You can get a small sense of how that sound emerged at Hugh McElroy’s Ruffian Records Web site, which recently posted some free MP3s from two of McElroy’s pre-Black Eyes projects, A.K.A. Harlot #1 and Exaspirin, as well as a 1996 session McElroy engineered for New York art punk outfit the Vestpocket Psalm. While you’re there, you can also grab (for free) every song that Horses—McElroy’s 2004 band with Black Eyes members Dan Caldas and Mike Kanin—ever recorded, as well as Hume’s Wyfe EP.

Ruffian also announced a pair of upcoming joint releases with Sockets Records: Phosphenes, the debut full-length by aggro post-rockers Imperial China, and a compilation LP featuring local bands. In an e-mail, McElroy wrote that the labels are hoping to release the compilation in the spring.

First, Asa Osborne—formerly of Baltimore gnostic/punk quartet Lungfish—will perform with his guitar/organ project, Zomes. Lisa Selin Davis will read. That’s kind of a tough gig, though, considering the last person to put words in or around Osborne’s music was Dan Higgs.

Then, in February, J. Robbins—fresh from reissuing the late ’90s masterpiece For Your Own Special Sweetheart and performing on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon with the reunited Jawbox—will perform his first ever solo show. Marianne Villanueva and Steve Fellner will read.

Dates and details after the jump:

December 4, 2009
Readings from Lisa Selin Davis (Belly)
Musical Performance by Zomes (Asa Osborne of Lungfish)

February 19, 2010
Readings from Marianne Villanueva (Mayor of Roses)
and Steve Fellner (Out Loud)
Musical Performance: J. Robbins Sings J. Robbins
(First ever solo show! New interpretations of Jawbox songs and other works from his canon)

This is a free event.
Program Begins at 8:00 PM
The Writer’s Center is located on the Red Line
at 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD

If a scene happened thirty years ago and no one paid attention, should anyone care now? Two new documentaries make the case by covering bands not regularly associated with the infancy of American punk. Let Them Know: The Story of Youth Brigade and BYO Records is a fond reminiscence; You Weren’t There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977-1984 makes good on its title’s insular, accusatory tone. With the marquee bands of the era enshrined in boomer-like reverence, Let Them Know and You Weren’t There are in the double-bind of portraying lesser-known subjects as overlooked trailblazers without hallowing a decidedly checkered past.

And it’s a history that, at this point, has taken on a familiar hue: the halcyon days are short-lived, the club owners crooked, the bathrooms despicable, the cops assholes. It should be noted that punks back then were the real deal, though remembering the fury and danger of the early days is not quite as fond an exercise for those on the wrong end of a police officer’s baton.

Let Them Know follows the Stern brothers as they form Youth Brigade, a Southern California band that recorded a handful of seminal albums in the early 1980s along with starting the Better Youth Organization. BYO, described vaguely as a group “coming together to promote positive things we do on our own,” began by promoting shows but eventually evolved into a record label that went on to release bands such as 7 Seconds and SNFU. The four Stern brothers are intriguing personalities but director Jeff Alulis seems flummoxed by their complexity and inconsistencies and commentators scrunch their noses at what they perceive as Youth Brigade’s misfires. It’s a particularly unfortunate angle considering Youth Brigade has not been fully active for decades and BYO’s most prominent contemporary contributions are a punk rock bowling competition and a well-received NOFX/Rancid split, both of which serve as this inconsistently paced story’s happy ending. Alulis adheres to the Michael Moore template of documentary film-making, with its slick cartoon-ish imagery and kitschy 1950s footage, a trick that wouldn’t feel so forced if Paul Rachman hadn’t pilfered similar techniques to enliven 2006’s American Hardcore.

But where the middling American Hardcore takes on too much and Let Them Know lacks focus, You Weren’t There is a clinically thorough look at the Chicago punk scene. Breaking the social contract of keeping punk documentaries under 90 minutes, You Weren’t There methodically chronicles the Chicago punk scene of the late `70s and early `80s in agonizing detail. Rather than make false gestures at a cohesive narrative, directors Joe Losurdo and Christina Tillman dedicate segmented chapters to 14 of the city’s major players. The film’s almost nonexistent coverage of Big Black is probably an intentional demonstration that there is more to Chicago than Steve Albini’s big mouth but glossing over such an important band is unforgivable in the face of a running time topping 120 minutes.

If Alulis’ treatment of the Stern brothers is one of great admiration, Losurdo and Tillman’s more even-handed approach takes on a didacticism that expunges all of the electricity from the music it hopes to exalt. When the films capture sparks of the era’s ingenuity, such as Ian MacKaye’s explanation of how bands scammed corporate credit cards to book tours (or footage of Tutu & The Pirates playing “I Want to be a Janitor” with a plunger and toilet seat guitar), they fall back just as quickly into rote chronological explanations and griping. Neither documentary does justice to punk’s fleeting, scrappy genius.

Louis P. Mazur’s excellent Slate piece on Bruce Springsteen’s 1975 album Born to Run hails the hit record as the fruit of one visionary’s dogged persistence. Springsteen, laboring Lincoln-like through the 1970s, had twice failed to make good on the record industry’s big bets on his ramshackle boardwalk aesthetic—1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park and 1974’s The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1974) had pleased critics, but failed to move units.

According to Mazur, Springsteen’s problem wasn’t a lack of spontaneity, but bad editing. Born to Run documents Springsteen’s triumph over his own first thoughts. “What mattered to [Springsteen] was to sound spontaneous, not to be spontaneous,” Mazur writes. “It took him six months during the spring and summer of 1974 to record the title track.”

This devotion to excellence is why Bruce Springsteen can’t cover Suicide.

Suicide, the revolutionary, drummer-less duo formed by New York art fucks Alan Vega and Martin Rev in the ’70s, was reviled by punks. But, like many reviled things, Suicide still looks and sounds like the future. Here’s an undated performance of the ballad “Dream Baby Dream”:

“Dream Baby Dream” succeeds because it is a jumble of first thoughts. What are these guys doing? What are these guys wearing? Is this even a song? I can’t call Suicide lazy because I didn’t live on the Lower East Side during the Carter administration—perhaps they worked for months or years on the three chords, drum loop, and random chatter that are “Dream Baby Dream.”

I do know that when I saw them at the Black Cat a few years ago, this keyboard/vox two-piece didn’t bother bringing a keyboard to its show. Instead, Martin Rev borrowed a random keyboard from a random guy and, while blasting prerecorded beats through the P.A., danced around in a leather jacket while miming his keyboard parts. The whole performance was a monument to spontaneity.

Here’s the Boss covering “Dream Baby Dream”:

I hope you haven’t watched this full clip, because it’s very boring. It’s easy to see why Springsteen loves Suicide—just as Rev lays down repetitive riffs while Vega riffs on (usually) death and sex, the E Street band lays down repetitive riffs while the Boss riffs on (usually) the exploits of working class heroes (“Johnny 99″ on 1982’s Nebraska sounds particularly like “Johnny” on Suicide’s 1977 debut).

But Boss can’t cover “Dream Baby Dream”— the song’s too spontaneous, too weird, too half-assed, too tossed-off, too bad. Playing it in a stadium is like climbing the Washington Monument just to use the bathroom.

Here’s Suicide live—wild, weird, and, most of all, not boring.

On Daisy, Brand New is still providing soundtrack material for countless unwritten bildungsromans, the kind set in suburban high schools, dorm rooms, and first apartments, and which feature protagonists who didn’t have it rough growing up, and don’t have it all that rough now, but who, deep down, would rather feel pissed off for no reason, than feel, you know, just so so.

Incidentally, Brand New front man Jesse Lacey has implied this might be it. If true, Daisy’s glumness and cacophony are both a touching coda to the group’s own confused youth (fighting with other bands, bitching about neurotic fans, living on Long Island) and a melancholy disclaimer that adulthood does not guarantee equilibrium. (Lacey still lives on Long Island.)

To that end, Daisy is loud, simple, and–with 11 tracks clocking in at 40 minutes–short. Thematically, it contains the same cathartic accusations and dense but intuitively satisfying metaphors as 2006’s The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, which I listened to obsessively while recovering from one friend’s suicide and another friend’s attempted suicide, all the while feeling that Lacey’s melodramatic lyrics were about characters whose experiences were somehow worse than my own.

Mega-suffering takes a slightly different form on Daisy. For instance, the line, “I’m a preacher without a pulpit,” from the title track,  doesn’t make sense at first. Brand New has the 16-24 demographic pinned down like a bull walrus during mating season, and it’s difficult to imagine why, or in what way, they feel like no one’s listening to them. But plenty of their fans, especially the ones who are maturing into the music (as opposed to growing too old for it) probably feel this way once or twice a day, even though their parents and friends/significant others are likely listening to them more than they realize.

Such melodrama probably gave rise the term “emo” being used as a pejorative, but for my money, blowing psychological speed bumps into trenches beats happy-go-lucky any day of the week.

If you’ve never dug Brand New, or if you’ve never listened to them based solely on their reputation, this album is a great place to start. It’s punkish and sonically mature. Especially good music for night drives, overtime at the office, or whenever something bad has happened to you and you need a little help emoting to your full potential.

Stream Daisy at Brand New’s Myspace.

Perhaps you’ve heard there’s a lot of free shit going down this weekend. If you haven’t, well, there’s a lot of free shit going down this weekend. Most of it revolves around the Kia Soul Collective tour, which has set up shop in a warehouse at 3330 New York Ave. NE, with free parking as well as a free shuttle from Union Station. Wale performs in the space tonight at 7 p.m., with DJs Stereofaith, Reed Rothchild, and Chris Burns spinning from 4 p.m. Tomorrow night belongs to Dan Deacon, The Creepers, and Nouveau Riche DJs; the music starts at 8 p.m. And MGMT is headlining an 8 p.m. show Sunday night following DJ sets by DJ CA$$IDY and Dave Nada. To get tickets to this last concert, however, you have to test drive a Kia first, which you can do all weekend, if that’s your thing.

And Future, Army Of Me (in an acoustic iteration), Laughing Man, and The Mighty Heard are all performing outdoors at the H Street Festival on Saturday, all along H Street NE. Brightest Young Things is also hosting a free party that night in the Rock & Roll Hotel’s upstairs bar. Baller.

Dischord Records is now distributing releases by Windian Records, a new label started by The Points drummer Travis “Cobruhhh” Jackson. The band’s new Beat In Hell 7″, whose 6-minute B-side is about four times longer than every other Points song, is available now.

This is a few days old: Dischord and DeSoto Records are rereleasing Jawbox’s 1994 career highpoint For Your Own Special Sweetheart, and they’ve included a few bonus tracks from the very rare Savory+3 EP. The remastered album drops Nov. 23.

The Velodrome dance/not-dance party is back from summer vaycay this weekend.

Local way-beyond-left-field hip-hop band The Cornel West Theory has a release show at Liv next Friday for its new album, Second Rome, and apparently the eminent Princeton African American Studies professor and group namesake will be there.

Image courtesy of Dan Deacon’s MySpace page.

Imperial China’s mathy post-punk probably won’t be the next dispensable soundtrack to an iPod commerical, and the D.C. band knows it. The trio is playing a free set in the Apple Store at the Tysons Corner mall tonight at 6 p.m., and the performance apparently merits this disclaimer: “Yes, really.”

OK, so Imperial China’s jagged, discursive aesthetic doesn’t quite fit with Apple’s peppy minimalism in the same way that Steve Jobs seems to have taken to his new liver. That’s cool: You were probably putting off a trip to the Genius Bar, anyway. This way, you get to hear some tunes from the band’s forthcoming full-length (out this fall) while no doubt finding amusement in your fellow mallgoers’ confusion—over Imperial China’s aggro experimentalism, of course, not to mention the vagaries of Apple’s new operating system. Can you get any more win-win?

Check out the show deets after the jump.

Imperial China

Apple Retail Store, Tysons Corner

1961 Chain Bridge Rd.

McLean, Va., 22102

6 p.m.

Free

Photo illustration by Maciej Makalowski; source image courtesy of Imperial China’s MySpace page.

This review involves a lot of name-dropping. So don’t say you weren’t warned.

And, really, how else to consider Free Energy? The Philadelphia-based blogosphere favorite doesn’t strive for originality, nor even hipster cachet: You can hear Television or Big Star all you want in the quintet’s peppy, big-guitar sound, but really, these guys are all about what you hear on “corporate classic rock stations.” Why it works — at least on record in mp3s — has as much to do with the group’s nonironic approach as its mindless raison d’être and taut, oft-inspired songwriting. We’re understandably skeptical of “woo-ooh,” “oh-oh,” and “hey alright” choruses, but it’s refreshing that Free Energy can actually sell them. Whether that places the band, in those gilded annals of nostalgia rock, closer to The Strokes or The Darkness, I can’t say.

In a quick, fairly energetic, and underattended show at the Black Cat downstairs last night, Free Energy cribbed T. Rex’s “Mambo Sun” almost verbatim and sometimes invoked The Stooges, but mostly, it reveled in the stuff of Alice Cooper, Cheap Trick, early Tom Petty, and (most centrally) Thin Lizzy — think big, loud, elemental, and poppy. Objectively, it was perfect: Hooks breathed, guitars sirened, cowbells clanged. Skinny as death and neon as fuck, singer Paul Sprangers pranced and strutted and crooned, a little bit Iggy Pop, a little less Julian Casablancas. And I was utterly nonplussed.

I suppose I owe you a mea culpa: Strange as it seems, somehow it’s easier to appreciate Free Energy on an academic level than a visceral one. To Sprangers and his bandmates, they’re just channeling their heroes and playing it straight. Hell, drummer Nick Shuminsky was wearing a Styx shirt. But the band’s songs conjure up grander, arena-sized associations it can’t pay off live — never mind the half-empty room. What I’m getting at is this: If you’re going for pure homage, then mean it. Execute rock kicks. Flash a devil sign or two. Spit on your fans. As long as the songs are good — and Free Energy’s songs are very good — it’s not self-parody.

The lexicon Free Energy trades in — of partying ‘cuz it’s all you’ve got left, of girls called “child” and “babe,” where “hold on” is the only imperative — is a seductive one. So are the choruses, repetitive, sure, but entirely infectious. And slowly, the charisma is creaking toward 11.

–

In an entirely different sense, the evening’s openers also made smart use of repetition. With drummer David Rich hospitalized, Buildings (or BLDGS) , usually a quartet, became a one-piece for the evening (BLDG?). Guitarist Collin Crowe smiled nervously as he played, constructing slow-building soundscapes with his guitar, synth, and laptop (chirp noises abounded). In the post-rock tradition, Crowe’s compositions involved much guitar noodling, but these moments were more barbed than fluid — more Nels Cline or Loren Connors, say, than Mogwai or Do Make Say Think.

And the Brooklyn band Bear In Heaven favored crescendoing song structures and unusual rhythms over verse-chorus arrangements and 4/4 beats. The quartet drew from bands blending the epic and the artsy — some Spiritualized, much Deerhunter — and half its members played synths half the time. What resulted was a glazed, insistent aesthetic that probably could use more attentive songwriting, but showed promise. Not terrible for an evening of works-in-progress.

Photo by Benjamin R. Freed.

Pastiche can be a funny thing: When Paul Sprangers and Scott Wells played fuzzy, proggy slacker pop in the St. Paul, Minn., band Hockey Night, I figured that as long as Stephen Malkmus keeps pumping out decent-or-better albums every few years, my brain just doesn’t have the RAM for a Pavement Lite.

If this is beginning to sound like a half-hearted endorsement, I’ll stop and say this: Sprangers and Wells’ new outfit, Free Energy, makes anthemic, insanely catchy music with a hefty, forgivable debt to your favorite ’70s pre- (but not proto-) punk bands — think Thin Lizzy’s chutzpah, Cheap Trick’s contagiousness, and the wide, romantic eyes of The Raspberries. The much-buzzed-about group (now based in Philly) recently signed with New York’s dance-punk mavens DFA, which some people find strange or something, since Free Energy isn’t a dance band. Bullshit. I’m shimmying in my desk chair just writing about these guys. What they lack in originality (plus ça change… and all that), they more than make up for with insistent songwriting, strutting rhythms, and insane hooks.

Free Energy brings its old-is-new-again rock to the Black Cat backstage tomorrow, and the show, also with Bear In Heaven and D.C.’s BLDGS, is well worth your $10. Unless, of course, you’re set on getting your Gossip Girl on with Cobra Starship instead.

This blog has already covered Free Energy’s self-titled single, so check out the hometown-loving video (and show deets) after the jump. (I lived in Philly for two years, so sometimes I gotta rep, too.)

Wednesday, Aug. 26 | Free Energy, Bear In Heaven, and BLDGS | Black Cat downstairs | 8 p.m. | $10

Photo courtesy of Free Energy’s MySpace page.

“We’re trying to have fun right now and not make it too serious,” Travis “Cobruhhh” Jackson, the drummer of D.C.’s noisiest party punkers The Points said yesterday, discussing the pitfalls of long-distance rock ‘n’ roll — Jackson moved to Blacksburg, Va., not long ago, and his bandmate, guitarist and singer George “Geo” White, now lives in Chicago. The geographic disruption may mean more planning, fewer shows, and less spontaneity, but to hear Jackson tell it, the band’s hard-partying (and, more centrally, hard-drinking) ethos remains the same.

The Points dropped a new seven-inch single this week on Jackson’s own Windian Records (City Paper’s own Aaron Leitko recently reviewed the six-minute song “Shout” for Pitchfork), and Geo and Cobruhhh are celebrating tomorrow night at DC9. After the jump, my condensed interview with Jackson.

Washington City Paper: Every time I read about The Points, there’s always something about how hard you rock and how hard you drink. But what do you do when you’re doing neither of those things?

Travis Jackson: Well [he laughs] I guess people say that because, you know, the fact that we’re alcoholics. We definitely, you know, when we’re not playing in the band or having beer, well, I dunno. Life is a celebration.

Washington City Paper: The song “Shout,” at 6 minutes long, is unique for you guys. When you wrote it, did you want to make something so, well, epic? Or did it just come out that way?

Travis Jackson: It kind of just ended up that way. We’ve had a couple of other songs that were six minutes or over, from band practices … When it feels right, you don’t want to stop. We’re not always thinking up three-chord wonders or anything like that.

Washington City Paper: Tell me about writing “Shout.”

Travis Jackson: The song was written a while back. We recorded it and we never put it on any of records because it never really matched up with anything else — the more Ramones-sounding, two-and-a-half minute songs. So I started a label and I pretty much just wanted to get these songs that we really, really liked but that we had pushed aside in the past onto a record.

Washington City Paper: What about the rest of the seven-inch?

Travis Jackson: “Beat In Hell” is more a percussion-heavy song. It’s got a really cool guitar riff, and it’s pretty primal. … It’s a pretty bad, mean song. And “F. Dali” is probably the fastest song we’ve recorded. And it’s about Salvador Dali and how much we hate seeing his posters everywhere. We’re art fans, but you know…

Washington City Paper: …but Surrealism isn’t for you?

Travis Jackson: Well, really, it’s just from being around art schools and seeing Dali on all the dorm walls.

Washington City Paper: How did Windian Records come about?

Travis Jackson: Out of sheer boredom. Geo moved to Chicago and I’m in the mountains. … We can pretty much only practice once a month and I still wanted to focus heavily on something rock ‘n’ roll, so I started a label to put out singles. I’m doing a Two Tears single in October, and Personal and the Pizzas, from Hoboken, N.J., want to do a seven-inch this winter.

Washington City Paper: What else do The Points have planned this year?

Travis Jackson: We’re going to be recording our next record here in the next two or three months. We’ve got about 10 songs ready to go for that, and I guess we’re going to be putting it out on Mud Memory, with [label owner] Justin Moyer, the coolest guy ever. And after that, in 2010, we’re going to tour to support that. Hopefully we’ll get to Europe this time. We didn’t do it this year, for, you know, money reasons. But we really want to go to Europe and keep, you know, rockin’.

(An apology: One-third of the interview recording came out as intelligible as the vocals on a Brainiac album, so you’ve been spared the more discursive moments.)

Photo courtesy of The Points’ MySpace page.