Duck & Cover :: Indie rock music writing from Arcade Fire to the Zygotic Minci

Guest post by David Schutz Buy Here Anonymous from Amazon. Sounds Like: They’re on the verge of an iPod commercial RIYL: Shins, Built To Spill, Film School A Few Words: At first glance, Eulogies' second, Here Anonymous , comes across like it’s pre-fabbed for Apple’s ad division. Driven by Peter Walker’s restrained, lilting vocals (a la Shins, Chairlift, Shins), the quartet engages for the most part in jangly, mid-tempo, middle-of-the-road indie rock. When they’re going through the motions (“This Fine Progression”, “Eyes on the Prize”), they’re predictably boring and ultimately marketable. But sometimes they throw a wrench in the formula and things get good. “Bad Connection” is weighed down by a subtle melancholy that Walker seems bent on trying to sing his way out of. The resulting tension creates a more complicated emotional landscape than on other songs, where optimistic and dejected feelings tend to inhabit different sections, fearful of stepping on each others’ toes. “Da...

Guest blogger Drew Zackary needs a day off. We wonder where he finds time to send us his guitar player's pick each month. The underground eats the years, breaks all your E strings; spits out death, obscure city workers, and suburban gardeners decades after the cocaine and long hair. . . I Digress. Robert Buras. 1975-2007. Found dead in his apartment in Oslo ( here's an amazing video of his band with him as the corpse ). Lead guitarist for Mudugrada. Lead singer and guitarist for My Midnight Creeps. I loved Mudurada for years before I understood it. Buras had the secret down. He played his soul through his right hand, man. Typically, when we watch the guitarist on stage, we focus on his orher left hand. But the soul-- the damn soul comes from the right hand . We can all marvel at the hyper speeds that the best players finger; the frets, pentatonic minor scales forward and backwards they play with their eyes closed. But it's those staccato upstrokes; the hard pounding; t...

Drew Zackary, citizen of earth and Old Denver, fights sleep to jot down his thoughts on Motel Motel's debut LP, New Denver. Sounds Like : New wave hipster psych- folk Americana with neither's existential terror or humor . . . and C-grade story-telling skills. Recommended if You Like : Eunuchized Nick Cave, Squirrel Nut Zippers on Bezodiazepines and PBR, or open mic night for folk-lovin' hipsters . . . and sleeping. Personal Reaction : Few bands practice and have visions of large orchestrations. And few bands of any experience level have such a grasp on what the arrangements should sound like recorded. This album is a great recording: great vocals, a keen understanding of the chordal structures of the lost traveling americana from the 20s, and a good mix of stringed intrumentation and other under-used instruments in rock. It's perfectly recorded and well thought out. Obviously made by people skilled in playing and passionate about making music they love. Yet for the gen...

Parkcow, author and intellectual, puffs his cedar pipe on this calm mid-summer eve and musters his creative command of the English language to describe Psychedelic Electronica trio School of Seven Bells thusly: "they are pretty good." When Jamie asked me to guest review the band School of Seven Bells, I must admit that I had rather mixed feelings. On the one hand, he threw out the qualifier “bit of an expert in the arena” in reference to the band’s electronica nature. It’s not often that I can claim to be a bit of an expert on anything (except Blue’s Clues, Yo Gabba Gabba, and, most depressing of all, the Teletubbies since I spend far too great a portion of my day watching these shows with my toddler), so I was naturally flattered and instantly turned on to the idea of doing something involving music that didn’t have an endlessly repeating, positive reinforcement message like “we’re really smart” (this coming after the solving of Blue’s Clues, which anyone familiar with th...

Guest blogger Justin Z takes a break from hammering to reflect on something he may or may not have heard before. Hypothetical Auditory Amnesiamania is a mental condition where the subject secretly or publicly desires to experience amnesia for the sole purpose of listening to something they've already heard before and experiencing it again for the first time. Some people have this desire with movies or books as well, craving that initial thrill the mind undergoes when it first watches or reads them. In lieu of beating yourself in the head with a hammer (which only has a small percentage of causing amnesia, anyway) you can listen to Pickin' On Modest Mouse by Iron Horse. To truly appreciate this music, you have to meet two qualifications. First, you have to like bluegrass. Second, you have to have listened to enough Modest Mouse to consider yourself a Hypothetical Auditorial Amnesiamaniac. If you meet these two qualifiers, then you owe it to yourself to supplement your HAA ...

Guest blogger Parkcow is not afraid of Captain Dan & the Scurvy Crew I found the band thanks to a banner add for another musician. It was an electronica, indie chick who was actually pretty good (kind of like Imogen Heap, sort of, from Frou Frou—let’s say if Hooverphonic and Regina Spekter had a baby and Imogen Heap raised it). Actually, after 13 years of using the internet (though I probably shouldn’t count the first two since that was when AOL was charging per minute so it’s not like I used the internet for anything but the high priority stuff: chat rooms and porn, and chat rooms about porn, of course), this was my FIRST purchase based on clicking through a banner add. I’m not sure if I’m the norm or not, but I don’t know how ANYONE makes money on the internet with that kind of year to purchases ratio. Anyway, CD Baby, where I found Captain Dan, suggested that if I liked Echo Slightly, then I’d also like Captain Dan (and about five other artists). It should be noted that NO...

Guest post by Drew Zackary Ed. Note: Sometimes, we at Duck & Cover solicit reviews from other writers or musicians. We value the insight they can provide into an industry, of which we are little more than casual observers. Sure, the D&C crew loves music, buys music, watches live music. The problem is we don't actually play music (high school trombone doesn't count as "music"). No matter. You get to a point in your life when you just have to accept the fact you're never going to be a rock star, and no Guitar Hero score will change that. So we go about our lives living vicariously through the musicians whose music we follow. The solicitations for their written opinions are little more than thinly disguised invitations to participate in our fantasy. Because we don't have rock star lives; we have geeky, music-hungry, shoe-obsessed lives. So when I received this month's Guitar Player Pick from sporadic contributor and dedicated guitarist, Drew Zackary,...

Guest post by Drew Zackary, guitar afficionado "So if I had a dime for every time I should've Stopped playing guitar and put my nose in a book Then my head would be healthy and my guitar would be dusty And that just might save me from a bunch of bad songs So maybe I'm too polite just like good Moses But just like good manners we've had enough of them." --Davey von Bohlen So this pick isn't so much about the guitar playing on Maritime's latest album as it is about Davey von Bohlen's long career as a guitar player. Personally, I have a special affinity for him. While we never met, his various bands' songs have found their way into my cars and living rooms for the past decade. He may also be the coolest, baldest, most left-handed sunburst Fender Telecaster player and father of two in rock today (who also had a fist sized tumor removed from his head AND survived a van crash). Bohlen truly deserves that oh-so-overused moniker of ‘underrated’. Pitchfork ...