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 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 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 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 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: Jens Lekman

[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.]

Jens Lekman is not the man he used to be. After three albums of charming, sample-happy semi-pop, culminating in 2007′s brilliantly overstuffed Night Falls Over Kortedela, the Swedish singer-songwriter-producer decamped to Australia, where he proceeded to fall in love. On heartbroken 2010 mini-masterpiece Love and Its Opposite, former Marine Girls/Everything But the Girl singer Tracey Thorn addressed him directly, warning, “Oh Jens…love ends just as easy as it’s begun.”

Unbeknownst to Thorn, a harsh breakup was already teaching Lekman this lesson for himself. That’s the main theme of his richly expressive new album I Know What Love Isn’t, which turns Lekman’s keen storyteller’s eye and casual urbanity toward a more minimal instrumental arsenal, in a form of musical process of elimination. Chatting from his hometown of Gothenburg, after running around to pick up equipment for a backyard show with California electro-R&B singer Nite Jewel, Lekman remains as friendly, witty and observant as ever: a romantic still, hoping against hopelessness.

How long have you been back in Gothenburg, and what’s your view on what’s happening there musically these days? A few years ago there was you, the Knife, the Tough Alliance, Air France, the Embassy…

I’ve been back since New Year’s Eve 2010. It’s great. I just came back because I couldn’t really finish the record in Australia. Things just got really complicated with the visa issue. I left just to finish the record, basically. It’s nice here. I like being able to know that I don’t have to call my friends when I’m going out, I can just go to the local bar or café and they’ll be there.

I’m not sure about the music scene anymore. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything that exciting happening right now…I mean, I worry sometimes, is it just me getting older and nostalgic for what’s happened in the past? There’s a lot of young bands, but it feels like they’re playing in a tradition, rather than creating something of their own tradition.

They’re taking heroes instead of taking inspiration.

Exactly, yes! Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I think music scenes need to go up and down a little bit.

You mentioned getting older. Did you feel pressure being a few years older, and perhaps not being able to access the same “lens” that Tracey mentioned?

The transition was something that I didn’t notice myself, and it was something that created a bit of a problem. And that was interesting, too, with Tracey singing to me. It felt kind of weird at first, because I was going through those transitions at the time and she was singing to a past me, someone who I used to be. And I wasn’t really sure how to relate to that. I’m really glad I took five years to finish this album because otherwise — it just had to take five years, basically. I had to get a little bit older to be able to do the record.

Were there any follow-up records you looked to that other artists had done at similar points in their careers?

The two records that came to mind — they’re records that I’ve always loved — were, first, Behaviour by Pet Shop Boys, when they went from this very hit-based, fun pop music to a more serious thing. I’ve always loved how that record just feels like a real album. And also for some reason I was thinking about Simple Pleasure by Tindersticks. Just the way they went from this very lush, orchestral music to something that was more stripped down and more jazzy and soulful somehow.

How did you come up with the idea of changing to a more stripped-down instrumental palette?

I had a conversation with Joel [Karlsson] from Air France, some time ago. We had both worked with so many different sounds, and at some point we started thinking, “Are we supposed to make a pan flute album now? Is that the next thing?” Because in the first 10 years of the new millennium, all these old instruments started coming back. There was ukulele, and then there was the thumb piano, double drummer, and it just kept going like that. It felt like a pattern after a while. We looked at each other and we were just going, “No, we don’t want to make a pan flute album. We’ll find another way.” For me the most natural way to evolve was to subtract rather than to add, and just to work with what I had, basically. But less.

The whole world is in a phase of cutting back in the past few years. Is that something you had in mind, or was it just more personal?

It was just more personal, but I’m sure the whole world was feeling a hangover from the massive flood of different sounds and instruments that those first 10 years spat out. A reason why the music was so colorful and full of so many sounds back then was because all of the sudden everyone had access to the whole music history at the same time, and everyone just went bananas. The Avalanches’ record Since I Left You was what started it, basically.

I should talk to you about some of the songs a little bit, too. One that I really like is “The World Moves On.” In a weird way, it reminds me of Kortedala‘s “Your Arms Around Me,” with these funny little details, but instead of an avocado there are frozen peas — and then it goes off in a whole different direction.

Well, that’s a good example of the way I wrote the songs for the new record. That song started as an attempt to move away from the breakup story and to write in a new way. And I just felt, “Write down the first image that comes to mind.” And the first image was me, lying on the floor, hugging a bag of frozen peas. And I thought, “That’s a great image. Why am I hugging a bag of frozen peas?” That was because it was during the heatwave in February 2009 when it was like 50 degrees Celsius [122 degrees Fahrenheit]. And then that image led to me the Black Saturday bushfires, and my birthday happening at the same time, and all these images just started flooding in. And I was writing like Joan Didion said, just to write to find out what I’m thinking about, and eventually it started leading me back to the breakup. And that’s how basically every song on the record happened.

So let’s talk about the records you picked from the eMusic archives. You gave us four…

The Twerps, Twerps

I must have seen like a hundred shows with the Twerps. They just grew to be one of those bands that really was the soundtrack for the time I lived in Melbourne.

Peter Gordon & the Love of Life Orchestra, The Love of Life Orchestra

I just got that the other week from someone. He played with Arthur Russell. It has that disco feeling, but it’s still kind of abstract and jazzy in a way.

Ace of Base, Happy Nation

I remember being in fourth grade and someone had that record on tape, and we played it in class while we were working on some project. It was a girl who played it, and I remember all the guys went, “Ugh, why do we have to listen to this? Why can’t we put on some hip-hop or some heavy metal?” And I remember my best friend turning to me and going, “Actually, isn’t this the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard? Her voice, isn’t that the most beautiful voice ever?” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, it is, but don’t tell anyone.”

Marine Girls, Lazy Ways/Beach Party

I love the Marine Girls. The one thing that was funniest with Tracey Thorn singing that song for me was that she sang to me as if, you know, me being a young foolish romantic. And I got that from her! I got that from listening to Marine Girls back when I was a teenager. So I just thought I’d pick that as a little link to my teenage years, I guess.

I love Tracey’s recent solo albums, especially the one that she mentions you on. The sound of it reminded me of your new album, too.

I feel like we almost made the same record. This didn’t hit me until I finished the record, but it feels like we did the same record but from different points in life. Even the title is very similar [Love and Its Opposite vs. I Know What Love Isn't]. I didn’t think of that either, but It’s kind of fascinating. I’m hoping that we get to continue this correspondence through songs. I don’t think she will reply to me on her next album.

But they’re both really depressing albums, Jens. How are you doing? Are you doing OK?

Yeah, I’m doing great.

OK, good. I listen to these and I just go — is it “The World Moves On,” where she’s saying you’re a friend, and you’re like, how could you say you’re a friend, “…but I never said any of that”? And it’s just, like, ugh. Every time, it’s just crushing. I’ve got a little baby now, so I’ll be playing it, and I’ll be like, “Should I really expose my child to this kind of melancholy? Is this going to be a bad influence on him?”

Not yet, not yet. When the kid gets older, maybe.

Interview: Jens Lekman

Jens Lekman is not the man he used to be. After three albums of charming, sample-happy semi-pop, culminating in 2007′s brilliantly overstuffed Night Falls Over Kortedela, the Swedish singer-songwriter-producer decamped to Australia, where he proceeded to fall in love. On heartbroken 2010 mini-masterpiece Love and Its Opposite, former Marine Girls/Everything But the Girl singer Tracey Thorn addressed him directly, warning, “Oh Jens…love ends just as easy as it’s begun.”

Unbeknownst to Thorn, a harsh breakup was already teaching Lekman this lesson for himself. That’s the main theme of his richly expressive new album I Know What Love Isn’t, which turns Lekman’s keen storyteller’s eye and casual urbanity toward a more minimal instrumental arsenal, in a form of musical process of elimination. Chatting from his hometown of Gothenburg, after running around to pick up equipment for a backyard show with California electro-R&B singer Nite Jewel, Lekman remains as friendly, witty and observant as ever: a romantic still, hoping against hopelessness.

How long have you been back in Gothenburg, and what’s your view on what’s happening there musically these days? A few years ago there was you, the Knife, the Tough Alliance, Air France, the Embassy…

I’ve been back since New Year’s Eve 2010. It’s great. I just came back because I couldn’t really finish the record in Australia. Things just got really complicated with the visa issue. I left just to finish the record, basically. It’s nice here. I like being able to know that I don’t have to call my friends when I’m going out, I can just go to the local bar or café and they’ll be there.

I’m not sure about the music scene anymore. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything that exciting happening right now…I mean, I worry sometimes, is it just me getting older and nostalgic for what’s happened in the past? There’s a lot of young bands, but it feels like they’re playing in a tradition, rather than creating something of their own tradition.

They’re taking heroes instead of taking inspiration.

Exactly, yes! Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I think music scenes need to go up and down a little bit.

You mentioned getting older. Did you feel pressure being a few years older, and perhaps not being able to access the same “lens” that Tracey mentioned?

The transition was something that I didn’t notice myself, and it was something that created a bit of a problem. And that was interesting, too, with Tracey singing to me. It felt kind of weird at first, because I was going through those transitions at the time and she was singing to a past me, someone who I used to be. And I wasn’t really sure how to relate to that. I’m really glad I took five years to finish this album because otherwise — it just had to take five years, basically. I had to get a little bit older to be able to do the record.

Were there any follow-up records you looked to that other artists had done at similar points in their careers?

The two records that came to mind — they’re records that I’ve always loved — were, first, Behaviour by Pet Shop Boys, when they went from this very hit-based, fun pop music to a more serious thing. I’ve always loved how that record just feels like a real album. And also for some reason I was thinking about Simple Pleasure by Tindersticks. Just the way they went from this very lush, orchestral music to something that was more stripped down and more jazzy and soulful somehow.

How did you come up with the idea of changing to a more stripped-down instrumental palette?

I had a conversation with Joel [Karlsson] from Air France, some time ago. We had both worked with so many different sounds, and at some point we started thinking, “Are we supposed to make a pan flute album now? Is that the next thing?” Because in the first 10 years of the new millennium, all these old instruments started coming back. There was ukulele, and then there was the thumb piano, double drummer, and it just kept going like that. It felt like a pattern after a while. We looked at each other and we were just going, “No, we don’t want to make a pan flute album. We’ll find another way.” For me the most natural way to evolve was to subtract rather than to add, and just to work with what I had, basically. But less.

The whole world is in a phase of cutting back in the past few years. Is that something you had in mind, or was it just more personal?

It was just more personal, but I’m sure the whole world was feeling a hangover from the massive flood of different sounds and instruments that those first 10 years spat out. A reason why the music was so colorful and full of so many sounds back then was because all of the sudden everyone had access to the whole music history at the same time, and everyone just went bananas. The Avalanches’ record Since I Left You was what started it, basically.

I should talk to you about some of the songs a little bit, too. One that I really like is “The World Moves On.” In a weird way, it reminds me of Kortedala‘s “Your Arms Around Me,” with these funny little details, but instead of an avocado there are frozen peas — and then it goes off in a whole different direction.

Well, that’s a good example of the way I wrote the songs for the new record. That song started as an attempt to move away from the breakup story and to write in a new way. And I just felt, “Write down the first image that comes to mind.” And the first image was me, lying on the floor, hugging a bag of frozen peas. And I thought, “That’s a great image. Why am I hugging a bag of frozen peas?” That was because it was during the heatwave in February 2009 when it was like 50 degrees Celsius [122 degrees Fahrenheit]. And then that image led to me the Black Saturday bushfires, and my birthday happening at the same time, and all these images just started flooding in. And I was writing like Joan Didion said, just to write to find out what I’m thinking about, and eventually it started leading me back to the breakup. And that’s how basically every song on the record happened.

Interview: Animal Collective

The four members of Animal Collective have spent the past decade building a sprawling body of work comprised of solo releases, experimental works and collaborative albums. Centipede Hz, their ninth proper record as a band, finds the group working again as a quartet after writing, recording and touring for their landmark album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, as a trio. In this conversation with all four members of the group — David “Avey Tare” Portner, Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox, Josh “Deakin” Dibb and Brian “Geologist” Weitz — they discuss Dibb’s return to the fold, their desire to create new music that is “rockIng” but is not rock, and the philosophy behind their decision to significantly alter their sound on each new release and their penchant for favoring unreleased material in their live shows.

You use radio and radio signals as a musical motif through this new record. It’s also pretty explicit in the lyrics for “Moonjock.” What inspired all of that?

David “Avey Tare” Portner: As we start to write songs and piece everything together, we get a feeling of where everything is going. That was a lot of the process of writing this record — just jamming and trying to figure out a sound. “Moonjock” came later, but I definitely had the idea that it would be inspired by driving around with my family when I was growing up. My brother was a radio DJ, so I kind of got into music through him. He’d give me a lot of tapes. Sometimes he’d make these mixes, or just record stuff straight from his own airtime. I got into pop music from always hearing pop radio in the car, and there’s all these radio identifications and that kind of thing, which always seemed real weird and cool to me. Like, I couldn’t imagine something like “Into the Groove” by Madonna not having this other weird thing [a station ID] coming after it that would be on a tape my brother had. Or interference, or just driving on I-95 and going from one town to the next, and the radios crossing signals. I remember talking to Brian about it, and in Musique concrete, radio is a big sound source, so it’s maybe kind of overdone or overstated. But I kinda liked the idea of somehow using that vibe to make it more alien — like, alien radio signals, and how the crossing of songs works with our aesthetic to begin with.

How did you find the airchecks that you used on the record, like the “Johnny Walker” thing at the end of “Rosie Oh”?

Brian “Geologist” Weitz: You can find them online; it’s really easy. That one in particular was from a British pirate radio station where the DJ’s name is actually Johnny Walker. There’s a group of people that collect those aircheck tapes online, so I spent hours and hours listening to them. It was a little mind-bending. I tried to stick to stations that some of us might have heard, but eventually I had to stretch out to other markets.

What were you looking for when you went through all of those sounds?

Weitz: The sort of unintentional moments. I think DJs made them primarily to apply for future jobs, so there’s a lot of stop, pause, record, where they cut out the music. You’ll hear some ID, a commercial, and then a song fade up, then it cuts to the outro of another song. So if you listen, you find a lot of these moments where the DJ made his own splice and that created a cool moment. So I’d sample right around there.

The lyrics of “Applesauce” are pretty interesting. Can you talk a bit about that? It seems like you’re drawing a connection from agriculture to something more philosophical.

Portner: We wrote all the lyrics down and I gave them to my sister, because she’s designing all the lyrics in the album packaging, and she was like, “The one that was really weird to me was ‘Applesauce’ — it really is just about fruit, isn’t it?” I like fruit and vegetables a lot.

Weitz: One morning I got a text from Dave and he just said, “I’m gonna write a song about fruit.”

Portner: The simplistic nature of fruit was what I wanted the base the song off of — that fruit and vegetables are just something that you can just kinda eat, and they flavor themselves. It’s so satisfying for me to grill vegetables for my girlfriend, because it always ends up being so good. But then it ended up turning into me thinking about myself and writing a bit more personally. I think having all these experiences in the past couple years — I’ve gotten out of relationships and friends have passed away, that kind of thing — I just connected [those things] somehow to fruit going away, too.

It’s hard for me, with lyrics, because I just want to have people take what they want from it, and not be so much me trying to shove something down your throat. The textures and melodies are just as important, if not more important.

It seems like, between the three of you who write lyrics, that there’s this recurring theme of family and personal responsibility.

Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox: That’s probably more in my songs than anyone else’s.

Portner: I think one thing that ties us together is that we’re all talking about something very immediate and very now — what’s going on in our lives, and what we’re seeing around us. That translates into us dealing with relationships. I think personally, for Merriweather and the solo record I did, I was being so inward and talking about what’s going on in my life, and I kinda didn’t want to do that so much. I want to look outward, and talk more about my relationship to things.

Josh, how was it for you jumping in and being a third voice in the band with “Wide Eyed”?

Josh “Deakin” Dibb: It felt challenging. These guys were really psyched about it. When I brought it up to them, they were like, “Do it.” I was already working on the song. It was one of the first songs we actually worked on, and they were all psyched on it, so I felt really easy and safe just to try it. It’s definitely a new thing, in a good way. I’d always experienced, like, Dave having a song and Noah having a song. It was interesting to be the one who wrote the song, and have someone like Dave being like, “I think this sounds really good,” and me being like, “I know, but it’s not quite right.” It’s a good perspective.

This new album has a lot of live instrumentation, but there’s still a significant electronic element, and that’s been a thread through all of your records. Still, people rarely label you an “electronic” group. Do you identify as an electronic band at all?

Weitz: I think we all like electronic music. Everything from Musique concrete to, like old, early electronic stuff, BBC Workshop stuff influenced this record. And techno, and trance and house music — I think some of that stuff has always influenced what we’re doing. But with any music that influences us, we don’t think, “Let’s totally sound like this, or sound like that.” I think that, in terms of electronic music, Merriweather Post Pavilion shows that side of us the most. I think there are a lot of people who were into the electronic side of us who will hear [Centipede Hz] and wish there was more low end, or that particular style was pushed a little bit more.

We used to be a noise band, then we were a folk band, like freak-folk. And then people were like, “Now they’re these electro Beach Boys dudes.” It changes so much, and it seems like a lot of times, whatever we’re doing at the moment becomes this umbrella for everything we’ve done. I don’t pay too much attention to it anymore, because it’s like, if we can’t answer it, and [critics] can’t answer it…

Portner: I think if we talked about anything for this record, it was like, “Let’s do more of a rock kind of thing.” But I don’t know. It’s hard for me to get into a lot of modern rock, so I wouldn’t even want to do that, really.

Lennox: I think it was more that we wanted to do something rocking.

Portner: Yeah, rocking. We made a separation of rock ‘n’ roll, and something that rocks. We don’t want to make rock and roll, but we want to make something that rocks.

You recorded this album in Texas, right?

Portner: Yeah, El Paso. It was pretty isolating. Alienating, but in a good way. More so than any other record we did, we had very little contact with people outside of the studio. We went into El Paso once. The studio was 40 minutes outside of El Paso, on a pecan farm. The pecan trees were all barren, basically. It was just row upon row.

Dibb: It’s a massive farm.

Weitz: Yeah, like 2,000 acres.

Lennox: It was a homogenous view.

Portner: We were in this kind of Mexican-style hacienda type of thing, with rooms in a weird motel and a pool. There’s three studios there, so you’d be in the studio, or just go off on your own and get lost in this weird world. There were fires everywhere all the time, because they were constantly burning the leftover branches, when they take them down and prune.

Weitz: There was a lot of weird Mexican club music being produced there. There were other producers there, like Italian-slash-Mexican pop producers making Britney Spears or Katy Perry-like music. I remember they spent about eight hours on two measures of sound. It was interesting to observe the process of a “perfect” club or radio single is made, every day. Like, just two measures, to get it as precise as possible. The singer was there for three days.

Did you react against that?

Dibb: It was more a thing we saw in passing.

Weitz: My room was the wall that was shared with the mixing studio they were in, and going to bed, I’d be like, “I can’t understand how they can even focus.”

Lennox: I’m closer to that world, and I’d be like, “I don’t even know what they’re doing in there.”

Weitz: I just wanted to knock on the door and be like, “Can I just try to mix the track?”

You were playing most of the songs on this album on the road; I saw you play a few of them at Prospect Park in Brooklyn last year. What is it like playing these songs for an audience who has never heard them? Do you pay attention to how the audience responds?

Portner: Definitely. Part of the reason for us writing a full set of songs was to play a little tour and to play Coachella. It was definitely an interesting experience, playing the main stage of Coachella for 20,000 or 30,000 people and playing mostly stuff that people had never heard before.

Dibb: We played after Mumford & Sons and before Arcade Fire, two bands that 60,000 people could sing along to the whole time. And in between was us, where there were almost no songs where people could be like “I know that!”

Portner: It always puts us in the position of feeling that we’re the odd man out. But on the other side of it, it’s like “Yes, let’s do this!” It’s always what we wanted to do. We’re still pretty confident about it, it’s not like we’re having any regrets. It’s definitely changed a lot since when we were doing a show a month in New York and just feel like we were playing for our friends. Now we’re playing for people who really want to hear certain songs.

Do you feel pressure to play any of those? What is your philosophy about playing your hits?

Weitz: It’s different for all of us.

Lennox: It’s a work in progress.

Dibb: It’s not really a pressure, it’s more an awareness of what gets people psyched. I still meet fans who were at that Coachella show who were like, “I’d heard of you guys before, my friend knew you, and I came over to see the set, and I was really psyched to see someone do something that twisted me a little bit.” I think that’s how all of us relate to going to see music. I know I get psyched seeing something where I feel like, “Whoa, that really threw me for a loop, in a cool way.”

Lennox: But there’s also like, “I flew from Houston and you didn’t play the song I wanted to hear.”

Dibb: Parts of us will never be like, “I guess we have to play this song again tonight.” But at the same time, there’s 8,000, 10,000 people, or at Coachella, 60,000 people, and it’s awesome to have them feel psyched. We want to do what we’re doing, but also acknowledge that it’s cool for people to hear, like, “Brothersport,” which we were playing last year. We get psyched doing that one live, and we know people are going to connect to that. It’s fun to look out and see people lose themselves, and it’s harder for them to do that when they’re hearing a song like “Honeycomb” for the first time.

Portner: It’s also weird when you’re aware of critical response, and when you realize that opinions can vary so much. We can have a great show and think everything came together, and then you read reviews and all across the board, you get “These guys weren’t even playing songs, it was a mess.” And we’re like, “Really? It felt really together to us.”

Dibb: The Pitchfork festival was a great example, because I still feel that, to us, looking out, everyone seemed amped, but any review we saw, we were at the edge of this thing. But I was there, and everyone I could see was jumping while we were playing, so what’s the difference between what was actually happening and what I saw?

Are you concerned about the reaction to this record, since it’s significantly different from the last one?

Portner: No more so than any other record that we’ve done. I feel like as long as we’re psyched…But it’s not a self indulgent thing, like we’re just doing it for ourselves. We are all really aware that we’re trying to connect with people. But at the same time, we just want to do our best. In terms of Merriweather, Noah, Brian and I were psyched after we did the record. We didn’t really know how anybody would respond to it, but we felt like we did something really special. I think we just wanted to recreate that experience. Not recreate the music, but have a similar feeling — like we did our best work. In my experience, especially over the past few years, I don’t even know what people are going to like, or what’s going to be really popular.

Weitz: We almost left “My Girls” off of Merriweather. We recorded it twice, and the first version didn’t sound good. Until we started playing around with it in the mixing, we were not even sure whether it would fit with the rest of the songs. So it wasn’t like that was part of a grand plan where we knew that this song was going to make people psyched.

Divine Fits, A Thing Called Divine Fits

Dan Boeckner and Britt Daniel are studies in contradiction: Both create intimacy with distance and heat with an unshakeable sense of cool. Daniel’s main project, Spoon, has become one of the smartest and most radical indie-rock bands of the past decade despite also being one of the most reticent. Boeckner, who until recently co-fronted the noir-ish synth-pop group Handsome Furs and played with Wolf Parade, is more or less the human equivalent of an agitated soda can. When they seethe, they seethe quietly. Together with Sam Brown — occasionally of the punk band New Bomb Turks — they are Divine Fits, and they are anxious.

Daniel, who once wrote an entire song about a Japanese cigarette case, has a gift for the compact, and like Spoon, the music Divine Fits make is alluringly streamlined. Synths and guitars are given more or less equal billing. Boeckner cooes nervously; Daniel’s mussed, grainy voice is the aural equivalent of bedhead. Charged glances, unspoken words, the accidental brush of limb against limb in a narrow hallway: This is where they butter their bread. Sex for them is cryptic, and cryptic is always sexy. Music this brittle doesn’t grow or unfold — it bends thrillingly until it snaps.

But as their name suggests, there’s glory in tension. The album’s best songs — especially the standout “What Gets You Alone” — are so wound up it’s dizzying. In love as on Christmas, there’s nothing as exciting as the thing you can’t have. And the few times they get loose — on “Shivers,” for example — the effect isn’t relaxing, it’s spooky. With tension like this, release seems corny. They should package the record with sunglasses.

Deerhoof, Breakup Song

For 20 years, Deerhoof has written restless, explosive, oddly-shaped songs that still accommodate pop’s basics: pretty melodies and words about love. Their discography — especially the visionary stretch from Reveille to The Runners Four — is like an experiment in trying to make difficult music in the most charming way possible. For the past few years, they’ve been transitioning: Guitarist Chris Cohen left in 2006; and after one album as a trio, the band added multi-instrumentalist Ed Rodriguez.

Despite these lineup shifts, Deerhoof remain inescapably Deerhoof: They’ll never sound like anyone else. But what was once more or less garage rock in a food processor now features salsa horns (“There’s That Grin”), synthesizers (“Bad Kids to the Front”), and a newfound sense of what to do with processed drums (“Mario’s Flaming Whiskers III”). The changes don’t dilute their sound as much as expand its possibilities. “Accessibility” has always been a relative quality in Deerhoof’s music: If you eat sand every day, the occasional piece of paper might taste pretty good. Breakup Song is a clever title in part because it sounds like a description of what Deerhoof has always done: taken what might be otherwise accessible songs and broken them up into thousands of little parts. Over the past few albums, though, they’ve mellowed (also a relative term) — a few songs here even make it from start to finish without changing their time signature.

Matsuzaki is not a deep lyricist. “Panda panda panda panda pan,” reads a verse from 2002′s sensibly titled “Panda Panda Panda” — “bye bye.” But her deliberate lack of eloquence is also her way of being direct. “Ready for a love,” she sings on “Fete d’Adieu.” “Ready to be tough. As a robot on the dancefloor. A muscle in the heart.” It’s a hint that the steadiness in her voice was not particularly easy to come by. Even their flashiest, weirdest songs are counterbalanced with simple emotional statements. It’s a neat distraction technique: They do crazy tricks with one hand and punch you in the stomach with the other.

Nothing on Breakup Song stays around for long. Even the gorgeous, restful passages that end “Fete d’Adieu” and “Mothball the Fleet” cycle once or twice, then stop. For all their experiments, Deerhoof is ultimately a tidy, strong-willed band that knows the perfect word only needs to be said once. If they seem impatient, it’s the wondrous impatience of children: They know how much there is to be done.

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 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 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.

New This Week: Animal Collective, Jens Lekman, Stars & More

A pretty hefty new release week! Here’s what we found — what did we miss?

Animal Collective, Centipede Hz: Surely you remember these guys? Animal Collective come back with more woozy, multi-colored psych-pop sure to bend brains and break hearts. Andrew Parks says:

[It's] initially a very bewildering listen, from Barrett-era Pink Floyd and latter day Portishead to slivers of psych, rarified garage rock and manic world music. None of which are immediately apparent on the first or 50th spin. Instead, Centipede Hz unfolds like a series of scrambled radio transmissions, right down to the tortured transitions between each track. It’s as if the band’s tapping into a broadcast from the great beyond, with little regard for the amphitheater-ready hooks that made Merriweather Post Pavillion such a joy.

Jens Lekman, I Know What Love Isn’t: We gave Jens the keys to eMusic’s editorial this week, and he pointed us in the direction of some of his favorite bands. As for his new record, Marc Hogan says:

Taking as influences such masterpieces of restraint as Pet Shop Boys’ subtly breathtaking Behaviour and Tindersticks’ soulfully stripped-down Simple Pleasure, Lekman retreats from the Avalanches-style excess of 2007′s brilliant Night Falls Over Kortedela and achieves something still richer, if also more emotionally bleak.

Stars, The North: Latest outing from long-running Canadian ensemble. Nick Marino says:

Beats range from pitter-pattering to hammering, while jangling guitars share space with synths. And the band’s two singers, Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan, take turns singing lead when they’re not delivering lyrics in conversational rounds.
The album on the whole has a vaguely retro bent. Awash in reverb and shot through gently with Millan’s cooing vocals, the hazy “Through the Mines” sounds like vintage Mazzy Star. “Lights Changing Colour” could’ve been an old Cocteau Twins demo, while a rave-up called “Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Get It” has the soaring, synthetic thrill of Cut Copy at its best.

Fresh & Onlys, Long Slow Dance: I love this band so much. Long Slow Dance is the umpteenth F&O’s record in a relatively short period of time, but its by far their most graceful, diverse and sublime. It’s also Recommended. Here’s Austin L. Ray with more:

The Fresh & Onlys are often grouped with shaggy-haired maniacs such as Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees. In reality, their gorgeous, glassy-eyed pop is more in line with The Shins, or, to use an era-appropriate comparison for the Nuggets-inclined set, the Zombies. With each subsequent release, The Fresh & Onlys have refined their tunes, trading lo-fi riffs for jangling strums, garage rhythms for elegant, choral-enhanced accompaniment. What once could’ve served as the soundtrack for a Vice-funded documentary now sounds appropriate for starring placement in a Wes Anderson flick.

Two Door Cinema Club, Beacon: Brisk and sparkling commercial alt-pop — blinking synthesizers and earnest, conversational vocals. Jillian Mapes says:

The album’s opening line, “I don’t know where I’m going to rest my head tonight,” establishes a tone that doesn’t let up. The lonely, triumphant songs chronicle not only the havoc that months of travel wreak on a “normal” life but also the personal growth it facilitates. You can hear that growth in the band’s sound, which expands to include a blend of electro-pop beats and post-punk guitars, with equal attention paid to catchy riffs (“Someday”) and earworm-y synth lines (“Handshake”).

Blu & Exile, Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them: I was a huge, huge fan of B&E’s first outing, Below the Heavens, and sort of despaired that we’d never hear from him again. Well, thankfully, he’s back, and Flowers is just a little more futuristic and a little more herky-jerk, but is still inarguably distinctive. Nate Patrin says:

It reignites the eloquent-everyman appeal of the pair’s much-loved debut. Exile’s golden-age sensibilities lean heavily on psychedelic soul, sinewy dub reggae, and off-kilter bebop, refined beats that gleam at low volumes and rumble authoritatively when cranked. And Blu’s low-key mic presence is introspective and extroverted all at once, unspooling lines that evoke vintage Pharcyde in style and ambitious adolescent hang-out sessions or family reunions in spirit. It’s the second chance this album — and this partnership — absolutely deserve.

Deerhoof, Breakup Song: Latest from Deerhoof pops and clatters defiantly, brutish squelches of sound an ideal counterpoint to sweet, wispy vocals. Mike Powell says:

What was once more or less garage rock in a food processor now features salsa horns (“There’s That Grin”), synthesizers (“Bad Kids to the Front”), and a newfound sense of what to do with processed drums (“Mario’s Flaming Whiskers III”). The changes don’t dilute their sound as much as expand its possibilities. “Accessibility” has always been a relative quality in Deerhoof’s music: If you eat sand every day, the occasional piece of paper might taste pretty good. Breakup Song is a clever title in part because it sounds like a description of what Deerhoof has always done: taken what might be otherwise accessible songs and broken them up into thousands of little parts.

Staff Benda Bilili, Bouger Le Monde: Bright and brash new album from this Congolese outfit. Richard Gehr says:

In “Souci” (“Worries”), a slow acoustic rumba in the tradition of West Africa legends like Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau, three members sing individually about going on the road and leaving their families’ troubles behind. “They thought a band with disabled people would never work,” declares bandleader Ricky Likabu Makodu in the loping “Apandjokwetu” (“This Is Our Place”). And in “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (“Don’t Leave Me”), Roger Landu, the band’s dazzling soloist on a homemade one-stringed electric satonge, confesses that “many people…tell me that I should leave the band, but I will never quit!”

Cult of Youth, Love Will Prevail: I really love these guys. Doomy pagan folk music offsets broad acoustic strumming with glum, minor-key vocals and sinister melodies. These sound like hymns written to accompany some long-dead pagan ceremony. Recommended

California Wives, Art History: Even after the new Stars record, if you still can’t get your fill of brisk, vaguely synthy, summery pop music, this is where you should go next. You can hear traces of the same breezy, endearing hooks that informed old Stars records, rounded out with slightly more robust choruses.

Crypts, Crypts: Doomy, shadowy synth music from former members of These Arms Are Snakes, Crypts seem to exist in some weird netherworld between drone and wicth house, blending the most sinister elements of both.

Imagine Dragons, Night Visions: Mechanically engineered to appeal to my soft spot. Towering vocal harmonies on the chorus, twirling keyboards, and an unabashed flair for grandstanding and stadium-destroying hooks. This is commercial rock, make no mistake, but if you’ve got a secret love for, say Fun., this might appeal to you as well.

Pacewon & Mr Green, The Only Number That Matters is Won: In 2008, Pacewon & Mr. Green released >The Only Color That Matters is Green, a great record that not nearly enough people heard. This is the follow-up, and it sounds just as good, packing in swirling, emotive production and tough, punchy rapping. Recommended

Raymond Byron & the White Freighter, Little Death Shaker: Scuzzed-out, grimy, gutbucket rock on Asthmatic Kitty. Byron’s got a high, nasal voice, and his music is a kind of skewed, kicked-in take on Americana.

Arthur Russell, Keep the Lights On: Soundtrack to a new independent film features a cross-section of Arthur Russell songs, from his folk stuff to his more outre electronic stuff. A handy, if super brief, career overview.

Sondre Lerche, Bootlegs: I’m not sure what it means that there’s both a new Jens Lekman and a new Sondre Lerche record out on the same day. Lerche’s is a live album, featuring a number of his most beloved numbers.

Various Artists, FAC Dance 02: Pretty great compilation of electro/dance stuff on the timeless Factory label.

Jazz Picks, by Dave Sumner
Sort of a small drop this week, but it does give me the opportunity to highlight some very strange and beautiful music.Nothing here is pure straight-ahead jazz.Whether it’s the compositions, the instrumentation, or the concepts, most everything here should get filed under Something Different.Let’s begin…

Karin Hammar, Chris Jennings, Ingrid Jensen, and Patrick Goraguer, Land:Beautiful album.Hammar takes the lead, exploring the trombone’s melodious qualities.Jensen provides some wonderful harmony on trumpet.Jennings gets a good chatter going on bass, but doesn’t come off as insistent.Goraguer, on drums, matches trombone’s intensity to a tee.But it’s the clash between trombone and trumpet’s long sonorous notes and the up-tempo rhythm section that makes this such a seductive album.Pick of the Week.

Dom Minasi and Karl Berger, Synchronicity:Appealing duo recording from free jazz vets, guitarist Dom Minasi and vibraphonist/pianist Karl Berger.Minasi’s inquisitiveness seems to match very well with Berger’s free-floating lines, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a “pretty” album, there is a surreal beauty to this music that proves avant-garde and free jazz need not get all up in the listener’s face to get its point across.And yet another example of how guitar and vibes make the best jazz marriages… warm bright notes that often hang frozen in the air.Highly Recommended.

Dave Phillips & Freedance, Confluence:Nice modern jazz quartet album.Bassist Phillips brings together a group that includes guitarist Rez Abbasi, alto saxophonist John O’Gallagher and drummer Tony Moreno (with guests on piano and percussion).Album is a fine example of what fusion can aspire to… elements of rock, folk, and world all informing a thoroughly modern jazz recording.Hi-voltage at times, rustic at others.Recommended.

Various Artists, Spiritual Jazz 3:Europe:Compilation of European jazz artists who applied Miles Davis’s modal jazz approach to liturgical and folk music.Culled from private releases, underrepresented artists and visionary one-offs (and fully licensed), it’s a nifty mix of choral jazz of the past.

Jan Klare, Ahmet Bektas, and Fethi Ak, Klare Bektas Ak:World jazz trio of alto sax, oud, and percussion.While oud takes the lead, and to pleasant effect, it’s the grace of alto sax that keeps this in jazz territory.Beautiful languor at times, other times the tune deconstructs in freeform tumults.Good stuff.

Parallaxe, Der Zweite Raum:Quartet session, with trumpet, piano, bass, drums with the odd percussion mixed in for flavor.Very much from the mod Euro-Jazz scene, which means you’ll get some avant-garde-ish stuttering tempos and angular melodies, but somehow they’ll fit in some time to swing and bop, too.Very enjoyable album.

Tom Custodio da Luz, Fuga:Debut album from Brazilian guitarist/vocalist.Some Bossa, but also plenty of pop and rock music elements, too.Mostly vocals and guitar in the spotlight, occasionally backed by strings.Gotta say, this ain’t really my thing, but these are some seriously catchy tunes.I don’t know how I’ll feel about this album down the road, but right now, this album has got its hooks into me.

And four older albums that made an appearance in Freshly Ripped this week…

Kenny Werner, Beyond the Forest Of Mirkwood:One of those elusive albums that is finally getting out of the house and joining the public.The second album by Werner under his own name, recorded just before the turn of the century, and just now getting the digital treatment.Solo piano work.Werner creates his own special brand of electricity, and it crackles with life even when he’s feeling introspective on keys.

Zony Mash, Live in Seattle:Recorded about ten years ago, this avant-groove quartet, which features Wayne Horvitz of Hammond B3, this album showcases this quartet’s inventiveness at presenting catchy tunes, as well as its strong musicianship.Personally, I prefer the live recordings over the studio, however, a Zony Mash compilation also dropped today.

Dickie Landry, Fifteen Saxophones:Originally recorded back in ’74, this reissue features one of the founding members of the Philip Glass Ensemble.With the use of live delays and looping, multi-reedist Landry created an album that is equal parts avant-garde and new age space-y, and just as likely to appeal to ambient drone enthusiasts as experimental jazz fans.

Andreas Willers Octet, The Ground Music:A little over ten years old, this album was part of the recent drops from the Enja label.It’s an exciting recording that brings some modern approaches to third stream music.Heavier on the jazz than the classical elements.Terribly engaging album.

Gustavo Dudamel: Electric Superconductor

The most electric young conductor on the orchestral scene today is less a trailblazer than a throwback to podium heroes of long ago. Once again, audiences throng, not just to hear Beethoven or Mahler, but to hear his Beethoven or Mahler. Once again they want to be present for the thrills, they want to touch the aura, witness the galvanizing bolt that flies when he swings the baton. Gustavo Dudamel provokes the kind of idolizing that upper echelon conductors from Toscanini to Karajan came to expect, but that has eluded their successors. He has made his profession seem superhuman again.

In 2004, the then-23-year-old Dudamel entered a conducting competition in which Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was on the jury. Salonen did more than make sure that the young Venezuelan won; he called LA, reporting to the Philharmonic brass that he had discovered someone special. “He’s a conducting animal,” he said. Five years later, Salonen left the orchestra and Dudamel took his place, a changeover that was celebrated as a kind of royal succession.

You can hear the reason for the excitement in his recordings — though not especially in the recordings he has made with the L.A. Philharmonic. By the time he took over that group, he had already spent a decade in charge of the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, and under his leadership that group of young musicians continues to play with an explosive urgency that shames many more august ensembles. Listen to its version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring interlocking rhythms spark and jump in a fusion of primal pounding and industrial precision. The effect — fearsome, rousing, unnerving — is exactly what Stravinsky wanted but could hardly ever get, because once the score entered the canon of certified masterpieces, it lost its jagged edge. These young musicians have recovered the score’s extremes, the spasms of violence alternating with quiet, reverent frenzy.

Dudamel and his muchachos, as he refers to them, accept no settled wisdom, and in the recordings, they are constantly renegotiating the impact of even the most scriptural works. In the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony the string figures boil dangerously beneath the main theme, and (at 2:07) it’s the volcanic upwelling of those figures, rather than the principal trumpet call, that impels the music to its climax. In each dense fortissimo, you can make out the orchestras every hue, as if the conductor had sheared away the side of a sonic cliff, revealing all the layers and veins below.

Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Orchestra are both products of Venezuela’s now-famous nationwide music education program, nicknamed El sistema, which draws slum kids, among others, into orchestras by the thousands. The experience has been infectious. Other countries and cities — including L.A. —are trying to emulate El sistema‘s success, and a few Latin American composers are enjoying a sudden (though unfortunately mostly posthumous) surge in popularity. The orchestra’s calling card is a wildly joyous program called Fiesta, which combines the overpowering roar of Silvestre Revueltas’s Sensemayá with the acrobatic dances of Ginastera’s Estancia — plus the sexiest, most combustible “Mambo” from West Side Story you will ever hear. In concert, the tux jackets come off to reveal warm-up gear in the colors of the Venezuelan flag. Violinists boogie as they play, bassists twirl their basses, and horn players blare skywards. But even without the choreography, you can sense the players’ sheer physical glee.

Not all works — or all orchestras — respond equally well to Dudamel’s relentless application of excitement. So far, the L.A. Phil’s few live recordings haven’t captured the incandescent quality of his best performances. Their reading of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony is eminently respectable but it lacks charm or mystery, and sometimes seems to proceed from measure to measure out of a ponderous sense of duty. Dudamel displays greater kinship with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, but this is turf that the Angelenos had already covered sumptuously with his predecessor. Dudamel possesses enormous, potentially limitless talent, but it may take a while before Salonen’s orchestra becomes his, and before they can enjoy together all the marvelous music that takes place between bouts of spectacle and thunder.

Staff Benda Bilili, Bouger Le Monde!

The Congolese octet Staff Benda Bilili has five polio-disabled street musicians at its core, and on their excellent sophomore effort, Bouger Le Monde!, bittersweet autobiographical glimpses of their struggle peek their way in toward the end: In “Souci” (“Worries”), a slow acoustic rumba in the tradition of West Africa legends like Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau, three members sing individually about going on the road and leaving their families’ troubles behind. “They thought a band with disabled people would never work,” declares bandleader Ricky Likabu Makodu in the loping “Apandjokwetu” (“This Is Our Place”). And in “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (“Don’t Leave Me”), Roger Landu, the band’s dazzling soloist on a homemade one-stringed electric satonge, confesses that “many people…tell me that I should leave the band, but I will never quit!”

However, SBB transcend their inspiring backstory with their music, which blends gritty-sweet harmonies, clattering percussion, and Landu’s aforementioned primitive-futurist guitar sound: a needling sine wave that oscillates between Ernie Isley and a pedal steel. In the end, Staff Benda Bilili is nothing more nor less than a fresh, heartfelt take on 20th-century Congolese rumba; and a particularly fine one at that.

Jens Lekman, I Know What Love Isn’t

On I Know What Love Isn’t, the Swedish singer-songwriter-producer pares back his musical template to suit a muted and downcast reflection on a breakup. Taking as influences such masterpieces of restraint as Pet Shop Boys’ subtly breathtaking Behaviour and Tindersticks’ soulfully stripped-down Simple Pleasure, Lekman retreats from the Avalanches-style excess of 2007′s brilliant Night Falls Over Kortedela and achieves something still richer, if also more emotionally bleak.

Past fans will find the easiest connection with the bouncy, string-flourishing piano-pop of election reminiscence “The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love” or the sham-marriage-proposing title track. But Lekman’s endearing wittiness shades toward hard-earned wisdom here, from the jazzy, Sinatra-referencing “Erica America” and exquisitely drip-dropping sax ballad “She Just Don’t Want to Be With You Anymore” to the two album book-ending tracks both titled “Every Little Hair Knows Your Name.” If there’s a unifying conceit, it’s what Lekman sings on tenderly poignant standout “The World Moves On”: “You don’t get over a broken heart/ You just learn to carry it gracefully.” No silver linings, just magnificent purple clouds.

Icon: Animal Collective

Not to pull an I-was-there or anything, but the first time I saw an Animal Collective show — eight years ago at a decrepit art space in Philadelphia — I thought the whole thing was an elaborate joke, an Andy Kaufman-esque piece of performance art for Pitchfork readers. Not because their music was laughable; because everything about their slapdash set seemed too strange. It was as if the very idea of “arty” indie rock was being sacrificed at the altar of two screeching, instrument-swapping mad men — Baltimore bros who went by the names Panda Bear and Avey Tare, and looked as if they were dressed for a Lord of the Flies audition.

What I didn’t realize is that Animal Collective shows are supposed to be mind-fucking affairs. They’re that way by design, thanks to the quartet’s unorthodox mindset and methods, which have barely budged over the past decade. Namely their insistence on calling any release with at least two marquee members an Animal Collective record — they’re a “Collective,” not a band…get it? — and their expectation-warping set lists, which often draw more selections from in-progress material than any of their crowd-pleasers.

In other words, Animal Collective is one of the iPod generation’s most pivotal acts, an ever-evolving mass of record collector references and DJ culture nods — everything from the severely stoned jam sessions of the Grateful Dead and the psychedelic folk of the Incredible String Band to the clean minimal lines of German techno and the note-mashing noise of Black Dice — that doesn’t sound like anything but Animal Collective.

For better or for worse, post-everything pop music doesn’t much ballsier, or more infinitely rewarding, than the following records…

Megan Abbott, Dare Me

Megan Abbott’s Dare Me is Bring It On in a Blue Velvet world. Abbott describes a Lynchian speed-and-sex-fueled, rotten-to-the-core suburbia full of maniacally uncheerful high school cheerleaders whose only goals in life are to beat the other team after beating up on each other. Anorexia and sociopathy are as common as beauty products — and given that “it takes a half hour under the showerhead to get all the hairspray out,” that’s saying something.

Dare Me focuses on perennial squad captain — and all-around mean girl — Beth Cassidy, and her vaguely less intimidating sidekick Addy Hanlon. With the introduction Colette French, the new head coach and the first to see Addy’s potential, the years-old balance of power between friends tilts, unleashing a torrent of obsessive and violent behavior by Beth, who keeps a pin-up of a Japanese Zero pilot in her locker where most teenage girls might keep the latest Tiger Beat heartthrob.

Abbott’s meticulously plotted story and turns of phrase will come as no surprise to those fans who followed her to Dare Me from her previous notable work in thrillers (especially the Barry and Poe award-winning Queenpin), though this latest novel is a genre-crossing portrait of modern suburban depravity. Cheerleaders have always been ripe for satire, but Abbott has painted Beth with the darkest of brushes. The girl has the kind of icy personality that’d make Cujo run away with his tail between his legs.

Carlos Fuentes, Vlad

In Vlad, Mexican literary giant Carlos Fuentes puts his own spin on the classic vampire tale, with equal helpings of storytelling convention and spooky flourishes. The brief, entertaining novel follows the relationship between Yves Navarro, a lawyer and father, and a fictionalized version of Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure also known as Dracula.

At the behest of his boss, Navarro teams up with his wife to find housing in Mexico City that fits Vlad’s bizarre specifications. Even after he moves into his new home, Vlad’s demands don’t cease, and he shows an uncomfortable level of interest in Navarro’s wife and daughter. Little by little, Navarro comes to understand the full extent of Vlad’s sinister plans for his family.

Vampire stories have been told and retold for decades, and Fuentes playfully toys with readers’ expectations. While Navarro is slow to suspect Vlad of anything, readers will likely recognize the warning signs, creating dramatic irony right from the start — for example, Vlad insists on a house with covered windows and access to an extensive underground tunnel.

Fuentes never goes into more detail than serves the story, but he doesn’t skimp on description. Memorably, he describes Vlad’s naked body as totally hairless, “like an egg.” Though the story lacks the eerie beauty of Fuentes’ other writing, it’s a thoughtful, witty take on scary storytelling.

Animal Collective, Centipede Hz

The word on the street is that Animal Collective’s ninth studio album — yes, ninth — is a red-blooded response to the sunshine and puppy dogs of Merriweather Post Pavilion. Which is true in regards to its approach (bashed instruments rather than stacked samples) and overall vibe (wild and wooly), but it’s not like the group’s core quartet is back to baking batches of incoherent noise rock. To understand where they’re coming from this time around, it helps to first cue up the podcasts that Animal Collective leaked in the weeks leading up to Centipede Hz‘s release; namely Geologist’s set, which is based on an elaborate mix he made for producer Ben Allen before Animal Collective hit the studio.

“We put together a list of songs that either encompassed the overall sound and vibe, or just had specific things we liked, such as drums sounds, or vocal effects,” Geologist wrote in his Mixcloud notes. “For the final show of AC Radio we thought it’d be cool to play this inspirational mix and the album back to back.”
Sure enough, Animal Collective’s leading loop surgeon offers more than a few clues about the background of what’s initially a very bewildering listen, from Barrett-era Pink Floyd and latter day Portishead to slivers of psych, rarified garage rock and manic world music. None of which are immediately apparent on the first or 50th spin. Instead, Centipede Hz unfolds like a series of scrambled radio transmissions, right down to the tortured transitions between each track. It’s as if the band’s tapping into a broadcast from the great beyond, with little regard for the amphitheater-ready hooks that made Merriweather Post Pavilion such a joy. Where that album’s leadoff single (“My Girls”) flooded the endorphin levels of anyone within earshot, this one is prefaced by the stuttering rhythms and ravenous “let, let, let, let, let, let GO!” choruses of “Today’s Supernatural.” Listen to any of these songs loud enough and you’ll be forced to step back a few feet; it’s that harsh and heavy, from the trash compactor intro of “Moonjock” to the skittish synths of “Wide Eyed,” the first song to feature lead vocals from the group’s guitarist, Deakin.

In conclusion, do not take the brown acid at your next Animal Collective show. Your synapses will thank you.

Wild Nothing, Nocturne

A kissing cousin to Sweden’s Radio Dept or label mates Craft Spells, Jack Tatum (aka Wild Nothing) spins a soft sonic security blanket of hazy synths, distorted guitars and cooed vocals that pay loving homage to the star-kissed dream-pop of the 1980s. But despite his distinctly Moz-like melancholy and his Robert Smith-style preoccupation with love, longing and loneliness, here’s never a sense that Tatum’s aping his influences — merely using them as a touchstone for his personal explorations.

A more cohesive statement than his bedroom-recorded 2010 debut Gemini, Nocturne features 11 subtle variations on Wild Nothing’s after-hours pop — all awash in a timeless sense of romanticism. The perkiest of the lot, the sun-streaked “Only Heather,” turns on a giddy refrain that any lovesick lothario could identify with, “Couldn’t even explain it, I won’t even try/ She is so lovely she makes me feel high.” Meanwhile, “Though the Grass” submerges the album’s key elements — synth and sadness — into a Cocteau Twins-style web of ambient atmospherics. However, it’s the guileless title track that holds the key to Nocturne, where amidst languorous guitar lines and echo-filled chants of “You can have me,” Tatum doesn’t just present his ideal dream pop — he fully embodies it.

Icon: Animal Collective

Not to pull an I-was-there or anything, but the first time I saw an Animal Collective show — eight years ago at a decrepit art space in Philadelphia — I thought the whole thing was an elaborate joke, an Andy Kaufman-esque piece of performance art for Pitchfork readers. Not because their music was laughable; because everything about their slapdash set seemed too strange. It was as if the very idea of “arty” indie rock was being sacrificed at the altar of two screeching, instrument-swapping mad men — Baltimore bros who went by the names Panda Bear and Avey Tare, and looked as if they were dressed for a Lord of the Flies audition.

What I didn’t realize is that Animal Collective shows are supposed to be mind-fucking affairs. They’re that way by design, thanks to the quartet’s unorthodox mindset and methods, which have barely budged over the past decade. Namely their insistence on calling any release with at least two marquee members an Animal Collective record — they’re a “Collective,” not a band…get it? — and their expectation-warping set lists, which often draw more selections from in-progress material than any of their crowd-pleasers.

In other words, Animal Collective is one of the iPod generation’s most pivotal acts, an ever-evolving mass of record collector references and DJ culture nods — everything from the severely stoned jam sessions of the Grateful Dead and the psychedelic folk of the Incredible String Band to the clean minimal lines of German techno and the note-mashing noise of Black Dice — that doesn’t sound like anything but Animal Collective.

For better or for worse, post-everything pop music doesn’t much ballsier, or more infinitely rewarding, than the following records…

Who Are…Twerps

[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.]

File under: Flying Nun jangle pop peppered with ballads and jams

For fans of: Real Estate, The Go-Betweens, Eddy Current Suppression Ring

From: Melbourne, Australia

Personae: Martin Frawley (guitar/vocals), Julia McFarlane (guitar/vocals), Rick Milovanovic (bass), and Patrick O’Neill (drums)

While talking about his band Twerps’ self-titled LP from 2011, Marty Frawley calls it “such a fluke.” The band went into the studio, worked out some jams, recorded a few ballads, and made an album that unfolds with Flying Nun jangle and quiet, tender moments. Clearly, Frawley viewed the collection of songs as a hodgepodge, saying they took the disparate songs and “sculpted the record together for a particular sound.” But he’s being modest — it’s an excellent sculpting job. They manage to bridge the sonic divide between stuff like the ballad “Bring You Down,” freewheeling tracks like “Jam Song,” and drunken sing-alongs like “Who Are You” with their point-perfect sequencing. The album’s easy progression and strong songwriting makes it an overlooked gem of 2011.

After the album came out, the band toured America, hitting SXSW and supporting Real Estate for a string of dates. More pressingly, they’ve begun writing and recording songs for an upcoming album. The last record was largely written by Frawley, with the exception of “This Guy,” which was written and sung by Julia McFarlane, the band’s guitarist and Frawley’s girlfriend. So with McFarlane writing more songs and Frawley listening to a completely different batch of music since the last time he made an album, the songwriting dynamic in the band has definitely shifted.

At Jens Lekman’s request, eMusic’s Evan Minsker spoke with Frawley right before the band headed out for a music video shoot. “Like the Dandy Warhols in Dig!,” Frawley said. He talked about the band’s fast friendship with Real Estate, sharing songwriting duties with Julia, and his general disdain for SXSW.

On Jens Lekman:

I heard his new record last night — it sounds really good. I think over here, he was played on a lot of television. He had a lot of jingle spots. I would hear songs, then I’d hear them at a friend’s house who’d be playing him, and I’d go, “Isn’t that the bank ad?” But I’d never heard the records as a whole. I’d hear snippets. So I didn’t know who he was, but Rick [Milovanovic] who plays bass, he loved his first record. I’ve got to give it a bit more listens, I think.

I met him once; he’s a lovely guy. We met him at a show we that we played at in Melbourne and all these really sporty looking guys were talking to this guy, and I didn’t know who he was. They were like, “Man, we love your music, you’re amazing, how do you write these songs?” And I said to Rick, “Who’s that guy?” They were all these jocky guys, so it was a weird thing to be seeing. And Rick was like, “That was Jens Lekman.” I was like, “Oh my God!” He watched us play and he came up after and said he liked it. But he was a lovely guy. That was one of our firstest gigs, so it was a long time ago now.

On touring with Real Estate:

It was, like, a dream come true. I got into Alex Bleeker and the Freaks before I heard Real Estate — before they’d blown up, I guess, before you couldn’t not hear them. But when I heard them, instantly I was like, “Oh, I love this band.” So every day to be hanging out, and they’re just the most lovely people, and they really liked our music and we really like them. So it was just a dream. It was a lovely experience — the best way to travel your wonderful country.

I think we were all really inspired by how we saw Real Estate as a band and how they worked. We learned a lot from them about how to perform and how to get your songs across. Julia would watch Matt [Mondanile] and she’d be like, “I want to get one of those pedals.” I used Martin [Courtney]‘s guitar pedals a lot of the time on tour just so I wouldn’t have to set up, and I’d say, “I want to step on this one,” and I’d step on it, and shit would just go all over the place. Pat [O'Neill] would be like, “I want you to get one of those pedals for ‘Coast to Coast,’ it made the song go crazy!” So we like what they do. I can’t wait to see what they keep coming with, because they’re into the Clean and they played that “Anything Could Happen” song, and to me that’s such a coincidence. It’s like, “You guys covered that song? That’s why Rick and I started a band.” We’re just like friends from another side of the world, but if we were in New Jersey we’d be buddies, and if they were here, we’d be buddies.

On being compared to Real Estate:

Yeah, when our record came out, a lot of that was said, and I was like, “Oh, that’s amazing!” They’re so good. Martin and I are really good friends, so when we go on tour, I guess I kind of understood. We listen to a lot of the same music, and we’re just gentle men. He’s a songwriter, that dude. He writes killer songs. And with Twerps, I’ll come up with some ideas and the band will all make it. But I really like that comparison, and if it was a comparison that came up a lot, I’d be like, “Enough with that.” I like what they do, and I don’t think we sound enough like them. We’re Australian. We have our own stamp.

On playing SXSW:

I have a love/hate relationship with it. Like, I quite like the idea of it, but about four hours into being there, I can’t deal with it. Just because I don’t think we’re that type of band, you know? You drive into the city and all you can smell is pizza and a snare drum the whole day. I don’t think we’ve ever been a band that’s gonna be like, “OK, we’re gonna get up and perform five times, ’cause this time might be the one time someone comes.” And obviously, you have expectations of what it’s gonna be like when you go there, but it definitely was eye opening for all of us and very tiring, and I don’t think our songs — I’m not saying other people’s songs don’t have meaning, but when we play them, we try to make them feel like what we were feeling. And trying to give that to someone five times a day, maybe while standing on the back of a fuckin’ big truck to three people eating hot dogs, just doesn’t work for us sometimes. Saying that, we had a good time and met a lot of lovely people. What we’re there to do is just play and work, and for me in particular, it’s a hard thing. I don’t want to ruin our chances by not playing good shows.

On being friends with several great Melbourne rock bands:

Rick’s fiancée is from Super Wild Horses, and he plays in a band with one of the dudes from Eddy Current. We’d see them every weekend — they’re just our buddies. We were all friends before we started playing in Twerps or before Super Wild Horses started or before Beaches started. We were all in other bands and other things. Now it’s just the same, it’s just we’re doing other bands. It is funny, sometimes I’ll be having a beer with three dudes and they’re all from different bands. It’s not like we’re like, “We’re in bands! That’s what we do! We hang out!” It’s just the people we hang out with that we’re inspired by. It’s a small little world.

On the video store where he met Rick:

I worked at a video store and I remember Rick always used to come in with his girlfriend. And they’d always get cool movies. He’s a bit older than me — I’m a bit younger than the rest of the band — but he’s a really nice guy. The girl that worked there said, “I’m going to get a friend to work,” and it was him, and in the first 10 minutes, we were buddies. He took me under his wing. We’d go to shows like every day if they were on. He showed me this music scene that I hadn’t been into.

After we got back from America, I got my job [at the video store] back. The people that work there are cool. We’d drink beer on the shift and just chat. It was a really nice place to work. I like them — they’re always kind of warm places, there’s usually a movie going on in the background, and there’s so much to choose from. It’s like a record store.

I noticed while I was over there [in America] that Blockbuster was selling everything. You’ve got Netflix, why do you need a video store? It’s the best thing ever.

On what he’s listening to lately:

I never really liked Neil Young, which is weird. But I’ve been listening to his records. I like that War on Drugs record. I really like David Kilgour’s solo record with this guy Sam Hunt, who was a New Zealand poet — they made a beautiful record with just a 12-string and an acoustic. I like Paul Kelly.

On how the band has changed their approach to songwriting:

I don’t think it’s going to take a direction of “Pat’s going to play electronic drums” or something. But I think the songs are going to be a bit more considered in the writing technique. I feel songs like “Dreamin’” and “Coast to Coast” and stuff, I’d just be like, “Here’e the riff, let’s just jam.” And then we’d just want to finish the song, so we’d go with whatever came first. A lot of our songs, we just played for 10 minutes and would want to play it at the next show. We’d be so pumped. But now that we’ve got a bit of time, maybe we’ll try and think about how songs should progress.

Jules has a couple killer ones. Jules is writing a lot more, and I’ve been so into so much different music. I don’t want all these songs to sound so different. And Twerps has never been about a direction, it’s just about making songs ’cause that’s what they are. Maybe over summer, we’ll try to record [the album]. The goal is to have it by March. I don’t want to rush that — that’s why we make the songs, to make the best ones we want to make. Rick doesn’t like doing fillers — not that we’re ready to call songs “fillers” — but we want to make sure we’re happy with all of them.

On sharing songwriting duties with Julia:

Jules has a new one that’s so killer. We’ve played it three times at our last three shows. It’s next level. The band started [with me writing most of the songs] because the other guys weren’t write songs, but I was, so I was the one coming into rehearsal with all of them and they were playing catch-up with the ones I had. But now we’re kind of up to date with where I’m at, and Julia’s been writing even more. She’ll look at a song in a different way from me, so it’s really interesting and fun to learn through her. I don’t want it to be one man’s project. I like the idea that Julia can sing and make her songs. She’s my girlfriend, so it’s an interesting dynamic. I’d really like for it to be an even six-five, five-six [split], because her songs are probably about how I’m irritating her or how she saw the sun one day. She’s a really good singer, we just need to get her more strong and happy with her vocals.

On his spare time:

I procrastinate about why I’m not playing my guitar. This is what I want to do — I want to play my guitar. I want to make songs. But then a lot of the time, you can’t just be making songs. I can’t, anyway. So a lot of the time, I’ll just be sitting, stewing, I’ll check the internet, I’ll take my dog for a walk, I’ll call my buddies. I used to skateboard a lot to get some nervous energy out, but I’m worried that I’ll hurt myself now. I want to be a primary school teacher, so I think I’d like to go back to school. Rick’s a graphic designer, Pat’s a photographer and Julia’s a printmaker, so I’ve got all these arty ones around me and I just procrastinate at home, thinkin’, “What am I going to do — how am I going to ruin this band?” I used to play video games, but now I just sit around and go, “Shit!”

Deerhoof, Breakup Song

For 20 years, Deerhoof has written restless, explosive, oddly-shaped songs that still accommodate pop’s basics: pretty melodies and words about love. Their discography — especially the visionary stretch from Reveille to The Runners Four — is like an experiment in trying to make difficult music in the most charming way possible. For the past few years, they’ve been transitioning: Guitarist Chris Cohen left in 2006; and after one album as a trio, the band added multi-instrumentalist Ed Rodriguez.

Despite these lineup shifts, Deerhoof remain inescapably Deerhoof: They’ll never sound like anyone else. But what was once more or less garage rock in a food processor now features salsa horns (“There’s That Grin”), synthesizers (“Bad Kids to the Front”), and a newfound sense of what to do with processed drums (“Mario’s Flaming Whiskers III”). The changes don’t dilute their sound as much as expand its possibilities. “Accessibility” has always been a relative quality in Deerhoof’s music: If you eat sand every day, the occasional piece of paper might taste pretty good. Breakup Song is a clever title in part because it sounds like a description of what Deerhoof has always done: taken what might be otherwise accessible songs and broken them up into thousands of little parts. Over the past few albums, though, they’ve mellowed (also a relative term) — a few songs here even make it from start to finish without changing their time signature.

Matsuzaki is not a deep lyricist. “Panda panda panda panda pan,” reads a verse from 2002′s sensibly titled “Panda Panda Panda” — “bye bye.” But her deliberate lack of eloquence is also her way of being direct. “Ready for a love,” she sings on “Fete d’Adieu.” “Ready to be tough. As a robot on the dancefloor. A muscle in the heart.” It’s a hint that the steadiness in her voice was not particularly easy to come by. Even their flashiest, weirdest songs are counterbalanced with simple emotional statements. It’s a neat distraction technique: They do crazy tricks with one hand and punch you in the stomach with the other.

Nothing on Breakup Song stays around for long. Even the gorgeous, restful passages that end “Fete d’Adieu” and “Mothball the Fleet” cycle once or twice, then stop. For all their experiments, Deerhoof is ultimately a tidy, strong-willed band that knows the perfect word only needs to be said once. If they seem impatient, it’s the wondrous impatience of children: They know how much there is to be done.