That's Some Community

Brazil’s most promising indie-rock band, Some Community, formed in 2009. The five piece that met in prep school consists of Juliana Vacaro who delivers charming and delirious vocals as well as: Veronica Vacaro (keyboards and guitar), Marco Frugiuele (percussion), Gabriela Gonzalez (guitar), and Fernando Fernandes, who brings lead guitar to the mix.

This clashing of talent and instruments is augmented and punctuated by an array of Casiotones and melodica (played by all) in arrangements sweet enough to give you a cavity, yet hard hitting enough to knock that tooth right out.

Some Community will be releasing a brand new single later this month, and will be traveling all the way to Austin for this years’ SxSW Festival!

Download: Random Words

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Telekinesis Avoid A Car Crash

On February 15, Merge Records will release 12 Desperate Straight Lines, the sophomore album from Telekinesis on CD, LP and digital download.

When Telekinesis mastermind Michael Benjamin Lerner set out in July to record songs for the follow-up to his debut album Telekinesis!, he found himself with no band, a case of vertigo, and a wrecked van. The long-distance relationship that inspired his debut album’s songs of wanderlust had ended, and he had just returned from a much-needed escape to Berlin where he banished himself to a room in the warehouse district to write songs from 9 to 5 each day.

With the original recording date scrapped, Michael was inspired (by the heavy, fuzzy bass in Flin Flon’s A-OK) to buy a bass guitar and, in a sudden burst of inspiration, wrote four more songs for the album. His second attempt at recording led him to Portland and Jackpot! Studios. Michael and Chris Walla continued their partnership from Telekinesis! and again recorded to tape. They tossed out all the rules—as they are wont to do when they get together—and, as Michael says, “went a little crazy,” with impromptu dance parties and recording drum parts backwards.

The result of all of this is 12 Desperate Straight Lines, twelve new songs of heartache, anger, and even a little hopefulness. Telekinesis has re-emerged with a new band featuring Jason Narducy (Robert Pollard band, Verbow) on bass and Cody Votolato (Jaguar Love, The Blood Brothers) on guitar. The van is fixed, the dizziness is gone, and Michael Benjamin Lerner has returned.

Judging by "Car Crash," the album is going to be a doozy and it seems like all the crap that Michael had gone through only made the songs on 12 Desperate Straight Lines even better. I mean, while it's hard to judge an album by a single song...it's a pretty good bet the whole thing is going to be at least half as good as this tune. Fun stuff and quite honestly, it seems as though all this trauma prior to recording was worth it in the end!

Download: Car Crash

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It's Generationals

It was an active summer for New Orleans’ Generationals. Grant, Ted, first tracked their second LP, Actor-Caster in Washington DC with Con Law producer Daniel Black. They then returned home to New Orleans to write several new songs with drummer Tess Brunet during a housesitting session at The Spellcaster Lodge (home of Quintron & Ms. Pussycat). The three then headed out to Austin in August to record a four-song EP with Bill Baird at Baby Blue. They tracked in a sweaty, distinctly sound-porous box by day and swam in Barton Springs as an evening reward. It was the first time Generationals had recorded a body of work with anyone else.


In their second release, Trust (EP), the band is audibly transitioning from a jangling, sun-kissed sound in the vein of Aztec Camera or Felt to pop drones distinctly more hypnotic, textured, and challenging to conjure accurate comparisons for. The shimmering hooks, girl-group choruses, and late-summer breeziness of Con Law remain intact in EP’s title track ("Trust"), but are joined by feedback loops, drum-machine beats, and abstractly dubbed-out, wobbling basslines throbbing organically in the mix. Con Law’s “When They Fight They Fight” may be Generationals’ early-career singsong anthem, but songs like “Say For Certain” and “Victim of Trap” are their lilting, droning annunciations of a burgeoning post-pop sound.

Download: Trust

Ham1 Go On and On and On...

Through the last half-decade or so, Jim Willingham's ever-expanding canon-of-song has become somewhat of an Athens, Georgia institution; in that rough interval, he and his band Ham1 have performed extensively amid the vaunted downtown music scene, toured a good bit, and recorded no fewer than four full-length albums that both reflect and expand upon that locale's long-noted proclivity toward idiosyncratic narrative and a psychedelicized instrumental approach to fleshing elemental chord changes into full-blooded songs. Ham1's newest offering, Let's Go On and On and On and On With HAM1 somehow miraculously manages to expand on both of those factors simultaneously, a phenomenon attributable to fresh directions taken in the realms of the studio and in the development of the band's sonic palette, song-per-song.

Let's Go On and On and On and On With HAM1 finds the band reveling in sonic expansion a-plenty - in fact, there are three instrumentals across the record, all unified by the notion that they conjure some mythic day when Bob Wills drunkenly discovers a Big Muff. However, Ham1's calling card remains wholly intact: Willingham's affable, affecting delivery of his character-driven narratives.

As with any fully-felt folk-song, the main mode of emotional communication here are the lyrics and vocals, and Willingham speaks, intones and imparts his like an advising, wide-eyed friend beside you on a barstool might; think of a somewhat-southern-fried Jonathan Richman with his arm amiably around you on the porch, or a more-with-it Pip Proud overdubbing his vocals over a long-lost Guided-by-Voices track, and you're getting there. The inherent tension brought to bear between Willingham's heart-bravely-on-sleeve tendency toward vocal openhandedness and the swirling complexities of the ensemble playing and production gives the record its rarefied blend of sunlight and shade that makes for repeated, rewarding listening -- and allows Let's Go On and On and On and On With HAM1 to stand as a brash progression not only for the band itself, but for the skewed and celebrated psych-pop of Athens, Georgia.

Download: Ghost Loop