Joshua

Washington City Paper: What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?
Joshua Luna: We make comic books.  We develop the plot together, I write the scripts and provide layouts and lettering, and then Jonathan handles the pencils, inks, and colors for each page.

WCP: When (within a decade is fine) and where were you born?
Joshua: I was born in Lemoore, California in 1981.
Jonathan: Lemoore, California in 1978.

WCP: Why are you in Washington now?  What neighborhood or area do you live in?
Joshua: We are actually in Northern Virginia, just 20 minutes away from D.C., in a city called Woodbridge.  We lived around this area before we lived in Italy. Our dad was in the Navy, so we were stationed overseas for a few years. When he retired, we returned to this area because it was familiar to us.

WCP: What is your training and/or education in cartooning?
Joshua: We attended The Savannah College of Art and Design and earned BFAs, majoring in Sequential Art. I believe it’s one of the few schools to offer a degree in “comic books.”

WCP: Who are your influences?
Joshua: There’s just too many to mention.  Naming individual influences wouldn’t be accurate because I’m inspired by just about everything.  But if I had to choose a major one, I’d say life in general. I love to incorporate realism and personal experiences in my writing and art as much as possible.
Jonathan: Movies.  I love cinematic storytelling.  You could say that I’m a comic book artist that wants to make movies.

WCP: If you could, what in your career would you do-over or change?
Joshua: It’s always difficult for me to read my past work because all I see are things I’d like to do-over or change.  But at the same time, I think it’s nice to see the progression and ongoing improvement in your body of work.
Jonathan: I have no regrets, really.  I’m always trying my best.

WCP: What work are you best-known for?
Jonathan: That’s hard to tell, because I wouldn’t really know.  Girls and The Sword almost tie in terms as our bestsellers.

WCP: What work are you most proud of?
Joshua: I can never choose. It’s like picking your favorite child.
Jonathan: I think it’s always my most recent work because it’s where I see most improvement.  Hopefully.

WCP: What would you like to do or work on in the future?
Joshua: I’d love to continue working on comics until I’m physically able. It’s also been a dream of mine to write and direct a film.
Jonathan: Same here.  There are other things I’d like to do that will be announced when the time is right.

WCP: What do you do when you're in a rut or have writer's block?
Joshua: It really is the worst feeling.  For me, sometimes the best option is to go the opposite direction and do nothing pertaining to writing for a day and concentrate on something else.  Sometimes, you have to let inspiration find you, not the other way around.

WCP: What do you think will be the future of your field?
Joshua: I think the digital presence will continue to grow.

WCP: What's your favorite thing about DC?

Joshua: The great restaurants, sites and museums.
Jonathan: I’ve definitely been enjoying the great food lately.

WCP: Least favorite?
Joshua: I love to visit DC, but as far as living there, I think I’m more a suburbanite. City life is a little too hectic and fast paced for me.
Jonathan: Traffic.

WCP: What monument or museum do you take most out-of-town guests to?

Joshua: Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial and Smithsonian are must-see stops.
Jonathan: The Hirshhorn.  I love modern art.

WCP: Do you have a website or blog?

Joshua: For more info, our website is www.lunabrothers.com.

Som Records is worth the hunt for parking along 14th Street NW. Just got the store's latest e-mail of new arrivals and it's fairly packed. The store has got solid new releases from Real Estate, Broadcast, Cold Cave, Girls, Kings of Convenience, Circuit Rider (reissue),  Jay Farrar, Odissee, Chain and the Gang, The Clientele, Felix, among others.

The store is also having a sale this Thursday. It's 10 percent off all used vinyl!

Used vinyl list after the jump. We recommend picking up the Pretty Things' SF Sorrow.

The Pretty Things – SF Sorrow
Them – Again
Robbie Basho – The Falconer's Arm
John Martyn – The Tumbler (UK press)
John and Yoko – Two Vigins
Soul Searchers – Salt of the Earth
Etoile de Dakar – S/T
V/A – Sub Pop Rock City (German press)
Azambuja & CIA – S/T
Phantom Limb – Dance of the Guilty
Prince – Black Album (German press)
Time Machine – Live a the Back Alley
John Coltrane – My Favorite Things
Richard Thompson – Guitar, Vocal

The store now sells turntables as well. So there's no excuse.

Your sacred cows mean nothing.

That, at least briefly, was the message of Los Campesinos! last night at a packed 9:30 Club. "I never cared about Ian MacKaye," sputtered Gareth Campesinos!, the Cardiff, Wales-based group's frontman, in "The International Tweexcore Underground," surely aware of the lyric's particular application. Not that the audience — whose average age couldn't have exceeded 18 — noticed or cared. Throughout the evening it returned the septet's considerable panache in triplicate, pogoing and mouthing along to each sarcastic word, even when the group's schoolyard accents and entropic arrangements swallowed the vocals whole. Energy overpowered attitude, and for a while, that was fine.

Though the group played many of its "rubbish older songs" — as Gareth referred to numbers still less than three years old — the members are clearly starting to get over the knowing cocksureness of their early recordings. "I've got so many witty retorts," Gareth proclaimed at one point, but refrained from dispensing them because, he said, his hecklers were unamplified (for Los Campesinos!, context is everything).

The band has released two well-received albums since its 2007 EP, Sticking Fingers Into Sockets, carefully honing its dichotomous sound — which pits thick guitars and distorted bass against whispy strings and gurgling synths — along the way. But the lyrics are another matter. Once Los Campesinos! sang about bands you surely know and mixtapes and the absurdities of twee culture, reveling in the blend of irony and insiderness with which young lyricists often mask a lack of confidence. Coupled with Gareth and Aleks Campesinos!' bratty inflections, it was really, really annoying stuff. I miss it dearly.

The less immature Los Campesinos! (I hesitate to say "more mature") concern themselves with matters of the heart rather than the mechanics of hipster cachet. In "We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed," Gareth sang "I taught myself the only way to vaguely get along in love / is to like the other slightly less than you get in return / I keep feeling like I'm being undercut," which on paper is a much more satisfying lyric than "Sarah Records never meant anything to me / but the International Tweexcore Underground will save us all." But twee pop is one of the few genres (along with hip-hop) that can thrive on self-reference, in its case the more cloying, the better (think Tullycraft). Which is to say: Los Campesinos! should be in no hurry to grow up. In this era of bromances and the elevated fart joke, they are our brat punk.

And for all their too-cool-for-schoolness, Los Campesinos! are clearly a band of fans: How else to account for a jagged cover of Pavement's "Box Elder," or the unmistakeable influence of the U.K.'s post-C86 generation (particularly bands like Heavenly or The Pastels)? Likely, it was no accident that the two bands that opened — Chicago's Smith Westerns and San Francisco's much-buzzed Girls — fell just as easily into categories of record-collection rock.

For reasons too boring to explain, I missed most of Smith Westerns' set, but what I did hear reminded me more of, say, T. Rex than the  Vivian Girls or Crystal Stilts vibe I get from their very lo-fi album. And Girls, who didn't do much for the crowd but whom I mostly enjoyed, summarized dozens of reference points — from Johnny Thunders' booziness and The Raspberries' ebullient heartbreak to the Laurel Canyon scene of the late '60s — into druggy, delay-heavy come-down pop. It was exactly the stuff you'd expect from a songwriter who grew up in a cult. And I was prepared to drink the Kool-Aid myself, right up to the final song of the set, whose chorus went “Love is everything I need," soon followed by “kissing and hugging is the air that I breathe.” Maybe singer Christopher Owens, shaggy and rail-thin, was being earnest. But I sensed contempt.

Photo by Benjamin R. Freed

Girls: "Hellhole Ratrace"
Band name aside, Girls isn't offering up a whole lot that has to do with the female sex. Every spare measure of "Hellhole Ratrace," is chock full of men. Wistful men. Melancholy men. Men feeling the great heartbreak. But, yeah, men all the same. "I don't want to cry my whole life through/ I want to do some laughing, too," mopes singer Christopher Owens. Strong men also cry, but this song, which stretches to almost 7 minutes, is positively bloated with tears.

Jonsi & Alex: "Boy 1904"
Sigur Ros front man Jonsi Brigisson and his partner Alex Somers have more streamlined approach to provoking elegiac thoughts. With it's low drones, boys choir-style vocals, and field recording snippets, "Boy 1904," from the duo's upcoming ambient album Riceboy Sleeps, makes almost any activity performed during the songs duration feel sublime and cathartic. All that's missing is a rain-streaked window to gaze out of.

Air: "Do The Joy"
Air isn't big on substance, obviously, and "Do the Joy," from its upcoming record Love 2 is appropriately ethereal. There are gossamer synths, fuzzy guitars, and the a voice that quietly murmurs, "Do the joy" over and over again, yet refrains from specifying exactly how ones does it. Conceptually, it's a minor step down from, say, "Surfing on a Rocket."