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.

Following up their full-of-promise inaugural EP from last year, Hollywood Gossip’s debut full-length finds the band exactly where you would hope to find them. Dear as Diamonds displays an impressive leap in sonic maturity. Whereas You’re So Quiet was a pop purist’s delight, propelled by tunes like “Bicycle” and “Something’s Happening,” Dear as Diamond manages to rock a little more and strike a more reflective tone, but without losing that pop sheen. In progression, the album and band at this point are reminiscent of fellow local pop prospects the Sour Notes. The swooning vocal dives, the jangled guitars, and kick-stepped pep of percussion all feel wonderfully familiar and comfortable, yet surprising moments continually drive the quartet into some impressive new territories.

What Made Milwaukee Famous, aside from its cheeky name, is quietly recognized as one of the most notorious indie rock bands of the last decade to come from Austin, or anywhere for that matter. They toured with indie icons like the National, had placement on national television, and were regular and much anticipated faces on the summer festival circuit. Yet despite getting all the appropriate breaks, they still never have managed to gain significant traction. But with such a regal, indie pedigree, it makes sense that Drew Patrizi’s solo endeavor of his own stockpiled material from the last couple years — which has donned the name Trumpeter Swan — would take the power-pop, crank-the-stereo idioms that defined WMMF’s visceral and heartfelt rock to the next level. Patrizi, in his solo effort, has opted for chamber-pop and studio acrobatics to produce an emotive and lush record, comparable in emotional scope to any of his previous group’s pursuits.

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.

Leatherbag’s Randy Reynolds has never shied away from his influences, highlighting them and pushing them to the fore even as he transforms them into his own style. That certainly remains the case with Hey Day, Leatherbag’s third LP and follow up to last year’s two excellent EPs, Tomorrow and Everything I Once Knew. The album sets its tone and conscience with lead-off track “Start All Over Again,” opening with a hefty bassline that sounds lifted straight from the Feelies’ “It’s Only Life” and Reynolds chiming in with lines like “It’s time for you to come full circle, and start all over again.” As Leatherbag continues to - by his own accord - resurface the aesthetic of Austin’s Eighties New Sincerity, he seems to do so as a brace against the mercurial fads of fleeting scenes, proposing with this Neo Sincerity is something that doesn’t purport to be timeless, but that it is above all genuine in its constant evolution as a work in progress. So when Reynolds calls on the opener “recognize that the past is still fiction,” it’s not a statement of trying to break from the past as much as not be bound and beholden to it, which would apply equally to Hey Day’s relationship to the present.

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.

No matter how hard we try to deny or hide it, Texans have an accent. Not everyone’s is obvious in everyday speech, but after a few beers the twang starts to become more pronounced and difficult to ignore. And it doesn’t take long for that accent to take hold upon adopting the state either. Such is the case of singer-songwriter Claire Small. The Austin-by-way-of Nashville songwriter’s sophomore full-length, How Do You Like Love?, would be mislabeled under country, as her ambient folk-rock influences contradict the traditional structure too openly. Still, throughout Small’s dreamy LP is the presence of elements like honky-tonk electric organ that allow her pop-inflections to fluctuate from light country shadings to full-blown country homages.

Claire Small seems to epitomize the Austin influence, that ideal of bringing both flower children and cowboys together to shake hands on neutral ground.

An unfortunate corollary to Austin being a city with more bars than parking spots is that it also festers with an equal number of bar bands; friendly, safe blues rock that does little more than give frat boys an opportunity to lean over to a nearby girl and confidently declare, “I can play that on my acoustic guitar. You should hear me sometime.” Into this convenient slot slides Ryan Young, with his second full-length album, White Citrus. While perhaps at the top of the local niche, the artist’s uptempo songs rarely seem more than pleasant – something to throw on before cracking that first beer as the sun comes down – and are true to the genre to a fault.

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.