Austin Sound

Someday Parish, the new project from Austin songwriter/folkster and McMercy Family Band member Ted Hadji, teeters dangerously on the line between subliminally spiritual folk rock, and Christian Americana. As a reviewer and connoisseur of modern trends in music, I don’t really have a high tolerance for the submissive and servile nature of Christian rock. To me, it seems less like art and more like trying to pander religion to a younger crowd that doesn’t really respond to the whole hymnal, mass/service tradition — but there are always exceptions to every rule. Hadji sidesteps many of those inclinations by taking momentary vacations from his religious focus to dwell on his own personal life, though it may not be enough.

Formerly known as Operator, The White Hotel has finally released their debut album, Operator. Much hyped as one of Austin’s soon-to-be breakout acts, The White Hotel, have cavorted about the Austin music scene for a few years, touting an ear for New-Wave pop and a panache for sardonic, cynical songs backed by sometimes harrowing, sometimes ecstatic, electronic drums and synths.

Debut albums are an unspoken line in the sand, though, especially bands with clout such as The White Hotel, but Operator seems to dodge any assumptions about influence, aesthetic, or technique and deftly lands on a cushy middle ground — nothing too commercial or definitive while at the same time being readily accessible to the pop-minded. The sextet seems to take the “physical over intellectual” approach with Operator as most of the cuts reek of The White Hotel’s dark, danceable electronic fuzz.

Hug is sheer novelty - something to amuse and offend listeners with their self-aware, completely ludicrous rock. It’s no surprise that the band pictured on the inside sleeve of their latest LP, Cravings, Lust, and Chaos, has two out of three members in a dress swaying back and forth in a drunk-possessed state, consumed by their own meta-pop about adulterous gay politicians, buying drugs in Mexico, and taking your pants off just for the hell of it.

Chaos plays like a cheap party trick. Stuck somewhere between blissfully unaware of its own tongue-in-cheek tackiness and subliminally insane, the tracks meander through patches of electro kraut-rock, socio-cultural narratives about humanity’s penchant for its own destruction, and a bout or two of actually listenable, tolerable, lucid moments, which unfortunately only work as relief from the rest of the album, and less as compliment.

With such a long and foreboding title, Mediocrity is the Strongest Inevitability, you’d think Austin duo, Dirty Dancing, would have somehow managed to avoid the inevitable. Over Mediocrity’s fourteen tracks of low-fi, electro-guitar noise, they manage to demonstrate the very dangerous, intimate nature of home recording, engineering, and producing. In pouring through their long-playing catalogue, there are only a few moments, somewhere near the album’s middle torso that glimmer with a chance of hope, and that’s only if you have the accepting palate: plenty of Velvet Underground, some 80s music by groups who were really good in the 70s, and a tolerance for (art?) noise.

For those of you who haven’t noticed, SXSW has started already. The music kickoff comes Wednesday night, but there have been free shows going on downtown since Saturday (like when I was at Harlem, the Strange Boys, and Blair at the Red Eyed Fly for free) including local garage rockers Woven Bones, the Octopus Project, and second-city R&B duo Flosstradamus at the Mohawk on Sunday night—one that I regret to have missed. So here is the SXSW Music Tuesday unofficial preview.

Legs Against Arms’ debut EP gives a glimpse at what we could see later this year with their first full-length release. With a title like Come On Let’s Disappear, you’re going to mine connotative thoughts of early decade alt-rock bands playing radio-friendly tunes and getting placement on crummy WB teen dramas. But Legs Against Arms manages to overstep such dubious prejudices despite the presence of cinematic crescendos and throaty, heart felt vocals — there’s something more bubbling below. It’s somewhere between the glassy, streamlined rock and roll of the EP’s first three tracks and the conclusive two-part epic of Disappear’s’s last two songs, “B.I.O.L.O.G.Y.” and “Paper Ships”.

On 2009’s debut, …And Girls Club, the Strange Boys grape-vined through sixteen songs of unabashed, uninhibited, youthful garage rock. Their tunes wavered between alt-country, blues and R&B, and sultry lo-fi noodling — all maintaining the indiscernible trademark of front man Ryan Sambol’s cerebral, tongue-in-cheek whimsy. Critics applauded it and (a few) disliked it — all for the same reasons. The Strange Boys just didn’t seem to be playing by the rules.

For their latest offering, Be Brave acts like more of a mantra than a title track or album name for the Austin foursome. Where …And Girls Club had edge and swagger — perhaps even a decided indifference to perfection and professionalism — Be Brave has a more mellow and tame persona. This departure in sound and album aesthetic will definitely divide the room on whether the sophomore album was a step up or not.

In 2008, local subdued psych quintet, the Able Sea released a self-titled debut of hushed pop songs that swayed in and out of focus like a ship on woozy, 1960s, coastal horizon. Their sound was comprised of disparate influences from folk, rock, and psychedelic camps alike all brought into a hazy fruition via the quasi-séance-like vocals of principal songwriting duo Alex Thompson and Robert Pearson. The album cover of the debut conjures a mysticism that lends itself to the kind of pondering one might do while looking out to an endless, sepia-toned sea — a nine-song coda for the very moment in time the picture was taken.

Enter 2009, and a follow-up sophomore album capriciously entitled the Able Sea II — a more straightforward picture of an ocean horizon with blue water white-capping underneath an even bluer sky donned on the cover. Judging by appearances, it looks like the Able Sea have made a departure in tone and timbre to a much cleaner and more focused (perhaps more pure) sound.

It’s startling to hear a band so decided in their sound on a first album. You expect them to be scattered and unsure of themselves — to have almost unwittingly stumbled upon something to be perfected in future albums. But Candi and the Strangers self-titled debut LP seems to have such an assured character already. There’s something intentionally seductive layered into Candy and the Strangers LP - a permeation of sex into dark, driving, indie-rock, which makes for good listening by principle (think of the successes of international act the XX, or the awkwardly erotic phonetics of Nico with the Velvet Underground.) A little tension is good, and Candi and the Strangers seem to revel in the fusing of dark, bedroom-style synth-pop with breathy, subdued, near-hypnotic female vocals.

The Rocketboys have come a long way since their humble beginnings in Abilene playing small venues to crowds of college kids. They now have a pretty good album, 20,000 Ghosts, that has production credits to a name-drop-worthy role call. Produced by Louie Lino, who has worked with east coast acts such as Nada Surf and Matt Pond, and mastered by indie-noodler Alan Douches, Ghosts is cut from a very decadent indie-rock cloth. The quintet can be seen on the cover distantly perched on a rock amidst fog and trees, in a sort of minimal and drab mystical setting, and it calls to mind the very present ethereal space supplied in the layers of 20,000 Ghosts — an album that sounds full but also finds a way to breath in between passages of ambient indie rock and piano-laced ballads.