Rafter returns, once again donning his indigenous brand of oddity. His school bus-cum-Cabinet of Wonders rambles down dusty roads, polluting the air of pristine studio-calculated-concoctions with post-pre-psychedelic exhaust. He sets up camp in strip mall parking lots, steps out of the truck hat in hand, red hair gleaming in the sun, and offers a taste of his many sonic trinkets and audio delights. With a wave of invitation, he hops into the back of the Jalopy.

Enticed, you walk up the wooden stairs and find him hunched over a four-track recorder losing his mind, spinning it, tricking it  . . . man o man! It smells a little like a locker room, but with a peculiar hint of rose and lavender.  Seeing you, and surprised a bit, he stands up and starts opening little wooden drawers from the walls, where fake leather bus seats were once bolted, and hands you a litany of souvenirs: a paper sleeved cdr of Korean Pop Prince covers, a tidy mix-tape for a lost lover who was being wooed to the sheets at a barely respectable motel, an instruction manual for love-making populated with full-color visions of animals, trees, buildings, bicycles, cars, headphones, more animals, and fruit. 

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Twirling from the roof is a technicolor mobile of the life-death cycle crafted from yarn, tin cans, and pipe cleaners. The ham radio in the front of the bus has picked up some rainbows and glitter, gossip rocks, and lonely truckers singing their best talent show show tunes. Jars, cigar boxes, and socks line the tops of the cabinets, all full of broken songs, minor notes, and lost melodies collected along his way. A sax solo recorded in a cavernous machine shop falls out on the floor. Rafter hurriedly stuffs it back into one the cigar boxes.

He’s on a unseen marathon, running back and forth around his bus to flip his records: Guided By Voices, R Stevie Moore, Fela, Lightning Bolt, Fushitsusha, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, and Cody Chestnutt.  Full of hope and thankfulness and determination and chaos and wildness. Immediate, instinctive and largely automatic, he is like a worker bee hopped up on pollen, or Yoda digging through Luke Skywalker’s gear on Dagobah.

When you finally step through the Emergency Exit door of his museum-on-wheels and back out onto the tarmac, you leave with sweat dripping down your face onto your swelled lip; liquid salt, the quintessential flavor of late night post-disco parties and booty slinging good times. You’re heavy with it, like too much cough syrup on a stomach full of hi-quality sushi.

Before you’ve stumbled too far, the bus door swings open and Rafter tosses something your way. “Here kid, you forgot this.”  It is a collectors’ item, a helter-skelter boogie-down production of the slop-pop aesthetic. It is SEX DEATH CASSETTE, one of many strange beautiful chaotic albums to come.

By the time Chris Schlarb was 24 he was a husband and proud father of two children. Less than two years later, he was divorced and seeing his children once a week on court-approved visits. He quit his steady job as an insurance adjuster, altogether abandoned music, and with his final paycheck bought a beat-up […]

The album is a snapshot of an extended period of intense work, devoid of live audience but blessed by the detritus of players, city, country, ghost audiences, and improvisations of water, smoke and night.

Split Lips, Winning Hips, A Shiner kicks off with a solid rock march ambitious enough to soundtrack the first 10 miles of any road trip. The opening track is one that Shapes and Sizes could very well have penned during their recent 30 kilometer move from Victoria, where the band members met through the city’s vibrant artistic community, to Vancouver, B.C.

Initially the Canadian four-piece adopted the familiar singer-songwriter paradigm, but decided to break those parameters by having everyone write and sing. The gamble paid off; S&S concocted the self-titled debut album of bi-polar, stop-and-start songs that pulled listeners onto an emotional ride, and raised ears, hairs and goose bumps at Asthmatic Kitty Records. Anxious to test their brand of experimental pop on the more southernly Americans, Shapes and Sizes went on tour across the States. Somewhere between British Columbia and New York, the band found themselves sharing a rusted van with the songs that would constitute Split Lips, Winning Hips, A Shiner.

Split Lips, Winning Hips, A Shiner hardly sounds Canadian, at least when compared to the recent immigration of crafted pop from the West and Quebec. Fusing Jon Crellin (drums) and Nathan Gage’s (bass) formal musical training with the youthful energy of Caila Thompson-Hannant (keys) and Rory Seydel’s (guitar) R&B background, S&S consistently stretches and questions the musical structure of each song while providing an outsider objectivity to the complicated scope of music from the lower 48.

Lyrically, Split Lips is at once celebratory and derogatory; among other things, a peculiar but calculated meditation on naive nationalism and potent protest (“Victory in War, oh what a bore”). “High Life” focuses on benign habits turned scabrous, and “Alone/Alive” casts an existential strobe on freedom and dependence minus the pretension that usually comes along for that ride.

Split Lip’s harmonious discord is also technical: the band recorded with JC/DC Studios (Destroyer, New Pornographers, Tegan and Sara, etc.) and mixed with Asthmatic Kitty’s own Rafter Roberts (Fiery Furnaces, The Rapture, The Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower) to forge a pristine decomposition. Don’t try turning it down- the overdrive provides the framework for equally aggressive lyrics that combine sensuality, violence, and social critique.

S&S is on the dawn of a second move, literally. The 30 kilometers from Victoria to Vancouver wasn’t enough, so they are now on the road to the catacombs of Montreal. Likewise, Split Lips is a second move for the band. It is guided and on the mark, etching a continent-long mural from points A to B. Shapes and Sizes is probably out somewhere between those points at this very moment, thinking and singing.

Her latest semi-collaboration with 13 different remixers, entitled “Tear It Down”, reworks songs from the highly acclaimed album, “Bring Me The Workhorse” featuring tracks by Alias, Lusine, Murcof, Stakka and Gold Chains.

Music for Total Chickens is built from bits of pop architecture nailed together in odd forms; it is structurally sound (no pun intended) but at the same time it defies the conventional laws of (pop) physics. There are twisty-turny time signatures, swaddled in chunky guitar fuzz and sweet strings and harmonized “ooo”s and direct lyrical love-notes, sometimes riding percussive trails all the way up great crescendos to pinnacles of bang-crash (like if Deerhoof recorded a self-help album). For all those containing inner wrestlings (and who hasn’t at one time found themselves in the throes of battle?), this album resonates-these songs intend to celebrate and encourage everyone’s wrestling match with their demons, whatever they may be. This is a brave album of advice for those seeking happiness, and so the music also strives for happiness. This is caring advice for those in the depths of uncertainty, and so the music is also caring and uncertain.

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Of course this album is not only directed outwards, but is also written to Rafter’s own struggles-this naked sincerity is a balls-y move in a cultural environment overpopulated by the uber-cool pose and the jaded artist soul. His commitment to such a singular and not-quite-popular and yet love-filled purpose shows Rafter’s kinship with AK labelmates the Danielson Familie (though his is a secular perspective), both in word- and song-feel. The frank talk, kind ecouragement and heavy subjects are everywhere wrapped in a magic, silly, death-defying playfulness, as if to say that no matter how serious your suffering may be, this whole business is still child’s play. This is advice for those seeking happiness, and so the music also strives for happiness. This is advice for those in the depths of uncertainty, and so the music is also uncertain. This is possibly the most straightforward lyrical message you’ll ever hear, and despite (or because of) this, it presents a challenge. The challenge is to abandon your learned stance, and open your ears up for some honest communication.

Recording traditional favorites alongside unique originals, Sufjan has, over the course of five years, constructed an odd, impressive, and compelling collection of Christmas hits (and some misses) that will either warm your heart or make you throw up eggnog all over the bath mat (depending on your constitution).

Like the swimmers floating peacefully on CALAMITY’s cover, The Curtains’ music hangs suspended, buoyed-up by a strange spring of  optimism and curiosity. Ideas surface unexpectedly and blossom for  just long enough to be grasped, but no longer –

To truly take it all in, you can’t ask yourself what’s just happened or what is about to happen, you can’t hold on to old ideas of what a  song should be – The Curtains music has a mind of its own and like a  stubborn weed, it grows where it wants to. To allow their songs to develop each in its own way, The Curtains have left lots and lots of  space on CALAMITY. There are never more words or sounds than are absolutely necessary, and this kind of economy is the album’s  deliberate aesthetic intent.

Self-taught and self-invented like The Shaggs, like Jandek, like Sun  Ra, The Curtains have found their own distinctive voice, but have  never stuck to a formula. With each album, they begin again from the  ground up – and as strange as the songs on CALAMITY (their fourth  album) are, there is an irresistible charm which has intrigued the  many who have heard their records or seen them play live on tour with  such groups as Beirut, Final Fantasy, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, The Red  Krayola, The Dead C. and Liars.