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!

“Gravity’s Rainbow” by Klaxons (2007): This ravey U.K. lad band named a song on its 2007 album, Myths of the Future, after Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 postmodern masterpiece, although the lyrics (something about Tangier deserts and the year 4000) share little with the namesake, save denseness. No clue if Pynchon would approve, but the song is probably a lot better than Laurie Anderson’s proposed (and rejected) Gravity Rainbow opera would have been:

“California Zephyr” by Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar (2009): This rose-tinted cut leads off One Fast Move or I’m Gone, an album inspired by Jack Kerouac’s 1962 novel Big Sur. Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie) and Farrar’s (Son Volt) lyrics draw from Kerouac’s prose, and the two more or less match their vocal styles (earnest and weather-worn, respectively) to the book’s opposing tones (romantic and nightmarish).

“Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush (2008): The first single by the fey, experimental pop singer, which in 1978 made her, at 19 even, the first woman to both record and write a No. 1 single in the U.K. (This after her label wanted to introduce the singer with a safer song, but relented. Go lit!) She penned the song after watching a movie adaptation of Emily Brontë’s tragic novel, which has bedeviled AP Language classes ever since its 1846 publication (OK, it took a few years for it to enter curricula). As weird as it is, the song is pretty restrained for Bush, who continues to make great, challenging music but is utterly to blame for nonsensical ’80s videos like Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

“Your Blood” by Destroyer: Dan Bejar mentions a couple of Albert Camus novels in this cut from his excellent Rubies album. This being Destroyer, though, there is ostensibly no logic as to why.

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.

On writing his first song at age 15:

“I really remember it as being such a completely unknown thing that I didn’t know what I was doing until I was doing it, and then there was this song and I was like ‘Oh, I guess I just wrote a song.’ It was some months later before I had the courage to share them with anyone else. Definitely, on some level, why I make music is something to do with a hope of connecting to people… But also there’s some madness in it without reason. There’s something about all of art that’s contrary to reason.”

On his musical influences for 3 Rounds and a Sound:

“I don’t know if I was trying to write like somebody else anymore, I wanted to get out of the Portland music scene. So Ryan and I just went to the coast just to be alone and see what we could create in that setting. But you know, I was listening to pretty much nothing but Joanna Newsom and Neutral Milk Hotel.”

On the origins of “The Story I Heard,” his current favorite song from the album:

“I was putting in some final weeks at a waiting-tables job in Portland before moving out to Astoria for a summer to write the rest of the album. And I was waiting at a bus stop to go to work, and a guy named JoJo came up and started talking to me. He was asking for spare change and I started talking with him. And he was this guy from Jamaica, and he had this something about him that was just almost contagious, so appealing, even though he was obviously in a pretty rough part of his life. I’m generally a pretty shy and reserved person, but he got me to sing Bobby McFerrin songs at the top of my lungs at the Portland bus stop with him. And it just really got me thinking—not that I judge everybody that I see purposely, but it got me thinking about how I see everyone and judge them without really thinking about it. And also thinking about how myself, and how we’re all judged in each other’s eyes.”

Bassist/vocalist Justin Angelo Morey has a sharp ear for ’60s R&B hooks and Zombies-style harmonies. “Gloomy Monday Morning,” with it’s farfisa organ grooves, is such a thorough psych-pop forgery that even Lenny Kaye wouldn’t know for sure. And a lifetime of high volume pounding will do wonders for your rhythm section. Strawberry Alarm Clock could have benefited from such a stint on the New England basement-show circuit.

The Black Hollies w/ Title Tracks and Brian Scary and the Shredding Tears
@ Black Cat
$10 8:30 pm
1811 14th St. NW

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!

Dandelion Gum by Black Moth Super Rainbow (2007): The members of this blissed-out post-rock band cloak their identities with costumes, pseudonyms, and video-heavy performances, hoping to emphasize their music by de-emphasizing the personalities making it. As the group has acknowledged, this strategy of willful obscurity hasn’t exactly worked out. No kidding: When you record your breakthrough record in a Western Pennsylvania cabin and sing trippy, hypnotic songs about witches, you’re more or less asking to be typecast as backwoods Svengalis.

American Recordings by Johnny Cash (2004): The cabin that the late Johnny and June Carter Cash built in Hendersonville, Tenn., in the late ’70s is definitely that, rustic patina and all. But in the early ’90s, when Johnny began collaborating with producer Rick Rubin for a tetralogy of morose, mostly acoustic albums, the space became a full-fledged studio, which is now run by Johnny and June’s son, John Carter Cash. You can’t find a knobsman more pro than Rubin, but in this case, he simply captured Johnny singing and strumming in his living room. How the Man in Black then wound up with this terrifying Anton Corbijn video, I can’t quite say:

Cabin in the Woods by Retsin (2001): The name says it all. Tara Jane O’Neil and Cynthia Nelson met in the early ’90s when their bands, Rodan and Ruby Falls, shared a tour, and they soon became romantic partners and musical collaborators. The final Retsin album, made more or less in isolation in upstate New York, is dusty and acoustic, drawing as deeply from the well of American folk music as the ’90s indie-folk milieu. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Retsin contributed to a Jandek tribute compilation around the same time.

Songs from the Black Mountain Music Project by Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn and Ginger Brooks Takahashi (2003): This between-album project found the Olympia, Wash., singer Mirah retreating for a month to the Blue Ridge Mountains with an eight-track and some fellow musicians. There, she recorded some playful ditties—more washboard band than precise, lo-fi folk—and found sounds. And then she laid down this brassy jam, which recounts, doo-wop refrain in tow, the month-long experience:

Image courtesy of the Cash Cabin Studio MySpace page.

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.”

On the Electric Six’s new album Kill, out today, the band cuts the usual synth-driven dance rock with some disarmingly sweet monster ballads: “Steal Your Bones,” for instance, is a beautifully composed song that might have cracked the pop charts in the early ’90s. It runs back-to-back with another casually paced ballad called “My Idea of Fun.”

Elsewhere, the band goes after Middle America with “Escape From Ohio,” a takedown of the Buckeye State and its mysterious stranglehold on American culture. “It’s not just a bellwether state in terms of elections,” Spencer says, “but it’s where a lot of products are test-marketed. So if, like, the housewives in Columbus like something, they’ll make more of it for the country.” (The band has tactfully avoided scheduling Ohio dates on its current tour.)

Kill contains some of Electric Six’s most lush, sophisticated songwriting—both musically and lyrically. Spencer is unashamed to say that his music has historically fallen somewhere between “clever and stupid,” but the new record leans toward the former. “I think this is really the only album so far where we want to make sure we play every song at a live show,” Spencer says. Satire might be in the eye of the beholder, but danceability is universal, so Electric Six’s show tomorrow night at the Black Cat should be appealing to everyone—except perhaps housewives from Columbus.

Electric Six performs at 8 p.m. at the Black Cat on Wed., Oct 21. Tickets are $15

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.”

These aren’t the only covers Title Tracks can play, but don’t expect to hear many more of them. “A lot of time at practice, we’ll just play covers for fun, most of which won’t see the light of day,” Davis wrote, “as people probably don’t need to hear Title Tracks’ instrumental version of Fugazi’s ‘Public Witness Program.’”

Title Tracks perform with Fulton Lights and The Andalusians tonight at 9 p.m. at the Black Cat. Tickets are $10.

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:

Case No. 1: The Field Mice

Conversion: Perhaps realizing it could never match the rough jangle of its 1988 debut single “Emma’s House,” the great U.K. twee band already was toying with beats in its 1989 album Snowball. Sequenced sounds meant a few near-unlistenable experiments (”Triangle”), but they also laid the groundwork for the band’s elegant, measured swan song, 1991’s For Keeps—which remains the most essential long player that lead mouse Robert Wratten ever made.

Case No. 2: The Mountain Goats

Conversion: The 2003 album Tallahassee, on which songwriter John Darnielle gave up his boombox-recording fundamentalism and began creating  concepts about more than geography. Darnielle probably could’ve spent the rest of his days releasing swappable cassettes or eccentric LPs like Protein Source Of The Future…Now! and left his fans happy. Instead, he became our best concocter of lush neuroticism.

Case No. 3: Guided by Voices

Conversion: No one’s going to seriously argue that the 1996 album Under the Bushes Under the Stars, for which the standard-bearers of lo-fi entered an actual studio, is better than Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes. But as leader Bob Pollard became a tighter writer of anthemic pop, the studio offered a wider palette. Take the synthy album version of “Teenage FBI” (from 1999’s Do The Collapse), which is miles better than the stripped-down take found on Guided by Voices’ best-of collection. More controversial: I like the polished “Game of Pricks” from the Tigerbomb EP far more than the fan-favorite version on Alien Lanes.

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart perform tonight at the Black Cat with The Depreciation Guild and Cymbals Eat Guitars. Doors open at 8 p.m.; tickets are $13. Photo courtesy of The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart’s MySpace page.

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.

And there’s also the matter that after four decades as a rock ‘n’ roll trope, the word “Krautrock” is basically meaningless. “In the beginning I liked it,” Péron says. ”It was first a joke, then it was a quite respected way of making music. But in the past decade, everything that comes from Germany is called Krautrock, even if it sounds like Anglo-American rock. That’s the opposite of what we meant it to be. But I don’t mind, really. The audience will decide if it’s good.”

But when Faust—and bands like Can, Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Cluster—began making music around the late 1960s, they weren’t trying to concoct an explicitly Teutonic tonic to ascendant U.S. and U.K. rock music. Simply, their goal was to make experimental sounds outside the accepted boundaries of any popular genre—an aesthetic far more otherworldly than German.

Part of that aim had to do with social unrest on the continent. “There was a big upheaval in Europe poltically and socially, so it had repercussions in the arts,” Péron says. ”And there was a surge of a new identity, new values, and so we wanted very much to find something of our own, far from the normal American thing.” Faust’s early recordings—which hit an apex on the sprawing The Faust Tapes in 1973—are often chaotic and sometimes ambient, generally unbeholden to structure but occasionally playful, and utterly uncompromising.

To Péron, though, experimental music was actually an escape from the political zeitgeist. The multi-instrumentalist and singer left France in 1967 for the United States as an exchange student. There, he absorbed the music of Henry Mancini and Bob Dylan (”I’m not sure if I liked either,” he says). When he returned to France in July 1968, two months after a nationwide general strike, he found the political situation confusing, he says. He ended up following a girlfriend to Hamburg.

With Faust, which formed in 1971, Péron and his bandmates quickly earned a cult following, and soon after a great deal of media attention in the U.K. By 1975, however, the group was label-less. “We were more or less thrown out of Polydor, just as later we were thrown out of Virgin, because we didn’t want to make compromises,” Péron says. ”We didn’t want to make mainstream or popular music. That’s how you feel when you’re 20 and full of revolutionary ideals. You don’t mind being thrown out of a record company.”

After that, around 1975, Faust “went incognito,” Péron says. ”We were a bit fed up so we went underground. We kept on doing concerts for a couple years but without really shouting on top of the roofs.” Then the group stopped making music.

Faust reformed in the early 1990s, and in various lineups, and with increasing frequency, the group has toured, recorded, and collaborated with other experimental acts since. Péron even says he considers the group’s 1997 album, You Know FaUSt, to be as good as anything he recorded in the 1970s. Increasingly, Faust is a mainstay of international experimental music festivals, and Péron even runs his own, the Avantgarde Festival in Schiphorst, Germany. He says he’s generally impressed with the experimental music being played today, even if he’s taken slightly aback at the credit Faust sometimes receives as an influence.

“When you’re in the middle of a storm you don’t realize what the storm is doing all around you,” he says. “But for me it is very flattering.”

Faust performs Sunday night at the Black Cat with Rat Basterd, Chris Greir, and Ulrich Krieger; HEALTH; Pekka Airaksinen; and Alexei Borisov and Anton Nikkilä. Doors open at 8 p.m.; tickets are $15. Photo courtesy of Faust’s MySpace page.

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).

Its indie cred and noisy propensity notwithstanding, Yo La Tengo has long nurtured a profoundly poppy sensibility while just as often thriving on repetition; their best songs—of which the band played quite a few last night, including “Autumn Sweater,” “Tom Courtney,” and “Sugarcube”—combine those impulses. To wit: Yo La Tengo’s may be the smartest take on record-collector rock.

For “Avalon Or Someone Very Similar,” from Yo La Tengo’s new Popular Songs album, the trio scrapped the studio version’s Bacharachian sheen, favoring noisy economy. In “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House,” meanwhile, the group hewed closer to the original’s cool, sophistipop reading. Even during its most consciously unintellectual songs—like “Periodically Triple Or Double,” which sports the lyric “I never read Proust/seems a little too long”—Yo La Tengo appeared less like a band playing its material than one thinking about it out loud. Once or twice, that meant longish, slow-building songs best consumed in solitude, not in a packed club. Most of the time, it meant a nearly perfect Yo La Tengo show.

If Yo La Tengo demands patience and rewards it with smart pop, Matt & Kim make music for short attention spans—think loud drums, farty bass lines, carnivalesque melodies, and infectious choruses about nothing in particular. At one point Johnson, who plays keyboards and sings, told his giddy audience that “Daylight,” from the band’s recent album Grand, is the most meaningful song he’s written. Its chorus goes like this: “In the daylight, I don’t pick up my phone/cause in the daylight anywhere feels like home.” Would that we all had it so good.

Photo from Brando Wu’s (really awesome) set. You can listen to the complete Yo La Tengo show at NPR.

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.