It�s impossible to mention Mark Linkous and his band Sparklehorse without mentioning his depression and substance addictions, or at least that seems to be the belief of the music press as a whole, so we�ll go with it. But even Linkous admits it�s difficult not to be fascinated by a mentally ill artist creating music; he has recently admitted to becoming interested in Daniel Johnston for the same reason. Ever since Brian Wilson put a sandbox in his house and created some of the most beautiful music ever put to tape, we have been enthralled by hearing what a depressed or otherwise unwell individual might have to communicate to us through words and music.

Like Wilson before him, the music of Sparklehorse is sometimes at odds with the lyrics or whatever was surely going on in Linkous� mind at the time. While there is no doubt that Linkous has made more than his share of morose and downright dirge-like tunes, often times there are upbeat, sunshine-in-your-face type songs to complement them. Perhaps these indicate brief moments of clarity or happiness, or maybe it�s merely a front�a lie to himself and others that he tells when he desperately wants to believe that everything will be okay.

�Some Sweet Day,� from the recent Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, is the type of song that, had it been made thirty years earlier (and with the post-hip hop production toned down a bit), would undoubtedly have been a Mellow Gold favorite played on A.M. radio alongside Chicago�s �Baby What a Big Surprise� and Seals & Crofts� �Summer Breeze.� Not unlike the Flaming Lips� �Do You Realize??� it seems to be a �happy death song��a tale of a loved one who has recently passed away. Linkous ponders to the deceased, �Where did you go, up to the sun? / Where are you now, part of the sea in every drop / Or did you simply stop?� and asserts that �some sweet day you will be mine, you�ll be mine.� The narrator then describes the loved one saying �she was my black earth / And the fire in my spine / Her magnetic waves gave birth / I was the one who loved you most.� With such a sweet description, Linkous almost makes a case to the listener about how pleasant death could be. Almost.

�Sick of Goodbyes,� from Goodbye Spider (co-written by Cracker frontman David Lowery and originally recorded for his band�s Kerosene Hat album) offers a surprisingly catchy and rocking power-pop song with a chorus so good you won�t even mind that it�ll be stuck in your head for weeks. I�m not going to pretend to know exactly what a song with the line �no one sees you on a vampire planet� means, but I�m guessing the lyrical content is probably a great deal sadder and at odds with the jubilant, seize-the-day tone of the music.

�Gold Day� from It�s a Wonderful Life sounds like Linkous� own �Strawberry Fields Forever,� starting off with a mellotron part and some sampled strings. The song is a rather romantic one, especially for Linkous, seemingly about a couple helping to support each other: �keep all your crows away / Keep skinny wolves at bay / In silver piles of smiles� and ends with the coda �may all your days be gold my child.� It brings to mind the more psychedelic work of John Lennon, a man who, despite having more than his share of psychological issues, nonetheless made some of the (presumably) happiest music of anyone.

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The best of the best: Michael F. Gill presents some of the Beatz by the Pound crew�s favorite older dance tracks…

Tracklist
01: Eberhard Schoener feat. Sting - Why Don’t You Answer [buy]
02: Trans-X - Digital World [buy]
03: Moody Boyz - Shango (Pray To The Thunder God) [buy]
04: Simple Minds - Theme for Great Cities [buy]
05: Lee Garrett - You’re My Everything [buy]

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The best of the best: Michael F. Gill presents some of the Beatz by the Pound crew�s favorite new dance tracks…

Tracklist
01: Grandadbob - pictures (DJ Naughty Mix) [buy]
02: Owusu & Hannibal - Lonnie’s Secret [buy]
03: Baby Oliver - Hypochondriac [buy]
04: Adultnapper - Betty Crocker Moves To Berlin [buy]
05: Shackleton - New Dawn [buy]

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You know that chapter in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that starts with the Art Linkletter quote? The one where Hunter S. Thompson talks about the death of the �60s dream and how the youth generation was riding a seemingly inexorable wave of momentum that broke and rolled back with the deaths of Martin Luther King and RFK Jr. and Richard Nixon�s election as President? I�d always held that chapter dear to my heart�it�s the demarcation line between what the book is (an intense deconstruction of 1970s �silent majority� America) and what it could have been (�hey, aren�t people stupid when they�re fucked up?�), one of the most cogent pieces of what the 1960�s meant to the people that lived through them. You can actually feel Thompson�s pain as he describes what it felt like to have the future stretch out before you, vast, exciting, and all for the taking, only to have it snatched away by the vagaries of fate.

I think about that when I hear Brian Wilson�s solo take of �Surf�s Up,� recorded for Leonard Bernstein�s World of Music in November of 1966. It�s just Wilson at his piano, debuting what would be the final track of his fabled Smile album, his heart-meltingly beautiful voice wrapped around Van Dyke Park�s brilliant word paintings. Free of Wilson�s studio conjuring, the Beach Boys� gliding harmonies absent, Wilson alone with his two favorite instruments, you can truly get a sense of how amazing the song really is, the perfect capper to Wilson�s unfinished symphony.

At that moment, the Beach Boys, and especially Wilson, had reached the peak of their own massive wave, both creatively and popularly. Behind him were �Surfer Girl,� Summer Days and Summer Nights, �I Get Around,� �California Girls,� �Good Vibrations� (yet to be released), and the masterpiece Pet Sounds. Ahead were the painful valleys of drug abuse, the rejection and dismembering of Smile, tragic deaths, increasingly brutal albums, the band�s descent into a creatively bankrupt nostalgia act, and Wilson�s sad, ugly downfall in the 1970s. But before those would come, we would have this moment, taped for a nation to watch on CBS, Brian Wilson�s final moment in the sun before the clouds, and the shade, and the darkness.

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Back in the summer of 2003, I was witness to a great concert put on by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers at Starwood Amphitheater in Antioch, Tennessee (may it R.I.P). The concert was great for a casual Petty fan; nary a song from the Heartbreakers� �Greatest Hits� collection was passed over and the band even changed up some of the classics to keep things interesting (a subdued and transcendent �Learning to Fly� comes to mind).

But my concert-going experience was interrupted by an inebriated gentleman sitting on the lawn behind me, a man who I will affectionately call �Drunk Guy.� Drunk Guy felt it his duty to explain to Mr. Petty, in as loud of a voice as possible, what songs should be on his setlist, and when Mr. Petty did not comply (not surprising, as the man was probably 500 yards away) Drunk Guy grew agitated. It went something like this (said in a thick Middle Tennessee accent):

�Tom! Tom! Where�s �Dogs on the Run�, man? No �Rebels�? C�mon! You�re not telling me you�re going to come down to Tennessee and not play anything from Southern Accents? That�s the only reason I�m here, Tom!�

To a casual Petty fan like me, the man grew from slightly amusing to plain annoying over the course of the night as he continued his one-sided conversation with Petty. But when I got back from the concert, I started to wonder what made these songs so special to this man. I quickly forgot about it, but about a year or so later, as I was perusing the used CD section at Nashville�s The Great Escape, I found the album in question for $7.99 and remembering the indirect recommendation from Drunk Guy, I thought I�d give it a try.

And it�s a good thing I did. Southern Accents is probably my favorite set of Petty songs to date, and possibly the best songs written about the Southern experience since Robbie Robertson (featured here) wrote �The Night They Drove Ole� Dixie Down.�

The album is a throwback to Petty�s roots. Though he�s often labeled as a California rocker (due in no small part to songs like �Free Fallin�� with characters living their lives in the San Fernando Valley) the Heartbreakers actually started in Gainesville, Florida and the album seems loosely built around the concept of coming to terms with one�s heritage � something most Southerners have experienced, especially those who spent their whole lives trying to leave the region, only to find out you can never really leave it.

�Rebels� is the first person account of a man living as a �rebel� in the modern day South, only he doesn�t have anything to fight for, so he just gets drunk and speeds and wonders why his girlfriend gets mad at him when she has to bail him out. He�s a man out of time; a Confederate soldier born a hundred years too late, surrounded by reminders of the desecrated South, cursing those �blue-bellied devils� who �burned out cornfields and left our cities leveled.� Rebellion is in his blood, �even before� his �father�s father,� he just doesn�t have anywhere to direct his unruly streak, which is why he lives with �one foot in the grave and one foot on the pedal.� It�s no surprise this song is often covered in concert by Drive-By Truckers, a band who recorded an entire album about what they called the �duality of the Southern thing.�

The title track covers similar territory, but even more directly. Whereas in �Rebels� the narrator didn�t realize he was self-destructing, the character here is clearly trying to salvage the last vestiges of life as he knows it. The narrator seems to be somewhere in a dirty hotel room, far away from home, thinking about how awful things are. He talks about how �that drunk tank in Atlanta was just a motel room to me,� as if his life is so far down the crapper he can barely tell the difference. He sees his mother by the window saying a prayer for him; but he�s sure to note �everything is done with a Southern accent, where I come from.� Again, he can�t escape it, no matter how hard he tries, for better or worse he keeps getting pulled back in.

�Dogs on the Run� seems to be the capper, when the character finally �fell overboard and washed up on the beach.� He meets a girl who takes him into a room painted �blue and gray� (the colors of the Union and Confederacy, respectively) and she turns out to be just like him. She tells him: �some of us are different/It’s just something in our blood, there’s no need for explanations/We’re just dogs on the run.�

Now I know what Drunk Guy was yelling about. Petty wasn�t just singing to him; he was singing about him. He was singing about every modern day Southerner who feels alienated in the world, the folks with rebellion in their blood � the people who really are just dogs on the run.

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So, metal talk. The reformed Angel Corpse is about to embark on a �hot� national tour with Watain and Nachtmystium. Ares Kingdom has run into a swath of well-deserved accolades for their Return to Dust debut. The stars of Pete Helmkamp, Chuck Keller, and Mike Miller appear to be simultaneously on the rise. Very nice, but in my opinion, nothing these former band-mates have done lately rivals the work that united them during the �80s and �90s. I�m talking about Order from Chaos, the maligned, mind-warping power trio from Kansas City.

It seems as if a lot of nowadays metal bands want to be OFC, whether they know it or not. Standards for heaviness have been eroded; it�s hard to say which tempos qualify as really fast, downtuned isn�t all that low, gross, violent things are merely cute, and the impact of complex time signatures has just about refined itself out of existence. One alternative is to crank the gain to previously unrealized levels and learn the rudiments of playing together as an organic, interactive band (as opposed to the rigid model inherited from Judas Priest, Metallica etc.), seizing on savage grooves in a series written to engage and disorient at once. Epic songwriting and sound-construction bounded by a spontaneous live group performance standard, for the sake of unmediated enervation.

That was Order from Chaos, and the other side of moderns wanting to be OFC is the pervasive longing for at least the appearance of kvlt status. OFC was a fucking cult. A couple different labels released their debut album Stillbirth Machine throughout the �90s, with varying degrees of consent from the band. By Keller�s account, the recording session was a botched job, but it�s yielded some of the most abrasive guitar tones on Earth. The rhythm tracks buzz continuously like seething insects, and the solos just jab their needle-like way through the mix without warning, red hot disruptions so fucked sounding that you�re left momentarily unable to compute the sound as music. OFC abstracted their noise long before the practice caught on in metal circles, like an early industrial band with normal rock instrumentation.

Early Sodom and Voivod�s inability to stay in time has been re-conceived here as an agitation device, a sophisticated means of shifting gears in the hands of a young troupe none too far from flying apart themselves. Their take on thrash is groovy and not so fast, but it drags you and stomps you in different directions, really rubbing its irregularity in your face. Layers of planned and unplanned percussive disorganization on offer, feverish, predatory intelligence shot through with blood freezing panic. Fuck, they quote Nietzsche themselves, so I might as well say it; this inhumanity, this metal for mettle�s sake, creates the opportunity to go beyond good and evil. Beyond emotions even, to the site of pure biological reaction, gut response to big dangerous objects hurtling around in the dark, smashing each other to bits at an undetermined distance.

But the lucid sneer of cold command at the heart of this storm, the vocal performance, is what really turns OFC�s urge-unto-disorientation into something glorious. Pete Helmkamp kicks ass at growling, and I insist that his vocal presence is the main reason that people care about AngelCorpse as much as they do. Again, giant insects come to mind. The normal timbre of a human speaking/singing voice has been completely excised from the guy�s vocal chords. He sounds shredded, but far from taking the incoherent screaming approach, Helmkamp enunciates every diction-elevated syllable like a stage actor, cajoling, stretching, pausing for theatrical effect, like Bruce Dickinson reborn in fallout contaminated Hell. And he�s populated Stillbirth Machine with some of the most ridiculously quotable fragments of metalspeak, ever. �I am an alien from another world, sent to communicate a message,� he spits at the beginning of �Stillbirth Machine.� ��And I saw eternity the other night, the unvanquished black splendour of “The Edge of Forever.� Then there�s my personal favorite: �Fundamental! Dysfunctional. Monumental�Incredible!� That brilliant associative chain dribbles out of Helmkamp�s pie hole in mini epic, �Iconoclasm Conquest.� Between those lines there�s a tangled maze of grammar, alluding to ancestral consciousness, class struggle and various systems, but only really addressing the process of fashioning order from chaos.

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Rex Garvin and the Mighty Cravers - Emulsified

The lovelorn possess heartache enough to ask many a great question. Rex Garvin and the Mighty Cravers posited an exceptional one when they inquired: �Whoa! Do you know what it means to be emulsified now?�

Simply put, you bet your ass I do.

Clearly, so does Rex. He knows it enough to belt out the �whoa�s� and �yes, I do�s� and �me�s� in a manner either borderline inhuman or painfully so. This man is falling apart, no two ways about it, and there�s nothing left for him to do other than holler up a storm.

Yo La Tengo - Emulsified

Yo La Tengo, on the other hand, replace the chorus of sympathetic men with a band of enthusiastic youth. In this way, they turn the track into more of a children�s song than a tale of woe and misery. Some might be quick to note Ira does sing the line �I wanna make up a real romance��a phrase we usually never (should be always never) say to our children, but I still hold that the child-choir infuses this tune with a world of playfulness. The rousing saxophone solo is replaced with strum-heavy guitars, and while Ira isn�t �Dr Stringz� (reference to Hoboken aside) he comes damn close.

Gibson Bros. - Emulsified

Lastly, I would be remiss not to mention the Gibson Bros, whose take on �Emulsified� is, well, an acquired taste. I suppose everyone gets emulsified now and then, even those who play garage rock.

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Fergal O�Reilly celebrates his return home to the Stycast with a series of songs related to home, followed by a much longer series of songs which are nothing to do with home…

Tracklist
01: Pet Shop Boys � Home and Dry [buy]
02: Magazine � Upside Down [buy]
03: The Lemonheads � If I Could Talk I�d Tell You [buy]
04: Black Strobe � Brenn Di Ega Kjerke [buy]
05: Justin Timberlake � What Goes Around Comes Around (Sebastien Leger mix) [buy]
06: Funkadelic � One Nation Under a Groove [buy]

For one reason or another, the members of indie-rock group Frightened Rabbit have thought it best to keep a lot of things to themselves. Rather than take what some might consider to be the far more sound approach in a business dependent on constant, up-close exposure, this quiet trio has instead done the exact opposite, letting little escape publicly about who they are and where they come from. With a lack of promotional press leaving almost no concrete information to go off of, the only things that are known about this particular band is that they�re from Glasgow and that the group is comprised of two brothers, Grant and Scott, and a friend called Billy.

Yet despite Frightened Rabbit�s unusual affinity for leaving new listeners in the dark, there is something revealing about the band in its debut effort Sing the Greys. One such informal introduction occurs in the band�s standout track �Music Now.� With the drum kit�s floor tom offering a constant down-beat thump, as if pounding on a door that just won�t open, these young Scots progress with a controlled outcry. Singing �make your music / Make it so loud and so trite� above an acoustic guitar�s bright ring, Frightened Rabbit acknowledge the modern music scene as something they do not want to be a part of. Songs like �Be Less Rude� continue this biting-of-the-thumb towards artistic self-importance. �This is what we need,� the lyrics begin, �a line in the sand / I will cross to here before the tide comes in.� With the hum of a harmonica throughout, the inclusion of a brisk, running-step guitar hook, and the occasional plinking of piano keys in the background, the band eventually forgoes any kind of unnecessary subtlety and just tells it like it is: �you�re sitting on your high horse and you�re spouting high horse shite.�

While Frightened Rabbit certainly have a few anti-establishment stances, they should not be pigeon-holed as a couple of guys full of lo-fi piss and vinegar. Songs like �Behave,� demonstrate that they are simply content with their independence, content with their particular musical control and ownership. The members of Frightened Rabbit probably don�t want reveal anything about who they are because once they do, they�ll lose the last remnant, the feeling of simply sitting together playing for no one but themselves. Who could blame them? It�s something difficult for any artist to find again once it�s lost.

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Stylus editor Todd Burns presents a mini-mix of electronic music…

Tracklist
01: Theo Parish - Children of the Drum (1997 Predecessor Mix) [buy]
02: Lovebirds - Behind You [buy]
03: Bebel Gilberto - Bring Back the Love (Prins Thomas Miks) [buy]
04: Kate Wax - Killing Your Ghost (St. Plomb Mix) [buy]
05: Sly Mongoose - Bad Pulse [buy]

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