.

The performances are faithful to the originals, although the epic and emotional “Memorial,” featuring stratospheric soprano Sarah Leonard, is played somewhat more gently than the version that appears in Greenaway’s The Cook The Thief His Wife And Her Lover. (That piece began as a genuine memorial from this soccer-loving composer, written after the so-called Heysel Disaster in 1985, in which 39 fans died.) Highlights include…well, it’s an album of highlights. But Nyman picks the hits from The Draughtsman’s Contract, inspired by the music of Henry Purcell; and Drowning By Numbers, based on a fragment of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in Eb for violin and viola, is ably represented by three tracks that will probably make you want to hear the whole soundtrack.

Russ Lossing, Drum Music

One of the most remarkable aspects of the late drummer Paul Motian’s playing was its lack of forward momentum, a trait that is skillfully translated by the pianist Russ Lossing in his solo tribute comprised of Motian compositions. Lossing, a player of wonderful technical achievement, largely puts speed and easy fluency on hold here, opting for a crystalline stillness that serves the writing very well. In order to “get” Motian’s playing, you had to put aside many received notions of what a jazz drummer was expected to do. You had to listen carefully, to think in terms of his collegial responses to those with whom he played. His playing, like his writing, was not geared to those who want easy answers in their jazz. So, although Drum Music is inarguably profound and beautiful, it rejects casual listening. Lossing hasn’t merely captured the letter of Motian’s compositions, he’s captured their spirit.

Lossing doesn’t favor one hand over the other, which breaks down the standard “right hand = melody and solo, left hand = chords and bass” that’s typical of most jazz pianists. As a result, a piece like “Conception Vessel” becomes something like a conversation, with either hand capable of initiating or responding to the other. “Gang of Five” could almost be a Motian drum solo, the lower part of the piano blocked and used as a percussion instrument, thumping great oceanic slaps of vibrating bass, and forlorn treble figures on the keys. It’s mournful and moving. “Last Call” has a quiet dignity that Lossing leaves wholly unadorned. It brings to mind Edward McDowell’s “New England Idyll,” short piano pieces written at the turn of the 20th century. The mysterious opening to “Olivia’s Dream” develops into a melancholy minor solo. Every note counts and, as he does on a number of pieces in the program, Lossing moves between the keyboard and the piano’s interior. Right and left hands work independently in “Dance,” creating two complex strands of linear exposition. The pianist’s clarity of articulation is noteworthy here. No matter how abstruse the development of his improvisation, there is an ironclad logic to everything he plays. Drum Music requires close attention. There is no flag waving or gratuitous display of any sort. Russ Lossing is a serious musician interpreting the work of another serious musician. He brings it the gravitas it deserves. It’s the art of a genuinely great pianist, just coming into what promises to be a long and productive maturity.

Interview: The Embassy

[In honor of his new album, I Know What Love Isn't, we asked Jens Lekman to take over eMusic. All this week, you'll be reading both Jens-assigned Reviews of the Day and interviews commissioned, at his request, with some of his favorite bands.]

Embassies are funny places. They tend to be grand old buildings in posh residential areas, either surrounded by protective walls or doing their best to blend in with their surroundings. They are, above all, discreet — as though recognizing that there’s something odd, perhaps unseemly, about the arrangement by which they’ve staked out a plot of sovereign land in their host country. For most of us, they’re non-places: Who, besides diplomats, ever sets foot in one?

The Embassy, then, turns out to have been a particularly apt name for Gothenburg, Sweden’s Fredrik Linson and Torjörn Håkansson. Since 2001, they have acted as unlikely go-betweens in an ongoing, low-key summit between classic indie pop and breezy electronic music; influenced by bands like New Order and Belle and Sebastian, their music has a distinctly Anglophilic cast, but also an internationalist bent. A reading of Karl Marx underlies their critique of contemporary European capitalist society; you also get the sense that they’re followers of Groucho Marx — or, at least, his dictum that he’d never want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. Because, for the extent of their now decade-plus history, the Embassy have consistently declined to capitalize on their growing acclaim. Besides their two albums, 2001′s Futile Crimes and 2005′s Tacking, their catalog is thick with 7-inches and CD EPs that seem more interested in dodging and feinting than building a grand narrative, flitting between wistful pop and oddball disco and cutting up jangling guitars with jarring samples and sleek house beats. (A selection of those singles and assorted remixes is gathered on 2011′s Life in the Trenches.)

Throughout their elliptical career, however, the Embassy have been influential, particularly in their native Gothenburg. Pitchfork cites them as key predecessors of Jens Lekman, the Tough Alliance, Studio, Air France and jj, among others; reviews of the band’s records often describe them of being ahead of their time, painting the Embassy as unheralded patron saints of Swedish independent pop. Finally, however, they may be ready to receive their due. Seven years after Tracking, the Embassy are preparing a new full-length for release this fall. eMusic spoke with them about Gothenburg, their notion of “underclass disco,” and why lo-fi is for underachievers.

I just came from a visit to the American Embassy in Barcelona — well, the consulate, but close enough — so of course, my first question has to be, why did you call yourselves the Embassy?

Fredrik Linson: Don’t remember really. Guess it just felt fresh, catchy. A name you could say with pride.

What was the music scene like in Gothenburg when you were growing up? The bands that seem like they may have influenced you — New Order, the Smiths, Belle and Sebastian, Sarah Records, perhaps the Pet Shop Boys — were they easy to find in the city’s record shops?

Linson: Back in the late ’80s, when we were still too young to get in into clubs and bars, the Gothenburg music scene was very underground and experimental — rock music, art and occultism was mainly released by a label called Radium. Musically, it was hardly listenable, but you were affected by the alternative spirit. A few years later, Radium was gone, but loads of new bands had come up in the city, some of whom would become massive later on. It was a movement. I must say though — labels like Sarah and Heavenly were not highly ranked. We were just a small clique who were into that.

Of the music that influenced you back then, or simply captured your imagination, can you explain what it was that attracted you?

Linson: It is, of course, many moments and many attractions, but when I first saw a photo of Stone Roses, suddenly it was something deeper — like I was part of something. And after such a thing, I guess, there is no turning back. That summer I got some Joe Bloggs shirts and formed a band with a friend with instruments we didn’t know how to play. We quit a few weeks later, but that’s how it kind of started.

Torjörn Håkansson: Seeing Pet Shop Boys performing at The Tube on TV, like in 1986, my small-town ways were forever changed. Still a very good show, a good format. Time to start something like that again, take music seriously, create dreams.

From your first records until now, you have taken an unusual approach to genre. On a song like “Great Indoors People,” for instance, you balance a fairly traditional, jangle-pop sound with synthesizers and incongruous horn stabs. That kind of hybridizing may be more common now, but it was certainly unusual in 2002. Were you intentionally trying to fuse genres, or was it more just that those were the sounds that arose from the tools you had at hand?

Linson: Both. Our limitations are much of what we are, but it has also been very intentional. To make people look somewhere else. We can’t stand when it’s too conformist.

Håkansson: The late ’90s were all about being true to your genre and being successful. That’s the opposite of what we value.

I get the sense that you’ve never been particularly interested in lo-fi. Even on your early records, there was a real sumptuousness to your sound (those marimbas on “Sincerely Yours” — spine-tingling!) Where did your appreciation for hi-fi come from? Is that the disco side of you?

Håkansson: Definitely disco. We always worked with producers to get the sound we wanted. Lo-fi can be groovy, but you have to be Ariel Pink or Hype Williams to get away with it. Otherwise, it just feels unfocused and rockish.

Linson: The term lo-fi doesn’t appeal to me. It’s like you want to reach low.

Somewhere along the line, you got dancier. “That’s Meat Boys,” for instance, is a relatively purist house track, although your vocals set it apart. What changed? Did you start clubbing more, or playing more festivals with dance tents? I’ve noticed that your last album, Life in the Trenches, struck a careful kind of balancing act between “pop” and “electronic” music.

Håkansson: We hate festivals and tents, but love clubbing and are pretty good DJs. We’ve always been listening to dance music as well as pop, it feels natural to go hybrid. “That’s Meat Boys” is a remix and not made by us, and Life in the Trenches is a collection of non-album tracks. But you’re totally right, Tacking is more dance-oriented than Futile Crimes and the next record will be even more so.

I have a confession to make: I almost never listen to lyrics. It’s not that I don’t want to; I just can’t. They go in one ear and out the other. I think it might be neurological. With that in mind, how important are lyrics to your music? What am I missing out on?

Linson: I don’t know. I am kind of the same. Catch some lines here and there. I like good lyrics, can’t stand bad, opportunistic ones. But the words in the rhythm come first. Storytelling second.

Håkansson: Sound technicians often focus on the vocals, because they don’t know better. The relevant experience is to find the flow — that is everything. Vocals, bass, beat, guitar, melody… everything has the same value in our world.

Tell me about your Tumblrs — Embassy Classics, Flesh of My Flesh and Hip to Hate. They seem cryptic in the extreme, with these koan-like phrases: “Prelude to rave,” “Elan vital,” “Cambari bitter,” “exploring the notion of lived time”…They’re not your typical band websites.

Håkansson: It’s stuff thats gets you going through the day. Might be a tune, a line, an idea, a video. It can be explanatory or cryptic, taken out of context — there’s no standard style here. More of a memory board, really.

Can you talk about your notion of “underclass disco?” How important is class consciousness to your music in general? And is your position unusual for Gothenburg, which I understand is a fairly prosperous city, or does that kind of class consciousness run through the indie/DIY scene in general?

Linson: There is very little class consciousness in Sweden in general. I think people still associate class with how much you earn, and as you might know, Sweden managed to erase much of those differences during the last century. So the common opinion is that class doesn’t exist here anymore. But, of course, it does play part in people’s lives and opportunities, and maybe more than ever in an individualistic era.

Our “genre” might not be that politically ambitious; it more came from our attempts to play disco without knowing how to do it, and [our belief] that that not is a problem, but that it hopefully might lead to something new.

You had an album last year, after a six-year delay, and now there is another new one on the way. You don’t usually work this fast. What changed?

Håkansson: We split up after Tacking; there was nothing more to say. Fredrik had a new band called the Crepes and I moved to L.A. Bad decisions really, but it created a void and some longings.

In interviews, you have criticized the “careerism” that’s rampant in the music scene. Now that you’ve been doing this for a decade…has it become a career? How do you fight against getting too comfortable, especially the more heralded you become?

Linson: We’re not the ones getting comfortable. And it’s not like that in Gothenburg. No one’s a legend. People laugh at each others’ mistakes and failures.

Air France told Pitchfork, ” I don’t feel there’s a community or a scene here [in Gothenburg], which is really liberating. With a community, there’s rules, hierarchy, all these things I can’t fucking cope with. It turns people into morons.” Do you agree with that assessment of Copenhagen? Has Gothenburg continued to be a supportive place for you to make music?

Håkansson: There’s never been a community or scene in Gothenburg, but some key individuals that were very good at what they were doing worked there at the same time. Generally, I don’t know about scenes in the post-internet-era, do they exist? It feels more like a construct for tourists, like Brooklyn.

Linson: It’s not a supportive town in that sense, and I agree with Air France that that is a liberating thing. Local politicians and the business sector don’t care what’s going on, therefore you learn: 1) You will never be anything with music, and 2) you’re free to do whatever you want.

Given that Jens Lekman selected you to be interviewed by eMusic, what can you tell us about your relationship with him? He came up after you, I take it; how did his music affect your own (if at all)?

Linson: He’s a great and truly inspiring person. I think of him more than I listen to his music.

Finally, what can you tell us about your upcoming album?

Håkansson: It’s a brotherhood record. We made it for each other.

Interview: The Fresh & Onlys

The Fresh & Onlys belong to a class of Bay Area artists who make fuzzed-out, psych-infused pop songs and use prolificacy as a means of moving forward. Like their peers Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall and Sic Alps, the Fresh & Onlys have grown up a little more with each new release. Their chugging, punky 2008 self-titled debut hardly sounds like the work of the band responsible for 2012′s crisp slow-burner Long Slow Dance, but both albums share a tenderness in lyrics and melody that distinguish the group from their contemporaries.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with the band’s core members bassist Shayde Sartin, vocalist Tim Cohen and guitarist Wymond Miles about their artistic evolution and the surprising heartbreak lurking beneath the jubilant surface of their songs.

The Fresh & Onlys, The Fresh & Onlys

Shayde Sartin: The first album, we had a kind of loose and punk-rock way where it was like, “Don’t overthink it.” We were trying to work really fast, and we were really getting inspired by working fast. We knew that we wanted it to be pretty guitar heavy and pretty punked out, but at the same have a sort of melancholy side to it. So we would write them on acoustic guitar in the kitchen and then take them upstairs into the bedroom studio and just sort of pummel them. There was nothing really thematic on that record lyrically. It was all just kind of haze — there was a lot of drug influence at the time. Mostly just weed and psychedelics. And a lot of drinking. People sort of underestimate the ability of the alcohol-induced psychedelics. If you drink as much as Tim and I were drinking at that time, you can be pretty tripped out.

Wymond Miles: At that point, the band was Tim, Shayde and I. We had our buddy, James Kim, on drums and two girls from the Sandwitches, Heidi and Grace, with us too. Everyone was working full-time. Life was pretty busy then, but everything about making that record was so off the cuff and fun. At the beginning of “I Saw Him,” there’s a sound of about three beer cans being opened all at once, like “Pop!” “Pop!” “Pop!” That was just coincidence — it wasn’t Pro Tools editing to create some party vibe. We were definitely in a party phase at that time.

Tim Cohen: I really like “I Saw Him,” but those are really personal lyrics. That song was written shortly after my very good friend passed away. It was sort of memorializing him in a way, and honoring him. But at the same time, he was a very dark person. I didn’t know whether he was very loved. The song is basically turning him into a ghost and creating a legend about him. The lyrics are very simple. “I looked into the ditch/ I looked into the ditch/ I looked into the ditch/ I saw him/ Imagine looking at fire.” It’s very haunting, in a way. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The Fresh & Onlys, Grey-Eyed Girls

Sartin: I’ve known Jarvis from Woods for a long, long time. He and I have done many records together. We were both in this band Wooden Wand together. We did records for Kill Rock Stars years ago. But I never had any intention of doing a record with Woodsist or anything. I was a fan of the label, because I was really stoked on Crystal Stilts. But I just played a bunch of demos for [Jarvis] that me and Tim had worked on, and he emailed me, and he’s like, “Hey, would you be interested in doing a record or a 12-inch or an EP?” I was like “Fuck it. Let’s do a record. We have enough material.” This was about two months after we had finished the first album. To me, it was pretty key to keep moving forward, because we had moved so far forward in those two months and I wanted people to see we weren’t just some garage-punk band. I wanted people to see that we were also approaching this really sensitive, kind of dream-pop side.

There’s a song on there called “No Second Guessing.” For me, that’s a really classic kind of Magnetic Fields song. It has very much that kind of vibe. Stephen Merritt’s one of the greatest pop songwriters of our generation, I think. He’s extremely witty, extremely talented. He can break your heart and make you laugh all at once. I was rediscovering them, and Beat Happening as well. There’s a song on there called “What’s His Shadow Still Doing Here.” That’s probably personally my biggest nod to Beat Happening, who are one of the most influential bands for me personally. Coming up as a kid, that was the first punk band that I ever understood that wasn’t, like, Bad Brains or Black Flag.

Miles: We were certainly pushing ourselves a bit mentally, too. There was maybe too much alcohol going on at that moment, maybe not. I certainly remember myself nodding off over an acoustic guitar. We’d be going for so many hours.

“Invisible Forces” is probably my favorite. It kind of broke a lot of the ideas about us just being a straight-up garage ensemble. There was a lot of mystery in it too. It didn’t have to be so straightforward. I love how it sounds, too. I had just broken in a tape delay machine, and that’s what gives the whole song this warbly to the feeling. It’s just the tape echo itself coming off the rockers and not quite working right and feeding back. It’s something we’ll never be able to get again, ’cause it was the unique sound of an old Space Echo from the ’70s on its last legs.

Cohen: I think Grey-Eyed Girls, personally, is my least favorite of our releases. We’d released our first album, done some touring, then we had an offer to put out another record on a label that we really respected and admired. The excitement around that, and the excitement around being a band and having people continue to buy our records, led us to really rush release that record.

At that point, we were really intrigued with the idea of being a prolific band. It wasn’t reaching Guided By Voices level, but it was something where we like, “Let’s keep this trend going. Let’s keep this San Francisco music scene going with our band.” We were a pretty indie band at that time, and we thought that was the way to do it. We didn’t really spend a lot of time on the sound of the record, developing ideas fully. So you have really catchy, interesting songs, but there’s no context there. It’s just a selection of poppy songs and then one long, kind of over-indulgent song at the end, “The Delusion of Man.” There’s not a lot of joy on that record. It’s sort of a black hole in a way.

I was also going through a pretty heavy breakup, so there’s really no love songs on this record. They’re more foreboding like “Invisible Forces,” “Black Coffin,” “Delusion of Man” — even “Clowns (Took the Baby Away).” It’s really dark. I don’t have a very wide emotional spectrum as a person, and as a writer, you just tap into that.

There’s actually a couple songs I did vocals for in Wymond’s garden. On the song “Happy to Be Living,” it’s a genuinely happy song, and there’s a dog barking right in the beginning of that song, which is the dog that lives next door to Wymond. After my vocal take, he barked at this perfect moment, and we looked at each other like, “Should we stop the tape?” We both were just like, “Nah, let’s keep it rolling.” I nailed the vocal take and we kept the dog barking. It’s one of those happy accidents. If you listen to that song, right at the beginning, you can hear the dog bark.

The Fresh & Onlys, August in My Mind EP

Sartin: A lot of those songs were written around the same time as Play It Strange. In a way, I really wish we would’ve married those two, because there’s this feeling that they could’ve been one piece. I really like the way this EP sounds, because it’s pretty blown out, pretty weird sounding. I think it’s one of our most underrated records. There’s song on there, “The Garbage Collector,” that I truly only think we could write. That’s not to sound arrogant — I know we’re not the fucking Beatles, or whatever. But there are songs on there that really do represent us in the most unique way possible.

Miles: What I like about “Diamond In The Dark” is that it has that really wailing guitar stuff all throughout it. That was all on the fly, in the moment. It came from Tim pushing me and getting me out of my head as much as he could. Just going for this deep down Neil Young soaring guitar, keeping it simple but heavy. I was pretty excited by that. Even the little bits, you can hear us yelling out chords where the little chord changes are going to be. It was Tim on drums, and Shayde playing these guitar chords and changing it up, not quite sure where the next chord should be. Any normal band in the world would of course been, “Well, we didn’t know what chord we were playing.” But to us, it sounded great. I love the vibe of that — chord changes being made on the fly, keys changing and trying to follow this guitar that was so achingly loud.

Cohen: We actually conceived of that song and that record August in My Mind while I was on tour in 2009, with a broken right hand. The whole tour, I was playing keyboards left-handed. The songs had this sort of chugging, caveman, masculine drive to them. When I broke my hand, I don’t want to say it emasculated me, but it turned me to someone who had to use my left-hand to play an instrument I wasn’t comfortable playing. We still had to go on tour. So I was trying to use these melodic keyboard lines and singing, and I was really into the way it sounded. It almost romanticized the songs. It took away from the chugging guitar going all the time. There are songs of despair and longing and solitude, which goes hand-in-hand with the breakup which, by that point, I had gone through it and I was kind of in this lonely place like, “Well, time to move on to the next thing.” Right at that time I was on tour, I was drinking a lot, and I was being very destructive. But this other side came out when I was breaking up that was very tender and, in a way, longing. The song “Garbage Collector” is specifically written about being dumped like garbage.

The Fresh & Onlys, Play It Strange

Sartin: I wish we took our time with that record. Looking back, we were rushing through it. We did it the same way we did Grey-Eyed Girls. We tried to make the record completely on our own. That’s one record where Tim really is kind of isolating and paranoid. I know that sounds like really cliché, but there was some pretty heavy stuff going on his life. There was a lot of these questions about commitment and stuff coming up in his life. He was kind of wandering freely. So there is kind of a twilight desert feeling on the record, and a lot of the loneliness and sort of bizarre lyrics were all fitting. “Waterfall” sounds like gibberish to a lot of people, but it’s a song about not sitting comfortably with your surroundings.

Cohen: We’d just been working really hard and didn’t let up, and it felt like that was the only way. No one was going to go out and give it to us, we had to go out and get it. So the process of recording Play it Strange was a new thing for us, whereby we didn’t have to sit there and turn the dials ourselves. We had someone in the studio doing it, I still really like that record, I think it’s got some good songs on it — but you can tell there’s more patience to it, I wanna say. We kind of had it worked out. We’d written 40 or 50 songs for that record, and ended up recording 14 or 15, maybe 16. This was the first time where we actually had a studio where we could sit back and actually listen to what we were doing and take stock in what we were making. I can tell from listening to that that Tim Green, the guy who recorded it, did a great job. And we stopped worrying or thinking too hard about what we were doing. You could say, “I want my guitar to sound like this,” and he would just reach up and turn a dial or go grab his amp and a mic, and he would make it so it was pretty effortless to record. We weren’t relying on our own bedroom sensibilities. This was the first record for me that sounds like it has that extra life to it. It’s not like a charming bedroom record. It’s like approaching what I think we achieved with the new record.

Sartin: Part of the enthusiasm for releasing so much stuff early and so quickly, for me personally, was that when I started buying records, I was really into Sebadoh, Guided By Voices, the Grifters and Pavement, and I really liked that those bands were constantly putting things out in low run pressings. They would put out a 7-inch every month or two. Quantity was a way to keep ourselves inspired and keep moving towards the next new thing, as opposed to dreading it.

A lot of times, I think that’s one of the downfalls of a lot of bands early in their careers: They put all of this weight on one record and then fail to grow during the most promising and important time of their career, which is the first three years. That’s when you’re not sick of each other and you’re inspired. Everything you do has some sort of insane magic to it. So if you’re sitting there and going, “I’ve got to make the best first impression possible,” then you’re going to fuck it up and you’re a sucker.

You have to look [at those first three years] as sort of an amplified state of being clumsy. Those are the times when the synapses are firing, things are connecting. You’re deciding what you’re going to be as a band. For us, that shit wasn’t going to happen in a rehearsal space. It had to happen on a tape machine.

The Fresh & Onlys, Secret Walls EP

Sartin: That EP is the first time we put everything in Wymond’s hands. We basically just recorded it, tracked it at his house and just let him mix it. That EP is also the first time that we fully collaborated. Tim and I wrote the music and the words, but the musical influence is so significant on Kyle and Wymond’s part that I feel like it’s truly the first Fresh & Onlys record made as a quartet, the way it is now. I think as a live band, it was the first time we ever really let that free. That was after years of touring together and playing hundreds of shows. Wymond was really getting heavily into the Gun Club, and playing with this super heavy twang. Part of why that record sounds so different is largely due to Wymond’s musical influence blossoming a lot more than it had in previous releases.

I think for Tim, the title track is a lot about his elusiveness, and his vagary as a person. The song is saying that you’ll be there for someone, but then basically you’re only physically present — you’re emotionally not-so-present. That’s a really hard thing for someone that you’re with, whether it’s your friends, family or your partner. It’s a really fucking complex thing to have to deal with. It’s horrible for people. It’s something that Tim and I have talked about a lot in discussing relationships and problems, which are for he and I both an extremely difficult thing, because we’re both selfish people. We both struggle with alcohol problems and it’s ugly. I think Secret Walls is kind of like a subconscious nod to keeping things inside. If you read the lyrics, it tells a lot more than I can tell you on the phone here.

Miles: I think Secret Walls is better than anything we had done before. That was where I took on the producer reigns more than I ever have. We started out it so democratic, but you need a leader with a vision sometimes. We started to learn to let go. We stopped fighting as much, because we could trust one another. When we were making records before, we were arguing as much as we were recording.

The Fresh & Onlys, Long Slow Dance

Sartin: We didn’t want to make a record where [every song] sounds like it was recorded on the same instruments, in the same week, by the same person. We were just doing press in Europe and someone said, “It sounds like every song is a different band.” That’s a huge compliment. You can’t approach a song like “The Executioner’s Song” in the same way you would “Presence Of Mind.”

“The Executioner’s Song,” which is really minimal sounding on the record, that song took a lot of time. It’s an extremely textured song. There’s a lot of guitars and a lot of acoustic guitars. There’s really staggering rhythms. It was really hard to get the feeling of that song because of the way the rhythm staggers between the verse and the chorus. There was all this rhythmic dissonance as opposed to harmonic dissonance. There was something really weird about that song. When Wymond started putting guitars on top of it and the textures started to set into place, and the song really took on a life of its own.

Miles:: Here’s a great thing: So we used Lionel Ritchie’s Neumann U67 microphone. The very microphone Lionel Ritchie used when he made all his hits, like “Hello”. This really killer microphone. All of sudden, we didn’t have to mess with anything. We didn’t have to EQ it much. We didn’t have to do much of anything. We put a little reverb on there, maybe. The studio owner has been collecting amazing gear for a long time. It was his mic. He was the tour manager for the Melvins. He basically got to tour the world looking for gear pre-eBay. Basically the whole record we were using Lionel Ritchie’s mic.

Cohen: When we signed with Mexican Summer, we’re like, let’s make a record that reflects that we have a label; we have resources, we have time. Let’s be patient about recording it. Let’s make something that stands the test of time. Let’s not make something that hides my lyrics behind fuzz and reverb and delay. That’s not really the band that we are. We’re not beholden to a lo-fi aesthetic by any stretch of the imagination. We all feel really confident in the record.

The Solo Outings

Wymond Miles, Earth Has Doors EP

Miles: I think the EP startled people when that came out. [People thought] that I was trying to assert my identity away from the band. But really, it was just me without any consideration. It was written right before the Onlys started as a band, and then recorded later. It was a much different worldview, it was my mid ’20s, very cosmically-oriented. My concerns were totally different from the Onlys. There’s a song on there that was seven minutes of viola and classical guitar.

Wymond Miles, Under the Pale Moon

Miles: If there was any narrative to the Onlys, I’d say it was in the spirit of playfulness. Even when it has the mood of something darker. Everything with the Onlys to me is laced with our humor. We’re kind of like the Muppets, together we’re all just kind of these characters. We shine with both things, but it’s that real playful spirit that allows us to be that prolific, give the songs the feel that they do, that are really dreamy and driving. With me, I know what I was going after [with this record]. I was doing this big, romantic, guitar-pop record. There’s this starry-eyed romanticism to us both, but this propelling heavy side as well. They’re not laid back per se. I think both things are filled with a lot of romantic, star-gazing notions.

Tim Cohen, The Two Sides of Tim Cohen

Cohen: The title is totally tongue and cheek. Some of those songs’ original destination would’ve been a Black Fiction album — Black Fiction was the band I had before Fresh & Onlys. When Black Fiction kind of dissolved, one member went into an alcoholic rage and one member died. I was sort of just left standing there, holding my head in my hands. I put those songs away for a minute. That record became very personal for me, so I took them, put my name on them, and thankfully had these two small labels that were like, “We want to put your record out.”

Tim Cohen, Laugh Tracks

Cohen: My favorite moment is probably my dad singing on “Small Things Matter.” My dad is just an amazing dude. He’s not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s so cool. He’s a community psychologist. He’s had this crazy job and career for like 40 years. He’s still looks at me and what I do and he doesn’t get it, but he fully understands that this is what I want to do, and this is what I’m supposed to be doing. He’s always been really supportive. I had to help with the melody, because he has no melodic sense. I’m surprised he could even sing the notes. It was one of those things where I know he could sing, but people always told him that he couldn’t sing, so he never sang. So now, in his late 60s, I’m the guy who has to be like “You can do this! You can really sing!” I was now encouraging him, and he’s been the one doing that my whole life.

Tim Cohen, Tim Cohen’s Magic Trick

Cohen: The central narrative behind that album is actually a funny story. I was at this cocktail party and our friend was putting these flowers in her face. I was a trying to flirt with her. I was like, “The stalk looks like celery. You should eat that.” She was like, “Nah.” I was like, “Well, I’ll do it. I want to see what it tastes like.” So I ate the stem of a flower. Everyone stood around and watched.

Almost immediately, I felt this burning sensation in the back of my throat — this sharp, pins-and-needles feeling in the back of my throat. I felt my throat starting to swell up. I started trying to spit out the flower. The girl who was working the bar or something — there were only five people there — started pouring me shots of whatever she could find. I was like “More! More! More!” I was just trying to make the burning go away, but it just made it worse. I went to the bathroom and tried to make myself vomit up the flower. Then, I just had this horrible feeling in my throat, my upper chest and my mouth. I was trying to eat as many peanuts as I could. We went to this place the Homestead — one of those places where you can throw peanuts all over the floor —and I was just trying to take a ball of peanuts and cram them in my throat. Kevin looked up the flower on Google and it said that eating the stem of this flower can cause convulsions and death. It actually is a poisonous flower to swallow. I refused to go to the hospital. I’m not going to let a flower kill me.

So one of the songs on that album is called “The Flower.” It’s about the near-death experience. It’s sort of the over-dramatization of the fact that I ate the flower and knew that my life was over. I felt like I looked death in the eyes. There’s that and there’s another song on that record, “I Looked Up” which is about passing. One of the lines is “I crossed the long way into dreaming.” Then there’s the song “I’m Never Going to Die” on that album. The pretty central theme of that is “I beat death” sort of thing in a way. That was my magic trick.

Interview: The Fresh & Onlys

The Fresh & Onlys belong to a class of Bay Area artists who make fuzzed-out, psych-infused pop songs and use prolificacy as a means of moving forward. Like their peers Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall and Sic Alps, the Fresh & Onlys have grown up a little more with each new release. Their chugging, punky 2008 self-titled debut hardly sounds like the work of the band responsible for 2012′s crisp slow-burner Long Slow Dance, but both albums share a tenderness in lyrics and melody that distinguish the group from their contemporaries.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with the band’s core members bassist Shayde Sartin, vocalist Tim Cohen and guitarist Wymond Miles about their artistic evolution and the surprising heartbreak lurking beneath the jubilant surface of their songs.

The Fresh & Onlys, The Fresh & Onlys

Shayde Sartin: The first album, we had a kind of loose and punk-rock way where it was like, “Don’t overthink it.” We were trying to work really fast, and we were really getting inspired by working fast. We knew that we wanted it to be pretty guitar heavy and pretty punked out, but at the same have a sort of melancholy side to it. So we would write them on acoustic guitar in the kitchen and then take them upstairs into the bedroom studio and just sort of pummel them. There was nothing really thematic on that record lyrically. It was all just kind of haze — there was a lot of drug influence at the time. Mostly just weed and psychedelics. And a lot of drinking. People sort of underestimate the ability of the alcohol-induced psychedelics. If you drink as much as Tim and I were drinking at that time, you can be pretty tripped out.

Wymond Miles: At that point, the band was Tim, Shayde and I. We had our buddy, James Kim, on drums and two girls from the Sandwitches, Heidi and Grace, with us too. Everyone was working full-time. Life was pretty busy then, but everything about making that record was so off the cuff and fun. At the beginning of “I Saw Him,” there’s a sound of about three beer cans being opened all at once, like “Pop!” “Pop!” “Pop!” That was just coincidence — it wasn’t Pro Tools editing to create some party vibe. We were definitely in a party phase at that time.

Tim Cohen: I really like “I Saw Him,” but those are really personal lyrics. That song was written shortly after my very good friend passed away. It was sort of memorializing him in a way, and honoring him. But at the same time, he was a very dark person. I didn’t know whether he was very loved. The song is basically turning him into a ghost and creating a legend about him. The lyrics are very simple. “I looked into the ditch/ I looked into the ditch/ I looked into the ditch/ I saw him/ Imagine looking at fire.” It’s very haunting, in a way. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The Fresh & Onlys, Grey-Eyed Girls

Sartin: I’ve known Jarvis from Woods for a long, long time. He and I have done many records together. We were both in this band Wooden Wand together. We did records for Kill Rock Stars years ago. But I never had any intention of doing a record with Woodsist or anything. I was a fan of the label, because I was really stoked on Crystal Stilts. But I just played a bunch of demos for [Jarvis] that me and Tim had worked on, and he emailed me, and he’s like, “Hey, would you be interested in doing a record or a 12-inch or an EP?” I was like “Fuck it. Let’s do a record. We have enough material.” This was about two months after we had finished the first album. To me, it was pretty key to keep moving forward, because we had moved so far forward in those two months and I wanted people to see we weren’t just some garage-punk band. I wanted people to see that we were also approaching this really sensitive, kind of dream-pop side.

There’s a song on there called “No Second Guessing.” For me, that’s a really classic kind of Magnetic Fields song. It has very much that kind of vibe. Stephen Merritt’s one of the greatest pop songwriters of our generation, I think. He’s extremely witty, extremely talented. He can break your heart and make you laugh all at once. I was rediscovering them, and Beat Happening as well. There’s a song on there called “What’s His Shadow Still Doing Here.” That’s probably personally my biggest nod to Beat Happening, who are one of the most influential bands for me personally. Coming up as a kid, that was the first punk band that I ever understood that wasn’t, like, Bad Brains or Black Flag.

Miles: We were certainly pushing ourselves a bit mentally, too. There was maybe too much alcohol going on at that moment, maybe not. I certainly remember myself nodding off over an acoustic guitar. We’d be going for so many hours.

“Invisible Forces” is probably my favorite. It kind of broke a lot of the ideas about us just being a straight-up garage ensemble. There was a lot of mystery in it too. It didn’t have to be so straightforward. I love how it sounds, too. I had just broken in a tape delay machine, and that’s what gives the whole song this warbly to the feeling. It’s just the tape echo itself coming off the rockers and not quite working right and feeding back. It’s something we’ll never be able to get again, ’cause it was the unique sound of an old Space Echo from the ’70s on its last legs.

Cohen: I think Grey-Eyed Girls, personally, is my least favorite of our releases. We’d released our first album, done some touring, then we had an offer to put out another record on a label that we really respected and admired. The excitement around that, and the excitement around being a band and having people continue to buy our records, led us to really rush release that record.

At that point, we were really intrigued with the idea of being a prolific band. It wasn’t reaching Guided By Voices level, but it was something where we like, “Let’s keep this trend going. Let’s keep this San Francisco music scene going with our band.” We were a pretty indie band at that time, and we thought that was the way to do it. We didn’t really spend a lot of time on the sound of the record, developing ideas fully. So you have really catchy, interesting songs, but there’s no context there. It’s just a selection of poppy songs and then one long, kind of over-indulgent song at the end, “The Delusion of Man.” There’s not a lot of joy on that record. It’s sort of a black hole in a way.

I was also going through a pretty heavy breakup, so there’s really no love songs on this record. They’re more foreboding like “Invisible Forces,” “Black Coffin,” “Delusion of Man” — even “Clowns (Took the Baby Away).” It’s really dark. I don’t have a very wide emotional spectrum as a person, and as a writer, you just tap into that.

There’s actually a couple songs I did vocals for in Wymond’s garden. On the song “Happy to Be Living,” it’s a genuinely happy song, and there’s a dog barking right in the beginning of that song, which is the dog that lives next door to Wymond. After my vocal take, he barked at this perfect moment, and we looked at each other like, “Should we stop the tape?” We both were just like, “Nah, let’s keep it rolling.” I nailed the vocal take and we kept the dog barking. It’s one of those happy accidents. If you listen to that song, right at the beginning, you can hear the dog bark.

The Fresh & Onlys, August in My Mind EP

Sartin: A lot of those songs were written around the same time as Play It Strange. In a way, I really wish we would’ve married those two, because there’s this feeling that they could’ve been one piece. I really like the way this EP sounds, because it’s pretty blown out, pretty weird sounding. I think it’s one of our most underrated records. There’s song on there, “The Garbage Collector,” that I truly only think we could write. That’s not to sound arrogant — I know we’re not the fucking Beatles, or whatever. But there are songs on there that really do represent us in the most unique way possible.

Miles: What I like about “Diamond In The Dark” is that it has that really wailing guitar stuff all throughout it. That was all on the fly, in the moment. It came from Tim pushing me and getting me out of my head as much as he could. Just going for this deep down Neil Young soaring guitar, keeping it simple but heavy. I was pretty excited by that. Even the little bits, you can hear us yelling out chords where the little chord changes are going to be. It was Tim on drums, and Shayde playing these guitar chords and changing it up, not quite sure where the next chord should be. Any normal band in the world would of course been, “Well, we didn’t know what chord we were playing.” But to us, it sounded great. I love the vibe of that — chord changes being made on the fly, keys changing and trying to follow this guitar that was so achingly loud.

Cohen: We actually conceived of that song and that record August in My Mind while I was on tour in 2009, with a broken right hand. The whole tour, I was playing keyboards left-handed. The songs had this sort of chugging, caveman, masculine drive to them. When I broke my hand, I don’t want to say it emasculated me, but it turned me to someone who had to use my left-hand to play an instrument I wasn’t comfortable playing. We still had to go on tour. So I was trying to use these melodic keyboard lines and singing, and I was really into the way it sounded. It almost romanticized the songs. It took away from the chugging guitar going all the time. There are songs of despair and longing and solitude, which goes hand-in-hand with the breakup which, by that point, I had gone through it and I was kind of in this lonely place like, “Well, time to move on to the next thing.” Right at that time I was on tour, I was drinking a lot, and I was being very destructive. But this other side came out when I was breaking up that was very tender and, in a way, longing. The song “Garbage Collector” is specifically written about being dumped like garbage.

The Fresh & Onlys, Play It Strange

Sartin: I wish we took our time with that record. Looking back, we were rushing through it. We did it the same way we did Grey-Eyed Girls. We tried to make the record completely on our own. That’s one record where Tim really is kind of isolating and paranoid. I know that sounds like really cliché, but there was some pretty heavy stuff going on his life. There was a lot of these questions about commitment and stuff coming up in his life. He was kind of wandering freely. So there is kind of a twilight desert feeling on the record, and a lot of the loneliness and sort of bizarre lyrics were all fitting. “Waterfall” sounds like gibberish to a lot of people, but it’s a song about not sitting comfortably with your surroundings.

Cohen: We’d just been working really hard and didn’t let up, and it felt like that was the only way. No one was going to go out and give it to us, we had to go out and get it. So the process of recording Play it Strange was a new thing for us, whereby we didn’t have to sit there and turn the dials ourselves. We had someone in the studio doing it, I still really like that record, I think it’s got some good songs on it — but you can tell there’s more patience to it, I wanna say. We kind of had it worked out. We’d written 40 or 50 songs for that record, and ended up recording 14 or 15, maybe 16. This was the first time where we actually had a studio where we could sit back and actually listen to what we were doing and take stock in what we were making. I can tell from listening to that that Tim Green, the guy who recorded it, did a great job. And we stopped worrying or thinking too hard about what we were doing. You could say, “I want my guitar to sound like this,” and he would just reach up and turn a dial or go grab his amp and a mic, and he would make it so it was pretty effortless to record. We weren’t relying on our own bedroom sensibilities. This was the first record for me that sounds like it has that extra life to it. It’s not like a charming bedroom record. It’s like approaching what I think we achieved with the new record.

Sartin: Part of the enthusiasm for releasing so much stuff early and so quickly, for me personally, was that when I started buying records, I was really into Sebadoh, Guided By Voices, the Grifters and Pavement, and I really liked that those bands were constantly putting things out in low run pressings. They would put out a 7-inch every month or two. Quantity was a way to keep ourselves inspired and keep moving towards the next new thing, as opposed to dreading it.

A lot of times, I think that’s one of the downfalls of a lot of bands early in their careers: They put all of this weight on one record and then fail to grow during the most promising and important time of their career, which is the first three years. That’s when you’re not sick of each other and you’re inspired. Everything you do has some sort of insane magic to it. So if you’re sitting there and going, “I’ve got to make the best first impression possible,” then you’re going to fuck it up and you’re a sucker.

You have to look [at those first three years] as sort of an amplified state of being clumsy. Those are the times when the synapses are firing, things are connecting. You’re deciding what you’re going to be as a band. For us, that shit wasn’t going to happen in a rehearsal space. It had to happen on a tape machine.

The Fresh & Onlys, Secret Walls EP

Sartin: That EP is the first time we put everything in Wymond’s hands. We basically just recorded it, tracked it at his house and just let him mix it. That EP is also the first time that we fully collaborated. Tim and I wrote the music and the words, but the musical influence is so significant on Kyle and Wymond’s part that I feel like it’s truly the first Fresh & Onlys record made as a quartet, the way it is now. I think as a live band, it was the first time we ever really let that free. That was after years of touring together and playing hundreds of shows. Wymond was really getting heavily into the Gun Club, and playing with this super heavy twang. Part of why that record sounds so different is largely due to Wymond’s musical influence blossoming a lot more than it had in previous releases.

I think for Tim, the title track is a lot about his elusiveness, and his vagary as a person. The song is saying that you’ll be there for someone, but then basically you’re only physically present — you’re emotionally not-so-present. That’s a really hard thing for someone that you’re with, whether it’s your friends, family or your partner. It’s a really fucking complex thing to have to deal with. It’s horrible for people. It’s something that Tim and I have talked about a lot in discussing relationships and problems, which are for he and I both an extremely difficult thing, because we’re both selfish people. We both struggle with alcohol problems and it’s ugly. I think Secret Walls is kind of like a subconscious nod to keeping things inside. If you read the lyrics, it tells a lot more than I can tell you on the phone here.

Miles: I think Secret Walls is better than anything we had done before. That was where I took on the producer reigns more than I ever have. We started out it so democratic, but you need a leader with a vision sometimes. We started to learn to let go. We stopped fighting as much, because we could trust one another. When we were making records before, we were arguing as much as we were recording.

The Fresh & Onlys, Long Slow Dance

Sartin: We didn’t want to make a record where [every song] sounds like it was recorded on the same instruments, in the same week, by the same person. We were just doing press in Europe and someone said, “It sounds like every song is a different band.” That’s a huge compliment. You can’t approach a song like “The Executioner’s Song” in the same way you would “Presence Of Mind.”

“The Executioner’s Song,” which is really minimal sounding on the record, that song took a lot of time. It’s an extremely textured song. There’s a lot of guitars and a lot of acoustic guitars. There’s really staggering rhythms. It was really hard to get the feeling of that song because of the way the rhythm staggers between the verse and the chorus. There was all this rhythmic dissonance as opposed to harmonic dissonance. There was something really weird about that song. When Wymond started putting guitars on top of it and the textures started to set into place, and the song really took on a life of its own.

Miles:: Here’s a great thing: So we used Lionel Ritchie’s Neumann U67 microphone. The very microphone Lionel Ritchie used when he made all his hits, like “Hello”. This really killer microphone. All of sudden, we didn’t have to mess with anything. We didn’t have to EQ it much. We didn’t have to do much of anything. We put a little reverb on there, maybe. The studio owner has been collecting amazing gear for a long time. It was his mic. He was the tour manager for the Melvins. He basically got to tour the world looking for gear pre-eBay. Basically the whole record we were using Lionel Ritchie’s mic.

Cohen: When we signed with Mexican Summer, we’re like, let’s make a record that reflects that we have a label; we have resources, we have time. Let’s be patient about recording it. Let’s make something that stands the test of time. Let’s not make something that hides my lyrics behind fuzz and reverb and delay. That’s not really the band that we are. We’re not beholden to a lo-fi aesthetic by any stretch of the imagination. We all feel really confident in the record.

The Solo Outings

Wymond Miles, Earth Has Doors EP

Miles: I think the EP startled people when that came out. [People thought] that I was trying to assert my identity away from the band. But really, it was just me without any consideration. It was written right before the Onlys started as a band, and then recorded later. It was a much different worldview, it was my mid ’20s, very cosmically-oriented. My concerns were totally different from the Onlys. There’s a song on there that was seven minutes of viola and classical guitar.

Wymond Miles, Under the Pale Moon

Miles: If there was any narrative to the Onlys, I’d say it was in the spirit of playfulness. Even when it has the mood of something darker. Everything with the Onlys to me is laced with our humor. We’re kind of like the Muppets, together we’re all just kind of these characters. We shine with both things, but it’s that real playful spirit that allows us to be that prolific, give the songs the feel that they do, that are really dreamy and driving. With me, I know what I was going after [with this record]. I was doing this big, romantic, guitar-pop record. There’s this starry-eyed romanticism to us both, but this propelling heavy side as well. They’re not laid back per se. I think both things are filled with a lot of romantic, star-gazing notions.

Tim Cohen, The Two Sides of Tim Cohen

Cohen: The title is totally tongue and cheek. Some of those songs’ original destination would’ve been a Black Fiction album — Black Fiction was the band I had before Fresh & Onlys. When Black Fiction kind of dissolved, one member went into an alcoholic rage and one member died. I was sort of just left standing there, holding my head in my hands. I put those songs away for a minute. That record became very personal for me, so I took them, put my name on them, and thankfully had these two small labels that were like, “We want to put your record out.”

Tim Cohen, Laugh Tracks

Cohen: My favorite moment is probably my dad singing on “Small Things Matter.” My dad is just an amazing dude. He’s not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s so cool. He’s a community psychologist. He’s had this crazy job and career for like 40 years. He’s still looks at me and what I do and he doesn’t get it, but he fully understands that this is what I want to do, and this is what I’m supposed to be doing. He’s always been really supportive. I had to help with the melody, because he has no melodic sense. I’m surprised he could even sing the notes. It was one of those things where I know he could sing, but people always told him that he couldn’t sing, so he never sang. So now, in his late 60s, I’m the guy who has to be like “You can do this! You can really sing!” I was now encouraging him, and he’s been the one doing that my whole life.

Tim Cohen, Tim Cohen’s Magic Trick

Cohen: The central narrative behind that album is actually a funny story. I was at this cocktail party and our friend was putting these flowers in her face. I was a trying to flirt with her. I was like, “The stalk looks like celery. You should eat that.” She was like, “Nah.” I was like, “Well, I’ll do it. I want to see what it tastes like.” So I ate the stem of a flower. Everyone stood around and watched.

Almost immediately, I felt this burning sensation in the back of my throat — this sharp, pins-and-needles feeling in the back of my throat. I felt my throat starting to swell up. I started trying to spit out the flower. The girl who was working the bar or something — there were only five people there — started pouring me shots of whatever she could find. I was like “More! More! More!” I was just trying to make the burning go away, but it just made it worse. I went to the bathroom and tried to make myself vomit up the flower. Then, I just had this horrible feeling in my throat, my upper chest and my mouth. I was trying to eat as many peanuts as I could. We went to this place the Homestead — one of those places where you can throw peanuts all over the floor —and I was just trying to take a ball of peanuts and cram them in my throat. Kevin looked up the flower on Google and it said that eating the stem of this flower can cause convulsions and death. It actually is a poisonous flower to swallow. I refused to go to the hospital. I’m not going to let a flower kill me.

So one of the songs on that album is called “The Flower.” It’s about the near-death experience. It’s sort of the over-dramatization of the fact that I ate the flower and knew that my life was over. I felt like I looked death in the eyes. There’s that and there’s another song on that record, “I Looked Up” which is about passing. One of the lines is “I crossed the long way into dreaming.” Then there’s the song “I’m Never Going to Die” on that album. The pretty central theme of that is “I beat death” sort of thing in a way. That was my magic trick.

Interview: The Fresh & Onlys

The Fresh & Onlys belong to a class of Bay Area artists who make fuzzed-out, psych-infused pop songs and use prolificacy as a means of moving forward. Like their peers Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall and Sic Alps, the Fresh & Onlys have grown up a little more with each new release. Their chugging, punky 2008 self-titled debut hardly sounds like the work of the band responsible for 2012′s crisp slow-burner Long Slow Dance, but both albums share a tenderness in lyrics and melody that distinguish the group from their contemporaries.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with the band’s core members bassist Shayde Sartin, vocalist Tim Cohen and guitarist Wymond Miles about their artistic evolution and the surprising heartbreak lurking beneath the jubilant surface of their songs.

The Fresh & Onlys, The Fresh & Onlys

Shayde Sartin: The first album, we had a kind of loose and punk-rock way where it was like, “Don’t overthink it.” We were trying to work really fast, and we were really getting inspired by working fast. We knew that we wanted it to be pretty guitar heavy and pretty punked out, but at the same have a sort of melancholy side to it. So we would write them on acoustic guitar in the kitchen and then take them upstairs into the bedroom studio and just sort of pummel them. There was nothing really thematic on that record lyrically. It was all just kind of haze — there was a lot of drug influence at the time. Mostly just weed and psychedelics. And a lot of drinking. People sort of underestimate the ability of the alcohol-induced psychedelics. If you drink as much as Tim and I were drinking at that time, you can be pretty tripped out.

Wymond Miles: At that point, the band was Tim, Shayde and I. We had our buddy, James Kim, on drums and two girls from the Sandwitches, Heidi and Grace, with us too. Everyone was working full-time. Life was pretty busy then, but everything about making that record was so off the cuff and fun. At the beginning of “I Saw Him,” there’s a sound of about three beer cans being opened all at once, like “Pop!” “Pop!” “Pop!” That was just coincidence — it wasn’t Pro Tools editing to create some party vibe. We were definitely in a party phase at that time.

Tim Cohen: I really like “I Saw Him,” but those are really personal lyrics. That song was written shortly after my very good friend passed away. It was sort of memorializing him in a way, and honoring him. But at the same time, he was a very dark person. I didn’t know whether he was very loved. The song is basically turning him into a ghost and creating a legend about him. The lyrics are very simple. “I looked into the ditch/ I looked into the ditch/ I looked into the ditch/ I saw him/ Imagine looking at fire.” It’s very haunting, in a way. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The Fresh & Onlys, Grey-Eyed Girls

Sartin: I’ve known Jarvis from Woods for a long, long time. He and I have done many records together. We were both in this band Wooden Wand together. We did records for Kill Rock Stars years ago. But I never had any intention of doing a record with Woodsist or anything. I was a fan of the label, because I was really stoked on Crystal Stilts. But I just played a bunch of demos for [Jarvis] that me and Tim had worked on, and he emailed me, and he’s like, “Hey, would you be interested in doing a record or a 12-inch or an EP?” I was like “Fuck it. Let’s do a record. We have enough material.” This was about two months after we had finished the first album. To me, it was pretty key to keep moving forward, because we had moved so far forward in those two months and I wanted people to see we weren’t just some garage-punk band. I wanted people to see that we were also approaching this really sensitive, kind of dream-pop side.

There’s a song on there called “No Second Guessing.” For me, that’s a really classic kind of Magnetic Fields song. It has very much that kind of vibe. Stephen Merritt’s one of the greatest pop songwriters of our generation, I think. He’s extremely witty, extremely talented. He can break your heart and make you laugh all at once. I was rediscovering them, and Beat Happening as well. There’s a song on there called “What’s His Shadow Still Doing Here.” That’s probably personally my biggest nod to Beat Happening, who are one of the most influential bands for me personally. Coming up as a kid, that was the first punk band that I ever understood that wasn’t, like, Bad Brains or Black Flag.

Miles: We were certainly pushing ourselves a bit mentally, too. There was maybe too much alcohol going on at that moment, maybe not. I certainly remember myself nodding off over an acoustic guitar. We’d be going for so many hours.

“Invisible Forces” is probably my favorite. It kind of broke a lot of the ideas about us just being a straight-up garage ensemble. There was a lot of mystery in it too. It didn’t have to be so straightforward. I love how it sounds, too. I had just broken in a tape delay machine, and that’s what gives the whole song this warbly to the feeling. It’s just the tape echo itself coming off the rockers and not quite working right and feeding back. It’s something we’ll never be able to get again, ’cause it was the unique sound of an old Space Echo from the ’70s on its last legs.

Cohen: I think Grey-Eyed Girls, personally, is my least favorite of our releases. We’d released our first album, done some touring, then we had an offer to put out another record on a label that we really respected and admired. The excitement around that, and the excitement around being a band and having people continue to buy our records, led us to really rush release that record.

At that point, we were really intrigued with the idea of being a prolific band. It wasn’t reaching Guided By Voices level, but it was something where we like, “Let’s keep this trend going. Let’s keep this San Francisco music scene going with our band.” We were a pretty indie band at that time, and we thought that was the way to do it. We didn’t really spend a lot of time on the sound of the record, developing ideas fully. So you have really catchy, interesting songs, but there’s no context there. It’s just a selection of poppy songs and then one long, kind of over-indulgent song at the end, “The Delusion of Man.” There’s not a lot of joy on that record. It’s sort of a black hole in a way.

I was also going through a pretty heavy breakup, so there’s really no love songs on this record. They’re more foreboding like “Invisible Forces,” “Black Coffin,” “Delusion of Man” — even “Clowns (Took the Baby Away).” It’s really dark. I don’t have a very wide emotional spectrum as a person, and as a writer, you just tap into that.

There’s actually a couple songs I did vocals for in Wymond’s garden. On the song “Happy to Be Living,” it’s a genuinely happy song, and there’s a dog barking right in the beginning of that song, which is the dog that lives next door to Wymond. After my vocal take, he barked at this perfect moment, and we looked at each other like, “Should we stop the tape?” We both were just like, “Nah, let’s keep it rolling.” I nailed the vocal take and we kept the dog barking. It’s one of those happy accidents. If you listen to that song, right at the beginning, you can hear the dog bark.

The Fresh & Onlys, August in My Mind EP

Sartin: A lot of those songs were written around the same time as Play It Strange. In a way, I really wish we would’ve married those two, because there’s this feeling that they could’ve been one piece. I really like the way this EP sounds, because it’s pretty blown out, pretty weird sounding. I think it’s one of our most underrated records. There’s song on there, “The Garbage Collector,” that I truly only think we could write. That’s not to sound arrogant — I know we’re not the fucking Beatles, or whatever. But there are songs on there that really do represent us in the most unique way possible.

Miles: What I like about “Diamond In The Dark” is that it has that really wailing guitar stuff all throughout it. That was all on the fly, in the moment. It came from Tim pushing me and getting me out of my head as much as he could. Just going for this deep down Neil Young soaring guitar, keeping it simple but heavy. I was pretty excited by that. Even the little bits, you can hear us yelling out chords where the little chord changes are going to be. It was Tim on drums, and Shayde playing these guitar chords and changing it up, not quite sure where the next chord should be. Any normal band in the world would of course been, “Well, we didn’t know what chord we were playing.” But to us, it sounded great. I love the vibe of that — chord changes being made on the fly, keys changing and trying to follow this guitar that was so achingly loud.

Cohen: We actually conceived of that song and that record August in My Mind while I was on tour in 2009, with a broken right hand. The whole tour, I was playing keyboards left-handed. The songs had this sort of chugging, caveman, masculine drive to them. When I broke my hand, I don’t want to say it emasculated me, but it turned me to someone who had to use my left-hand to play an instrument I wasn’t comfortable playing. We still had to go on tour. So I was trying to use these melodic keyboard lines and singing, and I was really into the way it sounded. It almost romanticized the songs. It took away from the chugging guitar going all the time. There are songs of despair and longing and solitude, which goes hand-in-hand with the breakup which, by that point, I had gone through it and I was kind of in this lonely place like, “Well, time to move on to the next thing.” Right at that time I was on tour, I was drinking a lot, and I was being very destructive. But this other side came out when I was breaking up that was very tender and, in a way, longing. The song “Garbage Collector” is specifically written about being dumped like garbage.

The Fresh & Onlys, Play It Strange

Sartin: I wish we took our time with that record. Looking back, we were rushing through it. We did it the same way we did Grey-Eyed Girls. We tried to make the record completely on our own. That’s one record where Tim really is kind of isolating and paranoid. I know that sounds like really cliché, but there was some pretty heavy stuff going on his life. There was a lot of these questions about commitment and stuff coming up in his life. He was kind of wandering freely. So there is kind of a twilight desert feeling on the record, and a lot of the loneliness and sort of bizarre lyrics were all fitting. “Waterfall” sounds like gibberish to a lot of people, but it’s a song about not sitting comfortably with your surroundings.

Cohen: We’d just been working really hard and didn’t let up, and it felt like that was the only way. No one was going to go out and give it to us, we had to go out and get it. So the process of recording Play it Strange was a new thing for us, whereby we didn’t have to sit there and turn the dials ourselves. We had someone in the studio doing it, I still really like that record, I think it’s got some good songs on it — but you can tell there’s more patience to it, I wanna say. We kind of had it worked out. We’d written 40 or 50 songs for that record, and ended up recording 14 or 15, maybe 16. This was the first time where we actually had a studio where we could sit back and actually listen to what we were doing and take stock in what we were making. I can tell from listening to that that Tim Green, the guy who recorded it, did a great job. And we stopped worrying or thinking too hard about what we were doing. You could say, “I want my guitar to sound like this,” and he would just reach up and turn a dial or go grab his amp and a mic, and he would make it so it was pretty effortless to record. We weren’t relying on our own bedroom sensibilities. This was the first record for me that sounds like it has that extra life to it. It’s not like a charming bedroom record. It’s like approaching what I think we achieved with the new record.

Sartin: Part of the enthusiasm for releasing so much stuff early and so quickly, for me personally, was that when I started buying records, I was really into Sebadoh, Guided By Voices, the Grifters and Pavement, and I really liked that those bands were constantly putting things out in low run pressings. They would put out a 7-inch every month or two. Quantity was a way to keep ourselves inspired and keep moving towards the next new thing, as opposed to dreading it.

A lot of times, I think that’s one of the downfalls of a lot of bands early in their careers: They put all of this weight on one record and then fail to grow during the most promising and important time of their career, which is the first three years. That’s when you’re not sick of each other and you’re inspired. Everything you do has some sort of insane magic to it. So if you’re sitting there and going, “I’ve got to make the best first impression possible,” then you’re going to fuck it up and you’re a sucker.

You have to look [at those first three years] as sort of an amplified state of being clumsy. Those are the times when the synapses are firing, things are connecting. You’re deciding what you’re going to be as a band. For us, that shit wasn’t going to happen in a rehearsal space. It had to happen on a tape machine.

The Fresh & Onlys, Secret Walls EP

Sartin: That EP is the first time we put everything in Wymond’s hands. We basically just recorded it, tracked it at his house and just let him mix it. That EP is also the first time that we fully collaborated. Tim and I wrote the music and the words, but the musical influence is so significant on Kyle and Wymond’s part that I feel like it’s truly the first Fresh & Onlys record made as a quartet, the way it is now. I think as a live band, it was the first time we ever really let that free. That was after years of touring together and playing hundreds of shows. Wymond was really getting heavily into the Gun Club, and playing with this super heavy twang. Part of why that record sounds so different is largely due to Wymond’s musical influence blossoming a lot more than it had in previous releases.

I think for Tim, the title track is a lot about his elusiveness, and his vagary as a person. The song is saying that you’ll be there for someone, but then basically you’re only physically present — you’re emotionally not-so-present. That’s a really hard thing for someone that you’re with, whether it’s your friends, family or your partner. It’s a really fucking complex thing to have to deal with. It’s horrible for people. It’s something that Tim and I have talked about a lot in discussing relationships and problems, which are for he and I both an extremely difficult thing, because we’re both selfish people. We both struggle with alcohol problems and it’s ugly. I think Secret Walls is kind of like a subconscious nod to keeping things inside. If you read the lyrics, it tells a lot more than I can tell you on the phone here.

Miles: I think Secret Walls is better than anything we had done before. That was where I took on the producer reigns more than I ever have. We started out it so democratic, but you need a leader with a vision sometimes. We started to learn to let go. We stopped fighting as much, because we could trust one another. When we were making records before, we were arguing as much as we were recording.

The Fresh & Onlys, Long Slow Dance

Sartin: We didn’t want to make a record where [every song] sounds like it was recorded on the same instruments, in the same week, by the same person. We were just doing press in Europe and someone said, “It sounds like every song is a different band.” That’s a huge compliment. You can’t approach a song like “The Executioner’s Song” in the same way you would “Presence Of Mind.”

“The Executioner’s Song,” which is really minimal sounding on the record, that song took a lot of time. It’s an extremely textured song. There’s a lot of guitars and a lot of acoustic guitars. There’s really staggering rhythms. It was really hard to get the feeling of that song because of the way the rhythm staggers between the verse and the chorus. There was all this rhythmic dissonance as opposed to harmonic dissonance. There was something really weird about that song. When Wymond started putting guitars on top of it and the textures started to set into place, and the song really took on a life of its own.

Miles:: Here’s a great thing: So we used Lionel Ritchie’s Neumann U67 microphone. The very microphone Lionel Ritchie used when he made all his hits, like “Hello”. This really killer microphone. All of sudden, we didn’t have to mess with anything. We didn’t have to EQ it much. We didn’t have to do much of anything. We put a little reverb on there, maybe. The studio owner has been collecting amazing gear for a long time. It was his mic. He was the tour manager for the Melvins. He basically got to tour the world looking for gear pre-eBay. Basically the whole record we were using Lionel Ritchie’s mic.

Cohen: When we signed with Mexican Summer, we’re like, let’s make a record that reflects that we have a label; we have resources, we have time. Let’s be patient about recording it. Let’s make something that stands the test of time. Let’s not make something that hides my lyrics behind fuzz and reverb and delay. That’s not really the band that we are. We’re not beholden to a lo-fi aesthetic by any stretch of the imagination. We all feel really confident in the record.

The Solo Outings

Wymond Miles, Earth Has Doors EP

Miles: I think the EP startled people when that came out. [People thought] that I was trying to assert my identity away from the band. But really, it was just me without any consideration. It was written right before the Onlys started as a band, and then recorded later. It was a much different worldview, it was my mid ’20s, very cosmically-oriented. My concerns were totally different from the Onlys. There’s a song on there that was seven minutes of viola and classical guitar.

Wymond Miles, Under the Pale Moon

Miles: If there was any narrative to the Onlys, I’d say it was in the spirit of playfulness. Even when it has the mood of something darker. Everything with the Onlys to me is laced with our humor. We’re kind of like the Muppets, together we’re all just kind of these characters. We shine with both things, but it’s that real playful spirit that allows us to be that prolific, give the songs the feel that they do, that are really dreamy and driving. With me, I know what I was going after [with this record]. I was doing this big, romantic, guitar-pop record. There’s this starry-eyed romanticism to us both, but this propelling heavy side as well. They’re not laid back per se. I think both things are filled with a lot of romantic, star-gazing notions.

Tim Cohen, The Two Sides of Tim Cohen

Cohen: The title is totally tongue and cheek. Some of those songs’ original destination would’ve been a Black Fiction album — Black Fiction was the band I had before Fresh & Onlys. When Black Fiction kind of dissolved, one member went into an alcoholic rage and one member died. I was sort of just left standing there, holding my head in my hands. I put those songs away for a minute. That record became very personal for me, so I took them, put my name on them, and thankfully had these two small labels that were like, “We want to put your record out.”

Tim Cohen, Laugh Tracks

Cohen: My favorite moment is probably my dad singing on “Small Things Matter.” My dad is just an amazing dude. He’s not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s so cool. He’s a community psychologist. He’s had this crazy job and career for like 40 years. He’s still looks at me and what I do and he doesn’t get it, but he fully understands that this is what I want to do, and this is what I’m supposed to be doing. He’s always been really supportive. I had to help with the melody, because he has no melodic sense. I’m surprised he could even sing the notes. It was one of those things where I know he could sing, but people always told him that he couldn’t sing, so he never sang. So now, in his late 60s, I’m the guy who has to be like “You can do this! You can really sing!” I was now encouraging him, and he’s been the one doing that my whole life.

Tim Cohen, Tim Cohen’s Magic Trick

Cohen: The central narrative behind that album is actually a funny story. I was at this cocktail party and our friend was putting these flowers in her face. I was a trying to flirt with her. I was like, “The stalk looks like celery. You should eat that.” She was like, “Nah.” I was like, “Well, I’ll do it. I want to see what it tastes like.” So I ate the stem of a flower. Everyone stood around and watched.

Almost immediately, I felt this burning sensation in the back of my throat — this sharp, pins-and-needles feeling in the back of my throat. I felt my throat starting to swell up. I started trying to spit out the flower. The girl who was working the bar or something — there were only five people there — started pouring me shots of whatever she could find. I was like “More! More! More!” I was just trying to make the burning go away, but it just made it worse. I went to the bathroom and tried to make myself vomit up the flower. Then, I just had this horrible feeling in my throat, my upper chest and my mouth. I was trying to eat as many peanuts as I could. We went to this place the Homestead — one of those places where you can throw peanuts all over the floor —and I was just trying to take a ball of peanuts and cram them in my throat. Kevin looked up the flower on Google and it said that eating the stem of this flower can cause convulsions and death. It actually is a poisonous flower to swallow. I refused to go to the hospital. I’m not going to let a flower kill me.

So one of the songs on that album is called “The Flower.” It’s about the near-death experience. It’s sort of the over-dramatization of the fact that I ate the flower and knew that my life was over. I felt like I looked death in the eyes. There’s that and there’s another song on that record, “I Looked Up” which is about passing. One of the lines is “I crossed the long way into dreaming.” Then there’s the song “I’m Never Going to Die” on that album. The pretty central theme of that is “I beat death” sort of thing in a way. That was my magic trick.