To judge by their tightly wound, country-tinged pop songs, Olivia Mancini and the Mates aren’t shorting their craft. But even the most polished band needs its R&R, and this local act—featuring two former members of Washington Social Club—loves to curl up with a good book. That’s the impression, at least, left by “Graphology,” a rollicking gem from the group’s new album in which Mancini lists maybe a dozen book titles. Apparently, her bookshelf (including 50 Years of Fender, 1776, and Bob Dylan’s Chronicles) is pretty heavy on nonfiction, although some Dashiell Hammett sneaks in (noir does not make its way, it only sneaks). Pretty eclectic stuff: too bad, then, that Mancini concludes each verse with “those are not enough to make me smart.” But we’ve all been there.

Olivia Mancini and the Mates perform tomorrow at the Black Cat with Stripmall Ballads. $8. You can download “Graphology” at the group’s Web site. Here’s another song:

More literary pop songs after the jump, including a nonsensical (what else!) Pynchon tribute, a lucrative (?!) Brontë homage, and Dan Bejar being Dan Bejar!

Read More “Clip Job: Five Songs About Books” »

When Blind Pilot frontman Israel Nebeker and drummer Ryan Dobrowski were looking for an isolated place to finish writing the band’s debut album, 3 Rounds and a Sound, they settled on a defunct cannery on the Oregon coast they called “Big Red”—not to be confused with “Big Pink,” the house in upstate New York where Bob Dylan and the Band absconded to write and play in solitude.

Nebeker says that while he doesn’t necessarily see the group as an extension of the American folk tradition (his songwriting idol was Billy Corgan, not Dylan) his music very much of a piece with the band’s own roots. “I think we wanted to make music that would fit in that idea of moving out to a cannery that was built in the late 1800’s,” he said in a phone interview. “We wanted it to fit there. And we also wanted it to fit in the land and the towns going down the West Coast.”

In other words: small, organic, honest. “Maybe about half the songs on the album I wasn’t even going to share with people, because I was sort of going through a phase writing songs that [only] made full sense to me,” Nebeker said. “I’m always surprised when it translates.” Sure, the lyrics on 3 Rounds and a Sound can be impenetrable. But the album’s tone requires little translation; in its melancholy warmth we glimpse love, guilt, and regret—indeed, Blind Pilot’s stripped-down ballads are destined to inspire reckless romantic impulses among audiences of whatever Fox Searchlight film inevitably features the band on its soundtrack.

Happily, you don’t have to wait that long; Blind Pilot plays tonight with the Low Anthem at the Black Cat—$15, doors open at 8. More from City Paper’s conversation with Nebeker after the jump.

Read More “Blind Pilot at the Black Cat Tonight:
A conversation with Israel Nebeker” »

Heavy on the Mellotron, fuzz tones, and paisley, The Black Hollies Softly Towards the Light has more psychedelic homage than a stack of Bomp! fanzines. You wouldn’t guess, then, that three out of four members of the band had toiled long and hard in the New Jersey post-hardcore outfit Rye Coalition. But that hoodie-to-turtleneck-and-sunglasses swap-out isn’t as awkward as it might seem.

Read More “Tuesday Rock City: The Black Hollies” »

Thanks in part to Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street, it didn’t take long for the rock-star-toiling-away-in-seclusion narrative to go from the stuff of critical legend to obvious fodder for parody. Nevermind that two years later saw the release and instant canonization of Bob Dylan and the Band’s long-buried The Basement Tapes—the inspiration, in fact, for the DeLillo character Bucky Wunderlick’s “The Mountain Tapes.” And so for listeners, the brilliant, hermetic artist has persisted, both as a reductive, suspect concept and as an undeniably seductive one. Listed here, some examples of the latter.

The D.C./Baltimore psych-folk act Le Loup retreated to a cabin in North Carolina to record much of its latest album, Family (out now on Hardly Art) and the result is druggy, country-fried, and poppy. Take “Grow,” which sports what might be the best pairing of Beach Boys harmonies and the “Be My Baby” beat since, well, the Beach Boys. But the real innovation here is space: Where past Le Loup songs were concise and linear, Family’s breathe and frolic and expand. The band—which performs Saturday at the Black Cat with Pree—recently recorded a session for All Our Noise. Check it out:

More records made in wooded seclusion after the jump: Reluctant backwoods Svengalis, some latter-day Johnny Cash, and brassy mountain ditties!

Read More “Clip Job: Five Records Made in Cabins (Other than Bon Iver)” »

With monikers such as The Colonel, Tait Nucleus?, and Smorgasbord!, and a catalog that includes an album called I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being the Master, the Detroit-based sextet Electric Six is often mistaken for a novelty act parodying the aggressive sexuality of disco and arrogant posturing of rock and roll.

But the band’s frontman, Dick Valentine, chafes at the suggestion that the Electric Six are anything short of straight-faced. “Cynical, yes, but not satirical,” says Valentine, whose real name is Tyler Spencer, in a phone interview with Washington City Paper. “Novelty is something that you premeditate, and you’re doing something that you wouldn’t normally do because you want to call attention to yourself or you want to sell more records. And with this band, it’s always been my path of least resistance—it’s just that these songs come naturally… I don’t think we’re trying to make a statement about other types of music in that way.”

Read More “Electric Six @ Black Cat” »

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” »

It’s probably not fair to call The Pains of Being Pure at Heart a lo-fi band. Certainly, the New York group’s self-titled album sounds appropriately hissy and fuzzy. But “lo-fi” also connotes an attitude, a puritanical devotion to songwriting whether it comes at the expense of sound quality or not.

But when the four-piece, which plays tonight at the Black Cat, released the song “Higher Than the Stars” earlier this month, I was taken slightly aback at the single’s wintry synths and programmed gurgles. And I wasn’t the only one. But maturity doesn’t have to be a bad thing, nor do higher production values. And you only need to look at some of the band’s forebears to see why:

Read More “In Defense of Hi-Fi Maturity:
Pains of Being Pure at Heart @ Black Cat” »

Almost 40 years after the fact, Faust remains a standard-bearer of Krautrock, the German experimental rock movement of the early 1970s.

Just don’t call Faust a Krautrock band.

For one thing, says Jean-Herve Péron, one of the group’s two remaining original members, Faust doesn’t have many fans in Germany, even though it’s still based there. For another, none of the musicians on the current tour, which stops at the Black Cat Sunday for the final night of the Sonic Circuits Festival, happens to be German. Péron is French, original drummer Zappi Diermaier is Austrian, James Johnston is British, and Geraldine Swayne is Irish.

Read More “Sonic Circuits: Don’t Call Faust ‘Krautrock’” »

Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, of Hoboken, N.J.’s Yo La Tengo, are married. Despite the rumors, Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino, better known as the Brooklyn band Matt & Kim, are not.

At Matt & Kim’s sold-out show at the Black Cat Wednesday, Schifino showed off what has to be indie pop’s most expressive face, while Johnson—with his Von Trapp good looks and overstimulated banter—spent half of the band’s hyperactive set pogoing on his stool. No drums-and-keys duo is more animated and entertaining, nor more modest, nor more, well, annoying. The set was all minute-long brat-pop nuggets and synthed-up arena themes (”Rock And Roll Part 2,” “The Final Countdown,” ODB’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”), and the crowd (youngish) ate it up. As for me, it was hard to begrudge Johnson and Schifino their success: They were too adorable.

Kaplan and Hubley (along with their bandmate James McNew) offer little in the way of body language. A shared smile and a quip from Kaplan after the couple forgot the lyrics to a Beach Boys cover (”Farmer’s Daughter”) was about all the physical rapport on display at a sold-out 9:30 Club last night. Here was a headier affair, and a nerdier one: Yo La Tengo opened with an acid test (”Here To Fall”), continued with 10-plus minutes of deep drone and blissed-out harmonies (”More Stars Than There Are In Heaven”), dug deep into its repertory (covers of Black Flag and Half Japanese), and even deeper into its celebrated discography (I counted a half-dozen crowd-pleasers, give or take).

Read More “Lover’s Rock: Yo La Tengo @ 9:30 Club, Matt & Kim @ Black Cat” »

Maudlin, noisy, and atmospheric, Last Tide is invested as much in mid-’80s navel-gazing as late-’80s shoegaze. I’m not sure if that makes the young D.C. four-piece kneegaze or thighgaze, but I do know that the group’s new EP, The Broken Places, is an engrossing study in dichotomies—the five songs are vociferous yet ebullient, miserable yet poppy, weather-worn yet insistent. The vocals, too, are diametric opposites: Keyboardist Libby Dorot’s are delicate, even ethereal—a perfect foil to guitarist Nate Frey’s large, searching baritone. Drummer Misha Alexander and bassist Rob Miller complete the group, and City Paper’s own Justin Moyer (aka Edie Sedgwick) engineered the recording.

Last Tide drops the EP in physical form in October, but for now, you can hear the whole thing on the group’s MySpace (although the version of “A Traitor In My Mind” is actually a shortened “single edit,” for those keeping score at home). And you can listen to the band live this weekend on WMUC’s Third Rail Radio program, Sunday at 6 p.m. at www.wmucradio.com (or 88.1 on your FM dial).

The group’s EP release show is Oct. 26 at the Black Cat Backstage with Austin’s Ringo Deathstarr and D.C.’s The State Department. Doors open at 9 p.m.