Perhaps the best—or only good—aspect of Lungfish’s “not currently active” status is that singer Daniel Higgs is releasing solo records at an impressive clip. In just 13 months, the Baltimore trance-punk act’s heavily bearded frontman has released three full-lengths, one of which, Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot, comes with a hardcover book of his psychedelic artwork.

Higgs’ droney, acid-folky latest, Metempsychotic Melodies, which is out now on the excellent Holy Mountain label, is more or less essential for Lungfish fans. But, for the uninitiated, it is no better an entry point than any other record in the Higgs canon.

In his new book Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff writes about artists like Higgs, musicians who seem to do nothing but work toward a single idea. “Many great musicians—Ali Akbar Khan, Björk, James Brown—essentially create their art as chunks of an ongoing discourse,” he writes. “The stronger the work is, the more it becomes a matter of sound rather than notes.”

Not too long ago, I wrote something similar about another Holy Mountain act, Om (a band that shares its name with one of John Coltrane’s later records).

By and large, the two songs on Om’s second full-length, Conference of the Birds—a title borrowed from Dave Holland’s ’70s free-jazz classic—offer mere variations on [the band’s first record] Variations. [Al] Cisneros seems to write the same bass line over and over again, which works because, hey, it’s a really good bass line. Loopy without being static, Cisneros’ playing twists and winds and folds back on itself, making Om’s five songs to date seem less like distinctive compositions than details from a larger work. The effect is of a band always playing somewhere—probably on a mountaintop or near something monolithic.

The same could pretty much be said of Lungfish and Higgs. To my mind, though, no one has written a more definitive piece on Charm City’s finest than my pal Joe Gross. This passage from his Chicago Reader review of the band’s 2000 album Necrophones gets at the very essence of this cult act and its otherworldly frontman.

Imagine a gnostic Ramones or an AC/DC peopled by Kabbalah scholars. Perhaps taking too seriously the old Lou Reed dictum that anything over three chords puts you into jazz territory, the Baltimore-based quartet has built whole, mesmerizing albums out of four or five notes. And as a lyricist, front man Daniel Higgs, at least according to Alan Kaufman, editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, is nothing less than the intellectual heir to poet Kenneth Patchen. (Memo to R. Meltzer: if you’re still looking for visionary postbeat rock music in the 21st century, buy the entire discography tomorrow.)

A veteran of the late-80s and early-90s performance-poetry scene, Higgs is 36 going on infinity. He cuts a striking figure with his rabbinical beard, myriad tattoos, and head-to-toe heavy clothing (he’s been known to wear two pairs of pants at once). Onstage, in front of the pathologically repetitious guitar-bass-drums drone of Asa Osborne, Nathan Bell, and Mitchell Feldstein, he’s riveting; if he’s not standing stock-still, he’s fiendishly contorting his face or trying to climb an invisible ladder. Sometimes he’s a preacher, preaching the gospel according to the plants and the animals; sometimes he’s the flowers themselves, opening their mouths and screaming.

Of all the guy’s attributes, the thing that is perhaps most impressive is Higgs’ ability to reduce the most cynical music fans to uncynical adoration. This puts him in excellent company. Tom Waits and Scott Walker–to name but two–do pretty much the same thing. Are they the real deal or jackdaws in peacock’s feathers? Of those who have seen him perform, what do you think about Higgs?

According to one of yesterday’s posts on the Baltimore Sun entertainment blog, Dischord founder and Evens frontman Ian MacKaye is very much alive:

A phone rings at 6:08 p.m. in Arlington, Va. A 45-year-old man picks up. The caller doesn’t even have the chance to offer a greeting.
“I am still alive,” reports Ian MacKaye, the frontman of such punk acts as Minor Threat and Fugazi, and the founder of Washington’s Dischord Records.
This would not be news except that The Sun and apparently many other organizations had been told that MacKaye was, in fact, dead. We were told that he died Monday night at Baltimore’s St. Agnes Hospital. A call to the hospital found no evidence of such a patient. We followed up with calls to Dischord (left a message) and to MacKaye’s home.
“I am happy to report that I am not dead,” says MacKaye. He and the record company had been blasted with calls, he says, after premature reports of his death were posted on MySpace and Wikipedia. He says he hasn’t been able to find the MySpace reference, but had the Wikipedia posting removed — and then re-removed, once someone reinserted the false news.

Joe Lally has been quietly working on a new album, and Dischord recently revealed some juicy details. The album will be called Nothing Underrated and boasts of some of D.C.’s finer musicians, including: Ben Azzara (The Capitol City Dusters, DCIC), Andy Gale (Haram), and Eddie Janney (Rites of Spring). Most awesomely, Lally jams with Fugazi bandmates Guy Picciotto and Ian MacKaye (who recorded the album).

His Fugazi songs were always standouts. But reading City Paper’s 2006 feature on Lally last year, you couldn’t help but feel that the transition from integral band member to frontman had been difficult. His first solo album, released last year, was a surprisingly contemplative affair. It will be interesting to see what Lally comes up with after spending a year touring, jamming and growing into his role as chief songwriter and the guy everybody stares at.

These are bleak times we’re living in. War, environmental cataclysms, stuff like this.

So it’s good to know that dreams can still come true–as long as you’re willing to open up your deepest desires to public scrutiny via blog.

Local musician and City Paper contributor Justin Moyer has made no secret of his love for Philadelphia post-punk band S PRCSS.

“S PRCSS is the number one band probably I ever wish I’d been in, which is ironic, because they kept losing bass players, and I play bass, and we’re all from Philadelphia, but for whatever reason (pick one) they wouldn’t let me join,” wrote Moyer last October on an older incarnation of his Iceland blog.

He also wrote this: “And finally I’d say to Bob [Doto] and Daneil [Mazone], if you ever get back together (though I know this is unlikely) and need a bass player, get in touch.”

Lo and behold, S PRCSS heard Moyer’s pleas and have decided to reunite. Furthermore, they have graciously fulfilled one of Moyer’s long standing ambitions by asking him to play bass.

You can witness the result of this touching gesture tomorrow night, when Moyer performs with S PRCSS at 9 p.m. at the Hosiery at 9 p.m., 441 Eye St. NW.

Over the course of the week I’ve had occasion to leaf through two separate books of photography–Pat Graham’s Silent Pictures and Glen E. Friedman’s Fugazi: Keep Your Eyes Open–that document indie music in and out of D.C. through the ’90s and into the early part of this decade.

I’ve come to this conclusion: D.C. of 2007, your bands are fucking boring. What happened!?

I’m not advocating that everybody should strap on a wallet chain and move into a bike-house or contort themselves on top of the monitor speaker at Black Cat–but jeezus people, there are pictures of Tortoise in here that look more animated than most of the groups I saw at Fort Reno this summer.

D.C., you need to make like House of Pain.

(Full Disclosure: Bands that I have been in have not helped to resolve this dilemma.)

OK. A bit of old news that we should have gotten around to months ago: Singer/songwriter John Bustine has an album coming out in mid-September on Gypsy Eyes. The local label, whose output is now being made available via Dischord’s Web site, was kind enough to release the tracklist for Bustine’s Waltzes and Pleas and post a few MP3s, which you can listen to here and here.

This blog and this blog beat us to it.

On Sept. 4 Akashic Books will publish Silent Pictures, a collection of photos by Pat Graham that documents the D.C. rock scene in the ’90s, and also features acts like Modest Mouse, Bikini Kill, and the Shins. (Akashic makes sense as the publisher of choice: it was founded by Girls Against Boys‘ Johnny Temple.) It’s a fun nostalgia trip for anybody who was paying attention to indie rock in the ’90s, or who just wants to learn what the fuss was all about. Graham spent much of the decade in D.C. (he now lives in London), and the book has a few casual, relaxed shots of iconic indie-rock musicians at the time–Unrest in a Bethesda yard in 1993, the Make-Up strolling through foggy London in 1997. But Silent Pictures is mostly made up of band photos like the one above, of Fugazi at St. Stephen’s Church in 1992–serious and intense action shots that expose Graham’s knack for capturing musicians at their fiercest, vein-popping-est moments. (On the same page as that MacKaye shot is one of Ian Svenonius flailing on the Black Cat stage in 1993 and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein in San Francisco in 1994, when she was in Excuse 17. Elsewhere is a shot of Lou Barlow hoisting his guitar in such a way that makes the mope look suprisingly, impossibly badass.)

In her afterword to the book, Cynthia Connolly notes that Graham often had trouble getting his due:

Pat was always the nice guy. He was constantly helping people out, taking photos, giving photography advice to people like me. When he started getting all these jobs shooting photos for bigger magazines, he had problems, as do most photographers, with getting paid and receiving credit for his work. One year, for a gift, I letterpressed him some business cards with big words that said, PHOTO CREDIT: PAT GRAHAM.

Graham will be in D.C. to discuss the book on Sunday, September 23, at 6 p.m. at the Dupont Circle Olsson’s.

Photo used with permission of Akashic Books.

Remember Frodus? We sure do. If you weren’t around for that band’s mid-to-late ’90s heyday, you can check them out here. That band’s singer, Shelby Cinca, has since moved on to more experimental turf. Here he kicks off a new semi-recurring feature where we ask musicians, label honchos, club owners, etc, what piece of music they are currently obsessed with…

Cinca responded in an e-mail to Black Plastic Bag:

“I am currently working on a remix for a Grand National song for an open-call remix and slowly putting together the next The Cassettes album with my bandmates.

The current song I am obsessed with is “Walkman (Re-Edit)” by SebastiAn. SebastiAn is a french electronic musician who is on the Ed Banger label whose song somehow became the summer-hit of 2007, at least in Sweden. On my travels there I saw the song spun two times, the first time by Ed Banger records founder, Busy P, which I happened to film. The energy was contagious and was something that I haven’t experienced since say Earth Crisis or Fugazi. The place completely exploded and everyone was purely excited for this song. What I felt I was witnessing was an epiphany of where electronic music and “techno” is right now and how these crazy distorted and overly compressed songs are sweeping the underground. It made me even question why I play guitar and bother lugging around gear in a van anymore and if this sort of excitement is hiding somewhere in DC or not! It was real and rather life-changing. And the crazy part of it was it was being simply played by a DJ on CD-Rs. People jumped the barriers around the stage and brought the party right there. Incredible. The song still stands on its own outside of the video in my opinion with its great detail and choice of sounds.

I filmed the moment [and produced] a version for iPod/iTunes download (much nicer quality).

My other obsession is the new Antelope album and the song “Wandering Ghost”… probably one of the best songs ever written in my opinion. I hope people start going as crazy for Antelope in DC one day.”

One of the bands appearing at the John Stabb benefit tomorrow night is Lorelei, a D.C. shoegazer/pre-post-rock act that formed in 1990, put out several records on the excellent Slumberland label, and was the subject of a tour doc, If You Don’t Try, Nothing Ever Happens.

The trio disbanded in 1996, shortly after I saw them at the old Indie Rock Flea market in Arlington, and has only played a few shows since. I can’t say that I remember much about that set, except that Stephen Gardner is really tall, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the old Slumberland scene lately–especially its connections to metal. A lot of those bands were down with near-metallic acts, such as Loop, Swans, and Head of David, and a lot of full-on metal acts are now revisisting Slumberland-type music without trepidation.

Seems like the time is right for a reunion.

Also, from the Dischord site, two new reissues from Guy Picciotto’s Peterbilt catalog, Rain and Deadline, are coming out in September. I’ve only seen the former on the wall at Vinyl Ink, but a fellow music critic and harDCore afficianado assures me that the Deadline, in particular, is an essential listen.

Bob Mould, like most sensible people, has serious issues with James Blunt and Live Earth. This week, Bob weighs in on the folly of rock stars broadcasting their feelings about global warming in song. Got a question for Bob about life in D.C., music, culture, or anything else that springs to mind? Send it here.

“You ever have to beat the shit out of a bunch of dudes in lockup so you wouldn’t get raped?” That was John Stabb’s attempt to defuse the fight he got caught up in on the way home from work on July 17. The former Government Issue frontman sustainted three facial fractures, two broken bones, and a broken nose. Jessica Gould has the story on Stabb, who’ll be the recipient of a benefit show tomorrow night at the Velvet Lounge. Gould also has the story on the Warehouse’s potential new digs, and the latest on beleaguered club H2O.

In One Track Mind, Justin Moyer talks with ukulele rapper Jon Braman about his song “The Weather,” the futility of rallies, and the pleasures of playing a very portable instrument. Braman plays Wednesday, Aug. 15, at 14U Cafe.

Plus our picks: Maggie Serota on British pop-rock sensation the Cribs, Friday at the Black Cat; Dave Nuttycombe on Jette-Ives’ Jette Kelly, leading a six-piece band Friday at the Rock and Roll Hotel; Zoe Pollock on Austin jam band Mingo Fishtrap, Sunday at the Kennedy Center; Serota on Vancouver “psychedelic circus” band They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Tuesday at the Black Cat; and me on Clay Eals, who’ll discuss his book on “City of New Orleans” songwriter Steve Goodman Wednesday at Politics and Prose. (He’ll be joined by Alexandria singer-songwriter Tom Paxton.)