Austin Sound

“Matrimony rock.” Hmmm. As a music critic, I’m down with all sorts of genre hybridizing (i.e. chamber-pop, glam-pop, jazz-rock, etc.). It’s part of our job to make up those descriptors to give music some sort of mass understanding, so I’ve seen a lot of bogus combinations, but the first time I came across the term “matrimony rock” was on the Long Tangles’ Myspace page. It seems to me that the word “matrimony” would contain certain connotations that act against the word “rock”, thus neutralizing the whole ordeal. The same way your best friend becomes a kitschy version of his former badass self after taking the plunge, the Long Tangles sound soft and comfortable on their debut LP, Silver City.

Nineteen, Frank Smith’s eighth overall album, is less boot-scooting music and more-boots-on-the-bar music. For a lot of their new album, the band doesn’t seem like it’s quite in the mood to do much other than drown their memories, so dancing seems a bit much to expect. Originally hailing from Boston – and not Nashville or Austin as one might surmise upon first spin – the foursome released a series of folky country-rock albums before relocating to Austin in 2007 and subsequently dropping 2009’s Big Strike in Silver City. On Nineteen’s ten songs, Frank Smith – not a solitary man, but a quartet featuring Aaron Sinclair, Kevin Bybee, Kyle Robarge, Steve Malone – half shuffle, half drunkenly shamble through their tuneful tales sounding like old students of the dusty bar band circuit. And, for the most part, it works.

You might be inclined to write off a band like Not in the Face! simply on the basis of their name, but that would be a mistake. The duo of Jonathan Terrell and Wes Cargal cast raw rock nuggets that can claw and scratch with a garagey abrasiveness, kick dirty roots, and even unload an outright fury of heavy Zeppelin-esque prog that would seem impossible from a two-piece. With Cargal abusing on the drums and Terrell flailing out front with proto-punk intensity, Not in the Face! delivers it direct and untempered. They’ll be playing Club DeVille this Friday, February 4 alongside Crooks and DJ uLOVEi as part of Knuckle Rumbler and From the Mind of Adi’s First Friday Frolic. You can also catch Terrell running his rootsier solo project, JT & the Heartache Tycoons, at the Ghost Room on Saturday the 5th with Frank Smith and Sad Accordions.

There is some baggage tucked into Oh No Oh My’s body of work. The console is full of a slew of television commercials; the glove compartment, a contest for a Mr. Gatti’s jingle; and in the trunk, the band’s own take on their latest album. People Problems is a causeway of sophisticated indie-pop awash with ever-unfolding beauty, struggle, and tension, yet in interviews with the band, the songs on the album are simply about “slitting a girl’s throat” or “going crazy”. Here Oh No Oh My faces the near-impossible task of crafting something commercial out of material that is inherently challenging, like finding one’s place in the world or death or relationships - topics that abound within People Problems’ palette. Problems shoves the band into a new era. Though the quartet resorts to its characteristic shock-factor appeal at times, Oh No Oh My fails to undermine the complexity of its music. On their second full-length, lyricists and multi-instramentalists Greg Barkley and Daniel Hoxmeier, drummer Joel Calvin, and keyboardist Tim Regan stand unflinching and People Problems finds the band sufficient in and of its music. The album, mixed at Spoon’s recording house Public Hi-Fi, is full of impressive guest appearances including Scott Brackett’s (Okkervil River) lovely trumpet and Miranda Brown of Crooked Fingers. Even still, it’s the band’s carefully constructed rises and falls — its core of opposing traffic — that gives Problems life.

Will Patterson’s Sleep Good has blossomed over the past couple of years from a bedroom pop project into a full scale outfit that mirrors the rise of his other work with Bill Baird’s Sunset. The two bands are often on the same bill together, and with good reason; both swim in the psych-pop wake of early Harry Nilsson, effusive and catchy, but not without a good amount of tongue-in-cheek wit that can bite and barb with ease and unexpected turns and experimentation that seem ever evolving in arrangements. Sleep Good dropped two noteworthy albums last year, Skyclimber and the December cassette Strange Vacations, and you can catch the quintet this Friday, January 28, at the Mohawk along with ((Sounder)) and the Denton five-piece Seryn, who will be releasing their debut EP at the show, This is Where We Are.

For all of the early allusions to literary figures made by the countless reviewers about The Dark Water Hymnal’s releases, one would think that the subtle and nuanced quintet would be overwrought with expert lyrical tumbling — but they’re not. Collapse the Structure is surprisingly easy to listen to and, at moments, revels in great moments of song-craft and instrumental build without flowing over, like an Arcade Fire album with the reins pulled in.

Chris Brecht and Dead Flowers second album and follow-up to 2008’s
The Great Ride, leads the listener through a musty corridor with a flashlight, opens a door and flips a switch to reveal stained floral curtains and yellowing lampshades. Slowly, with every listen, the curtains swish and the lampshades crack revealing the deliberate and delicate lace-like arrangements of the room: the Wurlitzer’s exacting pulse, the pedal steel’s reckless extension, the vocals’ penetrating reverberations. The assumption of what one thinks Motel is shrivels and falls off, and a song called “Living Twice as Hard” isn’t just a cliché for the grief and befalls of reckless living. Dead Flower Motel betters with each listen, revealing unseen turns and crevices. But like all motels, it is embedded with a sense of impermanence and the moments of revelation are constantly fleeting too fast.

Rising out of the new pack of young indie bands making an impression, Little Lo might be best considered as splitting the difference between their peers Marmalakes and Mother Falcon, melding the folk-pop of the former with the ensemble energy of the latter. Fronted by the Jeff Mangum-meets-Michael Nau trembling vocals of Ryan McGill, the band can explode with a cathartic abandon of brass and keys and rolling percussion, but just as easily lull with a subtle folk touch that can silence a room. Though looking to release their official debut EP later this year, the outfit has already garnered well-deserved attention for their live shows, and you can experience Little Lo for yourself this Thursday, January 20th as they pack onto the stage at the Cactus Cafe along with the Sour Notes.

My favorite part of Blue Water White Death’s self-titled debut album is definitely – without a doubt – exactly three minutes and fourteen seconds into “Song For The Greater Jihad”. At that moment, in a song that features some gentle acoustic guitar work, some slightly off kilter crooning, and a few well placed bombs of noise, there is such a weird howl that I rewound (or the equivalent in this digital era) back fourteen times just to hear it again and again – before I then finished listening to the song. It’s like if those creatures in The Descent (an awful movie starring girls being killed and chased in a cave) screamed for a split second in the darkness. Like a perfect guitar solo, this jarring noise made the hair on my neck stand up with excitement. For some reason unexplainable by me, that sound defines the entire album: a juxtaposition of gentle and terrifying; or perhaps meticulous and primal.

Listen to Cowboy and Indian and the aptness of the moniker is readily apparent. Jazz Mills, who dazzled as a backup singer in T Bird in the Breaks, and Jesse Plemons, of Friday Night Lights fame, meld a supple twang with a rootsy grit in duet, adding in Daniel James’ to lay down some funky blues touches on guitar. Though only formed less than a year ago, Mills and Plemons are a natural compliment to one another, and we are excited to see what the trio produces when they release their debut recording later in 2011. You can get a taste of that below with the bluesy “Ledbellies” that they’ve offered up for download, and catch them live as they kick off a big westward tour this Friday, January 14th at Lambert’s.