A couple of days before a Don Hill’s show, a band got added to our bill by a promoter who couldn’t shut up about the buzz it had, how cool the guys dressed, all the models at the shows and so on and so on. So we grandly acquiesced and let the band on our bill. This Other Band didn’t endear itself to us by sending an earnest email pointing out an error in our flyer for the show. The word ‘the’ in its name was always capitalized, the boys wanted us to know. Stop the presses, what were we thinking? This is rock ‘n’ roll, a genre of music founded upon not just correct grammar and correct punctuation, but also correct capitalization! Fucking nerds.

The show was fine, which is to say that I was hammered. I wore a dress I found on my girlfriend’s floor and a pair of panties I found on my other girlfriend’s floor. This Other Band was pretty good. On one song, the singer sounded like Jim Morrison as a Vegas lounge act over a Tom Petty lick, his voice a big boozy baritone sax. The band was as good as we were and I worried that they may be better. After the bands were done, the promoter came up to us at the bar and said that we’d better check on the gear we’d stashed behind the stage curtains because some kids were messing around back there. Our singer checked and reported back that they weren’t just messing around, it was, you know, the whole enchilada. The drummer’s girlfriend grabbed her digital camera, which was cutting-edge technology at that time. She walked over to the stage, stuck the camera behind the curtains and squeezed off a picture without looking, then walked away and waited for the picture to come up on the screen. When she got back to the bar, she was laughing so hard she could hardly stand up. With her random snap, she had captured the naked, white, pimply ass of the guitar player for This Other Band, pumping up and down between the spread legs of some unfortunate female in flip flops.

Our next show was at Luna Lounge with This Other Band and, always in the market for a catchy picture for a flyer, we used the picture of the guitar player’s naked butt, midstroke. Did I mention he had some kind of weird rash crawling out of his crack? We used our beer money to make full color posters in which we tinted the picture to emphasize the rash. When we were done, it looked like he had a chemical burn or a flesh-eating virus. I have never been so happy to hand a flyer to strangers, and I hate flyering. Guys were like, "Thanks… whoa!" and girls would inevitably ask, "Are those plastic Adidas flip flops? The poor girl."

We were giddy with our own cleverness when we loaded in to Luna Lounge. This Other Band had just completed their soundcheck and laughed when they saw us loading our stuff in. All except the guitar player, who walked right up to our singer, by far the smallest guy in our band.

"Hey, it’s not cool that you guys used my ass on your flyer." His bandmates tittered. Our singer looked nervous; the guitar player was quite a bit bigger than him, and our singer, God bless him, hadn’t landed this gig for his prowess on the battlefield. If you’re going to fight someone in my band, it’s going to be me. I stood up from where I was sitting.

"Yo, fornicator!" I said, "the next time we use your ass is going to be when I put my foot up it. Chill out."

"Well, it’s just not really cool of you guys, OK?" He sulked out of the back room and everyone—even This Other Band—cracked up. So we showed them, right? Except This Other Band made a record with a producer they met that night at Don Hill’s—a producer who had come to see us—and that record caught fire. This Other Band scored the cover of NME, Spin and, finally, Rolling Stone. I got hired as a barback by Don Hill. As This Other Band’s star rose, I bussed glasses, mopped up barf, fished saturated tampons out of overflowing toilets and dragged bags of trash to the dumpster as rats ran over my legs. One night after he watched me punch out a frat boy, Don Hill clapped me on the shoulder and said, "The battling barback! We gotta make you a bartender." Don understood our desperate lives and I’ll always be grateful to him for that.

In the dozen years that have passed since that show at Don Hill’s, I have had time—too much time—to reflect on This Other Band’s lucky break and wonder bitterly if Fate maybe didn’t have one too many Jager bombs that Saturday night and accidentally bestow the stroke of luck we so clearly deserved on This Other Band. Because our band? We broke up. Our old singer manages that bar right across from White Castle. Our old drummer lives with me and, officially, he doesn’t deliver weed anymore. Our guitar player married our drug supplier. I work off Craigslist. And This Other Band? Well, if anyone knows The Strokes, please tell them that I’m very, very sorry. 

"Fucked up/with my best friend." Has there ever been a more immediately auspicious beginning to a rock song? It trumps meeting a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis, which locates you leisurely and ostentatiously by comparison. The lyrics to MINKS’ "Drunk Punks" that follow that haikuperfect first line are unintelligible, present just to trigger the reverb and mixed low against the instruments: thin but driving snare-and-high-hat, flanged bass, corny wistful synths and a howling wash of Lou Barlow guitar noise. But who cares? Like a magical incantation, those six words stick a brown-bagged bottle in your hand, fill it with fortified wine, pump aimless hope in your heart and stick an old bestie by your side on a Chinatown bus to Philly on a rainy Saturday. Or a flask/Jameson/your first roommate/someone’s unattended backyard swimming pool, but you get the drift: hope and magic and a person around whom your universe once revolved are constants.

MINKS’ ascendancy has been similarly rapid. Sonny Kilfoyle, the writer, producer and only permanent member of the band, shrugs and hesitates in his basement studio off the Lorimer stop on the L train when I ask him how the band got started, as he does before answering almost every question. "It started as just a couple of songs in the basement," he says. He played about 90 percent of the parts with his brother and other folks "not necessarily in the band"—one of whom is Euro songstress/actress/Chanel model Amalie Bruun, who appears to only differ from The Velvet Underground’s Nico in that she can actually sing. Kilfoyle had heard some of the first songs by Wild Nothings on local label Captured Tracks and liked them enough to write and share some songs with the label. The same day, he was asked by Captured Tracks to put out a record and got a nod from The Fader. "So it was a funny little thing that happened," he said, as if that confluence of support, hype and it-girl friend didn’t make the next six months for MINKS. That first 7-inch came out before the band played its inaugural show, a sold-out gig at Mercury Lounge. Now, MINKS is about to head out for a month-long national tour with Dum Dum Girls in February and has a European tour slated for April—not bad for a band less than a year old with maybe 12 shows under its belt.

Those first singles are strong:melodramatic but knowingly so. The songs are quietly noisy bedroom symphonies, unobtrusive enough that you allow them into your head and they lure you away on some nostalgic reverie. "Drunk Punks" and "Funeral Song" sound like the offhand brilliance your idle stoner roommate might record with your four track in your living room one weekend when you were out of town. But how would those frozen moments, regardless of how perfect they might be, translate to a living, moving band for the buzzbanddowsing rod that is Captured Tracks?

Mike Sniper is such an enthusiastic, affable fan of music it seems impossible for him to work in the music industry, let alone run a label that has emerged as a reliable indie tastemaker. Wasn’t he concerned about releasing a 7-inch by a band that wasn’t yet a band? "Eh, maybe a little, but at that first show," he says, grinning, "man, they were just on from the first note." Still, after their early promise, MINKS seems to unravel quickly, with only a little prodding.

The new record, By The Hedge, out Jan. 21, has three compelling new songs, three of the four previously released tunes and six songs that don’t do much of anything. Only one, "Indian Ocean," is truly egregious—one of the advantages of having more than one person in the band is that there is someone who will tell you to leave the tap-water-tame instrumental off the record. Taken as whole, By The Hedge sounds like a mixtape you made for a girl in the coffee shop in 1998 but never gave to her. There’s the unison bedroom coo and slinky syncopation of Yo La Tengo, Belle and Sebastian’s upbeat twee jangle, Sebadoh’s mumble-and-drone, The Swirlies downer euphoria. Granted, these are all classic or at least mix-worthy bands, but it’s such a thorough and astute survey of the canon that you’re forced to suspect that it wasn’t arrived at organically, but by grim, deft calculation.

At Brooklyn Bowl late last year, the band seemed uncomfortable and bored on stage, less concerned with performance or at least having fun than with moping appropriately. At another show at Glasslands, ensconced under the fedora he’s never seen without, Sonny played through a tinny speck of a Gorilla practice amp, then badgered the soundperson again and again to turn him up in the monitors. And Sonny’s name is not Sonny but Sean, or Shaun, as it is carefully misspelled on MINKS’ page on the Captured Tracks website, an obvious nod to Nirvana, a band that he acknowledges as an early inspiration. He cites his favorite album as Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas; he professes not to know where his father works; after repeated nudging, he shared lyrics to only one song which were as oblique as a freshman poem; he works "doing things that need to be done"—which he finally clarified was not selling drugs—yet he maintains a decent basement studio and a separate apartment around the corner; he is ambivalent about his band’s success to date, its upcoming tour and its future. He was even coy about his age when I asked him, responding with "How old do you think I am?" as if it were last call at Union Pool. I want to root for MINKS like I root for every other Brooklyn basement band, but Kilfoyle’s relentless currying of mystery makes it hard not to understand him as heaping apathetic affectation upon affectation, playing Michael Pitt playing Kurt Cobain.

But so what? Mick and Keith were college kids ripping off their idols when only the landed gentry went to college. Keith was in fucking art school for God’s sake, and he’s still scared up a little street cred and even wrote a couple of decent songs. It’s the songs that matter and only the songs. What you carry away from the good MINKS songs—which are great, haunting and hooky and urgent—is the sense of loss. A friend, a lover, innocence, something of dire importance has been lost to time, overlooked or undervalued then misplaced, its absence only detected when it was irretrievable. And whoever Kilfoyle is, he’s got a full count. It’s up to him now whether MINKS endures or is devoured by a scene that conceives, celebrates and cannibalizes its progeny with high speed. "I feel like the music would happen with or without an audience," he said. Well, here we are now: entertain us.

–
MINKS
Jan. 21
Glasslands, 289 Kent Ave. (betw. S. 1st & S. 2nd Sts.)
Brooklyn, 718-599-1450
8:30, $10

Grandma was cajoled into buying the aspiring rocker a guitar—a plastic, nylon-stringed acoustic guitar, the very antithesis of rock ‘n’ roll. Majors had seen pictures of Eric Clapton in Cream and understood that any self-respecting psych rocker and protobluesman just had to have an otherworldly axe with a freaky beards-and-rainbows paint job, so he set about customizing his guitar with the tools he had at hand—his box of crayons. When the resulting creation failed to yield the mind-expanding fuzz he craved, he taped a pencil under the bridge of the guitar so it would buzz against the strings. Doing so zipped him several times across the ocean and also back in time, from his psychotic reaction in Louisville, Ky., to clubs in Great Britain where the Beatles and the stones were imitating sounds they’d heard from across the ocean—back in the american south from Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, whose use of distortion has been traced back to the slave coast of africa, where aboriginals have been building instruments that incorporate droning, buzzing or rattling sounds for hundreds of years.

So, Endless Boogie’s primal rattle started in africa but also in Kentucky and in new york City where, in the waning years of the 20th century, Paul Majors was fermenting in a Manhattan apartment after a divorce. after working a series of bad jobs—selling vacuums door-to-door, banging the heads onto poodle-shaped bottles of bubble bath with a rubber mallet—he’d found his niche trading rare vinyl. as a kid, he’d spent the money he made mowing lawns on the cutout records at local stores, choosing them arbitrarily: “Ooh, this has a really long track called ‘Mindflowers.’ that might be like LsD.” those discarded records, written off by labels and bought for pennies, were now worth top dollar.

“It just goes to show you that your parents were wrong,” laughs Jesper Eklow, Endless Boogie’s second guitarist and producer. He lured the reclusive record collector out of his apartment in the late ’90s to jam with some friends. they played in secret in a small practice space on stanton street for roughly the length of Creedence Clearwater revival’s entire recorded career. “not like practicing for three or four years made us any better,” Majors says, “it was just an orgy of crudeness.” Finally, at the urging of stephen Malkmus, who Eklow had worked with in his job at Matador records, Endless Boogie emerged from its beery, smoky womb to make its first public appearance. it hasn’t been a straight shot to stardom since that gig in 2001—recent appearances have included the Primavera Festival in spain, all tomorrow’s Parties and the basement of Williamsburg’s the Charleston—but a short 44 years after Paul Majors was converted to rock ‘n’ roll, Endless Boogie stands poised to fulfill the promise of that first crayon-covered guitar.

An accurate description of the genre Endless Boogie works in is “improvised psychedelic blues rock,” a combination of words in such frequent contact with shit that they feel skidmarked. Endless Boogie is two guitars, bass, drums; song lengths are as variant as the wait time for the G train (four minutes, OK, but 22?) dictated by a mysterious authority known as “the vibe”; the bandleader sports both luxurious, flowing silken locks and a mustache. How does a band tread such a well-worn trail without defaulting to simian caricature (Blues traveler), self-conscious parody (Blues Explosion’s later missteps) or insecure worship (any electric blues festival)?

With “new Pair of shoes,” a concise, raunchy groove off the new release, Full House Head, Endless Boogie’s answer is “with great feeling.” the initial come-on riff tumbles into a sexy, strutting chug and then, Jesus, that voice, like andre Williams trapped in the bottom of a well after a week-long bender with a one-legged hooker. top Dollar’s in top form here, hoarse and hoary, humming like a vibrator dropped to a hardwood floor, croaking like Howling Wolf through an electrolarynx. His raspy celebration of the joys of naked consumerism terminates with a goad somehow both unexpected and so suggestive that it makes you want to scour the world for a child of untarnished innocence, just so you can protect her from top Dollar’s lascivious machinations. Buzz, fuzz, overdrive, harmonic distortion—call that noise Endless Boogie is giving off whatever you want, but that isn’t a death rattle you hear, it’s the sound of life.

>> Endless Boogie July 24, Coco 66, 66 Greenpoint Ave. (betw. Franklin & West Sts.), Brooklyn, 718-389-7392; 8, $8.

The lyrics? Emotionally, Sam Coomes is a set of Russian
dolls, happiness nestled inside of sadness inside happiness inside sadness and
so on, ad infinitum. Coomes may even rival the master, John Prine, for
delivering wrist-slitting lines while sounding as if he’s about to crack up.
His writing is subtler here than on his early records, hence less immediately impactful.
It’s true that “the receding tanlines of a teenage dream” isn’t quite as
harrowing as The Donner Party’s “first you take your shit and then you cram it
down your throat” but it may yield a greater multiplicity of meaning on
repeated listens.

When lots of folks are giving away music that’s not worth
the space it takes up on your hard drive—don’t tell me saving this baby otter
pounding malt liquor as your desktop image isn’t a wiser investment of
bytes than the latest rcrd_lbl offering—American Gong is actually worth money. It’s a big fuzzy meatball of
good time downer jams, just a couple of kids singing happily about the end of
days.

Then one of them says “welcome” and they start into a song. The woman, Molly Shea, has a dusky, unaffected but moving voice and catchy songs. Still, this band template, Star and The Other Dudes, well, we’ve seen it before. The tall guy, Travis Rosenberg, who I’d assume handled the male vocals, knocks out a couple of killer lines on pedal steel but hardly opens his mouth. Then the short guy, Jason Klauber, takes lead vocals on “Lil Ivy,” a number about a young woman vanishing into a series of bad decisions in a voice both larger and older than his person, his voice cracking without having to fish for emotion, completely lost in the song. A-ha.

Acrylics is not the DIY indie collective/freak folk/synth punk ensemble you’re supposed to love for its eclectic esotericism or esoteric eclecticism. At first listen, there’s little astonishing about the band. There’s no ukulele or washtub bass or Theremin orchestra; live, there’s no cult of positivity, no mandatory audience participation dancing and no coordinated costumes. The band is closer to the pop band you might hear on the radio in a rental car and not turn off because you’re in traffic and then wind up thinking, holy shit, this band has some songs that are actually bopping-around-in-your-underwear great.

Acrylics’ official discography is limited to a five-song EP, All of The Fire, that was recorded in Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor’s church studio and released on his label, Terrible Records, but the band has several promising other tracks online which will presumably appear on an upcoming full length. Though the songs are daringly pared down to their essentials at Mercury, with just voices and guitars, recorded, they’re fully realized with live drums, layers of burbling synths and cinematic washes of reverb. The band must be omnivorous listeners with no limiting aesthetic as there is no undisguised hero-worship or narrow genre excursions. It’s a cohesive, unified effort but you can discern the voices of two powerful songwriters with distinct but complimentary visions. And married to their gliding melodies and hooky choruses are some stark, urgent lyrics. They sound like disco Neil Young or maybe a heartbroken ABBA. “Sparrow Song” from the band’s MySpace page seems to astutely lift both its production and arrangement from Chris De Burgh’s classic mid-eighties jam “Lady In Red” and still somehow remain sincere. You could say Acrylics sounds like ‘70s cocaine soft rock icons Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac except that it doesn’t suck at all. It ain’t country—despite his Nashville pedigree, multi-instrumentalist and pedal steel secret weapon Rosenberg isn’t sifting through the dumpster behind the Grand Ole Opry for leftover licks. If it’s dance music, it brings meaning to dancing beyond just moving your body.

When I meet up with the band members, they stomp into a bar bundled against the cold like serious children in earnest preparation for a snow fight. When, their drinks in hand, they settle in to talk about what they were up to, we kept returning to “the song”—they speak about it as if it is the older, beloved and respected bandleader who had just stepped out of the room and they are just the backing band, protecting and supporting the aims of the song. They talk enthusiastically about the Townes Van Zandt documentary Be Here to Love Me and his work, his music and the sacrifices he made. They fess up to being inexperienced when it comes to touring but speak quickly and enthusiastically about hitting the road in the spring for South by Southwest and traveling as much as possible in support of their music. For an unknown band, living on the road means forgoing all earthly comforts in search of transcendence that’s over in three and a half minutes. The writing equivalent of being a touring musician would be driving around with an 80-pound typewriter in your trunk for six, eight, 10 hours in order to type for 45 minutes a night. Was that something that Acrylics is willing to do? Yes.

After Acrylics down farewell shots of whiskey and traipse out into the night, I recall a line from the song “Lil Ivy.” The spunky heroine, despite her determination to live her dreams, still scuttles her future through weakness, finally submitting to anonymity. But Klauber sings ‘I’ll remember who she was for who she might have been,” restores her to her moment of greatest potential, renewing her open destiny.

Acrylics has great voices, hooks to spare and, for now, the fickle stamp of indie approval. The band also appears to have guts and spirit and a specific nave hope about the transformative power of song, all of which will serve it well down the line. Which is great, as it appears to be among the lucky few with the long, good, hard road ahead.

>Acrylics
Jan. 23, Knitting Factory, 361 Metropolitan Ave., (at Havemeyer St.), Brookyln, 347-529-6696; 7, $10.

His press release pimps his work with pillars of the ‘freak folk’ scene like Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and even the mother of them all, Vashti Bunyan, and this record gives ample evidence why he’s a sideman of choice as his notes winnow out their space without treading on the vocals or overloading the song. But don’t let the company he keeps pigeonhole this record: it’s very much a stripped down country rock album in the tradition of under sung songwriter JJ Cale’s Naturally. The arrangement on the title track restricts itself to guitar, bass, drums, piano and two voices and manages to sound both creamy and spare at once. The bass sleeps on some fills, the drums slurp out of the pocket at times… There is not some over caffeinated engineer frantically nudging the beats onto a grid on some monolithic, pixel-greedy monitor. The fingerstyle guitar is distinctly unweird while deftly dodging the country tropes abused by other Brooklyn 70s revivalists. Barker’s voice is clear but warm and open as if he were actually relaxed and not just anxiously cultivating a relaxed vibe. This outing elicits comparisons to great songwriting guitarists from Nick Drake to Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian to, yeah, even quieter Jimi Hendrix.

I caught him play during the depths of the blizzard of 2009, a show at The Stone that fell victim to winter’s stylishly late and nearly show-stopping entrance. It was the right venue, from The Stone’s almost unmarked entrance to the black paint already peeling from the worn wooden floor like the finish from the hip of a road-worn guitar. There was no band and his rig was no-frills, verging on ascetic—a newish Fender Deluxe Reverb amp, a three pickup Telecaster and the same white stompbox tuner slowly corroding in a damp rehearsal space. No rhinestone bedazzled Nudie suit, he wore jeans and heavy winter boots and, in a halting conversation with the event’s curator, decided aloud that the noisy radiator should be left on as a concession to comfort. Despite the strength of the record, I confess to worrying that it was going to suck. Of course, he was even more rhythmically confident and assured solo, speaking directly to the tempo without having a drummer act as a translator. He’s nailed not just narrative melodic lines but also the subtler moves like Sterling Morrison’s burbling stutter on The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes.” I did miss the band’s fluid roll-and-tumble, the drums bouncing like Neil Young’s “Out On The Weekend” but only because I’d heard the record: Barker’s guitar easily carried the songs, the show and the night.

You & Me delivers such immediate and lasting pleasure that it seems in bad faith to subject the songs to a lengthy literary analysis but, well, it’s a hard world and when your album photos make you look like both an Amish farmer and a ’70s session player, it inspires investigation. The lyrics don’t reach much higher than a certain homey introspection and there’s never any sign of instability, which means there’s not a whole lot at stake. Inspiring as the natural world is, Barker’s lyric sheet has more summer wheat/ spring green/ ocean/ sand than a Land’s End catalog. And what’s this, a song featuring “wide eyes,” that hateful word “childlike” and lutes? For shame.

Still, when so many songwriters sound noosed and waiting for the block of ice to melt, Barker gets big points for honesty when he sings “Life has never been so very hard to me/ life has never been like a blues song/ People move in and out like freighter ships/ and fall in love again before very long.” He’s describing a normal, unspecial life, and as such, one open to moments of swooning beauty and great possibility.

Justin Russo, the band’s primary architect, probably isn’t precious enough to open his latest effort with a musical metaphor, a lens through which to view the album that follows, but he’s invested enough in the listener’s experience that he wouldn’t discount that reading out of hand.That sound of work, the audible proof of the grinding hand of the creator, complicates and even argues with the melodious tones—and that’s the point.This aesthetic of complimentary conflict jibes well with a band that makes euphoric orchestral rock and calls itself The Silent League.

When I met up with Russo on a frigid night in Williamsburg, he reminded me of the young Al Pacino in Godfather II, with dark, sensitive eyes and, behind them, an intelligence so acute it borders on sinister.

Born and raised in Hopewell Junction, N.Y., Russo’s childhood home still holds remarkable sway over him; many of these songs take place in this neglected New York in the shadow of The City. “I remember wandering through Spanish Harlem one night where there were guys taking a car apart with a chainsaw and I’ve still never been as afraid here as I have been in some towns upstate,” he says. Fittingly, he returned with his band to track the record at a studio upstate where “they had every kind of mic imaginable, many hung from weird spots in the rafters or mounted in tin cans and if you were very, very good, they would let you in to the special sub-basement vault where all sorts of weird decrepit machines were kept and maybe only a handful of notes worked on them but if those notes fell in the key you were working in, man, you were in heaven.”

Sonically, it’s a massive, sweeping record.

Russo’s voice is high but rich, with the tenderness and earnest good humor of a solo Harry Nilsson. At times, it quavers like Willie Nelson’s on Stardust, where his lilt is proof of strength, not a sign of weakness. More than once, it calls to mind Gene Wilder’s indelible turn as Willy Wonka in the Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.Standard rock arrangements are just the skeleton for lavish ornamentation with live strings and horns, choral vocals, reedy percussive acoustic, electric and acoustic piano, layers of organs and synths, harp, mandolin, bells, samples and is that autoharp? Mellotron? Chamberlin? With its stereo pans and ghosted vocals, it’s the headphone equivalent of an everlasting gobstopper.

But digital instruments and recording software have made it easy to make, in the comfort and/or dank squalor of your own bedroom studio, an album as ornate and dazzling as the Waterford Crystal Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball… and just as hollow and meaningless.

Russo’s arrangements, as neurotically detailed as sailing ships built into bottles, don’t just prop up alienated and alienating para noid

Thom Yorke mumblings. His lyrics have been subject to the same ruthless perfectionist scrutiny.Though occasionally elliptical or open-ended, they are never half-baked and rarely adhere to their first meaning.The album title sounds like a plea to a retreating lover; the opener title sounds vaguely auspicious. Both titles converge in the song “There is a Caretaker in the Woods,” which flowers open gloriously with electric piano, synth and a chorus of backing vocals like a choir of angels.When Russo enters, he sings softly and gently, as if lulling a child to sleep. But the lyrics are a dark, thrilling revelation, complicating the song to the extent that it becomes as unsettling as it first appeared comforting.

“Half blind but allowed to drive/ The camper that he lived inside/ A hollow metal swan’s/ egg with a door/ An overgrowth of fir and oak/ Crumb cake and a boiled bird/ He’d start the day without a word/ The grandkids helped him train the chainsaw down/ With every tree he’d hack and burn/ He’d spit and measure something on the ground.”

The caretaker isn’t a lover but an alienated old man and it’s only the property he’s caretaking (and of course, that concept is challenged) at the expense of all human relations. “Egg-shaped” refers not to a vessel in which life begins, but the decrepit camper in which the man’s life shrivels to its conclusion. By the end of the song, the camper is “too rotted-out to ever tow away.”

Russo lances not just the countryside’s retreating promise of happiness but also the dream of transformation through rock ‘n’ roll. There is no solace in substances, no love in love, no future in the future and not even any comfort in nostalgia for your childhood home. Somehow “sometimes I think I’ve got my dosage figured out” is the most upbeat line sung over this glorious, even heavenly music. So where is the heaven of chocolate rivers and marshmallow meadows we’re obviously hearing the instrumentation to? Well, if searching for it and failing yields albums dense with alternating layers of beauty and decay like this one, I hope The Silent League never gets there.

–
The Silent League
Jan. 16, Gramercy Theatre, 127 E. 23rd St. (betw. Park & Lexington Aves.), 212-614-6847; 9, $18.

IT APPEARS TO be impossible for any review of Oran Canfield’s scarred memoir Long Past Stopping to get past the first sentence without mentioning that he is the son of Jack Canfield, the self-help grifter and author of Chicken Soup for the Soul and other dreck—see? But the book is remarkable not for its author’s random paternity—Oran could have been anyone’s child and throughout much of the book, that’s exactly who he is, shuttled from relative to friend to colleague to acquaintance to stranger—but for the dry, unaffected voice and the plain unornamented language used to detail the near erasure of a soul in minute increments.

The narrative adroitly juxtaposes two vastly different chronologies. Oran’s almost Huckleberry Finn childhood, bouncing around bohemian America, jonesing for the strictly verboten refined sugar and television, juggling in a circus, delivering newspapers on a unicycle, growing a Hitler ‘stache and silkscreening cocks onto the girls’ volleyball team’s uniforms in high school and awkwardly losing his virginity to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica is spliced into his adult life as an alienated, self-loathing drummer in San Francisco’s experimental/ noise scene which quickly descends into animalistic addiction, all told in Canfield’s no-bullshit prose.

“I hardly ever had problems with buying heroin, but the crack dealers were not to be trusted.They were always selling me bits of soap, drywall, even cat litter.Those guys had no fucking morals.”

Canfield wisely eschews both the emotional laser light show and the compulsive, desperate yuk-yuk-yuk of other druggie memoirists for just telling what happened, which is more than sufficiently funny, weird and sad, making Long Past Stopping both difficult to put down and difficult to read. In case you’d forgotten, tracing the reduction of a sensitive, intelligent young man to merely an appetite for heroin, crack and speedballs can be a little heartbreaking. “The crack dealer told me that the heroin guys were only two blocks away, and within a few days I was covering all the windows of Nora’s converted office space with cardboard and duct tape and ripping out a fair amount of the drywall looking for electronic devices that the cops were using to spy on me. Crossing a new line, I shaved most of my body hair off to get rid of the imaginary bugs that were crawling all over me. It was so goddamned unoriginal, yet I couldn’t stop thinking about them and scratching at myself.” At his nadir, Canfield calls to mind another articulate waster, Fred erick

Exley: “Suicide presupposes that something is being eliminated…. But what precisely was being eliminated in my case? Certainly not a man.Whatever I was eliminating was so inconsequential as to make the gesture one of trifling and contemptible ease.”Yeah, somebody light a candle, we’re about to go dark.

The drummer for Williamsburg’s own Child Abuse is slightly sunnier in person, at least after a couple of coffees. Seated at a picnic table in McCarren Park, he could be any one of us, hunched in a short-sleeve button down and perpetually rolling a cigarette. Oran’s clearly past the white-knuckle stage; his new life has taken hold. “Urges are so rare that when they do come, they’re a shock. It always feels like they will last forever, but it passes. For me, it’s creativity that silences those voices.That’s how I try to stay connected to the universe and without that, I shudder to think where I’d be.”

His “Terminal Assholism” thankfully hasn’t softened too much with sobriety— Child Abuse’s MySpace page proudly touts a review ending with the one-word sentence “Avoid.”When I asked him if Borders would be carrying Child Abuse releases now that he was a fancy author, he scoffed “Well, we like what we do.”When quizzed on his horrific trip on ibogaine, the powerful experimental hallucinogen that appears to cure many addictions (sometimes by killing the addict) the message he received was uncosmic: “It told me that I had to go to meetings and become a bike messenger.” Even after the ibogaine, he got hooked again: “My body just did what it was used to—it got off the train at 16th Street, it went and bought dope and it got hooked. I didn’t ride off into the fucking sunset,” he says, smiling. He’s so affable and open that it’s easy to forget that this guy has stared deep into the abyss.

Yes, there is no miracle cure and positive thinking especially will not cure your disease. You will not mystically figure it all out; you will be left in trouble, which is the human condition.The world is full of sorrows, large and small: when you’re not hooked on drugs, your desk chair is uncomfortable; your cheap shoes are making your knees hurt; your roommate is pissing in bottles in his room. Still, drinking coffee in the park, it may be enough to have taken that journey through the darkness and come out the other side.

> Long Past Stopping

by Oran Canfield (William Morrow), 336 pages

It’s telling that Shayde Sartin, the gregarious bassist of San Francisco’s The Fresh & Onlys, talks about the 32minute pop record and “first song, second side”— arcane concepts when digital media has both enabled releases to bloat regularly to double LP length and the few tracks lucky enough to make the iPod will be heard shuffled between “Jesus is a Dying- Bed Maker” and “It’s Raining Men.”

The Fresh & Onlys’ modest Grey-Eyed Girls is a welcome artifact from The Days Before Garageband, a cacophonous whirl of creaking chairs, barking dogs, slamming doors followed by an avalanche of reverb and yes, also some distorted guitars warbling in the distance, drums that sound like they were recorded under a U-Haul packing blanket gritty doo-wop backups and a lead vocal straight from Calvin Johnson’s pajama party in the haunted hive. It’s a dark, wet, atmospheric record, kinda like surfing a murky end-of-season wave off Coney Island.

Grey-Eyed Girls is welcoming and catchy without sounding precious—this isn’t a historical re-enactment recorded in a reconstructed, period-correct mildewy Olympia bedroom with the “lo-fi charm” plug-in cranked to 10. But the influence of that era of American punk rock on Sartin can’t be overstated: when I recounted a story about hitchhiking across the country at 17 to spend a few blissful days laying in bed with my girlfriend, drinking Carlo Rossi and listening to the cassette of Beat Happening’s “You Turn Me On,” he instantly grokked. “That album gave me wings. It was one of the first things I heard where I was like ‘man, I’m getting a guitar and I’m learning to play and I’m moving to the nearest city!’ Which in my case, wasn’t even a cool city— it was Tampa.” He left home at 18 with the worldly sum of $12 in his pocket and quickly wound up living in an abandoned fishing lure factory in Polk County, Fla. “We had a Rites of Spring tape and a boombox and I remember taking cold showers all day just to cool down and listening to that tape over and over again, you know, dyeing our hair by candlelight. It was amazing.”

Conspicuously absent from the conversation was Tim Cohen, the band’s lyricist and singer, whose lapidary responses in past interviews were in part responsible for Cohen’s promotion to hype man. Sartin offered that the two largest influences on Tim’s worldview and hence his writing were the circumstances of his birth—he was born into a coma, only gaining consciousness after three weeks—and his childhood and adolescence were spent listening almost exclusively to hip-hop, having only relatively recently become a fan of punk and indie rock.This sensation of wide-eyed awakening to a strange, new world is apparent in Cohen’s songs; it’s fun to imagine the endlessly enthusiastic Sartin spinning a laconic Cohen his favorite records deep into the night, the two of them ankle deep in beer cans.

Lyrically, Cohen recalls other prolific aliens as disparate as Daniel Johnston and Robert Pollard. Some lines are sparse, verging on rote or even boring (sample: “I don’t want to be alone”) but sung with enough unselfconscious investment that they’re somehow full of meaning in the context of the songs.Topically, he’s all over the map: “Clowns Took My Baby Away” is followed by “The Delusion of Man.” Cohen’s combination of playfulness, gravitas and clumsy desire is most compelling on tracks like “Dude’s Got a Tender Heart,” which neatly layers sarcasm and sincerity. Not quite a classic, but taken as a whole, Grey-Eyed Girls is hard to resist, like a long, far-ranging conversation with a brilliant and very stoned friend.

> The Fresh & Onlys

Oct. 8, Mercury Lounge, 217 E. Houston St. (betw. Essex & Ludlow Sts.), 212-260-4700; 7:30, $10. Also Oct. 9 at The Bell House.

IN 1999, my band practiced in a rehearsal space on South 4thStreet in Williamsburg, distinguished now as being the space where a singer named Constantine Maroulis bailed on his band for a TV show called American Idol. Ten years ago, that space housed a different creature entirely. The room closest to the exit seemed to constantly bulge with ferocious sound.The guys were a couple of years older than us, friendly in a quiet way and looked surprising normal. They were somehow both always there when we arrived and still at it when we were leaving. Once, the door opened as I was passing and I caught a glimpse inside—wall hangings, strange lights, amps covered in fur—as the band crept out, giggling guiltily as if they’d been caught having more fun than was appropriate for the serious business of rock ‘n’ roll. This was Oneida.

The People of the Rock have kept busy in the 10 years since we met.This weekend they will execute a temporary psychic transfer of Oneida’s interdisciplinary recording/ performance temple,The Ocropolis, to All Tomorrow’s Parties for a daylong, free-for-all audio/visual collision to be recorded and released as a supplement to their current “Thank Your Parents” triptych. Additionally, they’ve released 10 albums and a slew of split EPs and 7-inches in the last decade (the most recent triple album Rated O, a cosmic monolith of rock clocking in at nearly two hours), while playing in numerous side bands and participating in ambitious projects like a live re-creation of their strings album The Wedding, a 10-year anniversary concert at PS 1, the Boredoms’ massive drum vortices and a threeday cruise off the coast of Japan on a rented Russian ferry to provide the soundtrack to a lengthy solar eclipse. Let’s see, in the last 10 years, I… fuck, I must have done something.

It’s a shame that, for many, Oneida is still a band they know of instead of a band they know. Foolish as it is to try and pin a scene on one band, I’d posit that Oneida was patient zero for a kind of musical HPV that has spread through touching, petting and intimate contact to bands and music fans in Brooklyn and, slowly, Everywhere Else. Symptoms of the illness include: uninhibited ecstatic self-expression; active devotion to friends, family and community; ‘damaging’ genres as a means of beating dead horses back to life; loyalty, generosity, audience participation, nonsensical volume; and improvising, not just lyrics or songs but also instruments, performance spaces and entire lives.Working with co-conspirators like Kayrock Screenprinting, Live with Animals, Secret Project Robot, Monster Island and an evolving roster of musical comrades like Sightings, Oneida alumni Papa Crazee’s Oakley Hall, Ex-Models, Black Dice, Awesome Color, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the influence of this ethereal spirit on our narrow demographic has been transformative. And yeah, they were already up to their armpits when Todd P was still just some guy in Portland.

The music? Seat yourself in the middle of the maelstrom with Rated O, their Empire Strikes Back, and let a single tune buffet and massage you for eight or 10 or 20 minutes. Mostly wordless, live if not totally improvised jams built around thunderous organ/guitar/bass/drum grooves somehow create not just forward momentum but a nar rative thread. Shapes congeal in a clotted pool of sepulchral funk but the flames in the background—is that a universe cleaving apart or hewing together? Oneida is uniformly divergent, endlessly inventive, 100 percent pure gunk, committed to formal experimentation and open to myriad meanings, all of them emotionally true. Each song determines its own production.The drums are so close in one track it sounds like they’re inside your head and pushing out.The next track, they’re at the end of the hallway. No experiment is abandoned before its logical conclusion and many are pushed beyond, yielding uneven, strange and rewarding results. Oneida unearth startling effects through hypnotic repetition of one skuzzy riff with minute variations: a rose is a rose is a rose is not a rose at all.You feel confusion, then anticipation, then unease or even boredom and nothing changes and nothing changes and then something changes in you and the clouds unfold and your soul fairly bursts with delight and relief.What you are hearing is not just the loud, brutal abuse and sometimes annihilation of innocent drumheads, metal strings and plastic keys that never did nothing to no one but also a group of devout musicians listening very intently.

Oneida is the river of pink ectoplasm flowing under New York City in Ghostbusters II. Oneida is the elite squadron of guerrillas that ventured so deep into the jungle that they never got the transmission that the war was over and “adventure” lost to “commercial placement” so they have subsisted out there for years in their mud-walled laboratories in the jungle, building synthesizers and delay units out of capybara bones and coconuts. Oneida is challenging and rewarding, a complex, nonsensical riddle—Who put the ram in the ram-a-lam-a-dingdong?—that’s the fulcrum between vast knowledge and instant death. Oneida is bunch of kids who believed in dreams, hard work and friendship long and fervently enough that it became its own entity. Picture the three or four or five of them as trembling cilia on the same antenna, groping heavenward, channeling something invisible coursing through the air into sound: rock ‘n’ roll.

> Oneida

Sept. 13, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Kutshers Country Club, Monticello, www.atpfestival.com