The Hippodrome

Double Dragons are a duo from Exeter, New Hampshire, composed of Peter James and Josh Picard, childhood neighbors. Starting as a crude Hella tribute band, DD has evolved into a noisy and technical (but still concise) band that hasn’t had alot of opportunity to play live due to its members being in different states.

But when they do play live, DD is wonderfully true to the recordings. “Four” is the most popular track, managing to still be catchy despite its machine gun flurry of scales and snare rolls. Most DD tracks manage this same feat, making the experience far more than a demonstration of virtuosity.

Tours and future plans are up in the air, but a strong childhood foundation makes a DD breakup unlikely. So write Marnie Stern an email now and tell her you got her next tour opener.

Audio: 4
Audio: 8
Audio: 5c

Rarely in indie-pop do you see an artist using their name as the band. That appears to have disappeared long ago in the early to mid 1990s. But, with artists like Shawn Fogel rising up, it may be making a comeback. But wait! Jeremy Sparrow is not in the band. Is it a made-up name? Or is it a moniker taken from a novel, as that of Harper Lee?

Jeremy Sparrow is a made up name and a fairly new discovery. The band messaged me several… err… months ago about writing a little feature on them, but I never got around to it other than sticking it on my “things to do” list. When I finally checked them out, I found their music to be the hefty style of pop I tend to associate with countries like Denmark (their home) and titles like “experimental” (well… slightly experimental).

While it’s nowhere near as monumental as fellow Denmark cohorts Mew, or not nearly as experimental as The LK side-project Fredrik, Jeremy Sparrow does know a thing or two about crafting a good pop tune. There’s an 80s element to the music, often found in the guitar riffs, bass lines, and jumpy percussion. Just listen to “The Rent’s Due” and you’ll hear it.

Audio: The Rent’s Due
Audio: Outrunning Paper Tigers
Audio: Suburb

“To get to authenticity,” Meredith Monk said, “you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something.” A group of Monk’s most unknown protégés, Lurch and Holler, make music so imminently sincere that it’s hard to do anything but just sit down and listen.

Liz Downing and Michael Willis, the folks behind the moniker, are from Baltimore and make music together on weekends. Since 1985, their songs, or “confessionals at the family picnic” as Downing likes to call them, are unpretentious, carefully written, and full of lyrical provocations, challenges, and stories.

Downing tells me that Hank Williams was a drinking buddy of her granddaddy’s, and I believe it. Clearly, this is a family with a rich performance history. Lurch and Holler started out as a performance art group called Lambs Eat Ivy, touring around, playing short musical plays with sets and costumes.

“A couple of our more successful plays were ‘Dance the Flaming Tongues of Carpet’ and Dream Bardo,’” Downing says. “’Tongues of Carpet’ was a reenactment of a faith healing that took place at my family’s motel, the Heart of Dixie, in AL. ‘Dream Bardo’ was of a librarian who fell off her ladder, broke her neck and went through the 49 days after death as instructed by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.’”

None of these eccentric themes seem lost in Lurch and Holler’s music. Their uncanny brand of songwriting seems unfounded at first, but a closer look at the storytelling and songwriting shows their experience. Distribution seems like a nonissue for the band, as Downing’s art teacher chops show on each beautifully handmade release. “At this point,” she says, “we would like to give our music to as many people as would have it.”

It was hard to only put up three songs from this prolific all-American band, but if the music gods are real, then Lurch and Holler will hit it big. This is Edith Piaf doing American cabaret, Joanna Newsom without a harp, or Anne Sexton confessing her most twisted daydreams.

Audio: Companion If You Please
Audio: Vertical Stripes
Audio: Walt Whitman’s Letter to Lincoln

Honestly, I don’t understand why more people haven’t picked up on Motel Motel’s debut EP Old York yet. This band is one of Brooklyn’s best kept secrets, rocking anthemic go-for-the-throat hooks with timeless country twang, like Wolf Parade tearing apart a dirty old honky-tonk. Sure, they’re a young band, they’ve been together for less than two years, and half of them are still in college. But in this new-fangled internet age, with bands like Black Kids and Vampire Weekend going indie-supernova on the strength of four-song demo CD-Rs, it’s kinda surprising how far under the radar these guys have stayed.

With the upcoming release of their first full-length, New Denver, I doubt Motel Motel will be staying under the radar for much longer. Now they’ve added some delicate strings to the mix, giving their new songs a greater sense of elegance and grandeur without losing any of the drunken confidence and cocaine swagger that made Old York so damn awesome.

“Virginia Kids” starts soft and slow, with singer Eric Engel crooning like a country gentleman with three-day stubble and a loosened necktie. Then over the next seven minutes it gains momentum, builds to a climax, crashes, subsides, builds again, and finally dissipates into nothing, like one of those long songs from the middle section of Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica.

“Pedal Steel” is a more reserved number, with a long, sinuous melody winding around a gentle shuffle and cascades of strings that sound like they were lifted from a 1930s Hollywood musical. Once again, Engel’s raspy vocal stands front and center, as he sings about panoramic American landscapes with a world-weariness that makes it hard to believe he was studying psychology at the New School less than a year ago.

“Mexico,” the final track off Old York, is a breezy country-rock number that channels pretty much everything that’s cool about the Grateful Dead and features one of the most infectious choruses of 2007. Turn it up loud, roll the windows down, and drive west into the sunset. And just try not to sing along. I dare you.

Audio: Virginia Kids
Audio: Pedal Steel
Audio: Mexico

In both Heaven and Hell, there is only one album that has always played and will always play until the end of time: heaven has Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, hell has Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. If you like both of these albums and don’t believe in heaven or hell, but rather that nothing happens when you die and the only thing beyond this world is the endless stretch of cosmos in which each individual life is unfathomably small, then Helicon, the official debut by computer musician Rod O’Connor (a.k.a. Sixty Cycles or 60Hz), is for you.

Although this is O’Connor’s first official release, he’s recorded some 10-12 albums worth of material since high school, covering almost every imaginable style of electronic music, from drum and bass to ambient minimalism to psy-trance, and he’s done more than his fair share of genre-bending and experimentation along the way. His collected body of (mostly unreleased) work is approximately six days long in total.

“[This is my attempt] to make ‘noisy’ music which still harkens a little bit to this Romantic Music idea of evocation of emotions,” says O’Connor of Helicon. “But I’m not using traditional harmonies or tonal material so much, so what are those emotions that get called up? I don’t necessarily know, I just know that it’s not comfortable.”

O’Connor works primarily using a technique called granular synthesis, which is the process of cutting a sound up into lots of tiny pieces and rearranging them. While this would have meant countless hours spent cutting and re-arranging tape (see, for instance, the work of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis), the introduction of digital media completely re-formed the playing field for granular synthesis (as it did, of course, for pretty much every other medium); O’Connor uses, according to his SoundClick, only three pieces of equipment: computer, brain, coffee.

Helicon features a wide variety of source material, most of which is warped and manipulated beyond recognition into a wash of ambient textures. The title track opens the album with subtly manipulated electric guitars; “Noisey Planet” features a broken AM radio being played like scratching a turntable. Several of the tracks feature manipulated recordings of a fifteen-piece ensemble led by avant-garde jazz legend Anthony Braxton, with whom O’Connor has played live electronics at Wesleyan University.

“I included the live recordings to pay homage to his work without ripping it off per se, because I can extract the tamboral characteristics of what makes the sound a certain sound, but totally obscure any musical content that he was putting out.” He points out that Braxton’s voice is audible at the beginning of “Lacus Somniorum - Lake of Dreams.” “There’s no words, but the sound is there.”

Helicon was released for free download on Unwashed Records, a small label made up almost exclusively of psy-trance DJs. O’Connor has found a receptive audience in the dark-psy community (although some posts on the Unwashed message board complained that Helicon sounds “too harsh”).

“I was aiming for the things that I like about electronic dance music, but on my own terms,” O’Connor explains. “It has that [aggressive] sentiment, like ‘I’m a fucking sound! Listen to me!’ But it’s also got a little bit of subtlety in there. It’s not just to make you dance; it’s more about the intensity of sonic experience that I feel like a lot of the more underground dark-psy tries to have.”

O’Connor is (somewhat predictably) dismissive of any genre classifications you could apply to his music. “All these terms that you use to talk about music, they’re helpful, because you hear the term ‘bluegrass’ and you know it means something; you don’t know what it means, but it means ‘not dubstep’… the music business gives us terms like that. It’s like, how do we label this thing, this sound, this identity, that you construct by associating with this performer/group/image/whatever? How do we shape that to something that is common to all of these elements? But I guess I don’t really care about the music business. I just want people to hear it and take it at face value.”

There isn’t really much of a way to take Helicon other than at face value. When you listen to this album, it’s not hard to forget that you’re even listening to music. Like all truly great ambient music, it fills the room like a gas leak, registering subconsciously as changes in air pressure that affect you the same way a change in temperature or humidity might. The tones range from soothing and ethereal to gritty and claustrophobic, and they often change so gradually it’s nearly imperceptible until you find yourself submerged in a sea of noise that would give Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale nightmares.

To be sure, Helicon is not for everybody; there is nothing to grab you and pull you in. You have to just let it happen to you. Put it on as “background music” while you do your homework or cook dinner. Don’t wait for anything to happen, just let it unfold and see where it takes you. It may not be comfortable, but it is powerful, moving, and - somehow, despite all the cold, hard zeroes and ones that went into making it - utterly, undeniably human. And besides, if all you want from music is a feeling of comfort, listen to Music for Airports.

Audio: Helicon
Audio: Noisey Planet