New Music: Bracken, The National Gallery, Fred Thomas

Bracken - Fight or Flight - We Know About the Need (Anticon 2007)

Bracken – We Know About the Need / Anticon

It would be nice to give you a clever description full of pinpoint analogies and jaw-dropping metaphors for Bracken's debut LP, We Know About the Need, but the fact of the matter is that the best description is the obvious: Hood filtered through the Anticon aesthetic. Chris Adam's first solo project since separating from Leeds' psychedelic stalwarts Hood, Bracken utilizes the pastoral shoegaze-folk that has become his most notable association, but stripped of its clearly definable rock instrumentation and replaced with a barrage of samplers, analog machinery and tape manipulations. Not to say it is devoid of any traditional instrumentation, quite the contrary, but everything is routed through an array of archaic synthesizers and processors that only an audiophile could love. Obviously, atmosphere is the key component, a wonderful side-product of such perfectly imperfect machinery, and the final output is a myriad of both familiar and indistinct sounds melting, molding and interweaving with each other while Adams, the ghostly troubadour, narrates over their weary tone. We Know About the Need is brimming with gorgeous melodies and clever musicianship but doused with heavy reverb, strung through crackling electronics, bent and stretched with Abbey Road tape effects and bubbling with organic chemistry. It's like Hood displaced in a city sewer, like Anticon shacked up in a rural cabin, some eerie midpoint between melodic ethereality and errant machinery.






The National Gallery - Long Hair Soulful - Performing Musical Interpretations of the Paintings of Paul Klee (Fallout, originally 1968)

The National Gallery - Boy with Toys - Performing Musical Interpretations of the Paintings of Paul Klee (Fallout, originally 1968)

The National Gallery – Performing Musical Interpretations of the Paintings of Paul Klee / Fallout

Nothing is strikingly out-of-the-ordinary about the first two tracks of this long-winded album title given the time period it was recorded in and the soft-psyche pop being played, but the opening lines of 'Boy with Toys' is an instant attention grabber. The smooth-voiced male exclaims over a light psychedelic pop groove: "Boy with toys / playing in fantasy / killing his teddy bear / thinking of his father." Wait wait wait! Come again now. He continues: "Boy with toys / alone in the attic / choking his hobby horse / thinking of his mother." What the fuck! It immediately sends you careening back to the beginning of the disc to really listen to the lyrics. This 1968 album experiment was brought about as an attempt to transmit visual arts into an audible medium with absolutely no commercial success (surprise), but in retrospect, a good deal of aesthetic success. The brainchild of Cleveland producer Roger Karshner, The Nationally Gallery is a pseudo-band of studio musicians arranged by jazz musician Chuck Mangione, fresh off his stint in Art Blakey's band, The Jazz Messengers, and pre-pop-jazz goofball (though his later years do represent some of my favorite album covers ever). Karshner's goal was to create 'electronic paintings' based on the works of abstract painter Paul Klee, one of the original masters of modern art whose style is hard to nail down but featured dream-like images with wit and imagination. Utilizing the popular style of time, The National Gallery represented a melodic psychedelic pop group with hints of folk and jazz and their music, much like the Klee paintings used as inspiration, was colorful, moody, satirical and unconventional. The first single, Long Hair Soulful (which was initially credited to the moniker Bhagavad-Gita), is an excellent piece of chilly psych-pop that shamefully was completely ignored. The album was released despite the low interest and did even worse commercially. Listening to it now, I can't say I'm completely surprised due to the oddball and progressive subjects of some the songs (read: not love), but at least the project was completed in its entirety. This is a must have, and a great album to be turning heads at a shindig, for all fans of psyche-pop and late 60s music in general.







Fred Thomas - Holland Tunnel - Sink Like a Symphony (Corleone 2006)

Fred Thomas – Sink Like a Symphony / Corleone

Fred Thomas’s years of service establishing the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti/Detroit indie-music scene has not gone unrewarded. For his second proper full-length, the talented friends/collaborators are aplenty, Nomo honcho Elliot Bergman, His Name is Alive’s Warn (Warren) Defever and Little Hands Records exec and ex-Cornish in a Turtleneck Juan Garcia are just a few of the names contributing their skills to backing the emotive folk singer. Thomas helped establish the scene over the last decade with his many projects including the retro-bubblegum pop outfit Saturday Looks Good to Me, the minimal folk band Flashpapr and the punk-oriented Lovesick, all of whose influences seep into his solo sound. Along with his ubiquitous strummed acoustic, the singer/songwriter’s fragile, warbling croon is forefront, which will suck in some listeners for good but as easily send others cringing, and his solid songwriting is the result of boxes and boxes of densely scribbled notebooks. The backing band mostly consists of rural folk-rock and, no doubt thanks to the aforementioned contributors, it sounds obsessively rehearsed and masterfully played. Personally my favorite moments are when Thomas strays into bedroom psychedelia ala the second half of Apples on the Floor or the more aggressive songs akin to Holland Tunnel. Again, I’m going to reiterate that Thomas’s voice will be the make or break factor for most listeners; so if you are a fan of his previous projects, especially Flashpapr, do yourself a favor and pick up this disc.