Dirty Impound

Very few bands create more texture and sheer, tangible feel in as short a space as Pontiak, a trio of Virginia-born brothers who are inarguably one of the finest heavy guitar-bass-drums outfits currently kicking up a mighty dust, made all the more powerful for their flair for inspired brevity. While past works have cemented them as kin to Retribution Gospel Choir, Built To Spill and The Meat Puppets, Echo Ono (released February 21 on Thrill Jockey) moves beyond the beatifically befuzzed vibe and into sharply carved compositions that sacrifice nothing in volume and heft but gain bunches by the more upfront vocals, intriguing lyrics and general focus. Reportedly leaving behind the puzzle piece creative methods of earlier releases, Echo Ono moves along steadily and forcefully, holding the listener in its benevolent grip or tossing them skillfully into the expanding, color-flooded sky. Psychedelic is a word that fits (at times), but shorn of any hipster stink or cliché licks. With Pontiak the world just warbles with mercurial shine and flexibility, at times burning hot and at others calm and contemplatively smooth, but always in steady command of what they’re trying to get across. At nine tracks and a running time just over a half hour, this album is a richer, fuller experience than many compatriots could manage with double the time and band members, a release that confirms Pontiak’s place amongst the top tier of modern rock bands utilizing the same old tools to forge work of strange intimacy and sometimes-epic proportion, all touched by a winning cosmic elegance.

We fired off DI’s signature questionnaire to guitarist-singer Van Carney set to the band see what they had to say to our inquiries.

read on for gardening with Rob Halford

An irrepressibly modern shimmer gleams from Cabaret (released February 7), the new album from Nashville’s Moon Taxi. With this set these surefire, festival tested live dynamos have discovered their studio voice, a sound as intense and multihued as their concert presence, a song cycle where the entire band continually goes for it with all their might, impassioned singing bouncing above ringing guitars and a dense, hypnotic rhythm bed as the music rushes ever-forward. Timidity simply doesn’t exist in the Moon Taxi of 2012, whose earlier work had more classic rock and jam band leanings but now rolls in the same lane as Cold War Kids, Motopony, Lake Trout and post-Achtung Baby U2. Their road experiences still figure in lyrically with several cuts capturing the spinning abandon of late nights where one needs an extra pack of smokes and full flask because they know in their bones they’ll be greeting the sunrise. While still very much a rock band, this album showcases Moon Taxi’s beat savvy and dance/hip-hop awareness in a really fluid manner. Put another way, this sucker moves seductively, an inducement to twirl and smile even as it asks tangled questions and pokes at the cosmos with smiling curiosity.

Cabaret marks a new, exciting chapter for this tenaciously evolutionary unit, so we fired off DI’s signature questionnaire set to the band see what they had to say to our inquiries.

take the Taxi ride!

Rootsy soulfulness oozes from every note of Rumble, Shake And Tumble (released Stateside on August 16), a long-player that lives up to its onomatopoetic title, kicking up a ruckus that’d do pill poppin’ Johnny Cash proud. Melbourne-based Wagons stomps and croons ‘em like a new day descendent of Brinsley Schwarz – pub ready and just twangy enough, armed with their own budding Nick Lowe in singer-songwriter Henry Wagons, a tunesmith of great humor, abundant heart, and a downright charming gift for mixing casual profanity and poetry (“My life would’ve been a fuckin’ mess without you/ Turn my moon into the sun/ I need you now like I never needed anyone”).

Willie Nelson gets name-checked in his own song on Rumble, and it’s not hard to imagine Wagons opening for any of the Outlaw Country guys in their 70s heyday. Today, this band slots in just right with Shooter Jennings’ XXX movement – i.e. down ‘n’ dirty real country with a juicy side of rock and raucousness. Henry Wagons’ tunes also recall Buddy Holly and the gruffer side of fellow countryman Paul Kelly – touchstones that ain’t nothin’ but good – and the whole band moves with muscle and heat, tangible life force inside songs filled with a whole bunch of humanity in all its strange tumble of tears and laughter.

A succinct sense of the band’s humor and playfulness – as well as the firm ground they wish to build upon – can be gleaned from their MySpace page list of influences:

Roy Orbison’s driving habits
Canned Heat’s dinner
Puddles around houses in A Clockwork Orange
Cormac McCarthy’s final chapters
Early Rod Stewart’s fanclub
Johnny Cash’s dirt on his gravestone
Adam Green’s jacket inside-out
The Boss’s cap
Bert Newton.

We fired off DI’s signature question set to Australia and here’s what Henry had to say to our inquiries.

read on for a barking good time

In terms of official documents, The Barr Brothers aren’t exactly prolific. Brad and Andrew Barr have been making music together since childhood but even with multiple projects (including The Slip and Surprise Me Mr. Davis), the siblings have only released a handful of studio works. A profound sense of care infuses their albums, where each number has been loved and massaged in a way that gets into the cellular structure – a seemingly natural character that’s the product of intelligent design. It’s an approach that makes past works like The Slip’s under-sung Eisenhower (2006) and Surprise Me’s That Man Eats Morning For Breakfast presents waiting to be unwrapped at any time, i.e. music not locked into the time frame of its creation. This sense has never been more palpable than The Barr Brothers’ self-titled debut released this past September, a song cycle that hums with contemporary and ancient subtext, a mixture of traditional sounds and modernity’s cross-pollinating drive. These tunes breathe with moist reality, a scent filled with ideas that keep one awake at night or perhaps usher in a new sun on brighter days – music that feels unutterably alive. That they’re able to achieve this in the finite world of a studio is impressive and makes one patient for each new chapter since experience has shown it’s worth the wait.

Thankfully, the Barrs are touring regulars who frequently offer up new music in front of audiences. The band – which is fleshed out beautifully by harpist Sarah Page and multi-instrumentalist Andres Vial starts a new slate of shows this Wednesday, November 30th, in South Burlington, VT. You can see the full tour here, and here’s what Andrew and Brad had to say to our inquiries to get you in the mood.

read on for the Brothers’ answers

An elusive but irresistible musk rises off Elephant Revival, a scent to lure one into their dancing strings and cosmic-leaning reveries, a place of color and life, a garden for the ears. The Colorodo-based quintet – Bonnie Paine (vocals, washboard, djembe, musical-saw, stomp-box), Daniel Rodriguez (vocals, guitar, banjo), Sage T. Cook (electric banjo/guitar, mandolin, vocals, viola), Dango Rose (upright bass, vocals, mandolin, claw-hammer banjo) and Bridget Law (fiddle, vocals, octave violin) – is an interwoven thing, the strands so close and complimentary that new shades emerge in real time. One hears echoes old (Incredible String Band, Pentangle) and new (Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit, Greensky Bluegrass) but all faint in the face of five original singer-songwriters and gifted, empathetic instrumentalists.

Break In The Clouds (released June 14 on Ruff Shod), the band’s sophomore album, overflows with aspects to obsess upon – the smoky nectar of Paine’s voice, the graceful crow’s arc of Law’s fiddle, Rodriguez’s mountain-rooted banjo, Cook’s potent songwriting sway, to name but a few. Over fourteen tracks, Elephant Revival induces a heady hypnosis, a disorientation that comes from visiting another’s world and returning richer for the journey, which befits a record where traveler’s tunes abound and open skies beckon one to rise and wonder. Beautiful scratches the surface, but stick around a little longer and one will hear the new sound of folk emerging, one that questions the nature of time while light-steppin’ with barefoot friends.

Elephant Revival is a powerhouse live band as well, and will be celebrating New Year’s Eve at the famed Roseland Theater in Portland, Oregon, as well as touring around their native state of Colorado in November and January. Check out their full tour schedule here.

Here’s what Daniel Rodriguez had to say to our inquiries.

read on for David’s answers

Put bluntly, Portland, Oregon’s Red Fang is the best thing to tackle hard rock in ages. While already making a name for themselves in the metal world, this band has the drive, ferocity, raw talent and potential reach of a group like Mastodon, who’ve tapped Red Fang to open for their current fall tour starting November 1st at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles (check out all the dates here). While one encounters elements in this band that bring to mind Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and their thrash children, there’s something scruffier and punkier to Red Fang, an untamed vibe that suits their name well. And while the guys show greater discipline and growing skill in the studio on this year’s sophomore album, Murder The Mountains (released April 12 on Relapse), they continue to generate music that feels like it could knock a tooth loose if you took your eye off of them for two seconds. Palpable danger like that isn’t easy to translate into musical terms yet Red Fang makes it seem simple, birthing an agitated beast that splinters your door and lifts you off the couch with an indelicate yank. That they infiltrate this intensity with bursts of melody and consciously articulated dynamics just shows how well they understand that brute force isn’t the only way to own things.

Here’s what Red Fang guitarist David Sullivan had to say to our inquiries.

read on for David’s answers

It’s forgotten too often that rock can be an expansive, hugely flexible medium capable of grandeur, pathos, and quality distraction and stimulation. At its best, rock tightrope walks between majesty and earthy abandonment where the best in us canoodles with our baser, lizard brain instincts. From time to time, bands come along to remind us of the genre’s potential, ideally in a visceral, amp-shaking manner. Which brings us to Austin-based White Denim, whose fourth album, D (released May 23 on Downtown), stirs giddy comparisons to prime Yes, Queen and Talking Heads – i.e. genuinely progressive music that still makes one dance like a monkey.

Everything about this set is boldly carved, confidently delivered as the quartet swings off the backbeat with skillful yet wild speed and ingenuity. D is just plain exciting music, and the sort that bears up under extended scrutiny, only opening up its secrets once one has seriously whoosed a cerebral skateboard around the curves of “Burnished/At The Farm,” “Drug” and the other similarly banked spaces inside this album. And it’s not all fast complexities with the quality Latinismo of “River To Consider,” shimmering tender “Street Joy” and neatly sculpted pop closer “Keys” showing there’s not many moods White Denim can’t handle with aplomb. It also doesn’t hurt matters that they seem like real weirdos based on their videos (see below) and general playfulness This band and their latest salvo ooze greatness, and you’re a plum fool to miss out on this thrillingly evolving young band.

And catch White Denim on tour this fall with another DI fav-o-rite Manchester Orchestra. Tour dates over here.

Here’s what White Denim bassist Steve Terebecki had to say to our inquiries.

50 distortion pedals await!

Listen to The Mast’s debut release here while you read!

Some music could exist in no other age than the current one, where information and sound fly at us in mercurial ways, a flood that’s both blessing and onslaught. Brooklyn-based The Mast is expansive, compellingly insistent and inarguably modern, a combination redolent of Rumi and Bjork, Sanskrit inscriptions and the holy urban poetry of Patti Smith, Throwing Muses and a touch of Thoreau – the gleaming arrow of tomorrow whizzing through past and present, insightful penetration and flight. For something so layered, The Mast is built by just two gifted musicians – Haale (vocals, electric guitar) and Matt Kilmer (percussion) – who keep things both densely packed and skipping limber.

The Mast’s debut, Wild Poppies (released June 21), is hypnotic but in a non-somnambulant way, carrying the listener to thoughtful depths with such a deft, light hand that one only realizes they’ve stumbled onto archetypal ground after their toes are buried in the cool, wet sand. Beginning with thoughts of other times and other lives, the album courses over lakes and hills before depositing one in a lucid dream, a final exhortation of empowerment – “I go everywhere in this empire/ I go everywhere/ I go higher.”

It’s a fine line walked with such lofty subject matter but The Mast is gutsy and rock & roll enough to escape any New Age tinge. This is spiritual practice that makes amplifiers shake while delicious drums caress and animate everything around them, an articulation in song of things hard to grasp, a luminous prayer for awakened humanity.

Sky, plant seeds in my mind
Music, keep me alive
The love I feel is the prize
The prize

Here’s what Matt and Haale had to say to our inquiries.

read on for The Mast’s answers