Remember singing telegrams? Yeah, me neither. At least in my lifetime, their existence seems to have been purely pop-cultural.

But no longer(!), provided you like your missives flavored with saccharine, and occasionally anarchic, indie pop.

Thao with the Get Down Stay Down—formerly of Virginia, lately of San Francisco—will write and record a singing telegram for the winner of a raffle; the (kinda steep) $20 ticket price benefits CASH Music. The nonprofit creates open-source software and code to ease the distribution of music.

Read More “Thao Nguyen Wants to Write You a Song” »

No, not together, although that would be kind of funny.

The Points—pictured here, covered in beer and spit—recently posted five new demos on their MySpace page. Three chords used to be all The Points could handle, but these scuzzy, blown out recordings prove that the band’s aesthetic has evolved a little bit over the last year. “Now I Want It” has at least six chords.

Also, The Points are playing Friday, Oct. 16th.
@ Quarry House Tavern

Is Antelope broken up? Hard to say for certain. It’s been a minute since the band’s full length LP, Reflector, came out and they haven’t performed a show in almost a year. Then again, Antelope (which includes City Paper contributor Justin Moyer) has never really been in a hurry. Reflector came out two years after the band’s last 7″ single. Not exactly a hot-on-the-heels-type situation.

Whatever the status of Antelope may be, singer/guitarist/drummer Bee Elvy has been keeping busy. He recently posted some new material to his Website. Three video clips find him chanting over some house music-inspired synth bleeps.

It’s likely no accident that, at least on cursory listens, Psychic Chasms (Lefse Records) sounds out-of-time and incidental, like the gauzy score to a local-access television spot long relegated to the backwaters of YouTube. Certainly, there’s a degraded and lo-fi quality to this debut by Neon Indian, the project of 21-year-old Alan Palomo, who is based in Austin. That hissy, washed-over aesthetic is essential to the 30-minute album, but unlike the other glo-fi acts the blogosphere slobbered over all summer, Psychic Chasms has a productive tension between sound and songwriter.

Read More “Reviewed: Neon Indian’s Psychic Chasms” »

Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney and guitarist-vocalist Dan Auerbach are currently continuing the experimentation heard on 2008’s Attack and Release through their respective side projects. Before regrouping for this fall’s Blakroc project with Mos Def and RZA, Auerbach is touring in support of his solo album, Keep It Hid, and Carney is playing bass in his new side band, Drummer.

Do the extracurricular projects signal a new direction or broadening of sound? Or could it prompt them to draw back to the purer elements of the Black Keys?

“Dan and I started the Black Keys when we were very young and our first record came out when we were both 22,” says Carney. “In the past seven years we have grown a lot as musicians and have started to feel comfortable changing and doing what we want. Neither of us would ever want to feel like we need to sound a certain way to be pure.”

Read More “Drummer Combines Sundaes and Hot Dogs” »

Because I wrote about Title Tracks’ versions of songs by The Flamin’ Groovies and The Merseybeats earlier this week, and because Bob Dylan’s truly atrocious new disc of Christmas standards leaked yesterday, I’ve been thinking a lot about covers.

Let’s put aside the illustrious history of ill-advised tributes (read: the entire Me First and the Gimme Gimmes oeuvre). A good cover can both satisfy a simple, dorky impulse—to hear one artist you admire spin another in an interesting way—and prove rather instructional. For example, it can tell you that Title Tracks frontman John Davis is probably a sucker for semi-obscure gems (he is), as well as a student of infectious, pop-classicist hooks. With that in mind, I’ve collected some recent covers by local artists.

My short list, after the jump, is fairly folk- and indie-centric, and by no means complete. Tell me what I missed in the comments.

Read More “Your Local Faves, Playing Other People’s Songs” »

Never mind its status as an icon of Madchester and forerunner of Britpop. Happy Mondays remains in easy contention for another rock superlative: rudest fookin’ band. The drugged-up, blissed-out Mancunians made some pretty memorable, influential music around the late ’80s and early ’90s (see especially Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches), but mostly they earned notoriety for frontman Shaun Ryder’s antics: a very public heroin addiction, explosive comments, several threats made with unloaded guns. The band fell apart in the early ’90s, and Ryder went on to form Black Grape. Since then, he’s reformed the Mondays twice, in 1999 and in 2007. (The current incarnation stops at the 9:30 Club tonight with another great ’80s band, Pyschedelic Furs, and Islands.) All the while, Ryder—once a thuggish, pranksterish lothario—has remained insanely quotable. After the jump, some of his better bon mots.

Read More “Things Shaun Ryder Has Said: Happy Mondays @ 9:30 Club Tonight” »

John Davis’ new project, Title Tracks, makes some mean power pop, and it covers some, too. Davis, who played in the defunct Georgie James and Q & Not U, recently posted some quick-and-dirty demos to his MySpace: ”I Can’t Hide,” one of the catchiest teenage anthems by the influential ’70s band The Flamin’ Groovies, and “I Stand Accused,” a similarly themed ditty by the mostly forgotten British Invasion group The Merseybeats.

Davis’ band, which plays tonight at the Black Cat, occasionally covers both songs live. Davis wrote in an e-mail that he recorded the covers in his Brookland practice space with Michael Cotterman and Andrew Black, who play bass and drums in the band’s live incarnation (Davis plays every instrument in the studio).

“I think they were just songs that fit in with what we were doing overall,” Davis wrote. “We were actually playing that Flamin’ Groovies song on the final Georgie James tour in Europe last year (Michael and Andrew also played with me in GJ), so it was something we knew and just thought we’d bring back and do again.”

Read More “Hear (Groovy) Title Tracks Covers, See Title Tracks Tonight” »

Think of all the truly awesome things that Merge Records has accomplished in its 20-year existence. Not only has the label—founded in the late ’80s by Superchunk members Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan—released countless 7″ singles, LPs, and at least one boxed-set by myriad worthy artists, but they’ve pulled off a few truly improbable feats. Merge basically invented the tolerable use of brass in indie-rock. Before Neutral Milk Hotel, the best you could get was June of 44’s Fred Erskine playing balloon-on-scalp-style free jazz trumpet. The label also put out countless Lambchop records, even though Europeans were the only people who listened to them.

But most remarkably, Merge has grown into a widely successful record label in the most humble and respectable way possible—keeping their business personable, modest, and honest. Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, an oral history assembled by John Cook alongside Ballance and McCaughan, tells the label’s story through countless photographs, fliers, and extensive interviews. Washington City Paper recently spoke with McCaughan, who will be reading selections from the book tonight at Crooked Beat.

Q&A after the jump:
Read More “Merge Records’ Mac McCaughan @ Crooked Beat Tonight” »

Considering the group only has one full-length album to its name, Ra Ra Riot brought an impressively enthusiastic audience to a sold-out 9:30 Club last night. The Syracuse indie-pop sextet put on a show better than its album would lead one to expect—the hour-long set was just enough to leave fans wanting more.

Photos after the jump and at the full gallery.

Read More “Photos: Ra Ra Riot @ 9:30 Club” »

There are two questions Sacramento, Calif.’s Ganglians say they’re asked all the time: Is the band named after ganglion cysts? (Those are gross and kind of cool, frontman Ryan Grubbs said Tuesday, but no.) Also, what’s it like to trip on ayahuasca?

Grubbs said he loves talking about psychoactive drugs almost as much as taking them. But he and his bandmates have never ingested that particular one, which is hard to find outside of South America. (Not that he wouldn’t, he said.)

“We definitely talk about acid experiences a lot,” said Grubbs, whose band opens for Wavves tonight at the Rock & Roll Hotel. “I think it was Rob [Enbom] of Eat Skull who told some guy from The Agit Reader that when we were on tour with him we were finding psychoactive stuff along the road like ayahuasca and ingesting it.” Which is true, Grubbs said, except for the ayahuasca part. “Our bass player Adrian [Comenzind] is a botanist. He’s like the hippie of the group.”

Read More ““What’s the Question, Again?”: A Trippy Interview with Ganglians” »