"I found out Sufjan was recording Illinois here," says Stratton, chuckling. He’s fielded questions about Stevens before. "Michigan was a big influence on me in high school, and Sufjan agreed to appear on my record."

As exciting as that may sound for a fan, it came as a bit of a disappointment for Stratton, as Stevens’ contributions were minimal.

"He really had nothing to do with it besides putting oboe on the first and last song," says Stratton. "We had to edit it heavily and rearrange it completely just to get something that was close to what we had intended."

It also delayed the album’s release months, as Stevens was touring China and the two musicians never had direct correspondence with each other. In the end, it was a failed collaboration.

"He didn’t like the way his oboe turned out, so he asked us to take his name off the credits," says Stratton. "He was like a ghost figure on that first record."

I’m no longer the biggest Sufjan fan," he explains. "I’m glad it happened, but it was a very protracted and confusing experience."

Still, Stratton doesn’t regret being a blip on Stevens’ radar.

"It brought me more listeners than I ever would have had," he says. "That record is still the most listened to because of his small role."

While Sufjan completists haven’t forgotten about him, Stratton has moved on, recording two more albums and an EP since then. And any further musical partnerships have been with friends, many of them classmates from Bennington College in Vermont, where Stratton graduated from last year.

"Bands like Mountain Man and The Wailing Wall are bands that I play with a lot that are my friends," says Stratton. "It can get weirdly cliquish, but we try not to think about ourselves as a scene too much because we play with a lot of different people."

Stratton’s musical tastes place him outside many of the Brooklyn scenes. For one, it’s just him, so there are no lo-fi weed psych jams to be heard here, even if he wanted to make them.

"The closest ‘scene’ I guess I could be considered a part of is The Silent Barn crowd," offers Stratton, laughing. "Because a friend of mine books me there."

High school musical: Will Stratton.

Just the same, Stratton’s dynamic, often hushed brand of folk pop probably wouldn’t work at most Brooklyn venues. He also loves living and recording in Red Hook, where he moved recently from Bushwick.

"In Bushwick, it was pretty densely populated and there was a lot of noise all the time," he explains. "There’s an atmosphere down here that gives me a chance to think. To breathe. To exist. The quiet at night is good for recording. I’m getting a mattress from my old apartment and putting it up with hooks on the wall to dampen the sound."

His latest album, recorded in a bedroom as well, is called New Vanguard Blues, and was self-released in July in a digital-only format. Sounding like Nick Drake was suddenly blessed with John Fahey’s blues guitar picking skills, it features Stratton almost exclusively on just acoustic guitar and vocals. Recorded over a weekend earlier this year, it is the precursive antithesis to his next effort.

Stratton’s fourth album, tentatively titled The Late Romantics will be much more complex.

"There will be a lot heavier orchestration [on the next one]," explains Stratton. "I tried to make more it a more communal experience with my friends on previous records and improvise. We’d do seven or eight takes, and now not I’m doing that as much. It’s being done a little more compositionally."

There will also be a shift in the way he approaches the melodies in his songs.

"I’m trying to make [this record] more discordant," says Stratton. "I think peoples’ first instincts are not always to make really discordant music, so it helps to write it out with this one."

That all sounds just finejust don’t let Sufjan Stevens and his oboe anywhere near it.

–
Will Stratton
Jan. 1, Silent Barn
915 Wyckoff Ave. (betw. Weirfield & Hancock Sts.), Queens
212-253-8080; 8, $TBA.

Looking at Xylos’ MySpace page—remember those?—I was surprised to discover that the band had been around since 2004. Going by the “page created date,” Xylos has been chugging along for almost six years.

“Quite the contrary,” Eric Zeiler, the band’s only constant member, says after we clink our pints of beer together at Daddy’s in Williamsburg. Joined by Monika Heidemann and Nikki Lancy, Zeiler explains the confusion behind the band’s history.

“The quick synopsis of the current band,” continues Zeiler, “is that we started in late 2008 with an EP and continued until spring of this year. The kind of music we were playing started to mutate but there was a point where the lineup changed and we took some time off and restarted.”

The truth behind the mysterious website is that it began as Zeiler’s personal page, where he uploaded some solo electronic recordings nearly six years ago. Even before the band mutated, Xylos began to take on different forms.

Now completely solidified, the band consists of five Brooklyn-dwelling members: Heidemann on vocals and bass, Zeiler on guitar and synth, Lancy on keyboards and vocals, Jordan Brooks on bass and vocals and Chris Berry on drums and electronics. The band isn’t (to my knowledge) hot boxing a Monster Island practice space and fucking around on noise jams, however. Xylos’ sound and look is that of a clean-cut, well-produced electro-pop outfit, existing way outside of the chummy and insular Williamsburg scene.

Confusing to the group’s current output is the video from MTV Iggy (the network’s global music channel) that the band has uploaded, where the foursome looks like a Brooklyn bluegrass band— believe me, they exist—replete with acoustic guitars, banjo and an accordion.

“That’s not really a prime example of our band,” Heidemann chimes in. “They wanted us to record an acoustic set in Monika’s house, so that’s what we did,” says Zeiler.

So what is Xylos, then—a folk-pop band or a danceable electronic band? Does it have to be just one?

“There are certainly more synthesizers than there used to be,” says Zeiler. “But then, the song ‘Darling Dearest’ needed an acoustic guitar for the intro. It just made sense. [Before], a banjo might have fit into a song, and less so now.”

The song Zeiler refers to, from the upcoming, still-untitled record, is a perfect example of Xylos’ synthesis of twee pop and hard electronic rhythms. It’s like a female-fronted Hot Chip song mashed up with a Field Mice song.

The untitled record is currently being finished and will showcase the new-ish, improved and, yes, fully formed Xylos finding its stride. Don’t think that Xylos is content with staying this way forever, though. Just because the band has finished transforming this time doesn’t mean it won’t happen again.

“We’re in the trenches of recording this record, and there is a stylistic continuity there, production-wise,” Zeiler explains. “But I was thinking, our next record might be completely different. A lot of what’s colored this album now is we’ve been working with a friend of mine who has a very unique set of electronics that we’ve been using. I could see for our next record we go upstate and do something completely different. It’ll still sound like us, but it could be a completely different style of music.”

The accordion-laden days of Xylos are over. Kind of.

“Anything like that that you will hear from us from now on will just be ‘production sounds,’” says Heidemann. “We don’t have an accordion player,” continues Zeiler, just to make sure the band’s sound doesn’t get pigeonholed by one lone video on an archaic social networking site.

“Now we’re a death metal band,” he says, jokingly. “When the band started, we operated under the idea of having three lead singers, kind of like a Fleetwood Mac kind of thing. Now Monika is the one lead singer and Nikki and Jordan still harmonize, but it’s not based around that three lead singers idea anymore.”

That’s not to say that Xylos doesn’t still sound like Fleetwood Mac sometimes.

“Our influences are more mainstream, which is something I like,” says Lancy. “I think it’s the fact that we have three writers in the band that makes it like that,” Heidemann chimes in. “Nothing is untouchable,” says Zeiler, barely missing a beat. “We are truly collaborative in that way.”

>> Xylos Dec. 2, Mercury Lounge, 217 E. Houston St. (betw. Essex & Ludlow Sts.), 212- 260-4700; 7:30, $10.

Whatever you want to call it, PC Worship doesn’t really care, because the band could be any of these things.

“It’s definitely not some bedroom pop bullshit. We jam in the living room or the pit,” says PC Worship mastermind Justin Frye from the Italian countryside, where he’s currently playing bass on Gary War’s European tour.

While not physically playing in a bedroom, PC Worship also doesn’t sound like it’s cut from the same cloth as bands that can be filed under that tired descriptor. The band’s latest—from what I can tell, thanks to a seemingly endless list of recordings—is a 7-inch called Live Reduxion. The record’s tracks are just a little less melancholy beach pop and a little more, well, different. The band sounds like an East

Coast Ariel Pink, but weirder (yes, weirder) and with more distinguished musicianship.

In fact, when I finally catch up with Frye, he’s with Gary War making a medieval psych record in an old Italian castle. Or at least that’s what he tells me.

When he’s back in the States, PC Worship is sometimes just Frye and sometimes a couple of mystery collaborators, whom he would only refer to as The Mutant Soul Band. The recordings, split between cassettes, CD-Rs and vinyl, have either been self-released or put out on the Norfolk, Va., label Shdwply, which specializes in bands like Gary War, Teeth Mountain and Sore Eros, the side project of Ariel Pink and Panda Bear band member Robert Robinson.

“It’s definitely a personal project that can be solo,” Frye explains of his primary band, “but there’s usually between four to six other people playing.”

There are elements of psych, druggyness and, yes, even free-jazz in the music, which can be heard on any of PC Worship’s mostly long-gone records—if you were smart enough to pick them up when they were still around; seven of the band’s releases, including the NYC Stone Age LP and numerous self-released cassettes, are out of print, leaving Live Reduxion and two cassettes available for purchase. Of the one remaining release on wax, “Gravity” is the standout track, beginning with 30 seconds of screeching guitar noise and finally giving way to a rather charming, melodious song. The din returns for a second blow midway through, before relenting again and allowing Frye and the gang to churn out a messy coda.

It might be a while before any new PC Worship tracks appear, though. Frye is currently embarking on what he calls a “forced vacation” from recording. “Some junkie stole my busted laptop in Brussels,” he explains. “Also, my reel-to-reel has some magnetism issues that need to be sorted out.”

A bummer, sure, especially as his bass was also lifted, but at least he got some justice. A friend busted the culprit shortly after the theft.

“Funny thing is the guy tried to sell my bass a day later to a friend’s used gear shop, so that’s when they busted him,” Frye says. “He’s in jail now.”

It’s too late for his laptop, though, and of those aforementioned limited edition releases, including more than five last year alone, fans should refrain from holding their collective breaths for re-releases or compilations. The only copies were stored on his jacked computer.

“Maybe whoever has it will bootleg the jams,” laments Frye.

>> PC Worship Dec. 3, Death By Audio, 49 S. 2nd St. (betw. Kent & Wythe Aves.), Brooklyn, no phone; 8, $TBA.

Like many of its DIY-venue dwelling contemporaries, the Brooklyn-based quartet shuns the lo-fi label, because, like “indie rock” or “nugaze,” it doesn’t accurately describe what the music sounds like. Instead, “lo-fi” is quickly blanketed over a group of bands that maybe played together once at The Silent Barn or released a 7-inch on Captured Tracks.

“We want to be as hi-fi as possible,” David, German Measles’ drummer, smartly quips. “We’ve recorded on 16 tracks to twoinch tape.”

It’s his second sentence that lets me know he’s serious, and not just seriously fucking with me, as I believe he and the rest of the band have been for most of our encounter. (Indeed, they refused to divulge their last names).

Are bands referred to as lo-fi just because they aren’t filled with “professional musicians”? Or does it have to do with their associations with bands in a scene, whether real or imagined? Serge, the band’s bassist, sets the record straight.

“It has to do more with a certain scene than the actual quality of the recording,” he says, of the stigmatized genre. “If there’s any lo-fi quality [in our music], it’s because we can’t afford it.”

Either way, German Measles is just having fun, seeing what happens and making half-jokes.There’s the band’s fictitious, grizzled, middle-aged manager Louie Lemonsa, for whom the guys have created a MySpace profile. I ask the group who came up with his name.

“He did,” David hurls back at me, very matter-of-factly. “Or his mom did.”

There’s the song “Totally Wild,” a messy, awesome few minutes of Measles’ rock ‘n’ roll—the band’s defining sound is something of a messy swagger—curiously titled similarly to a song by The Fall called “Totally Wired.”They insist it has nothing to do with the prolific British band.

“Everybody thinks that, but no,” says Alex. “We have a new song called ‘Totally Mild,’ though,” continues Serge. “That song does reference ‘Totally Wired.’” And then there’s just the group’s general, goofy outlook on what’s happening.When we discuss Apple’s newest gotta-have-it piece of technology, an enormous writing tablet akin to a virtual sheet of paper, Serge remarks, “A book of those iPads would be very expensive.”

While he’s obviously joking, the band as a whole is so smartly funny that I can’t always tell what is true and when they’re messing with me.

The band’s humble beginnings were seemingly always based around happy accidents and ephemera.They started German Measles as a two-week project, when Serge was visiting from out of town.The idea was to play a show at the end of the two weeks.There was one problem, however—they didn’t have any songs and Serge didn’t know how to play bass.

“There were no expectations [for the band]. It was more of an experiment,” says Nick, Alex’s twin brother and the band’s frontman. “A lot of earlier songs were written in that two week period” Serge ended up moving to Brooklyn a few months later, and the rest, as they say, is German Measles history. Kind of.

The band was actually called Japanese Beetles for a while. And The Real Beetles before that. And a slew of other bands that sound like German Measles before that.

In fact, the new plan after the one when Serge learned bass for a one-off show was to shift the band’s identity every few weeks or so—just whenever the group’s members got bored with their current band name.

“We had been called Japanese Beetles, and one time at a show I said ‘We are German Measles,’” Nick explains. “We weren’t happy with it so we switched it.”That’s all it took.

On one the band’s catchiest tracks “Wild Weekend,” guitars and drums come in softly—this could be The Beets!—but then the lyrics come in: “Come on, babe, and party with me/ take some drugs and party with me… so fucked up/ our brains are leaking,” and it’s clear that this is something slightly more deranged. But the band has released a demo tape on the aforementioned Captured Tracks label, a six-song 12-inch called Wild EP and will soon release a 7-inch on Brooklyn’s Wild World label. So maybe they are part of the whole lo-fi revival thing?

“Nah. I’m really bad at surfing,” Serge tells me.

When I ask Alex and Nick if they ever fight over band-related issues like Noel and Liam Gallagher, the twins give me a nonchalant “nah,” almost in unison. So German Measles isn’t as serious a band as Oasis, Britain’s musical equivalent of Cain and Abel?

“We’re more serious than Oasis,” responds David, his tongue planted firmly in his cheek. Maybe he isn’t joking.

> German Measles

Feb. 20, Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 N. 6th St. (betw. Wythe & Kent Aves.), 718-486-5400; 7:30, $15.

IT STARTED WITH nothing at all,” says Cold Cave’s Wesley Eisold, of the origins of his dark synth-pop group. It sounds simple enough, but the former American Nightmare and Some Girls vocalist/screamer has since piled on thick layers of dreamy melodies, crushing noise and lyrics about death and dying.

Only when delving further into Eisold’s outlook on life does Cold Cave really start to make any sense, especially when considering that the electro band, considering current members and frequent collaborations, includes a former Boston hardcore vocalist, an ex-Xiu Xiu keyboardist and seminal noise musician Dominick Fernow of Prurient.

“People are dying on every corner, there is death everywhere,” explains Eisold, very matter-of-factly. “There are trees dying in front of me right now. It’s impossible to ignore.”

Just when Cold Cave seems to be focused on the macabre, though, Eisold throws me a curveball. “The positive version of [this outlook on death] is it is a reminder to continue to experience life and to try to be productive.”

Ah. So that’s where the brutal and dark meet the catchy melodies and dance-inducing drum machines in Cold Cave’s music: through the fusion of the bad (being dead, experiencing the death of a loved one) with the good (having fun, dancing).

While it’s not completely shocking that the former Ten Yard Fight roadie created Cold Cave, it is pleasantly surprising that Eisold quit being in punk bands, taught himself to play keyboards in his Philadelphia apartment and somehow came up with some of the most interesting and unique pop music being played right now.

“A lot of the early material wasn’t songs, they were just nude pieces [of music],” explains Eisold of his foray into instrumentation. “It’s kind of interesting to me after playing an instrument for six months to stumble upon a pop song.”

These unexpected gems wound up on a number of early recordings, including a self-released 12” on Eisold’s own Heartworm Press, a single on Brooklyn’s Dais Records and a 7” on Fernow’s Hospital Productions.The Hospital 7” led to an aborted collaboration between Prurient and Cold Cave, but Fernow still remains as a contributor to the band.

Despite Prurient’s knack for harsh electronic noise, Fernow has aided Cold Cave through songwriting and in their live show.

Eisold is brief explaining why Fernow makes sense as a collaborator. “[It comes] from music and friendship,” he says. “It just works.”

He is equally candid in his reasoning of how Cold Cave ended up on Matador

Records, quite the jump from self-releases and small indies. Following the excellent Love Comes Close LP on Heartworm, Matador released a 12”, the aptly titled Death Comes Close, and made plans to reissue the full album.

“They [Matador] are all people who are into music and buy records and I guess they liked our band,” a reserved Eisold discloses.

Maybe Eisold seems so detached from the business end of his band because he expends so much energy staying relevant and sincere in his songwriting. It also could be because he doesn’t seem to be as focused on who releases his records, as long as he is on the same page with a prospective label; otherwise, he’d be just as happy to release it himself.

Don’t forget, this is a man who has released records on labels as diverse as What’s Your Rupture? and Epitaph. In fact, Love Comes Close was supposed to have been released on a few different labels (Eisold doesn’t say which) before coming out on Heartworm in its initial run.

“There was a label or two that was going to release it,” Eisold clarifies. “I wasn’t comfortable with it at the last minute.”

Eisold seems to be comfortable enough with his band’s new home at Matador, which also seems to be a necessity as Cold Cave continues to get bigger. His intention wasn’t to start a record label—Heartworm Press is mainly an independent book publisher—but to just self-release the music he made with Cold Cave that sounded like it fit there.

This brings us back to Cold Cave’s humble beginnings in a Philadelphia apartment where there is a relative newbie banging away on a thrift store keyboard given to him by a friend. He swears that he started this project because he wanted to write music that didn’t get lost in translation from one musician to the other. It seems his plan has worked.

> Cold Cave

Nov. 21, Terminal 5, 610 W. 56th St. (betw. 11th & 12th Aves.), 212-665-3832; 7, $35

THE BAND REAL ESTATE isn’t named after anything particular, certainly not after the type of job that guitarist/singer/primary songwriter Martin Courtney has. Or maybe it is.

“I work in a real estate office actually,” says Courtney. “I have a real estate license.”

That’s not really where the band name came from,” continues Courtney. “It’s kind of a phrase that didn’t really mean that much.”

If that sounds cryptic, it’s because Courtney and his band thrive on the duplicity exemplified here—and it doesn’t stop there.

Courtney was also never in fellow New Jersey band Titus Andronicus. Or maybe he was.

“I was in band with the lead singer of Titus and [former Titus Andronicus member] Andrew Cedermark in high school,” he explains. “Yes and no. I was never in Titus.”

What Courtney means to say, but is a bit unclear about, is that he was in a band that would become an early form of that band, but, for whatever reason, he left before it all came together.The hesitant way in which he describes his formative years and how his band got its name is a reflection on the musical direction of the band we can definitely say he is in—Real Estate.

The Bergen County by way of Bushwick (Real Estate’s drummer lives at Market Hotel and even hosts a yoga night there) band is at once a few different things, never truly committing completely to one type of aesthetic—and that’s what makes it so great.

Real Estate’s self-titled debut album (out Nov. 17) has that lo-fi, nugaze sound that indie rock fans expect, but the garage rock sound is almost completely absent.The songs are about the beach and the summer, but the band has rarely, if ever, been to the New Jersey shore.

“‘Lets Rock the Beach’…I think of that as tongue in cheek,” Courtney reveals. “We didn’t grow up near the beach or spend a lot of time on the beach.We’re just playing up a certain vibe.”

Whether or not Real Estate’s version of fuzzy beach rock comes from personal experience or not isn’t important—what’s important is that the band does it well and that it doesn’t sound forced.

In fact, the summery aura that Real Estate espouses has little to do with the actual beach and more to do with the time of year in which the band formed.

“Pretty much every song was written last summer,” delineates Courtney. “It’s mostly the feeling of the way the band came together and how we kind of like starting playing in the summer.” One of the best examples of this is a standout instrumental track from the upcoming record, titled “Atlantic City.”The band has also never really been there and is a kind of—maybe, though probably not really— homage to Bruce Springsteen and his song of the same name.

“Yeah I guess [it’s homage.] It’s mostly an instrumental song that sounds really happy and ecstatic,” says Courtney. “I thought it was a cool name for a song. It’s almost tongue in cheek because it’s such a ridiculous place.”

The feeling—a correct one, by the way— that a listener might get from listening to Real Estate is that the band doesn’t necessarily feel tied to all of these specific New Jersey destinations, but does love New Jersey as a whole.

“We’re all pretty proud of being from New Jersey.We like to let that be known,” states Courtney. “If it’s instrumental song [like “Atlantic City”], you might as well give it a name that reflects who you are.”

Who Real Estate is, to be reductive, is three childhood friends from New Jersey— Courtney, Matthew Mondanile and Alex Bleeker—and a new friend, Etienne Duguay, from Massachusetts that love to play together and share their common experiences with the indie rock music world.

“Three of us grew up together,” explains Courtney. “That plays into the positive feeling.The summery and the positive are interchangeable.We hadn’t seen each other in a while and we were psyched [to play again].

If that’s all there is to writing this kind of uplifting, feel-good music, then what is left when their new record stops spinning?

“Positive vibes,” expounds Courtney. That’s good enough for me.

> Real Estate

Nov. 6, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 8, $15

WHO SAYS YOU need an entire group of musicians to write infectious garage rock? Kristin Gundred writes and records under the name Dum Dum Girls and uses the stage name Dee Dee, which makes the entire project that much more confusing, as the band consists of mainly just Gundred.

Pluralizing the band name wasn’t part of an elaborate joke, though, Gundred knew from the beginning that the band was going to just be her.

“I dunno, I just needed a name and that was it,” Gundred answers aloofly when I ask how she came up with Dum Dum Girls. “My husband actually came up with it—it’s from an Iggy Pop song. I stole it from him.”

While it’s just Gundred writing and recording the music, when she hits the road—she made the CMJ rounds, playing and DJing, and will be at Bowery Ballroom on Oct. 30—she cherry picks the rest of the band from friends and acquaintances that she likes to play with. At an early show, Dum Dum Girls was Gundred, Mike Sniper of Blank Dogs and her husband, Brandon Welchez of Crocodiles, along with their current drummer, former Crystal Stilt and Vivian Girl Frankie Rose.

If the live version of Dum Dum Girls sounds like a who’s who of the indie rock scene right now, it’s because Gundred has an excellent rapport with a few of the more well-known bands in lo-fi rock.This isn’t to say that she knew them before a few months ago, however.

“I met most of them at the Captured Tracks Festival,” remembers Gundred. “Everyone is super nice. Blanks Dogs are my best friends as far as other bands go.”

She also doesn’t think the lo-fi “scene” is particularly a scene anyway.

“I think it more than anything reflects that people are doing things on their own,” explains Gundred. “I think it’s easy to look from New York over to the West Coast and see these bands [but] I don’t think of it so much as a scene.”

She also doesn’t think her husband’s band Crocodiles fits in with the Woodsist/Captured Tracks bunch.

“Crocodiles gets lumped in, but I don’t feel they fit in [with that],” explains Gundred. “They are noisy, they record in a studio.They aren’t trying to sound like K Records.”

If Dum Dum Girls sounds just like it belongs on a label like K Records, home to jangly indie-pop bands like Beat Happening and Tiger Trap, it’s because it shares a common influence with the influential, Pacific Northwestern bands of yore: Phil Spector.

Despite Spector’s personal life, which was riddled with controversy even before actress Lana Clarkson was found dead in his house, Gundred looks up to the musical side of the infamous producer.

“That period of music is easy to idealize,” says Gundred. “I thought his whole approach to production is great.”

Production, which is usually in the hands of Gundred when it comes to Dum Dum Girls, is an important factor to consider now that she signed with Sup Pop.

When I ask Gundred the difference between her upcoming album on Sub Pop and her earlier records on tiny labels like Captured Tracks and Hozack, she expresses that she doesn’t really see a departure in her approach to recording.

“There’s a larger budget,” Gundred explains, but don’t fear, fans of lo-fi, fuzzed-out rock ’n’ roll—she’s recording it herself.The major-indie-label debut of Dum Dum Girls might sound bigger and better, but it will still boast the DIY aesthetics that any follower of the band will recognize. “I anticipate it will just be [for sale] in more places,” finishes Gundred.

Her relationship with the seminal label, most famous for making Nirvana famous, is as casual as casual gets, which can be rare for musicians making the big leap to a record company that presumably does much higher volume than say her other label, Art Fag Recordings.

“I’m working with one guy, basically,” details Gundred. “He’d be my friend even if we weren’t working together.”

She also finds comfort in differing, yet similar influences. “I love the Sangri-Las,” continues Gundred. “It’s a very casual, fun thing.”

Dum Dum Girls isn’t a pastiche of earlier genres, though. Gundred makes it clear to me that the band comes from a creative place that simply looks to her influences to gain perspective.

“I’m not duplicating the past,” says Gundred, “but that sound is something I like to think in mind when I think about what I want my stuff to sound like.”

> Dum Dum Girls

Oct. 30, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 8:30, $15. Also Oct. 31 at Bell House.

“I LIKE BIG EXPLOSIONS of sounds contrasting with quiet moments,” explains Cymbals Eat Guitars singer/guitarist Joseph Ferocious from a wool shop in Iowa, where the band is between shows on a tour with The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. “The goal is to make music that gives me goosebumps.”

The band’s debut album, Why There Are Mountains, reflects Ferocious’ focus, as it is filled with songs that adhere to the “loudquiet-loud” template that has been known to be shiver-inducing. Bands like The Pixies,Weezer and Nirvana had been perfecting the notion when Ferocious was just a pre-teen in suburban New Jersey.

“Maybe that loud-quiet-loud thing is so up front [on Why There Are Mountains] because that’s what I was listening to at the time,” says Ferocious. “Songs like ‘And the Hazy Sea’ were written a long time ago.”

The track, which opens the album, is a sprawling, six-minute exercise in crescendoladen indie rock, one that could be considered the archetype for the band’s sound.

“‘And the Hazy Sea’ is the song of the record for me,” asserts Ferocious, who lives in Staten Island while his band mates are spread across Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey. “Not only because of the explosive beginning, but because it succinctly encapsulates our sound.”

Nevertheless, Cymbals Eat Guitars doesn’t plan on necessarily becoming the next purveyor of this type of songwriting into the distant future.

“Loud-quiet-loud is pretty grand, but there are better ways to write songs, and we are sliding into that,” affirms Ferocious, adding a disclaimer to those thinking that the band might completely change shape on the next record. “That dynamic is still going to be a part of our sound though.”

There’s more to “And the Hazy Sea”— it’s also the song from which the band derived the title of the album, making the song at once a synthesis of the listener’s introduction to the band and the record.

“It’s taken from the middle of that song,” says Ferocious, dodging the question that he knows will come next. “The whole passage poses the question that became the title of the record.”

Eliciting an explanation as to what the cryptic title Why There Are Mountains actually means from Ferocious is a different story. Ferocious shies away from giving a definitive answer.

“I don’t want to be one of those people [in bands] that says ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’” he offers. “I don’t remember when I chose that title, but I will say from a superficial standpoint that all of my favorite records reveal that moment where you realize why the record is titled a certain way.”

Though it seems that all-night epic jam sessions after partaking in a certain illicit green substance might be the reason for such abstruse lyrics and long, complex song structures. But Ferocious denies they’re a drug band.

“We all partake in that sort of thing sometimes, but it doesn’t really factor into the sound,” Ferocious illustrates, laughing. It’s not like Spacemen 3, where the sound wouldn’t exist without heroin or LSD.”

It’s his songwriting process, Ferocious intimates, that keeps a lot of the songs clocking in at over five minutes in length.

“I think a lot of what people would call epic [about our music] is a result of the way I write songs,” he elucidates. “I do it over a long period of time. I can spend three or four months on one song.”

This is because Ferocious cringes at the thought of excluding an idea that is important to him in a song where he feels it is needed. A song is completed when his ideas are realized and the band can fit all of their parts together so that his lyrics can be in complete harmony with the music.

“Part of the epic quality is I want to get out the entire thought,” Ferocious divulges. How I add to them and augment them is I’ll have hooks and I will place them like individual movements one after the other.”

This isn’t to say that the songs are jumbled or repetitive amalgams of ideas; in fact, quite the opposite is true. Ferocious prides himself on rarely, if ever, repeating himself.

“There really aren’t a lot of choruses,” he maintains. “And if there are, I don’t repeat them.”

While the improvisational, “jammy” aspect of the music might seem to steer Cymbals Eat Guitars in the direction of bands that adhere to similar practices, Ferocious assured me that the band won’t be the next Phish.

“When I wrote ‘In the Hazy Sea’ I hadn’t even smoked pot for the first time yet,” asserts Ferocious, assuaging my fears. “Don’t worry, we won’t turn into a jam band.”

> Cymbols Eat Guitars

Oct. 3, Webster Hall, 125 E. 11th St. (betw. 3rd & 4th Aves.), 212-353-1600; 6, $16

The seminal emo band Hoerner co-founded in 1992 is both of these things in 2009: reunited and reissued, with their first two albums, Diary and LP2 receiving the deluxe packaging and bonus tracks treatment from Sup Pop, yet even dedicated listeners will still have trouble grasping a base understanding of the complicated relationship between these four musicians.

SDRE broke up for the first time only a little over three years after coming together. They recorded the aforementioned albums, grew tired and disbanded, with bassist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith joining Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters. The band reunited for in 1997, for the first time playing without Mendel—he continued with the Foo Fighters even after Goldsmith jumped ship back to SDRE. The band wrote and recorded its third album, How It Feels to Be Something On, replacing Mendel with Jeff Palmer before replacing him with another bassist, Joe Skyward. This new addition didn’t stick either, though: the group called it quits again after recording the follow-up to How It Feels.

Hoerner, however, explains that even after their most recent hiatus, one dating back to 2000, they fell back on old habits quite quickly.

“We have a lot of made-up words that we use with each other,” Hoerner says with a laugh. “We hadn’t seen each other in years and we starting speaking in that language again.”
If anyone is to be held responsible for this reunion, however, it isn’t Hoerner or Goldsmith or even lead singer Jeremy Enigk; it’s the band member with the most high profile post-SDRE music career, Mendel, who still plays in Foo Fighters.

“Nate brought this about,” explains Hoerner. “We were waiting for him to have the time and inclination and for the stars to align. He called out of the blue. If you want to blame one guy, it’s him.”

Fans of SDRE certainly aren’t holding Nate or the rest of the band at fault for the upcoming reunion shows, which will be awash with songs from the first two records, the only two in which all four original band members played on, as Mendel continued with Foo Fighters full time after the first break up immediately following the recording sessions for LP2.

“Because it’s the four original guys, we focused on everything on Diary, minus a few things that didn’t work,” Hoerner discloses when I nervously ask him whether this tour is going to be heavy on later-period SDRE. “Also we worked on everything on LP2 and some stuff off How It Feels to Be Something On and The Rising Tide. The later stuff sounds sick with Nate,” he continues, not offended that I come off as a typical “their early stuff was better” fan.

It’s hard to believe that the band would want to pick the pieces back up after the disaster of their last record, 2000’s The Rising Tide, when their record label, Time Bomb, literally imploded within weeks of the album’s release, leaving the band with no money for promotion, videos or even to tour.

“We were so careful,” explains Hoerner, “we looked at hundreds of labels. We wanted to stay independent, and it turned out that Time Bomb was a shell of a company.”
When I ask Hoerner about the debilitating effect that this kind of disappointment can have on a band, he responds with an analogy.

“Imagine you spent nine months writing a book,” he says. “You turn it into the publisher, and you feel like it is one of the greatest books ever. The next day, they call you and say ‘we burned your book.’ It crushed us. At that point we had to step away and do other stuff.”

Nevertheless, the band is excited about the Sup Pop re-releases and the opportunity to play their old songs in front of new audiences, especially the New York crowd.

“There’s way more passion in New York than in anywhere else,” says Hoerner, excitedly. “ I want to give New York the ultimate show. I’m nervous about that.”

Additionally, Hoerner doesn’t rule out the possibility of newly recorded SDRE material being released subsequent to this reunion tour.

“Right now, the mandate is to get ready for the tour. That’s the main focus,” he explains. “That being said, it’s kind of impossible for us to play without creating new music. I don’t know if it will get recorded. I would love for that to happen; it would be a dream come true.”

And with that, Hoerner speaks for both himself and for the thousands of fans that bought tickets to the upcoming sold-out shows, many of them hoping that their 2000 breakup was the last one—at least for a while.

“For a while, people get inspired by taking drugs when making music,”Vile says. “You have a different perspective under the influence, but for me, I can’t finish work and make things solid in that state.”

Even though Vile mostly restrains from partaking in illicit substances these days when writing music—“We still like to have a good time at shows,” he confesses—the subject still finds its way into his sprawling, jangly neo-folk rock songs.

Hailing from Philadelphia,Vile has made himself a presence in New York, releasing a slew of records on labels like Brooklyn’s Woodsist and sharing the stage with bands like our own Blues Control and Woods at local venues Market Hotel and The Shank, to name a few.

The title track from this year’s The Hunchback EP is an ethereal, dreamy song, dense with layers of hazy guitar, highlighted by not-too-clean production and showcasing his backup band, the aptly named Violators.

“It has a druggy undertone,” Vile says, although mentioning that the first version of the song is two years old, perhaps written during his and the Violators’ more clouded days. “It was gonna be on the Matador record,” Vile says, confirming his signing to the seminal indie label. “But my friend wanted to put it out, so we tried to capture the ‘practice room vibe’ of it for the EP.”

As Vile finds himself on the same record label as indie-rock all-stars Pavement and Yo La Tengo, he says he doesn’t think his approach to writing and recording will change much on his next record, much like how new labelmate Jay Reatard’s damaged punk went unharmed when he signed on with Matador in 2008. Both artists were plucked from lo-fi near-obscurity by Matador recently to inject a new dose of street cred to the so-called “major-indie.”

“There are a couple of home recordings on there, but it’s mostly studio stuff,” he says. “I worked on this a long time, but it’s not too clean, not too produced.”

It will certainly be a different type of recording process in one way, as he will be assembling an entire full-length album of material recorded in one time period. His first two full-lengths, Constant Hitmaker and God is Saying This to You… are culled from sessions recorded sometimes four or five years apart.

“Those records have a lot of stuff from other CDRs I put out. Constant Hitmaker came first, with all of my favorite stuff from the CDRs plus the song ‘Freeway,’”Vile says. “Those songs, they are more cool, more tripped out, and I knew I couldn’t have gotten made fun of for being a wuss.”

Vile refers to being a “wuss” in the context of God is Saying This to You…—a decidedly un-wussy, yet stripped down and earnest collection of songs dating as far back as 2003.

In conjunction with each other, the records show the heavier side of Vile’s music, the more “punk” side and the more vulnerable, folky facet of his music.Vile revels in his ability to meld the two while being neither punk nor folk.

“I can emulate punk rock, when back in the day my stuff was more acoustic,” Vile says. “I think it’s good I can do the punk thing too. I’m lucky I have the name I have.” As perfectly punk as Kurt Vile’s name is, it really isn’t a “punk name” in that he didn’t fabricate it—it’s his birth name. “People disbelieve it all the time,” Vile says. “When I was signing the Matador contracts, they were like, ‘Wait, we need to redo these with Kurt’s real name!’”

While some people might see a last name like Vile as, well, vile, Kurt considers himself blessed to have the surname.

“It’s good I can do the punk thing and the folk thing. It would be sad if I played only folk and my name was Kurt Vile.”

> Kurt Vile

Aug. 14, Cake Shop, 152 Ludlow St. (betw. Stanton & Rivington Sts.), 212-253-0036; 8, $8.