FRIDAY NOSTALGIA!! Braid

Frankie Welfare Boy Age 5/Age of Octeen/Movie Music Vol. 1 & 2 Vinyl Reissues (Polyvinyl, 04.2010)

For: Capn' Jazz, Sky Corvair, Fugazi meets Mineral

Byline: Braid's first two seminal albums and killer singles/b-side collections get reissued and remastered from Polyvinyl.

In commemoration of the Polyvinyl reissue of Braid's earliest albums and singles/b-sides/rarities collections, as well as my subsequent interview with Braid frontman Bob Nanna for SLUG on tuesday, I am dedicating this round of FRIDAY NOSTALGIA!! (remember all caps, two exclamation marks) to my favorite high school band of all time. Picking up Braid's Movie Music Vol. One at Angelo's Records in Littleton was a pretty important experience in my teen years. After hearing the word Braid being thrown around the internet as a wildly influential emo band, I decided to go on a limb and pick up the first album of theirs I saw. I'm glad I did, Movie Music is a posthumous release of singles and b-sides documenting some of their earliest recorded material. Those early years were the best Braid years, freshmen at University of Illinois, Braid had more mathy time-signature change-ups, frentic yelps, shrieks, and "yeahs" via hype man Chris Broach, and straight killer melodies per song than most emo second-wavers had per album. Needless to say, Southwestern Denver record stores got a literal deluge of crappy pop-punk cds once I heard the opening track "Sounds Like Violence". Each song was a cauldron of sweaty exuberance and barely contained angst. Braid killed it back in the day, even if they were still feeling their way into new territory after playing in hardcore and punk bands. The prototypical melodic hardcore "Minuet" following slower tempoed "Capricorn" on Frankie Welfare Boy showcases a band working hard to figure out what they sound like, and after 26 songs, it is amazing to realize just how cohesive they actually sounded. Later as the time signatures became more conventional and Braid really began hitting their stride, they began penning anthems in the truest sense of the word. "Forever Got Shorter", "Hugs From Boys", "Lucky To Be Alive" still retain their sense of immediacy and throat-tightening urgency after almost 10 years. Talking to Bob Nanna, I got the sense that Braid knew what they wanted, and worked relentlessly to get it, the liner notes to Frankie Welfare Boy read, "we want to be on your comp!". Braid simply wanted their music heard. After almost 10 years together, playing 47 of 50 states (Alaska, W. Virginia, and N. Dakota have yet to be rocked), in addition to Japan and Europe, the elusive success that Braid sought after would come in the thousands of bands in their wake in which Braid is a communal touchstone of life-changing music. Kudos to Polyvinyl for making sure these great albums inspire more kids to throw out the tired verse-chorus song structure, experiment with crazy time changes and to play with the intensity of a post-adolescent 19 year old. My hats are off to you Braid, you will forever be my "favorite band ever".

Ryan H.

Aloha

Home Acres (Polyvinyl, 03.2010)

For: AM/FM, The Velvet Teen, Silver Apples

Byline:The geographically displaced prog-poppers delve deep into tempestuous topics and emerge with the heaviest and ultimately best album of their career. Originally published on www.inyourspeakers.com. Used by permission from In Your Speakers, LLC.

....After releasing 2006’s universally acclaimed prog-pop tour-de-force Some Echoes and their equally lauded, stripped-down acoustic EP Light Works, Aloha’s opening announcement of a bass drum pedal being hammered to the floor, and a driving bassline on “Building A Fire” sound downright explosive. This concentrated repackaging of Cale Park’s most propulsive moments lock the song into a focused canter of laser beam intensity. Guitars come in quick, staccato bursts; barely melodic but hardly atonal, breaking the minimalist percussion show just enough to make themselves felt, and then exiting as quickly as they entered. After an announcement this compelling, “Moonless March” begins to unpack the kinetic interplay between Lipple’s lisping vocals (buried under layers of distortion) and vibraphone arrangements, and Park’s virtuoso percussion. “Moonless March” has been a longstanding crowd favorite; Aloha has been kicking the song around since at least early 2007 and its belated appearance on a full-length album benefits from years of tinkering, making it the album’s immediate standout single. Barely changing tempo from “Building a Fire,” “Moonless March” is Parks at his most jaw-droppingly frantic while still sounding amazingly cohesive....

...Crawling out of the self-imposed Siberian exile is the sentiment on “Waterwheel,” a semi-mystic rumination on existence reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s short film Village of Watermills. Watermills, in that film, represent the concept of cyclic rebirth and the transitory nature of life. Lipple posits “two hands on the waterwheel/the cold creek runs through everyone from here.” I can dig that. While we may not have total control over the course of our lives, there are quite a few things that we can control, and while we may not immediately see the direct results of our actions, they do exist somewhere down the line. Moments like these make me glad I am listening to this album for the express purpose of revealing some of its mysteries to others. Even if the world ends (please let it end after March 9th so you can hear this) at least I got a glimpse of something really wonderful.

I wonder if Spring gets off on being withholding. It comes at a time when you are past looking forward to it; it comes when you are comfortably settled within the cool hues of gray winter skies. Home Acres, while decidedly overcast, still retains a lining of the group’s entry-level stabs at making sense of the universe. 2010 finds Aloha a little older and a little wiser, like your smart older brother saying, “look, I don’t have all the answers. I’m just as confused as you are.”

Read the full article here on www.inyourspeakers.com

Ryan H.

Aloha myspace

Adelyn's pick of the month: Owen

New Leaves (10.09, Polyvinyl Records)

For: American Football, Aloha, Damien Jurado

Byline: Sounds of settling.

After fronting some of the most influential, scene-starting bands such as American Football and The One Up Downstairs, spending most of his adult life touring, writing trechent critiques of himself his L'enfant Terrible of a stage persona, Mike Kinsella is ready to settle down. Recently wed and house broken, New Leaves is his homage to the normal life with all its moments of domestic bliss and pangs of regret from leaving his carefree young-adulthood behind. Lyically, these themes have been trod heavily by his earlier works, but Owen writes songs like he writes melodies, pulling out unseen truths out of repeated lines in a single key.

Up to this point Mike Kinsella's most complex song arrangements have been a product of his cottage industry recording set up. Acoustic guitars, pedals, occasional percussion and synths strewn about his mom's living room while he tries not to sing loud enough to wake anyone else in the house up. However, recording leisurely over the span of two years have led him into the legit studios of Brian Deck (Iron & Wine), Tim Iseler (Wilco) and Graeme Gibson (Califone). The new found clarity and professionalism shows, but it is difficult to describe how. Mike Kinsella has a perfectly idiosyncratic and immediately recognizable sound palate used in every release. His intricately plucked, repeating guitar lines are uniquely Kinsella (I'm pretty sure I've used 'Kinsella-like' as an adjective). Sometimes, additional instrumentation can be a sophisticated way of saying burying great ideas under the weight of too many great ideas. But on New Leaves even his most produced arrangements still have room to breathe. For example, "Amnesia and Me" steers into a decidedly country/americana direction with it's slide guitars and rhythm and blues breakdown. Stronger strummed guitars, a deep bass section and a nice electronic pitter-patter mark the confident "A Trenchant Critique" while a swooning Andrew Bird-esque bowed violin make the track almost unbearably good.

Mike Kinsella, by his own admission, is prematurely cantankerous. New Leaves while promoting a newfound thematic foil of marriage and settling is still not without its slow burn of subdued wanderlust. Like John Steinbeck said, "When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch...Nothing has worked." Or as Mike Kinsella says, "I always thought I would end up owning my own boat before a home."

Ryan H.