On their latest LP, Stereo Total does a good job satiating fans with a full 17 tracks, though label Kill Rock Stars notes that the band wrote 40 for the album. Now, I’m not much of a Stereo Total expert, but Baby Ouh! feels a bit more experimental than what I’ve heard from the band. From the get-go, they drop in sounds that remind me of not only Stereo Total, but artists like Deerhoof and The Fiery Furnaces. And it works.

“Baby Ouh!” jumps out as an early favorite with loose percussion and wildly fun, playful synths. Not in English, the song gives off an exotic nature that the band doesn’t quite capture with their English-based tracks. The song goes on for a while in a bit of an experimental haze. There are plenty like it on the album, though there are plenty that hint of the group’s last EP, Anti Love Song. The album comes out this week on Kill Rock Stars and you can pick it up on Buy Olympia.

Above photo by Becky Ofek.

Download: “Baby Ouh!” by Stereo Total

Written by Jeremy Ryan.

When thinking about challenging bands like Xiu Xiu (MySpace), the words “stable” or “consistent” do not spring to mind. They are not supposed to release a gaggle of jaw-dropping, eerie records as frequently and reliably as they do (four records since 2004). After hearing 2004′s borderline masterpiece Fabulous Muscles, I gave it about a six-week limit until primary songwriter, Jamie Stewart, flipped out, renounced music, and fled to Asia for some good old overindulgent artist soul searching. Either that or he’d ended up trying to wriggle his way out of a straight jacket in a padded room.

That being said, I have to say, given the topics that Xiu Xiu records tend to examine, I do not know if I would necessarily blame him. Thank God that has not happened. Hell, I thought that this brand of reflective, self-examining and deeply affecting lyrics were something that existed only in hidden diaries, and not the kind with the cheap-ass locks that are easy to pop open (not that I would know). But after repeated listens, the word that comes to mind when describing this record is, wow. With the release of The Air Force, Xiu Xiu prove itself a band willing to move in a melodic and increasingly accessible direction, all the while holding onto the aspects that make their albums so damn interesting and unique.

Melody and structure aside, this is still a record that will force some awkward winces. However, despite the uncomfortable content, you will find yourself hanging on every word that Stewart delivers in his extremely affected tone. It is undeniable that Stewart has a knack for writing songs with multiple underlying melodies, as brief tidbits of this album will get stuck in the listeners head, likely bouncing around for days, a testament to Stewart’s capable handle on melodic musicianship and song crafting. Many songs maintain a regular structure, as the percussive elements of the music becoming increasingly pronounced. Most tracks then employ a paranoid electronic tone as the songs curve their way toward their anxiously brilliant and invitingly unbalanced conclusion.

The first song on the album, “Buzz Saw”, sets the tone for the record — melodic tinkling on a piano with a rambunctious snare drum and an increasingly atonal electronic smattering of notes. The music mirrors the lyrics, venturing on the uncomfortable, but returning to the familiar, albeit in an unconventional manner. The next track, “Boy Soprano”, provides a quick payoff, employing the type of distorted guitar line and pulsating electronic beat that seems to inevitably stay in the listeners head for days to come. Several tracks on The Air Force address the same type of awkward longing, cold rejection, tragic suicide, and frank violence that we have come to expect from Xiu Xiu. For example, the highpoint of the album, “Bishop, Ca,” begins as a sparse keyboard line while Stewart addresses incest and sexual abuse, both topics not commonly examined in the forum of indie rock, perhaps finding a more comfortable home on a spoken word album. The track then takes off, blossoming into a creepy, ritualistic style chant over glitchy, yet rhythmic electronics.

Examples of Xiu Xiu’s continuing evolution as a band are prominent throughout this album. Even songs that begin very conventionally, such as “Watermelon Vs. The Pineapple”, and “Save Me, Save Me”, retain the characteristics of a conventional indie rock song. However, they posses a certain uncomfortable edge that is unique to Xiu Xiu, leaving the listener engaged, though mildly uncomfortable. Xiu Xiu also doesn’t hesitate to wander WAY off the beaten path, as is evident listening to the track “Wig Master”. The song, if you could even call it that, has an extremely unsettling quality to it (lyrics like loneliness isn’t being alone, it’s when someone loves you and you don’t have it in you to love them back). That being said, “Wig Master” inhabits the same realm as past Jamie Stewart freak-outs like Fabulous Muscles song “Support Our Troops OH! (Black Angels OH!).”

The more you hear this album, the more its eccentricities come together to create a beautiful and powerful record. Due to the shear originality of this band, I will take a Xiu Xiu album over 95 percent of current releases. After all, where is the reward, and for that matter the staying power, when artists go the safe route and don’t challenge the listener? If you shy away from artists that do not spoon feed the listener with pop simplicity, this may not be the album or band for you. But personally speaking, this album is rewarding in a different way every listen; a quality that is making Xiu Xiu an increasingly reliable and prolific band that you can trust for innovation, as well as rely on for a large dose of realism and artistic integrity. You get the feeling that Stewart doesn’t make music specifically targeted for the listener, he makes music because he would go crazy if he didn’t.

This review was originally published November 3, 2006 on the old version of FensePost.

Xiu Xiu: Boy Soprano [mp3]

5 Rue Christine / Kill Rock Stars [CD, 2006]

1. Buzz Saw
2. Boy Soprano
3. Hello From Eau Claire
4. Vulture Piano
5. PJ In The Streets…
6. Bishop, CA
7. Saint Pedro Glue Stick
8. The Pineapple Vs. The Watermelon
9. Save Me, Save Me
10. The Fox & The Rabbit
11. Wig Master

Sad news was released last Friday, as the independent music world lost an amazing talent, and the world lost an amazing individual. Jeff Hanson was found dead in his new apartment; preliminary reports are calling it an accidental fall. I met Jeff a few years back when he performed at a small art gallery in Moscow, ID. Everyone always talks about how his voice was like no other, but for me it was that coupled with the passion in which he relayed his songs to his audience.

Jeff Hanson’s Madame Owl was released last year by Kill Rock Stars. The label also released his first two records, Jeff Hanson and Son.

Those early releases followed me throughout graduate school; the perfect accompaniment to long drives between Seattle and my college town of Pullman, WA. Songs like “Hiding Behind The Moon” and “If You Ever Say” would blast from the speakers of my ’92 Buick Century as I floated along the rocky desert lands of the Cascade River Basin and by the rolling wheat fields of the Palouse.

All music is experiential. We associate words and events with certain songs as often as we relate similar events to our emotive state at the time they occurred. That’s what I remember about Jeff Hanson — the drives and that dark art gallery in Moscow where he performed his heart out, leaving the Idaho town with a new devoted fan. Me. Jeff Hanson, I know I’m not alone in saying this: You will be missed.

Jeff Hanson: Hiding Behind The Moon [mp3]

Stereo Total (Stereo Total) joins euro sounds from France and Germany to create a style of music somewhere between Krautrock and new-wave. The duo has a string of albums released through Olympia label Kill Rock Stars and their latest EP pressed to vinyl is Anti Love Song.

It’s easy to pinpoint a favorite — the title track. Françoise Cactus’ German accent and the signature lack of Krautrock emotion as she sings And just as hard as I’d fall for you, boy / Well know you’d fall for me harder / That’s why I don’t want to love you. Add consistency in drums and a string of new-wave synth lines, and the song becomes a pillar of ecstacy.

“I Wanna Be A Mama” finds Brezel Göring taking the lead on vocals, the song delves into the influences parents indulge onto their children: I will call him Lucifer and teach him how to criticize / I’ll teach him how to live off prostitution / I will teach him how to kill / Oh yeah, I wanna be a mama.

Stereo Total excels at pointing out ridiculous things rampant in society. No topic is off-limits and that leads to some pretty clever and unique music.

Above photo by Stefanos Notopoulos.

Stereo Total: (I Hate) Everybody In The Discoteque [mp3]

Kill Rock Stars [7" Single, 2009]

1. (I Hate) Everybody In The Discotheque
2. Anti Love Song
3. I Wanna Be A Mama
4. No Tututu

Horse Feathers conjure an older definition of “gothic” in their music. It is the term as used in Southern fiction—at once horrible and beautiful. Like Flannery O’Connor’s short stories or Tennessee Williams’ plays, the songs are populated by families and lovers that are grotesque in the way that they can barely conceal their terrible pain, yet they experience moments that approach transformative grace.

Horse Feathers is composed of one man (Justin Ringle) writing, singing and playing guitar and a constellation of musical acquaintances filling out the aural space with string arrangements and traditional instrumentation. The Broderick siblings (Peter and Heather) have offered the greatest contribution to Horse Feathers’ recorded output, laying down pining cello and violin lines, vocal harmonies and folk and classical instruments such as celeste, saw, banjo and mandolin. When touring, the trio of Nathan Crockett, Catherine O’Dell and Sam Cooper are Ringle’s backing band. Their music is a co-mingling of pastoral folk with classical and avant arrangements.

The band released their debut record Words are Dead on Lucky Madison in 2006 (and reissued on vinyl in 2008) and quickly cultivated a positive reputation and a devoted following. They subsequently signed to Kill Rock Stars and released House With No Home in 2008, and have been restlessly touring in its wake. If you catch the band on their tour, perhaps you can acquire their new 7”, with the song “Road to Ruin” from the PDX Pop Now! 2008 compilation as the a-side and “Will Not Try” as its b-side. And you should see them at all costs—I have been reminded of why I like music so much each time I have watched them play, from Justin’s first time performing these songs in a friend’s living room, to witnessing them hush a noisy crowd with their whispered performance at the Sunset Tavern this past winter.

Ringle grew up in rural Idaho, an experience that compelled him to seek out and create his own ethos, and that still informs his music. He moved to Portland, Oregon in 2004 and established connections with musicians there. In the arrangement of Horse Feathers’ music, one can hear the soft, graceful foliage of the hemlocks of western Oregon, and one can feel the shadow and shade provided by their near-impervious canopy. But listening to Ringle’s words, stories and his plaintive voice, and instead you hear the stolid and open lodgepole and ponderosa pine forests of his home. This part of Horse Feathers’ music is from the other Pacific Northwest—the Inland Empire, and its sound is of lonesome wind moving through the pines, of austere sunshine, cool summer nights and hard winters.

Horse Feathers’ music is wrought with reckonings, heresy and redemption. Through it, Ringle embodies the clairvoyant seer, casting judgment while shaken by what he has seen. His body seems to act as a vessel for his voice, and the intensity and tautness that he brings to his delivery is astonishing. Horse Feathers not only offer the sound of the event—the exorcism, the baptism, the fight that ends the marriage, the funeral—but of the days and years that follow, the solitude and contemplation. Theirs is a music that demands a quiet, a stillness, and concentration.

Horse Feathers: Curs In The Weeds [mp3]

This time, The Thermals come to us via another label, Olympia’s famed Kill Rock Stars. However, having shed the Sub Pop label for that of KRS has not necessarily thrown them back to the minimally produced days of the beloved No Culture Icons. If anything, Now We Can See has more production than their last release!

Few songs have the rough edges of The Thermals’ youth, a lone exception being “When We Were Alive”. On Now We Can See, production equals cleanliness. There aren’t any sloppy riffs or slurred vocals. And, to be honest, I miss that from the old version of The Thermals.

In the middle, the tune “At The Bottom Of The Sea” is actually shocking; its the slowest, quietest tune from The Thermals to date (at least in the first half). Yet when the band captures enters the second half and cranks up the volume, that emotive element returns in full fashion.

While all these facts may present a modernization of Kill Rock Stars (or maybe just a modernization of this KRS band), it’s a clear sign that The Thermals have done their fair share of maturing since inception. They have also grown in popularity. What remains the same is their volume and their anger. For the fans that found those elements so endearing in the early days can rest assured that they will likely never fade.

The Thermals: Now We Can See”

Kill Rock Stars [12" LP, 2009]

1. When I Died
2. We Were Sick
3. I Let It Go
4. Now We Can See
5. At The Bottom Of The Sea
6. When We Were Alive
7. I Called Out Your Name
8. When I Was Afraid
9. Liquid In, Liquid Out
10. How We Fade
11. You Dissolve

Written by Fense

Madam Owl is the title of the new album by Jeff Hanson (MySpace), out now on Kill Rock Stars, and it’s quite a change from Son and his self-titled release. Overall, Hanson departs from folk and dives headlong into pop. However, that’s not the biggest change on Madam Owl… no, it’s the addition of orchestration that really sets this album apart from his prior catalog.

Hanson’s vocals are high pitched; the sound is odd coming from a man burly and built (I saw him live at an art gallery in Moscow, ID about 5 years ago, and it was one of the cooler performances I’ve been to). The voice goes well with the music which, prior to Madam Owl was much more limited to guitar and percussion.

“If Only I Knew” is not the best song on the album. That spot is reserved for opener “Night” and string-heavy midpoint “Careful” and the soft “No Never Mine”. But it’s the one Hanson put to video. Following the recent trend of poppy folk groups, it’s animated.

But it’s easy to see why they chose this song, though—the percussion beat is one of the few prominent ones on the album. There are horns and, rather than a focus on guitar, Hanson picks up the banjo.

Jeff Hanson: If I Only Knew [mp3]