Austin Sound

Through The Trees’ debut, Dig It Up, is a startlingly audacious ten-song career-opening salvo fired right across the bow. After taking stock of their influences and history – Ben McCormack (vocals/guitars/piano/etc) and Will Tanner (bass/percussion) played together in The Stags, McCormack in a variety of bands ranging from jam to garage band, Rob Jasinski drummed for the long departed garage and hip shaking The Good Looks – Dig It Up is even more disarming. Given where the trio came from, the resulting alt rock as played by late 70s classic rock fans isn’t completely surprising, but it seems refreshingly welcome. Pile on the fact that the band was practically born in the stale beer afternoons at the Hole in the Wall – Tanner owns it, McCormack books it, and Jasinski owns Cream Vintage next door – and one might expect an album of shambling, sloppy burners. Instead, Through The Trees wind up generally soaring through some fifty minutes of majestic rock and roll.

Like so many first albums before it, Smashed, The Blind Pets’ self released debut, is an admirable stab at rock immortality that comes up short while providing a quite a few glimpses at a promising future. Like the image inside the gatefold and printed directly on the disc, Smashed is a fractured record; at times, the band riffs, solos, and shreds its way out of the mundane and slices a mighty groove. Other times, the band freaks out into metallic spasms, seemingly intended to flip their audiences’ ears into a completely different direction. Just because a young band hasn’t quite put it all together yet on their first try doesn’t mean The Blind Pets should be dismissed. On the contrary, it just means listeners will have to work a little harder to find the hidden gems on the record.

For most people, there’s maybe a five point completely non-descriptive spectrum for rating an album “Awesome, Good, Ok, Not-So-Good, Turd”. With Indian Jewelry’s Totaled, there probably should be a sixth super descriptive option: “What the hell” (followed either by a series of exclamation points, possibly exclamation points and question marks, just question marks, or perhaps a single solitary period).

The new full-length album by the Houston noise gang is somewhere between completely confounding, disturbing, and unlistenable yet listenable. At first listen, Totaled comes across as the loose watery beer bowel movement of a bunch of Reznor-cum-Curtis fans, particularly on “Oceans” and “Look Alive”: just industrial and clanky enough for the former, just morose and despondent for the latter.

Consumed/Hot Buttered Anomie, the new split 12” release from Austin’s Beautiful Supermachines and The Distant Seconds, is an excellent example of how sometimes less is more. With about ten minutes of music for each band, the EP proves to be a nice coda for both bands after their well-received debuts. Any more than the three songs per band and things might have gotten too heavy; instead, listeners are left waiting and wanting more.

“Hot Buttered Anomie,” The Distant Seconds’ half of the record, picks up right where their red-hot debut Spectral Evidence left off in late 2008. “Between The Brackets” continues the taut and tense interplay between Matt Baab’s guitar playing and Brandon Bunch’s synthesizers that made much of Spectral Evidence so great. For fans of their debut, “Between The Brackets” will be the clear favorite on “Hot Buttered Anomie.”

Shocking news: on their debut album In And Out And Back Again, Woven Bones sound like they are listening to a lot of The Jesus & The Mary Chain. There, now that that’s out of the way, perhaps there’s a little time to discuss their excellent album - just act quickly on the discussion, because the entire thing clocks in at about twenty six minutes and feels more like fifteen with its breakneck pace.

The band careens from song to song so quickly and forcefully, never slowing down to even acknowledge that there are flowers, much less sniff them, that – especially upon first listen – the audience is left wondering what herd of animals just trampled them.

Sometimes one forgets that in the late 60s and early 70s, there weren’t a bunch of guys sitting around in garages and living rooms saying they wanted to be the next Led Zeppelin or Cream – because there was barely a Led Zeppelin or Cream. For a while there, your local record store probably wasn’t specifically a record store and the local garage bands were probably a bit more like the Beatles and the Stones still. Which all in all means that Prayer for Animals, and their gritty debut Swell, probably wouldn’t have quite existed then… even if it sounds like it definitely could, would, and should. There’s no shame in crafting your music in the image of some of the best; would anyone rather be in a band that merely wanted to be Styx?

The Mercers’ new release, Giant (Victim), marks the second consecutive solid seven song cycle in less than 12 months for one of Austin’s best kept secrets. Recorded at the same time as 2009’s Hovercraft, Giant was shrewdly kept under wraps for a few months as the band prepared for its release. Rather than force 14 songs onto one mixed up full length album, The Mercers appear to have wisely saved the 7 more mellow songs for Hovercraft’s subsequent follow-up EP. And, for the most part, this dual attack works pretty well.

The Mercers’ pop perfect blend of The Who, The Shins, and Guided By Voices continues on Giant. But while Hovercraft landed more towards The Who and Guided By Voices, Giant stomps firmly on The Shins end of the aforementioned spectrum.

Here’s something weird: The Happen-Ins aren’t doing anything remotely new or innovative on their self titled debut album, yet somehow they seem like a fun fresh breath of air. Maybe it’s because the album features instructions for “things to consider before, during, and after listening to this record” – and those things, in the end, will apparently and assuredly result in “palpitations, perspirations, and motivations to stomp the floor”. Maybe it’s because The Happen-Ins just sound like they’re having fun playing old school rock and roll. Or maybe it’s because, along with having a sense of humor, swagger, and melody, The Happen-Ins play the music your parents (or, shit, grandparents in some of your cases) might have loved, but they don’t sound worn out like the grooves on a dusty old Creedence record. Their debut affair practically bursts from the speakers, with exuberance that is all too often missing from their peers’ recordings.

On their debut album, The Bronze, Woodgrain does something good, possibly even very good. Exactly how to describe what that thing is, though, is nearly impossible. Lying somewhere between metal (this is a band that was chosen to open for The Sword on a half dozen or so tour dates) and a Brian Eno Moog-gasm, Woodgrain is relatively indescribable (other than maybe “repetitive” or “coma inducing” at times). There are times when “indescribable” means “horrible”, “awful” or “waste of sounds waves” – but not in the case of Woodgrain. The Bronze is a genuinely exciting and interesting album; it’s just hard to say what exactly is going on (perhaps the album art featuring a centaur astronaut carrying roses on the moon in front of a basketball hoop should have been an indicator).

If it takes more than a decade to release your debut album, calling it a greatest hits collection isn’t necessarily a misnomer, right? In the case of Gleeson’s debut, The Very Very Best of Gleeson, the wait was more like fifteen years and, thankfully, it wasn’t for naught. Fifteen years ago, power-pop wasn’t exactly topping the charts and it still isn’t, but that’s really of no concern for Ty Chandler’s brainchild. While Chandler may have been sitting on Gleeson’s tunes for years, his other labor of love – Almost There Records – was putting out a steady stream of some of Austin’s best power-pop in the interim. After all, this is a guy (and label) that has gone so far as to host Big Star, Cheap Trick, Mott The Hoople, the Who, and the Kinks Hoot Nights. What did you expect his band’s album to sound like? Something other than mostly ridiculously catchy power-pop with an Austin-fried edge? Get real.