Austin Sound

In many ways, the singer-songwriter has become a cliché. Maybe it’s too easy - pick up an acoustic guitar, pen a few flowery lines about heartbreak, add some recycled melodies, and voila! Thankfully, Sarah Jaffe breaks that mold. At 6 songs and 21 minutes, Even Born Again, Jaffe’s proper debut and produced by the Paper Chase’s John Congleton, is a mini-masterpiece. The Denton artist’s mournful melodies are wholly original yet comfortably familiar and every element of the EP, from the unique vocal delivery to the haunting strings, is emotionally gripping in all the right ways.

On This Machine Kills Rhythm, Austin garage-rock quartet The Spirit of Space make no effort to hide their influences. Musically, they stick around the “pop-ier” Velvet Underground realm, executing with a certain raw quality despite the seemingly calculated production. The fun and playful lyrics tend to lean more in the direction of ardent Velvet Underground enthusiast Jonathan Richman, as Spirit of Space weave tales of dream girls, loneliness, and pretty much everything that comes with being a young man. Well, except for the first track of the album that, in the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” sees Eric Wilson describing the process of eating someone. But that’s just the first song.

“If time was a river you wear like a sleeve, it’s sewn with a thread of hope so short you’d hardly believe,” sings Shawn Jones, a faint hint of sarcasm in his voice, though not enough to overcome the imagery of the phrase itself. Jones may very well be the thread that holds in the loose stitching of the album’s conflicting themes – everything from Pulling Up Floors-style emotional confessions to dark cynical humor – but also incorporates that small but distinct glimmer of “hope.” The space of the full-length allows the themes and instrumentation that were so densely crammed into the Lovely Sparrows debut Pulling Up Floors, Pouring on (New) Paint EP to diffuse and develop more distinctly, though hardly in isolation. The album is Jones at his best, refusing to allow his listeners to take his heart’s complaints too seriously, but reminding us behind every good joke is a stark reality.

It’s been four years since the New Year released their last album, The End Is Near, which had seemed to prophetically signal that the Kadane brothers were once more moving on to other projects. But with the north Texas quintet’s sudden return with their eponymous third album, the New Year has not only delivered their best record, but also seemed to have mastered the balance between slow burning, hazy modern malaise and a poignant restlessness that is in continuous search for something bigger, something with meaning. It’s a mellow set, propped up by a backside heavy with piano ballads, even as it courses with an urgency to move and escape. The mood is encapsulated in the mesmerizing build of the opening track, “Folios,” which dances a easy instrumental waltz for nearly 4 minutes before climaxing in the subdued questioning, “I don’t think the good years I’ve got can wait, so what are we staying for?”

Eve and the Exiles are back with their sophomore release Blow Your Mind, a fantastic party record full of 1960s inspired garage rock and a shot of blues. Cut on 2-inch analog tape at the Sweatbox Studios in Austin, Blow Your Mind features a 14 track program packed with precisely the kind of music that has made this outfit an Austin institution in their six years together.

Dan Dyer has made his way back to Austin after spending a few years in St. Louis raising a family and producing commercial work, and a welcome return it is. His first incarnation, Breedlove, debuted in the late 1990s as an Austin outfit that soaked the music scene with a soulful R&B sound that was 2/3 pop, 1/3 soul - with Dyer’s voice at the forefront. Dyer’s self-titled third release picks up where Breedlove left off, but includes a gospel-revival driven sound fusing rock, soul, jazz, and latin influences with a little less pop into the R&B sound. Recorded on the East side with producer David Boyle, the album is a refreshing dip in the R&B pool which seems to be in short supply these days in Austin. Dyer’s rich, soulful voice is the splashing standout on every track. It pairs well when backed up by Austin-based Mt. Zion Baptist Church Choir, although with his grunts and moans wetting the tracks, you feel a little more like you are visiting him in between the sheets instead of church pews.

If You Were Always’ 2007 debut EP, Since You’ve Been Gone, was like a gentle breeze in the falling leaves surrounding autumn’s trees, then their sophomore effort, Ghost Lanes is almost – almost! - like a summer storm with some gusts of rain going left-right instead of straight down. Ghost Lanes offers the same slowcore meets mellow indie as its predecessor except this time the band sounds louder, more comfortable, and much more confident on these five tracks. Earlier, singer/guitarist Cam Houser sounded sad, vulnerable, and afraid; now he sounds a little less sad, a little madder, and a lot less intimidated by whomever and whatever broke his heart.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Zest of Yore has a shrine dedicated to Robert Pollard. The Guided By Voices influence permeates every aspect of their new record Quality Of Life (down to the liner notes - Doug Gillard of GBV produced and played on some of the tracks). There is a difference, however, between a band that is unoriginal and one that simply wears their influences proudly. Zest Of Yore is definitely the latter, taking the best schizophrenic-pop elements of GBV records like Alien Lanes and Isolation Drills, and mixing in their own sweet-voiced, jangley guitar-pop. The result is a sound wholly their own - a sound built on unpredictable melodies and structural weirdness, but one that never strays too far from the traditional rock aesthetic (think of the power pop giants of yesteryear like The Knack, Big Star, The Replacements, and so on).

Humor me as I get in at least one good metaphor before the real “criticism” kicks in: the Okkervil River “leftover album” concept is a lot like Thanksgiving Dinner. After feasting on any number of delicious Pilgrim-themed foodstuffs, the average American spends a good week and a half eating cold turkey sandwiches every day for lunch because, no, even a solid party of 10 couldn’t finish off that forty-pound turkey. This is colloquially known (at least in my family) as the “leftover principle”; essentially, a tasty turkey yields a tasty week of lunch meat, same as a brilliant album yields equally brilliant leftovers, even they aren’t quite as good as when they were hot out of the oven. To put it even more bluntly, if you liked The Stage Names, you’ll probably like The Stand Ins.

It’s not hard to find post-punk bands nowadays. People have been claiming punk is dead since it’s birth and post-punk bands have followed in the wake ever since. On any given night, half a dozen bands with jagged guitars, frantic drums, and biting vocals are playing your hometown. Unfortunately for them (and likely you, unless you live in Austin), those bands are not Austin’s Red Leaves. A great mixture of all the above with a noticeable Cure influence (without too much of Robert Smith’s sad mope side), the Leaves’ By Road Or Rail surprisingly stands out among so much other lackluster drek.

Road Or Rail is 9 tracks of schizophrenic post-punk that veers from squalls of guitar to throbbing dark new wave to more straight ahead punk clatter from song to song, and sometimes within the same song.