Tag: Heron & Crane

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Turn it up: Our favorite local recordings this year

From punk to kids’ pop, hip-hop, and so much more, 2019 was another year with a lot to hear from Charlottesville-area musicians.

Lots of people complain that there’s no music scene here. And we get it—there can be lulls in shows (and definitely lulls in good shows)—but a music scene is more than what’s on stage. We love recordings, too, so may this list serve as your entry point to some local sonic treasures. We’ve compiled a lengthy list of local album and EP releases (scroll down for that) and while we were at it, highlighted a few of our favorites.

Fried Egg, Square One

When every day starts to feel exactly the same, when you’ve bought a car to drive to work in order to pay for the car you bought, you get down on your knees and pray to whatever idol you pray to for a band like Fried Egg to make you jump out of the pan. On Square One, an album about feeling disillusioned with modern life, the half-Charlottesville half-Richmond band turns up the heat with tight, off-center hardcore punk that’s neither over- nor undercooked.

Read more: “Over hard: Punk band Fried Egg goes beyond its hardcore roots”

Heron & Crane, Firesides

“It’s very much ready to be played during a Folgers coffee commercial,” Dave Gibson told C-VILLE about Heron & Crane’s Firesides. Gibson and longtime friend and musical collaborator Travis Kokas used a limited palette of instruments—a 12-string guitar, a few MOOG and Yamaha synthesizers, an Oberheim DX drum machine, and an organelle—to venture out onto the lush and gentle kinda-folksy, lightly-psychedelic, almost-kosmische, pastoral aural landscape.

Read more: “North by southeast: Heron & Crane’s Firesides arrives via online collaboration”

Little Skunks, Smells Like Music

Don’t turn your nose up at this kids’ album —we’re not talking Wee Sing Silly Songs, KidzBop, or even “Rockabye Baby” here. Smells Like Music was made by a bunch of adult musicians with pretty good manners and a sense of humor, people who usually make electronic, experimental, and rock music for grown-ups. The record is silly (“Mice in My Underwear Drawer”), endearing (“I Love You”), inspirational (“Start A Band”), and slightly ridiculous in the best way (“Who’s cooking pancakes?”). You don’t have to be a kid to get a total kick out of it.

Nathaniel Star, Bush Master

There’s alchemy in the combination of Nathaniel Star’s butter-smooth voice and producer Vintage’s rich beats, and the resulting elixir was so magical, it caught the ear of Bandcamp’s Chaka V. Grier, who named it one of the site’s “Best Soul on Bandcamp: August 2019” selections. Grier sums up the album’s appeal perfectly: “It’s not an easy thing to achieve—making music that enchants and enlightens—but Star makes it sound effortless.”

Read more: “Time to play: After nearly a decade, Nathaniel Star returns to the stage”

Patient 0, Girl Problems

In order for a small music scene to survive, young people have to start bands, make music, and play shows. So it was exciting to see a fledgling rock band like Patient 0 (one with solid skill and a lot of potential) release a full-length record, Girl Problems, which the teen band members recorded at the Music Resource Center here in town. Singer, lyricist, and bassist Tessa Majors wrote with a lot of heart and a good dose of ’90s riot grrrl attitude, and moved her audiences at every show. Majors died while this list was being put together, but her voice lives on in this record.

Space-Saver, Exponential Bummer

Local drum ‘n’ sax duo puts on one of the most fascinating live shows, and its recordings are no different. Do you lock into Steve Snider’s drum grooves, following them as they take roundabouts and sharp angles? Or into Travis Thatcher’s sorta-distorted sax paths? What if you get both at once? Whoa.

Waasi, From Virginia with Love

This is Malcolm “Waasi” Wills’ second release in as many years, and the young rapper has this to say about his new record: “If you don’t know me, I feel like From Virginia With Love gives you a perfect description of my personality: Funky, feel good, and raw.” He’s got flow, social consciousness, self-awareness, and solid stage presence—a combination that makes it easy to see how his record release show nearly sold out The Southern Café & Music Hall.

Wild Rose, Cosmic Miasma

Riffs, riffs, riffs, and more riffs. This local punk ‘n’ roll band has put out a couple tapes in recent years, and its first 7″ record (issued on local label Infinite Repeats) careens in at just under 10 minutes, with singer Josh Phipps maxing out his voice at whatever cost, eager to get his point across. The record’s great, and the band’s live show is even better. Next time Wild Rose plays in town, don’t miss it.

More 2019 local releases

Albums

Abstract Threats, Contentment (indie rock)

Alice Clair, Loop (folksy rock and soul)

Andrew Neil, Merry Go Round (alternative indie folk, grunge)

Angel Metro, Dark Days Bright Lights (dark synthpop)

Angela on the Arts, Within (chamber jazz, modern classical)

Bergot, Surmae (electronic, experimental)

Big Lean, C.A.L.M. and The Rabbit Hole (smooth, soulful hip-hop)

Butterfly Vendetta, Running in Place and Contents Under Pressure (pop punk, rock)

Charles Owens Trio, Three and Thirteen (jazz)

Chris Hall, red winter beats (emo, experimental, pop, trap)

David Wax Museum, Line of Light (indie folk-rock, Mexo-Americana)

Dropping Julia, Wake Up (funky/rootsy pop-rock)

Fried Egg, Square One (hardcore punk)

Front Porch Revival, Live at Lance’s (drum & bass, experimental hip-hop)

Grand Banks, Autumn Cannon and Live 3-31-2019 (experimental, electroacoustic, drone, raga, pastoral)

Greg C. Brown, Premieres (classical guitar)

Guion Pratt, Drone for the Holidays Vol.I III (experimental, ambient, drone)

Harli & The House of Jupiter, Deja Vu (alternative rock)

H.B. Kipps, Dead Air Telepathy (electronic, video game music)

Heron & Crane, Firesides (pastoral electronic psych-folk, library music)

Holly Renee Allen, Appalachian Piece-Meal (country, folk, Americana)

Human Shaped Objects, Country Countdown 2013 (ambient, algorithmic)

J Certi, Now or Never (hip-hop, rap)

Jeneene, the Areas (punk, garage)

Jordan Perry, Names and a Draft of First Cold (experimental guitar)

Jovon White, Thought Noise (experimental hip-hop)

LaQuinn, Nostalgia and Laquinn in South 900 (rap, hip-hop)

Lowland Hum, Glyphonic (minimalist hush folk)

Little Skunks, Smells Like Music (electronic rock for kids)

Matéo Amero and Ezra Miller, Tales from the Lazy River (country, folk, cowpunk)

Minnush, Minnush (Sephardic, jazz, roots, improvisation)

Nate Braeuer, altars were here (acoustic indie folk)

Nathaniel Star, Bush Master (Afrobeat, hip-hop, R&B, neo-soul)

New Immersion Blender, Feel Right, MF (experimental, kosmiche)

Oil Derek, The Devil’s Nine Questions (country, folk, spiritual)

Panda Slugger, Standing Outside in the Rain Trying to Remember the Way It Feels to Believe (ambient, chill)

Patient 0, Girl Problems (alt. rock with a touch of riot grrl)

Pearl Pile, Plastic Plant (alternative basement psych, indie rock)

Piko, œ (avant garde, experimental indie)

Pluto, Pluto (reggae-ish electronic)

Salvaticus, Ordo Naturalis (black metal)

Ships in the Night, The Remixes (darkwave, dream pop)

Six Foot Ceilings, Six Foot Ceilings (pop rock)

Space-Saver, Exponential Bummer (experimental drum ‘n’ sax)

ST/MiC, sevens & thr33s or something like that (lo-fi hip-hop instrumentals)

Studebaker Huck, Wired in the Darkness and Barn Burner (punk-ish Southern rock)

Tracy Howe, Things That Grow (gospel, folk, rock)

Va Doe, The Chris Newman Show (rap, hip-hop)

The Voice of Saturn, otherwordly transport (electronic, synth, kosmiche)

Willie DE, Runaway Child (blues-rock singer-songwriter, jazz)

 

EPs

ArtificalRealitySoundscape, Neutral Centipede Carpool (experimental electronic, noise)

Beasts of Least Concern, That’s Not How I Like to Do Business (gothy acoustic ballads)

Bobblehead, Bobblehead (alternative swamp rock boogie)

Cameron Taylor, The Reef (experimental hip-hop)

Carry, Small, Early, Free (Appalachian experimental drone)

Gold Connections, Like A Shadow (hi-fi indie rock)

Gold Sounds, Gold Sounds (jazz-funk)

Good Dog Nigel, The Implied Sunrise (indie rock, power pop)

jaRed lodwick, ¿ (hip-hop, rap)

Kate Bollinger, I Don’t Wanna Lose (chill indie bedroom pop)

Kendall Street Company, Lunar Dude (improvised rock, jazz-grass)

Kylie Cloud, Royal City Harbor Remixes 2

LaQuinn, If I Sold Dope (the Mixtape) (rap, hip-hop)

Lost Ray, Conflux (ambient electronic)

Matéo Amero, Untitled (folksy country rock)

Maxwell Mandell and Elinor Glassco, Next To You (electronic singer-songwriter)

Naomi Alligator, Big World (arty alternative singer-songwriter)

Paint the Watermelon, Composer (alternative ambient electronic)

Patrick Keese, Gallery (indie chamber pop)

Pretty Pulp, Break Me Up and Atrophy (grunge, alternative rock)

PROLO, singles ep and Te Hip Vol. 1 (hip-hop, rap, boom-bap)

Reagan Riley, Glass (chill neo-soul)

Ruckus the Bulldog, Welcome to Thrashville (hard rock, comedy)

The Skavaliers, The Skavaliers (ska)

Spillway, Fall 2019 Live Demo (shoegaze-y hard indie rock)

Stray Fossa, Laridae EP (poppy indie rock)

Synthetic Division, digital singles (synthpop)

Time Nothing, Losing Faith (metal, metalcore)

The Vailix, Ageless (conceptual hard rock)

True Spirit, II (noise-y post-punk)

Wild Rose, Cosmic Miasma (punk ‘n’ roll)

Wülf Boi, Thanatophilia (rap, hip-hop)

Local mixtapes

Various (Music Resource Center), It’s Here. It’s Always Been Here. (alternative, hip-hop, indie, rap, rock)

Various, Nine Pillars Mixtape Vol. 2 (rap, hip-hop)

 

What’d we miss? Email us at arts@c-ville.com to add your album or EP to the online list.

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Arts

North by southeast: Heron & Crane’s Firesides arrives via online collaboration

Electronic pastoral folk-psych duo Heron & Crane (Travis Kokas and Dave Gibson) releases its debut record, Firesides, on Friday, and plays a celebratory show at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on Saturday night. Publicity photo

Twenty-two years.

That’s how long Heron & Crane’s first record, Firesides, has been in the works, whether or not Travis Kokas and Dave Gibson were aware of it.

Kokas and Gibson met at a sparsely attended rock show in 1997, while both were students at Ohio State University in Columbus. They got to talking and discovered they shared a myriad of interests: Both were film geeks, and they had “all the same musical obsessions,” says Gibson. (Incidentally, they’d both go on to become librarians.)

They became buds, and soon after that, bandmates, playing in a band called The Cusacks “like John and Joan,” says Gibson, who describes his and Kokas’ first musical collaboration as a “power-poppy, Elephant 6-sounding band” that took inspiration from a recording collective comprised of some of the most notable indie rock bands of the 1990s and 2000s, such as Neutral Milk Hotel, The Olivia Tremor Control, and The Apples in Stereo.

When Gibson moved to Charlottesville, the friends kept in touch, talking often, visiting occasionally, and keeping tabs on one another’s musical projects. Gibson played psychedelic power pop with Borrowed Beams of Light for a while, and founded catchy indie pop band Weird Mob (with Renee Reighart) and kosmische-krautrock-synthwave duo Personal Bandana (with Travis Thatcher), while Kokas pursued a solo psych-pop project, Cryptids After Dark.

Gibson (as well as Reighart and a few other area musicians) helped Kokas record some of those Cryptids After Dark tracks while he was visiting from Columbus, and the two kept working on the songs after the fact and from afar, sending digital music files back and forth.

They discovered it was an exciting way to collaborate on music, and decided to start a new band where they could play the “weird, mellow, instrumental, folky” music they both love, says Gibson. It was “an opportunity to do music that we enjoy, that didn’t exactly sit with our other musical projects.”

Dusty old demos hatched fresh new ideas, and after an initial Charlottesville basement recording session in fall 2017, with just a drum machine and 12-string guitar, Heron & Crane took flight across the internet, with Gibson and Kokas trading off building up a track—a synth part here (Gibson), a guitar part there (Kokas).

Both say that it was exciting to open emails and see that the other one had uploaded a new file to their shared Dropbox, each time an aural surprise that would either confirm the direction they were following, or suggest a new one entirely.

“We built and built, and then we almost had too much stuff,” says Gibson. “Here are all the possible ideas…then for the sake of not totally overburdening people’s ears with different parts, we whittled it down to what it became.”

Firesides became a record in which Gibson and Kokas use a limited palette of analog instruments (no software sounds allowed)—including a 12-string guitar, a variety of MOOG and Yamaha synthesizers (including one that could do everything from sampling to Mellotron mimicry), an Oberheim DX drum machine, and an organelle—to explore the gentle, pastoral topography of electronic music.

Taking flight

The Heron & Crane name is, among other things, a reference to Russian filmmaker Yuri Norstein’s The Heron and The Crane, a 10-minute animated short from 1974 based on a fairy tale about a hapless courtship between the two titular birds. It’s also a nod to Mike Heron, a member of the highly influential British psychedelic folk act The Incredible String Band, founded in the 1960s. Renee Reighart designed the Firesides cover art, capturing the colorful, calming landscapes that Kokas and Gibson kept in mind while composing.

“You can tell we were feeling ourselves out a bit on this record,” says Kokas, pointing to the variety of sounds and feelings stretching across the album’s 10 tracks. Side one of the LP (they pressed 100 copies to red vinyl) is a bit more experimental, with the Electric Light Orchestra-inspired “Stars Over Nara,” the krautrock song “Surf Trials,” and Kokas’ ode to Gibson’s basement, “Cave Cricket Crossing.” Side two is a “bit more cohesive,” says Kokas, with the Gibson-penned Stereolab-y “Space Junk” and the duo’s favorite, the Kokas-written “Companions Of Fish & Turtles,” which they both say best captures the vibe they aimed for from the start.

“It’s very much ready to be played during a Folger’s coffee commercial,” says Gibson with a laugh. “A lot of what influenced this record is weird music from old educational films and stuff.” All that “library music” used in film and television scores, and the British psych-folk that both he and Kokas bonded over more than two decades ago.

Somewhere out there on what Gibson calls the “weird fantasy landscape” of Firesides, they found a new frontier worth exploring together:“It’s probably the funnest record I’ve ever done,” says Kokas. “I feel rejuvenated.”

While Kokas is in town to play a release show for the record, he and Gibson plan on laying down the first tracks for Heron & Crane’s next record. It’s sure to take less time.

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Arts

Album reviews: Heron & Crane, Vivian Girls, G Flip, Ikebe Shakedown, and Sleater-Kinney

Sleater-Kinney's "The Center Won't Hold" is a bit of a letdown. Publicity image.

Heron & Crane

Firesides (Hibernator Gigs)

Denizens of Charlottesville’s indie scene know Dave Gibson from power-pop exponents Borrowed Beams of Light and Weird Mob, plus synth soundscapers Personal Bandana. Here, Gibson and Columbus, Ohio, buddy Travis Kokas split the difference, with sweet results. The mostly instrumental Firesides is a fetching mélange of melody and texture, nature and geometry, as delicate guitar figures intertwine with murmuring keyboards while drum tracks rustle underneath (becoming the motorik backbone of the Byrds-meet-Delia Derbyshire “Stars Over Nara”). Firesides
is hypnotic yet sociable, and well worth hanging with. [8.8]

https://heronandcranemusic.bandcamp.com

Vivian Girls

Memory (Polyvinyl)

Following their 2008 debut, the Vivian Girls’ aesthetic—surfy post-punk with girl group cuteness and gothic brooding—seemed to crop up everywhere, and while the band’s spinoffs (La Sera, Best Coast, Babies) carried the ball in different directions, the Vivian Girls’ DNA was always detectable. On Memory they revisit their classic style with a squall of sound that’s aggressive and protective at the same time, obscuring intimate lyrics behind feedback. And although “Waiting in the Car” closes the album in a poppier mode, the Girls’ moodier side prevails on Memory. It isn’t an apotheosis of all that put the Vivian Girls on the map, but it’s nice to have ‘em back. [7.0]

https://viviangirlsnyc.bandcamp.com/album/memory

G Flip

About Us (Future Classic)

With her giant glasses, baggy tees, and stringy hair, Melbourne’s G Flip does Taylor Swift’s nerd character better by a mile. But it’s still a character—Flip’s a pop diva who specializes in The Big Ballad, especially of the “I’m soooo screwed up but will inevitably triumph” species. Flip’s got a potent voice, mixing Lorde and Camila Cabello, and she can turn a phrase. But the songs are Hallmark-card lame, all bombast and wide gestures, and not even the sprightly, funky beat on single “About You” can hide the plodding and plotting on top. [6.1]

Ikebe Shakedown

Kings Left Behind (Colemine)

Members of New York septet Ikebe Shakedown have played with Sharon Jones & the
Dap-Kings, so you kinda know what to expect, and you get it right from the top. “Not Another Drop” opens with solid funk from the trap kit and congas
before a pair of guitars enter,
one ringing out tremoloed chords, and one chunking away, while a snaky bass line insinuates itself. And then, the horns…they enter, playing an unremarkable melody in unison, and over the course of the album they never stop; they just rest, fitfully. However each song starts, you know the horns are crouching, waiting to unleash their staccato barks to squelch whatever psychedelic guitar solo or evocative harpsichord might be fighting for daylight. The only relief comes on the brief closer “Not Another Drop (Reprise),” featuring a tasty slide guitar that makes you wonder what else you missed. [5.9]

https://ikebeshakedown-clmn.bandcamp.com/album/kings-left-behind

Sleater-Kinney

The Center Won’t Hold (Mom + Pop)

The third Sleater-Kinney album since their post-Woods hiatus (and apparently their final outing with drummer Janet Weiss), The Center Won’t Hold begins with some lumbering, retro-industrial percussion, and the classic S-K punk throttle that emerges feels like it’s fighting out of tar pits. Sadly, this is a portent. There are hooks on The Center Won’t Hold, but in pumping up the band’s razor-sharp grooves, producer St. Vincent dulls them. The lower-key “Restless” is an exception, and the band’s always-bracing vocals come close to saving the day elsewhere. But the only joy I find is the breezy, danceable “LOVE,”—a little rock ‘n’ roll fun, and a tantalizing taste of where this album could have gone. [6.1]

https://sleaterkinney.bandcamp.com/album/the-center-wont-hold