Author: Patrick Wall

Back in 1994, Chicago Tribune rock critic Greg Kot reviewed the self-titled debut album by Tortoise. Even for Chicago, a town noted for musicians who tease at and push the boundaries of rock and jazz, the group was difficult to pin down. “The group’s dynamic is to layer textures and construct atmospheres rather than write linear rock songs,” Kot wrote. “Tortoise is hardly an esoteric art project.”

Two decades later, not much has changed. Tortoise is still five musicians—Dan Bitney, John Herndon, Doug McCombs, John McEntire and Jeff Parker, who each play multiple instruments—making their imperatives melt together. That notion is reinforced in the album cover of The Catastrophist, released in January, which features the members’ faces superimposed into one Frankenstein collage. And the quintet still makes music that defies easy categorization.

“Tortoise started out as an outlet for us to do something different,” says Parker, who joined the band in 1997. “Everybody else has history in punk and hardcore bands and punk and hardcore communities, and my background was more from a very broad jazz. So we all had this thing where we were doing the shit that we couldn’t do with the other people we were playing with.”

The band built a crisp instrumental aesthetic most tied to cool jazz and prog-rock by focusing on instrumental prowess, heady group interaction and unique arrangements that make full use of standard and nonstandard rock instrumentation. (Indeed, Tortoise is famous for using malleted instruments such as marimbas and vibraphones, sometimes two at a time.) Its music nods to dub, Krautrock, jazz, glam-rock, electronica and minimalism throughout its revered discography, but the resulting sounds have always been distinctly—even stubbornly—its own. Almost entirely instrumental, it’s all carefully constructed—Parker insists Tortoise does not jam.

“The only thing that we really do is we take small ideas and we make them bigger,” Parker laughs. “That’s why stuff takes so long, to be honest. There are so many possibilities, and we’re trying to figure it out. It doesn’t come easy.”

Since the turn of the millennium, the wait between albums (The Catastrophist is the band’s seventh record) has gotten longer and longer. The breaks are partly a consequence of the members’ long list of extracurricular activities: McEntire runs a studio in Chicago, for example, and Parker, who now lives in Los Angeles, is an in-demand jazz guitarist. But it’s mostly a result of Tortoise’s meticulous composition process.

“The way that we work takes a lot of time because there’s a lot of trial and error involved,” Parker says. “We experiment a lot with the material. But we’re also a band that composes together, so it has to go through everybody’s filter in order to reach any kind of fruition. And that takes awhile in and of itself.”

Seven years, in fact, in the case of The Catastrophist. In 2010, the city of Chicago commissioned Tortoise to write a suite of compositions in celebration of the city’s robust community of jazz and improvisational musicians. The quintet then used the bare-bones themes as a springboard for the densely orchestrated compositions on The Catastrophist.

“It was improvised music,” Parker says, “and Tortoise isn’t a band, collectively, that works in that way at all. We’re not an improvising band.” The band took the melodic and thematic material created for the suite, and refined it, expanded it and made it into something that worked for Tortoise. “Now,” Parker says, “it sounds like us.”

The Catastrophist feels like a microcosm of the band’s body of work. It often goes deep instead of wide, building on eerily pretty vibes with meditative repetition before pounding, frenzied, full-band finishes. (Perhaps weirdest of all, the album includes a cover of David Essex’s 1973 pop hit, “Rock On.”) Its cerebral latticework is built from serpentine melodies and a playful labyrinth of interlocking rhythms.

Even as its past innovations have become common practices, Tortoise still pushes forward against convention—especially its own. To wit, malleted instruments, eschewed for the scuffed hard bop of 2009’s Beacons of Ancestorship, make a return on the new record, but they’re hardly at the forefront.

“We still have fans that are like, ‘Man, why don’t you guys use the mallets,’” Parker laughs. “Nobody really wants to explore that anymore, because we started to feel like it was becoming a crutch. And we didn’t want to be defined in that way. So we retired it to do something new. Once we get to that point where we feel like anything we’re doing is inhibiting the progress of our band or making it seem stale, we’ll leave it behind.”

To be smart, playful and provocative, to follow no internal logic but its own—those are the standards to which Tortoise still aspires, and still meets, after a quarter century.

“I remember when we used to suck,” Parker laughs. “Now, I think we’ve turned into a pretty good band.”

For a band that writes nothing but fun, catchy power-pop songs about the national pastime, The Baseball Project hasn’t exactly replaced “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at the ballpark.

The reverent “Past Time,” from Frozen Ropes & Dying Quails, the band’s debut, gets some play at Twins home games, but “They’re not going to play [The Baseball Project’s song] ‘Ted Fucking Williams’ at Fenway Park,” laughed songwriter and guitarist Scott McCaughey. “A lot of our songs disqualify themselves rather quickly.”

McCaughey, a cagey veteran best known for his work in Young Fresh Fellows and The Minus 5, is but one member of the “murderers’ row” that comprises The Baseball Project. The lineup boasts two all-stars in Mike Mills and Peter Buck, both formerly of R.E.M.

Steve Wynn, who led the seminal pop-rock band The Dream Syndicate, and his wife Linda Pitmon, a longtime Twins booster who plays with Wynn in The Miracle 3, round out the roster. As conceptual supergroups go, this ranks as one of the most righteous in pop music history. And while rock might be their the first love, baseball is a close second.

A lot of McCaughey’s strongest childhood memories, he said, are linked to baseball, and The Baseball Project is meant to invoke a little bit of that nostalgia without being too cornball or goofy.

“We don’t write songs, necessarily, to be played at the stadium as rah-rah baseball,” said McCaughey. “Some of our songs have a darker edge, some of them say some negative things and describe some less-than-savory characters, because they pique our interest.”

The Baseball Project certainly isn’t the first band to look to the national pastime for inspiration. Terry Cashman’s “Talkin’ Baseball” honors Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider, among other diamond legends. Jerry Jeff Walker wrote about Nolan Ryan as if he were a real Texas outlaw, armed with a 100-mph fastball instead of a Colt single-action revolver. Barbara Manning, Todd Snider and Chuck Brodsky have all written songs about Dock Ellis’ LSD-aided (or, possibly, -addled) no-hitter. Puig Destroyer’s grindcore sprints honor five-tool Dodgers phenom Yasiel Puig.

The Baseball Project, among its paeans to The Splendid Splinter and Charlie Hustle, mines the less dog-eared pages of baseball’s almanac for its hidden idiosyncrasies. The band’s latest, 3rd, features songs about home run kings Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron, yes, but its more gripping songs star minor characters: Larry Yount, a promising pitcher whose career ended before he ever threw out a pitch, was eclipsed by his younger brother, Hall of Famer Robin Yount; Luis Tiant, a Cuban exile turned major-league hurler.

There’s a Dock Ellis song, one not about his infamous no-hitter but another notorious start four years later, when he attempted to bean the entire Cincinnati Reds lineup. Then there’s “Pascual on the Perimeter,” which recalls how pitcher Pascual Pérez missed a start once as he circled Atlanta on I-285, unable to find the park during his first season with the Braves in 1982.

“There are so many good stories like the Pascual Pérez [story],” McCaughey said. “And it’s not like that’s something a season turned on or affected the outcome of the World Series or anything like that. It’s just a weird, humorous story.”

McCaughey, like many Americans born in the 1950s, was enamored with baseball as a kid. He listened to San Francisco Giants games on the clock radio in his bedroom and on a transistor radio while doing yardwork, transfixed by legendary broadcasters like Lon Simmons and Russ Hodges (and, when the Oakland A’s moved to town in 1968, Monte Moore). The next morning, he’d recreate games at the breakfast table by reading the box scores in the morning paper—a devotion he describes in 3rd’s peppy “Box Scores.”

Wynn was a card collector. He filled shoeboxes with Topps cards before he “discovered cars and girls, punk rock and booze,” he sings on the ambling country loper “The Baseball Card Song,” and even now he’ll “go home and let down my guard/Put my guitar away and check out all my cards.”

Those songs point to The Baseball Project’s greatest asset: Though its songs are littered with statistics and arcane references, the music never takes a back seat. One needn’t know the infield fly rule to appreciate the songs, which are chockablock with clever arrangements that complement pointed and perceptive lyrics. The burly “From Nails to Thumbtacks” sums up the meteoric rise and dizzying fall of Lenny Dykstra; “You gotta fly high to fall this far,” McCaughey sings in the song’s chorus, mimicking the swaggering hubris of the former Mets and Phillies outfielder. “Monument Park” finds Wynn inhabiting Bernie Williams as he comes to the realization that he’ll only be, at best, the third-greatest player to roam centerfield at Yankee Stadium.

Baseball’s full of those kinds of “who’s better?” arguments, and in that way, McCaughey reasons, there’s a similarity to being a baseball fan and a diehard music fan. The intricacies of discographies aren’t much different than those of the data that drive baseball, in that they never produce much consensus.

“You can take statistics only so far,” McCaughey said. “You can say, well, if Mays had played at Candlestick [Park, former home of the San Francisco Giants], he’d have hit a hundred more home runs. Or you can say, if Mantle hadn’t tripped over the sprinkler or whatever the fuck it was in the outfield and wrecked his knee, then he would have been the greatest player ever. And that’s baseball. Things aren’t always on a level playing field. You can say, well, this guy’s got better statistics than that guy, or The Beatles sold more records than The Stones in their time period. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.”

Perhaps Israel wasn’t the best environment for Yonatan Gat to grow as a musician.

“The thing about Israel is, it’s very small and very isolated,” said Gat, who now lives in Brooklyn. “Personally, I found the kind of music that I am excited about is not a really good fit for Israel. It’s a very intense place; it’s just crazy. Politically, it’s very charged. People are direct and honest and there’s no such thing as standing in line. Everything is just crazy. It’s more about sad, minor songs. So I think people don’t really need the kind of release that’s a Monotonix show, or that’s my show, or that’s punk music.”

As the co-founder of Monotonix, Gat was part of a band that was consistently hailed as being one of the most viscerally intense live acts in the world. Most of the trio’s all-entropy performances were marked by shirtless, sweaty pandemonium—a boisterous maelstrom built from chaotic sing-alongs, pyrotechnics, gravity-defying acrobatics, thrown trash, piss, spit, beer and wanton disregard for personal safety. That rawness might not have been suitable for Tel Aviv, so Monotonix took its raunch global: Over the course of five years, the Israeli trio performed more than 1,000 shows, each one as much contact sport and circus spectacle as a rock ‘n’ roll concert.

But as Monotonix wore on, Gat felt oversaturated with the combustible garage rock, largely informed by 1970s American punk, that defined the band.

“Sometimes you just get tired of what you’re listening to and you want to listen to something radically different,” Gat said. “Some bands just remain very, very isolated in their own world and keep listening to the guitar they’re playing in the van and keep doing their own thing. When you’re a professional musician, you get to travel a lot, so all you have to do is open your eyes.”

Monotonix disbanded in 2011, and Gat’s since shed his former band’s arena-ready heft and shtick in favor of a freewheeling, genre-blurring sound that finds Gat, bassist Sergio Sayeg and drummer Gal Lazer scouring every sonic corner of the world, seamlessly exploring Portuguese fado guitar, African Brazilian psychedelia and Middle Eastern surf and garage rock, often in the span of just one song. It’s weaved together on the fly in the style of improvised free-jazz, but Gat’s careful not to classify.

“I come from punk rock,” said Gat. “We definitely don’t look at ourselves as jazz musicians. But as punk rockers, we can definitely take a lot of their ideas.”

Gat’s just-released second solo disc, Director, takes some direct inspiration from jazz titan Miles Davis. Not long after Gat formed his new band, and fewer than three days into a U.S. tour last year, he took the guys into the studio with little more than basic song structures and ideas. The goal was to capture the riotous and intricate improvisations of the band’s live show. The trio improvised for hours at a time, and it took months for Gat and engineer Chris Woodhouse (who’s helmed records by hot-shit garage acts Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees) to splice the musical experience to a glorious narrative whole—not unlike how Davis and Teo Macero stitched together Bitches Brew (though Gat professes more fondness for the jazz great’s In a Silent Way) with razor blades and Scotch tape.

While Director, which vibrates and crackles with life and unspools its breathtaking instrumentals like Miles running the voodoo down, doesn’t sound remotely like Bitches Brew, it possesses a similar aesthetic and attitude in that the music is about improvisation, about the moment. It’s about as far away from Monotonix as Gat could get—and that’s entirely the point.

“It’s the opposite of what I did before,” Gat said. “This is about creating something new in the studio, because I feel like that’s something very basic that people forget sometimes. The idea of rock ‘n’ roll is people getting together in a room and creating this kind of atmosphere that’s unique to rock ‘n’ roll. It exists in American rock ‘n’ roll. It exists in Turkish rock ‘n’ roll. It exists in European rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a part of the music. So I feel like no matter how much time changes or technology changes or how we’re definitely not living in the era of rock ‘n’ roll anymore, if we’re still making that music, the idea of that energy, the idea of musicians playing together, which it exists in jazz music and it exists in classical music, too, but rock ‘n’ roll is just the next step of that.”

There are still parallels between Gat’s current and former musical identities: His band sets up not on the stage but on the floor, performing not to an audience but inside of it, as part of it. His performances ripple with the same exploding-fireworks intensity and display the same physicality, in energy if not in movement or mayhem. After all, Gat’s about a different kind of chaos this time around.

“I have seen many dangerous situations at rock shows that I’ve played resolve themselves and everything was O.K.,” Gat said. “That’s definitely not the focus of this band. For me, this kind of danger is much more exciting.”

“The idea,” he concluded, “is to forget about the fact that you exist—to not exist while you’re playing music.”

Yonatan Gat plays at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar on March 4.

The collaboration between Killer Mike and El-P, the two indispensable and bomb-throwing emcees who form the uncompromisingly raw and forward-thinking rap duo Run the Jewels, has been as perfect as it was unexpected.

They seem, at first, like odd bedfellows: El-P’s a noise-loving Brooklyn firebrand with an independent streak as long as Bedford Avenue; Atlanta emcee Killer Mike is a boisterous Dirty South soldier who’s flirted with major labels and burst into consciousness via his Outkast guest features. But their similarities run deep—they both make loud, abrasive rap music that often features painful introspection alongside pointed political and societal critique.

While searching for beats for his superlative 2012 record R.A.P. Music, Mike was so enamored with El-P’s skittering, synth- clamored instrumentals that he enlisted the former Definitive Jux head to produce the entire project. Mike returned the favor by dropping a guest verse on El-P’s “Tougher Colder Killer,” from the latter’s own stellar 2012 record, Cancer 4 Cure.

The two have been seemingly inseparable since, in the process creating one of music’s most potent partnerships.

“Musically, I feel like I’ve found my soulmate,” Killer Mike said. “I’ve tried to explain it a thousand different times and given a thousand different answers. But I think it just comes straight down to—it was just meant, you know?”

“There’s no mathematical equation to friendship, you know?” El-P added. “And beyond anything, I think both of us really fucked with what was happening when we combined our influences and combined what we were doing. That was exciting to us, because we were making music together that we weren’t making ourselves. It wasn’t just, like, this works with what I do, it was like, we might be creating a sound that’s completely different for us.”

Run the Jewels was supposed to be a low-stakes, shits-and-giggles slack-off, a free download victory lap following a banner year for both. It turned out to be the most cohesive hip-hop team-up in recent memory, a hysterically hyperbolic and baldly menacing shot of rap adrenaline by turns playful and polemic and set to bumping, boombox-shredding beats. It was also perhaps the most affable thing either emcee had done: Mike and El catapulted off one another, trading eight-bar verses filled with back-and-forth, knuckles-first smack talk and upping the stakes with more protracted 32-bar stanzas filled with rich storytelling (Mike’s psilocybin-induced love story on “No Come Down”; El’s poignant coming-of-age confessional on “A Christmas Fucking Miracle”). Throughout, there’s a palpable sense of friendly, unspoken one-upsmanship between the two emcees, and their rapport’s enough to raise questions as to why this team-up was supposed to be unusual in the first place.

“This whole thing is our relationship extended into the creative endeavor,” El-P said. “It has to be about that. And I think you can hear the difference when you hear our music. You can hear it. We’re not mailing it in. We’re vibing off each other.”

RTJ2, Run the Jewels’ late-October sophomore release, runs louder, harder and nastier than its predecessor. “Last album voodoo/proved that we was fuckin’ brutal,” Killer Mike boasts on “Blockbuster Night, Part One,” before reminding us what Run the Jewels is all about: “This Run the Jewels is murder, mayhem, melodic music.” It’s angrier, too, pointing its invective at any and all authority figures: “Fuck the law/they can eat my dick,” El-P seethes on “Darling Don’t Cry.” “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)” evokes the blistering anti-cop ethos of N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police,” at one point, Killer Mike wonders aloud to various prison gangs, “When you niggas gon’ unite and kill the police, motherfuckers?”

But any resemblance to a direct response to the charged riots in Ferguson, Missouri—despite CNN making Killer Mike a key voice in the political crisis—is purely
coincidental.

“I mean, the album was done when that was happening,” El-P said. “The fact that it sort of has become more relevant to more people on a national scale who maybe weren’t keyed in or tuned in to that type of thing just is a coincidence to some degree. We always weave that stuff in and out of our music. So [RTJ2], I think it’s still a Run the Jewels record, but there’s a little bit more of that, you know, fuck-the-system vibe than there was on the first one.”

But RTJ2 nonetheless keeps what made Run the Jewels’ eponymous effort so winning—the rapid-fire rapport between two beastly rappers who really enjoy each other’s company. Hip-hop’s storied lineage is filled with tremendous tag-teams—Eric B. & Rakim, Gang Starr, UGK—that have remarkable chemistry. Just two albums in, Run the Jewels is already etching its name in those annals.

“I think that me and Mike have a very rich sort of fandom of all the stuff that we grew up on, and a lot of it was during a time when groups were way more common,” El-P said. “So, you know, someone growing up right now, maybe they’re looking at Run the Jewels as that. That’s what I hope. And I think that it would be cool if we could spark that idea. My hope, secretly, is that we can become the EPMD for a kid listening to hip-hop now.”

Sunday 11/2. $20-23, 9pm. The Jefferson Theater, 110 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 245-4980.

Roberto Lange apologizes after stammering through some small talk. The bilingual musician’s just gotten off the phone with another interviewer in Chicago in Spanish, and he’s having a little linguistic difficulty switching back to English.

The music Lange makes under the nom de plume Helado Negro similarly slides between languages; sometimes, as on the gliding “Are I Here,” Lange’s lyrics shift effortlessly between English and Spanish on the same song. “Are I Here” is the lead track from September’s Double Youth, the boldest and most intricate Helado Negro work to date, and a record that grapples with the ideas of memory and identity.

“It’s about dualities,” said Lange. “I’m always double. I’m Spanish and English. I’m Latin and American. When I’m here, in the United States, I’m Latin, because my family’s from Ecuador, so I’m Ecuadorian. When I’m in South America, I’m a gringo, because I was born here. It’s a really flipped-
up duality.”

Lange and tourmate Ahmed Gallab, who records and performs under the name Sinkane, mark a wave of artists making music that crosses genre and ethnic borders as easily as a diplomatic passport. Both are the children of immigrants, steeped in their parents indigenous cultures: Lange was born to Ecuadorian immigrants in the entrenched Hispanic communities of Miami. Gallab was born in London, lived in his parents’ native Sudan until he was five, and then crossed the Atlantic, eventually settling in Ohio. Both, now, are based in Brooklyn.

Their performing names, too, reflect their ethnic origins. Lange’s Helado Negro, translated from Spanish, means “black ice cream.” Gallab’s sobriquet comes from a misunderstanding of a reference to Joseph Cinqué, the slave who led the revolt on the Amistad slave ship, in a Jay-Z lyric. He heard the name as “Sinkane,” and concocted a fantastical backstory to who he thought that was—a monolithic African God, or a powerful monarch like Shaka Zulu or Amadou Bamba, who influenced the entire continent of Africa. The idea of Sinkane, in turn, started influencing the music he was making, insomuch as it refers to the African rhythms that permeate his songs. Gallab addresses his heritage directly on “Son,” one of the standout cuts from Mean Love: “I will not forget where I came from,” he croons over a spare beat and whole-note Rhodes piano chords.

“It’s a huge influence,” he said of his Sudanese roots. “I know I’ll always incorporate East African and Sudanese influences, because that’s who I am.”

Similarly, Lange says his Ecuadorian roots permeate Helado Negro’s music “in every aspect.”

“Someone like Ahmed is great because he falls back … on that idea of multiple [cultural] identities within the African-Amer-
ican community and the African community,” Lange said. “And I think that’s very deep. And with Latin America, there’s so much to fall back on [for Helado Negro].”

But while Sinkane and Helado Negro are projects inextricably linked to their creators’ cultural identities, neither is solely defined by ethnicity or national particularity. Rather, their indigenous influences are used as jumping-off points for pop music experiments. Both Gallab and Lange, as teenagers, dove headlong into punk. Gallab played in hardcore bands. Lange’s friends turned him on to Fugazi and the Dischord catalog. They’d both develop interests in jazz and experimental music, which still mark their music today.

Helado Negro’s sensibilities are decidedly Latin American, steeped in humid tropical psychedelia, familiar Latin rhythms and instruments floating beneath Lange’s vocal melodies. But Lange’s influences run the gamut of American art forms—New York minimalism, Miami bass, the icy Minneapolis funk of Prince.

“It’s slices of everything,” Lange said. “More than anything, I’m like anyone else who lives here, in the sense of being kind of struck by everything at the same time.”

Sinkane’s Mean Love, meanwhile, hungrily vacuums up disparate sonic influences. “Galley Boys” marries high lonesome, country and western pedal steel with dubby African rhythms and Brill Building vocal harmonies. On “How We Be,” Gallab lunges into funk-spiced pop that wouldn’t be out of place on modern R&B charts. But the tribal pulse and widescreen spread of “New Name” and “Omdurman” (named for the Sudanese hometown of Gallab’s mother) recall Nigerian funk pioneer William Onyeabor—a named influence to whom Gallab directed an all-star tribute band, The Atomic Bomb Band, last year.

“I find his music to be so fascinating and it’s always been inspiring,” Gallab said of Onyeabor. “But ultimately, I think the idea of his music is more interesting to me. That he created this music that is distinctly African but in turn kind of turned into this thing that transcended African music—I think that, more than anything, is what inspires me.”

And the music he and Lange, in turn, create is equally inspiring, equally transcendent of cultural identity.

“I’m just creating feelgood music, you know? It’s music that I’d like the whole world to relate to,” Gallab said. “I want to create a universal sound, universal music. The whole aim of my music is to create music that anyone can enjoy. Not just music for kids my age or people who’ve had a similar upbringing as me. I want to connect to the world.”

The highlight of the back half of Justin Townes Earle’s Single Mothers, the 32-year-old singer-songwriter’s superlative fifth record, is “White Gardenias,” a tribute to one of Earle’s favorite musicians, jazz singer Billie Holiday.

Holiday seems an unlikely inspiration on Earle, who’s nominally an alt-country troubadour. But a close listen to the way he sings on ballads like “Worried Bout the Weather” and “It’s Cold in This House” reveals a clear inspiration from Holiday’s instrument-like voice, his conversational and unclasped singing approximating her frayed edges.

“Her timing is just impeccable,” Earle said. “Just really far behind the beat, and I try to achieve that with my singing, and also to carry my voice like she did. You never saw veins sticking out of her throat or anything like that, but her voice always carried very well and stayed very smooth. I think she’s affected me with the utter emotion that went into her music.”

There’s another parallel linking Holiday and Earle. Holiday’s career was famously marred by drug abuse, drinking, and toxic relationships; so, too, were the early years of Earle’s career marked by self-destructive indiscretion, a trait seemingly inherited from his similarly troubled dad and notorious Nashville outlaw Steve Earle. 

By age 21, Earle had survived five heroin overdoses, finally getting help after a 14-day coke and dope binge that ended in respiratory failure.

After bottoming out again in late 2010, when an arrest following a binge forced him to cancel a month of tour dates, Earle’s stayed sober. He got married back in December. (“She’s an amazing woman,” he said of his wife. “She’d be every true artist’s dream. I definitely got the better end of the deal, for sure.”) He’s maturing, he allows, and his songwriting, as a result, has taken positive strides.

“I feel a lot better about my writing these days,” he said. “I’ve always had a semi-amount of doubt in my records—even The Good Life and Midnight at the Movies. I’m definitely a more confident person, and a bit more of a deliberate writer.”

Single Mothers benefits from such calculation. It’s a series of loosely connected vignettes—a kind of musical dialogue about real and fictional women—drawn from Earle’s history, without being strictly autobiographical or naively confessional.

“All you can do is tell how [things] affected you,” he said. “What did it result in for you, emotionally? That’s where I try to look from. I try to go from the point of view of how people feel after something happens as opposed to what exactly happened.”

“People relate to emotion,” he continued. “I mean, if I say I was smoking crack and I was feeling down, that cuts the relationship to my music down to a very slim population. Now if I say I was killing myself and I was feeling down, that’s a much different thing. That leaves a broader interpretation, and I think that’s what people want—they want to interact with the song.”

Earle cut Single Mothers in the same Quad Studios room where Neil Young recorded Harvest, with the same group of players he’s toured with for a few years including Matt Pence and Mark Hedman, the rhythm section of the Texas-based indie-rock band Centro-matic; and Paul Niehaus, who’s provided graceful, elliptical pedal steel lines for the Arizona-
based desert noir band Calexico and mercurial Nashville alt-country band Lambchop. 

Having players who operate largely outside of the confines of the Music City machine, Earle said, was paramount in making Single Mothers and keeping its arrangements sharp. “Paul is and never has been a Nashville musician; he’s never fit in that mold,” Earle said. “I needed guys that had never been there, and they’d never thought about it, and there was not one safe bone in their body.”

Earle currently resides in Nashville, if not entirely by choice. He has “some family issues” going on, he said, that forced him to return to the town where his mother raised him by herself.

Earle grew up about ten blocks south of Broadway in Nashville, which teems with juke joints and honky tonks, and it profoundly affected who he is, but he hates what Nashville’s become.

“It’s definitely a semi-terrible place,” said Earle. “I wouldn’t be here if my mother wasn’t here. It’s hard to watch your hometown turn into Los Angeles or Atlanta or something.”

No matter where Earle goes, physically, from here, he’ll be starting from a point of artistic strength. On Single Mothers, he never writes more than the song demands, never dulls the potency of his expressions by tempering them with saccharine sentiment. Though it might be, in his words, a more hopeful record, there’s still plenty of his characteristic self-damning darkness to go around. 

For Earle, at least, getting married, staying clean and loving your mother aren’t the artistic death-knells they might seem. “I still have 30 years behind me of very rough to semi-rough life,” he laughed. “So I’m not going, y’know, ‘Shiny Happy People’ any time soon.”

For about six years, Alasdair MacLean has been writing a novel.

“Occasionally I’ll send a draft of that to my agent and have it thoroughly rejected,” MacLean laughed when reached at his home in London. “And then I’ll start again. And that’s kind of been it for six years.

MacLean’s novel is about growing up in the suburbs of southeastern London in the 1990s—“Which, coincidentally, I did,” he said.

And the southeastern London suburbs, coincidentally, defined the earliest songs of The Clientele, the quintessentially British indie-pop band MacLean co-founded in 1997.

“It’s turning into a bit of a life’s work,” MacLean said. “Which is a bit tragic, really. It’s an odd thing to base an aesthetic on, I suppose.”

Save for a few scarce dates, The Clientele (pronounced CLEE-un-tell) has been largely inactive since 2011, when the band went on an indefinite hiatus. But it’s reuniting for a week-long tour centered around the Merge 25 festival, which celebrates the vaunted North Carolina indie label’s 25th anniversary.

Merge released all five of The Clientele’s full-length records, and in May reissued the band’s debut, Suburban Light, as part of a yearlong series which has also reintroduced notable records like Richard Buckner’s debut Bloomed, Lambchop’s critical opus Nixon, and a career-spanning anthology by seminal New Zealand indie rock band The Clean.

“I was really flattered,” said MacLean about the reissue. “There are so many great records in the Merge back catalogue, and the fact that they chose one of ours was incredibly flattering.”

Released in 2000, Suburban Light was meant to be a high-production debut rendered in a major studio, the inevitable delivery on the promise of the band’s run of critically acclaimed seven-inch singles. There were plans for string quartets, brass sections, and choirs. There were grandiose wall-of-sound production ideas—like “Martin Hannett crossed with Phil Spector,” MacLean said—and warm, vintage tones.

But it was the late ’90s in England, and recording engineers were more interested in the production style of Radiohead’s OK Computer or the Britpop dominating the charts at the time—music, MacLean said, “that was really inimical to how we wanted to sound.”

“Every time we went into the studio we said ‘This is going to be the time when we start to sound contemporary; we’re not going to sound like a ’60s band any more.’ And then we always fucked it up,” Mac-Lean said.

Instead of finding its sound, The Clientele found frustration. Eventually, the group went back to the relatively primitive but especially intimate recordings found on its demos and 7″, tracks cut wherever its members lived and whenever they wanted.

“We used those because they had a kind of magic to them that nothing else we recorded did,” MacLean said. “It was that simple. There was no further thought or ideology than it [the studio versions] sounds like shit, let’s not use it, you know?”

Suburban Light, either in spite or because of its low fidelity, is unfailingly gorgeous, marked by shimmering mystery. Like the artist Joseph Cornell, the titular subject of one of Suburban Light’s most memorable songs, The Clientele distills its source materials into something uniquely and instantly its own, in large part because of the band’s suburban surroundings.

“It’s an unlikely source of inspiration, I suppose,” said MacLean of the southeast London neighborhood that birthed and informed The Clientele. “I think what probably connects British suburbs is just boredom, really. That’s the aesthetic. It comes from boredom.”

But what is it composer Erik Satie said about boredom? That it’s potentially mysterious and profound? And The Clientele wasn’t just channelling ennui, they were living it.

Though it’s made up of odds and sods, Suburban Light nonetheless evokes a complete, cogent world, painting a soft-focus picture of British suburbia. MacLean’s vocals, drenched in faraway reverb, evoke the ghostly halos that surround streetlights in twilight. The marriage of grace and tension in his and Innes Phillips’ guitar playing is filled with young adult languor. The steadily pattering drums invoke the gloomy rain frequently referenced in song titles and lyrics. The negative space employed by the trio’s sparse arrangements conjure images of empty football fields and dimly lit city scenes. 

“We just wrote about the things that were around us,” MacLean said. “There was woodlands and…long avenues with streetlights that stretched out from the motorway and there was the sound of the motorway and the hum behind everything else at night. For me, it’s a very poetic, beautiful landscape, and that’s what we lived and breathed in the days that we were writing those songs. And that made a lot more sense. I mean, who needs to hear another song about London? Who needs to hear another song about New York? I think we need to explore these more liminal spaces.”

Though The Clientele went on to crank out high-production records, they never quite inhabited a clearly defined sonic world. It’s a little strange for MacLean, now 40, to revisit that world. “When I was 18, I was like, ‘If I don’t leave this place, I’m going to kill myself, if I don’t get out to college or to London or a job or something,’” MacLean added with a chuckle. “So it’s kind of weird to be celebrating it 15 years later. It’s one of life’s ironies, I guess.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo5gbXzrV0A

Five years ago, Bombadil was a band with a bright future. The band was mentored by Dolph Ramseur, whose Ramseur Records is home to The Avett Brothers and The Carolina Chocolate Drops, two of the country’s biggest roots music acts. Its rigorous touring routine built the band a considerable nationwide fanbase. Big festivals like Bonnaroo and FloydFest came calling. Scott Solter, one of indie rock’s most noted producers, recorded Tarpits and Canyonlands, an eclectic and ambitious multi-

colored pop album, in his North Carolina studio. It was only Bombadil’s second record, but it soaked in some very heady accolades; one critic compared it The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

But as Bombadil was winning those accolades, the band was starting to unspool. Bassist Daniel Michalak was slowly losing the use of his hands due to crippling nerve damage. As the daily routine of life in a band became excruciating, Michalak gradually ceded his responsibilities. He’d end rehearsals early and practice less. He stopped driving the tour van, and he couldn’t move equipment. After a while, he couldn’t even play an instrument on stage; the band rearranged a few songs so he didn’t have to play so much. Near the end of one tour, Michalak’s pain was so intense he could barely feed himself or brush his teeth.

“It was unpleasant, for sure, to watch him deal with that pain,” said drummer James Phillips. “And he was doing those things because he wanted to be making music so badly. I think he felt a big obligation and duty to us, which I think speaks very highly to who Daniel is as a bandmate and human being.”

With Bombadil unable to continue touring, Tarpits and Canyonlands, despite its acclaim, was essentially stillborn. Bombadil celebrated its release in Durham with a listening party, but the band didn’t perform. Shortly thereafter, Bombadil split up and spread out. Keyboardist Stuart Robinson left to study for medical school. Guitarist Bryan Rahija moved to Washington, D.C., then to Michigan. Phillips sprinted to Portland, Oregon, where he’d met his then-girlfriend.

Michalak retreated to rural Wilson, North Carolina, experimenting with all manner of treatments to ease his neural tension including pain medications, nerve stabilizers, homeopathic drugs, biofeedback, acupuncture, and even Rolfing.

“Personally, I was given a lot of unexpected free time,” Phillips said. “Daniel was given a lot of unexpected pain, you know? I went on this two-year, three-year adventure, learning electronic music and how to record music and how to play the piano. He had to go home and basically convalesce.”

Scattered by fate, Bombadil’s members still stirred creatively. Robinson focused on the piano, and discovered a knack for songwriting. Phillips toured with and recorded bands in Oregon, and made his own electronic music. Michalak continued to make music, too, composing on his computer after learning to operate a mouse with his feet.

“It was inspiring that he continued to make music during that period,” Phillips said. “And that pushed me to keep working on things and led to a whole multitude of decisions that led us to where we are today.”

Today, Bombadil is firmly entrenched in a solid second act. The band re-formed as a trio in 2011 — Rahija still writes and plays on the band’s records, but doesn’t tour — but the members’ experience apart changed the way the band operated.

“Maybe, in a way, it helped us become more of a collective than a band,” Phillips said.

Bombadil is more relaxed these days, according to Phillips. They’re encouraging each other to learn new instruments, to become better singers, to become better songwriters and collaborators.

Last year, Bombadil released the triumphant Metrics of Affection, a smart, winning pop record filled with sharp vignettes about life’s small victories and tiny pangs of heartbreak. The group’s second post-hiatus record, it’s the band’s most adventurous and varied collection, filled with fantastical and florid arrangements—even a rap song written by Michalak.

It’s creating at rapid pace, too. When reached in late June, the band was at Phillips’ house honing the arrangements on one of Robinson’s songs. The band has also been in the studio for months and is close to wrapping up its next record, which Ramseur, who stuck by Bombadil throughout its hiatus, will release it next year.

In the meantime, Tarpits and Canyonlands is getting a second chance. Ramseur Records reissued it in June, and its press package doesn’t mince words—it repeatedly asserts that Tarpits is the record that should have made Bombadil famous.

Phillips laughed at the hyperbole.

“I’m flattered that people who listen to a lot of music think that [Tarpits] is a record that could have done that for a band,” he said. “But I also know that it didn’t do that for our band. And I’m O.K. with that.”

Michalak is almost fully recovered. He’s been pain-free, Phillips said, for nearly a year. With Michalak healthy, Bombadil has spent much of 2014 back on the road, though at a more relaxed pace. And the return to performing and touring is paying off; Bombadil’s once again a band with a healthy buzz and bright future.

“I think we’re further along now than we were then,” Phillips said. “It did take a while to get back up and going, but I think we’re beyond that point now.”

The opening track to Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings’ Give the People What They Want is the burning and brassy “Retreat!” Nominally, it’s a song about the fury of a woman scorned, and Jones sings it masterfully, filling her vocal barbs with impassioned invective.

But for Sharon Jones, the song has a deeper, unintended meaning.

Last June, Jones was diagnosed with bile duct cancer, a rare carcinoma that blocks the tubes that push bile from the liver and gallbladder through the pancreas and into the small intestine. She underwent a seven-hour Whipple procedure—wherein various organs were partially removed or shifted to allow for a re-routing of bile—at a New York hospital.

She thought she was going to die.

Following the surgery, she laid in a hospital bed for 13 days. She was lying in that hospital bed when she first saw the animated video for the song, where Jones’ powerful vocalizations repel ever-circling wolves. Eventually, when the wolves have her surrounded, she invokes soul power and grows to giant size, as if empowered and emboldened by her music.

“I’m laying and I’m looking at this video, and I saw it, and then I was getting ready to look at it a second time, and Saundra [Williams], one of my background singers, she said, ‘Girl, I know you saw the meaning of that video,’” Jones said. “‘You saying retreat, and those little wolves running, that’s like you telling the cancer to retreat, and you overpowering the cancer.’ And I’m like, ‘Wow. Wow.’”

Jones went through her last chemotherapy treatment on New Year’s Eve, was declared cancer-free in mid-January, and hasn’t looked back since. The Dap-Kings returned to the stage in February, and swing through Charlottesville on May 29 in the midst of an extensive American and European tour.

Her hair still hasn’t fully grown back, but Jones insists that’s the only thing she’s lost. The Dap-Kings still put on their trademark nonstop soul marathon, and Jones still brings it, sequined dresses and tiny heels and all.

“My energy, I’m feelin’ it,” she said. “I’m not doing everything exactly like we did it before, but I’m still shoutin’, I’m still jumpin’, I’m still movin’. I’m feeling good. That energy’s still there. That’s a blessing. That’s how good God is.”

Jones, who grew up singing in churches in South Carolina, credits her faith—along with her fans—as a large part of her successful recovery, but she thinks the almighty spared her for a higher purpose—saving soul.

“That’s why God spared my life,” she said. “These people need to know that soul is here.”

The Dap-Kings were the first act of Brooklyn-based Daptone Records, an independent label started by Dap-Kings Gabe Roth and Neal Sugarman 13 years ago. The aim was to bring soul music back to the masses. The company roster now includes Antibalas, Sugarman 3, Charles Bradley, and the Menahan Street Band, but Jones remains its flagship act, one that almost singlehandedly brought soul back en vogue in the mid-’00s.

While Daptone expertly captures the vintage vibe of Motown and Stax—it built its own studio in Brooklyn, and uses old-school recording consoles and analog tape to capture the sound of its influences—it’s also come with a trade-off: the “retro” tag, a label the 58-year-old Jones dreads.

“To me, retro is some young person trying to sing like some old person back in the day,” Jones protested. “And here I am, when I open my mouth, soul music comes out. Ain’t nothing retro here.”

Daptone has never been shy about its commercial aspirations, and neither has Jones. “You don’t hear us in the mainstream,” she said. “Why aren’t we mainstream? It’s a good question.”

After toiling in relative obscurity for years, Jones and Daptone found a certain amount of exposure in the mid-’00s with 100 Days, 100 Nights, which broke the Dap-Kings out of its niche audience. (Even though the Dap-Kings’ earliest work, like the James Brown-ish hard funk of Dap-Dippin’ With…, might be the group’s strongest material.) While NPR and the mainstream music press—and, uh, alt-weeklies—have heaped a lot of laud on the Dap-Kings, Jones still feels soul gets slighted, adding an alternate meaning to tracks like “People Don’t Get What They Deserve.”

“Not me, not even Dap-Kings or Daptone, not even us,” Jones said. “But the other record labels, even all these young people out here trying to come up with this new soul thing and keeping soul music alive, we’re not getting what we deserve. We deserve to be recognized. Recognize our music. Recognize soul music.”

That’s Jones’ ultimate goal. And she’ll sing “100 Days, 100 Nights” as many times as that requires. After all, Jones posits, Tina Turner didn’t get tired of “Proud Mary.” Aretha didn’t get tired of “Respect.” “I’m not tired of doing nothing yet,” said Jones. “When I get tired of it, it’s time to sit my lazy behind down. That’s all that is, it’s laziness when you’re tired of doing your own stuff.”

“I’m not tired,” she concluded. “I’m just getting back out here.”