Austin Sound

Hardly any move is more fraught with musical danger than the one I’ve recently made from Austin to Houston. Wild Moccasins are really my first dip into the local scene, which I know more as the birthplace of robo trip hop. I’ve elsewhere mentioned in passing what I call the “pure pop,” and the this popular quintet’s clean-scrubbed little debut EP Microscopic Metronomes provides a nice opportunity to elucidate. In using this term, I don’t mean to suggest any specific relationship to pop art, most closely associated in this country with Andy Warhol and his coterie, but it is a useful comparison. The dramatic tension in pop art centers on the uncertainty over whether the artist does or does not intend to fully participate in the mass consumer culture s/he is either basking in or subjecting to the harshest kind of ironic criticism, or somehow in some kind of negative capability-ish way doing both. But the pure pop does away with this tension, replacing it with a deceptively simple aesthetics of a relaxed, lounging (as opposed to Dionysianly destructive) hedonsim. I say “deceptively” because of how unbelievably hard it is to write a good pure pop song, and also because of the analogous dramatic tension that arises in the best pure pop between sonic pleasure and what you slowly grow to suspect might be deeper meaning, and I suppose that to my mind Crowded House is the greatest example of pure pop music.

The day I realized he might not make it? It was somewhere between listening to Chris Boehk’s debut CD and trolling through his Myspace. The signs are there in there in the song titles alone: “The Busted Heart”; “The Saddest Story Ever Told”; “My Nostalgia”; “All Wagon No Star”; and those are just the first four tracks! But supported by his Myspace blogs, (especially the one about how he had to call 911 because he got too hot while working outside), and after careful consideration, I’ve decided that Boehk - and this hurts to say, because he is, apparently, an actual person, not just an entity, like “Congress” or “the weather - is kind of a pussy. This is the overly feminized side of indie culture - the kind that keeps dudes from being dudes, although Boehk apparently has a wife, who runs something called the Naughty Secretary Club. This is not what it sounds like, unfortunately. I mention this because the two of them used to run a label, no longer extant, called Has Anyone Ever Told You? Records, which is emblematic of another pernicious side of indie culture, also powerfully represented on the album, and that is the endless valorization of a DIY ethos that is no substitute for what lies beyond bare competence. Faithful Mary compared Boehk’s sonics to early Dinosaur Jr. In his voice, the lo-fi production, and the guitar’s relaxed attitude toward clearly defined rhythms, she has a point, but to my ears it’s really just a mediocre musician biting off more than he can chew.

If you’re like me - I’m not saying anything, but let’s just say - if you’re like me, you’re a moderately obese desk jockey pushing middle age. You’ve also been seeing the name “Li’l Cap’n Travis” in the Chronicle for close to a decade now with nary a second thought, written them off as Just Another Austin Band, most probably schtickmeisters like the gone and lamented Kings of the Motel Six, or maybe The Eggmen. I now know different thanks to the hunch of Austin Sound’s editor, who suggested, saying, “I think you might like it,” that I review their latest effort, Twilight on Sometimes Island, which is one of the finest albums by musicians who appear or want to appear not to be trying that I’ve ever heard.

If you’ve been reading this virtual rag with any regularity, you know that, as the great trip-hop DJ Sound 609 said, “I’m a sucker for a � space-rock band.” Needless to say, I snatched up for review The Frontier Brothers’ four-song debut EP Electronic Progress with a quickness, for it seemed to have all the makings: a band name connotative of Star Trek’s famous opening invocation; a title suggestive of the tricks and techniques common to the progeny of Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane; what has to be a pseudonymous frontman in Marshall Galactic; a Myspace claim to be on tour in Neptune; and, most damningly, track three, “Space.” Res ipsa loquitur the lawyers might say; shit for breakfast, sez I, for it’s mostly a sham. Oh sure, track three lives up to its name, sort of, opening with what might be a theremin before the lingering drawn-out vocals come in over an organ in full vibrato: “You can do what you want to do / and some more and / you can say all you want to say / all you need is space and / if that is a crime / shoot me.” But then, like most of the rest of the album, a sunny melodic indie pop bursts out, driven by a guitar and a hoppy happy beat. The Frontier Brothers seem bent on betraying the space-rock expectations they’ve established. The trio’s Myspace even goes so far as to compare themselves to Ben Folds!

Jon, Vince, Doug, it’s great to meet you. We’re so pleased you’ve chosen to set Swingers 2: The Central Texas Catastrophe here in our fair city. It is the Live Music Capital of East Narnia, as I’m sure you’re aware. Sorry, just a little joke there, maybe a bit too “in.” I know you guys don’t like to seem that way. But if you’re going to set this thing in Austin the soundtrack takes on an added importance, and I think we’ve got just the right band to catapult the sequel into elite box-office territory.

Not very long ago in these pages I touted Lomita as Austin’s next “It band,” inheriting (I argued) the mantle previously held by What Made Milwaukee Famous, Trail of Dead, Kissinger, and Spoon. I did so, at least in part, on the basis of an emerging psychedelic country gestalt in Austin, with Lomita at its center. Downtown Mystic, on both counts - the socio-musical quality as well as their centrality to the Austin Space Country scene - unfortunately leaves a shaken and uncertain jury.

Quick, what do Def Leppard, Iron & Wine, Modest Mouse, Elliott Smith, John Mayer, and bluesy English jam band Gomez have in common? Answer: They’re all obvious influences on the semi-baffling Lennings of Austin, Texas.

OK, that influence game, one of the music critic’s two favorite (we’ll play the other in a second), isn’t quite fair. Surely The Lennings’s aren’t trying to sound like John Mayer on track two, and there’s probably even a good chance they’ve never heard a Mayer song in its entirety. In fact, on “2:45,” they’re doubtless referencing Elliott Smith (”It’s 2:45 in the morning / and I’m putting myself on warning,” from 1997’s “Either/Or”), who gets a nod on their MySpace. But the song is just on the Mayerish side of a very thin line, viz. the chorus: “And I appreciate the changing of the guards, as it were / but I’m still keeping an eye on the calendar.” You’ll have to trust me on the vocal similarity, but then again track ten, “Betadine,” walks that same line, this time with tremendous success: “Whatever it was, it got out of hand / whatever I said, helped me to stand / just a mosquito / get my placebo.” It’s as affecting as Mayer wishes he were on his best day, and it’s the best song on the album.

One of the obstacles facing the Austin indie scene - indeed, one of the obstacles AustinSound.net was created to remove - is an ill-defined public perception. There’s no hook on which to hang our indie-rock hat. One the one hand, we’ve got all these great country singers, bluesmen, and singer-songwriters, the backbone, no doubt, of Austin’s status as the Live Music Capital of the Universe, and that’s all fine and good. But the indie bands most closely associated with our fair city have tended toward either the fun-but-bizarre (Octopus Project, Explosions in the Sky) or the excellent-but-generic (Spoon, What Made Milwaukee Famous, either of whom could just as easily hail from, say, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, or Boise, Idaho). There’s been no there there, when it comes to an Austin indie sound. But that may be changing. Along with other local bands like Lomita and The Lonesome Heroes, The Summer Wardrobe is defining a distinctive Southern rock/psychedelic country sound ideally suited for our collective penchant for blissed-out afternoons by Barton Springs, cocaine washed down with whiskey in a dirty bathroom stall, and a confabulated regional identity.

Is it me, or does the shadow of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah grow vectorially longer with the passage of time? When the rocket fuel of the internet launched their self-released debut from obscurity into the national consciousness in a few short 2005 weeks, it sure seemed as though they would revolutionize the way music and albums were produced and marketed. But I’m talking more about the actual sound and sensibility, for hot on the heels of splashsters The Laughing’s Clappish debut Tiger Cry comes Peel’s self-titled first album, also owing a heavy debt to CYHSY - just in time for their predecessor’s April 28 date with Stubb’s in promotion of their second album, also self-released in this country (they deigned to sign with a label in the UK) earlier this year.

Revealingly, many of my idiosyncratic historico-personal favorite bands share vocal duties between the genders, The Sugarcubes, Frente!, The Fiery Furnaces, even The Velvet Underground with Nico and Naomi’s few front-and-center appearances for Galaxie 500. The one Hit Space most reminds me of, however, is Australian jangle-popmeisters The Hummingbirds, the great Australian band unfortunately mostly unknown here. They share the too-close-to-the-microphone production (which works substantially more effectively for The Hummingbirds but regrettably sounds kind of amateurish here) and exuberant strumming characteristic of jangle pop as well as the straightforward rhythms and seemingly (although of course not really) obvious melodies and dirty boy-girl back-and-forth. On that last score Hit Space’s Carrie Clark is unfortunately no match for The Hummingbirds’ Alannah Russack; compare Clark on track two, “Can’t Get It Right” and Simon Holmes’ apostrophe to Russack on “Get On Down” from 1990’s loveBUZZ: “Don’t let yourself go on and on / to please me, please don’t use a line / we’ll save some time” versus “I’ve heard exaggerated rumors / about you using cocaine / and all of the men that you like / get access to your domain.” Clark’s well-intentioned heart just isn’t in the dirty girl drama; vocally, she’s like that earnestly endeavoring girl who thinks you’re just great, really nice, who really and truly likes you and wants to give you a blowjob, but just cannot bear to let the head of that dick touch the back of that throat. When she sings “You’ll never know what happened last fall” on track four, “Trash,” you can’t help but wonder if you’d really be that shocked, more “My Boyfriend’s Back” than Courtney Love.