Phil Elverum, the eccentric songwriter who’s carried his home recording projects through a series of mutating names and incarnations for over a decade now, has never seemed to be in the business of making new friends. After a series of landmark experimental records for the K label as the Microphones, he’s stuck to a trickle of self-released projects as Mount Eerie: a couple could be considered albums, but just as many have been books of photography, journals, posters, and all conceivable lengths of singles and EPs. The impossible output is supported only by shows in galleries and small venues, most of which are stacked with Elverum’s musical companions and somehow always start about three hours later than they’re supposed to.

Elverum’s M.O. remains decidedly old-school, mirroring the business plans of 90s punk and indie labels, while the infrastructure that’s traditionally supported careers like his has largely collapsed around him. Indie distributors are dropping out of the game left and right; the kinds of zines that once would’ve tracked his every move have dwindled to a few websites and blogs that mostly press major releases. Without the reputation that precedes him, it’s not likely he’d be accumulating many new fans in 2009.

This is especially true upon hearing Wind’s Poem, his new pseudo-black metal experiment, which opens with a minute of messy, furious drum and guitar noise that sounds like it’s coming from behind the closed door of a dark room you’re not sure you want to enter. Needless to say, it’s not a friendly introduction; in fact, it may be the tinniest, soupiest sound he’s put to tape. The metal passages on Wind’s Poem are thick with so many layers of washed-out distortion and processed cymbal loops, there’s hardly any melody to discern. Though that first minute is probably the most black metal moment on the record, it’s a fair warning of what’s to come.

Elverum has been public about the gradual development of his Norwegian metal curiosity over the past several years, and Wind’s Poem isn’t his first time dabbling. Last year’s Black Wooden Ceiling Opening was definitely metal, though filtered through the expansive ear of a home producer and avowed analog nerd. Despite the persistent double bass drum and the twin bass/guitar riffs, there was a warm, almost organic kind of distortion at play that felt nothing like the thin, icy sounds more commonly ascribed to black metal. Calling it “black wooden” was only half a joke.

Wind’s Poem is more deliberately true to form, though the bursts of aggression are paced at a crawl between softer, airier tracks that force you to cautiously tune back in. He’s used the same dynamic pattern on past albums, alternating between overdriven, drum-heavy rock and longer, more patient soundscapes. “Through the Trees,’”constructed almost exclusively of vintage organ and whispered vocals, clocks in over 11 minutes. “Ancient Questions,” carried along by swells of delay-treated piano, could easily be mistaken for Grizzly Bear.

This is neither typical Mount Eerie, nor a hasty repackaging of an established underground subgenre meant to earn cool points with the black t-shirt kids. Instead, it’s somewhere in between. Elverum’s songs have always been dark and introverted, broad sketches about nature and human senses. Countless lyrics can be boiled down to “how wind feels.” At heart, this isn’t much different from the work he’s nodding to. The connection was always there; on Wind’s Poem, it’s just louder than before.

Okkervil River’s moody, tousled, and always out-of-breath frontman, Will Sheff, wrote an online diary in 2006 called ‘It’s Hard to Be a Human Being When You’re on Tour’. Documenting the band’s tour across the U.S. following their first major success, Black Sheep Boy, Sheff dryly described losing his computer, his girlfriend, his grandfather and plenty of dignity, all in a trip that spanned less than a month. It’s a surprisingly unromanticized account of the exhaustion and straight-up pain that comes with spending each successive night in a new city, and the constant urge to self-medicate with the cheap beer, bad weed and prescription painkillers that fans dole out for good measure. Even considering the murder ballads he’s penned, the piece is by far his most depressing. More obviously, it’s also his most real.

His band’s new record, The Stand-Ins, and its predecessor, last year’s Stage Names, have gradually seen Sheff’s songs take more of this true-life, first-person approach. Still embracing the pace and tenor of short fiction, he’s stopped looking to folk tales and obscure one-column newspaper stories for inspiration; instead, he’s found enough fertile material schlepping across the country in a van. Of course, these songs are romanticized, if sometimes fictionalized accounts. The bouncy ‘Lost Coastlines’ is about a group of novice sailors out to sea, though their sentiments probably reflect those of most bands losing their bearings after daily 12-hour drives: “Though we have lost our way, nobody’s gonna say it outright.” It’s a clever way of dodging a whiny tone while still channeling all the road-bound frustration that’s clearly defined Sheff’s life since Okkervil River achieved a moderate level of fame — one that forces them to tour constantly, but never saves them from having to lead regular lives the way the rockstar myth would have people believe.

Sheff’s found a new level of truth in his writing that, while remarkably present in past songs about made-up characters, hits even harder when his topic is the passion of a music-loving band and its fans. He even deliberates it in ‘Pop Lie’, a perfect pop song about the inherent fraudulence of crafting — and for the fans, losing one’s shit to — of course, the perfect pop song. Simultaneously channeling and arguing against  the Hold Steady’s gloriously obvious classic-rock steez, Sheff rails on the songwriter, the guy the fans “had wrecked their hearts upon, the liar who lied in his pop song.” But it’s followed by ‘On Tour With Zykos’, which captures the slow motions of the now exhausted performer coming off a tour and a break-up, expecting to be inspired by both but struggling to feel anything at all. In the end, though, Sheff finally finds a sympathetic character in ‘Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979’, channeling the obscure, real-life glam rocker who, before dying of AIDS at 36, fell victim to the worst antagonism the music industry had to offer.

On the Stage Names’ ‘Title Track’, Sheff conjured the atmosphere of “a blood-flushed and heart-rushing race either to kick off too soon or stick around too late, to be far too dear or too cut-rate.” Whether he was calling out the insular world of current day indie-rock or referring more broadly to the plight of any entertainment career, it’s clear he has a conscious stake in where his own band fits into the scheme. But these past two records cover more than industry hang-ups: they also betray his total obsession with performance. To watch Sheff live is to see a total showboat, one who relishes singing to a crowd that digs the ‘Pop Lie’-style singalong and makes it painfully apparent. Now, thankfully, he’s found a seemingly endless source of inspiration in this relationship to mid-level fame that’s like that of so many New Yorkers to their city: constantly feeling lost but never deigning to admit it; constantly disparaging it but far too attached to ever consider an exit.

This time last year, Ra Ra Riot had resumed playing shows following the death of their drummer, John Pike, who disappeared from a house party in Massachusetts and drowned in a nearby bay. At the time, they were touring on an energetic, promising EP, at a point where most bands choose to either call it quits or finally commit to launching a career. Following Pike’s death, the remaining members kept touring constantly, and now, out of the same period of weirdness and uncertainty, comes their first full-length. The EP had a strain of melancholy, but it was a bouncy record too, packed with tons of great melodies and arranged cleverly enough to resemble a band similarly situated last summer: Vampire Weekend. The Rhumb Line doesn’t really move beyond that — the liveliest four songs are rerecorded tracks from the EP, and the new ones (some with lyrics by Pike) might as well be. It’s an upbeat tribute mostly absent the sense of tragedy one might expect from a band that’s weathered more in their first couple years than most do over entire careers.

(Barsuk)

Lil Wayne has been calling himself the best rapper alive since Tha Carter II, which mostly precedes his new Carter III in name only. The almost three-year stretch between those two records, epic by rap album standards, has already become the stuff of hip-hop legend: Wayne not only held onto a potentially fickle audience — people who love equal parts hard rapping and raunchy comedy — but somehow in that time became the biggest rapper alive, if maybe not the best. It took a couple key mixtapes and a constant flood of guest verses, all building up suspense for the long-delayed Carter III, but the success was enough to give Wayne something to brag about.
If it would then seem like that three-year gap was spent meticulously engineering this record to be a perfect number one, it doesn’t sound like it. Wayne’s best verses have all been druggy, free-associative rants, most of which sound completely unedited, doubtfully ever even written down. And that’s pretty much the entirety of Carter III: songs with loose themes and expensive beats, big hooks and a bunch of verses about nothing in particular. If he’s been doing anything other than standing in front of a mic with a styrofoam cup of cough syrup cutting who knows how many tracks a day, it doesn’t show. It hardly makes a difference that this is a proper album with marquee producers and guest stars, a couple monster singles and a hilarious cover that makes for great concert t-shirts.

His lyrics, all long strings of quick punchlines packed into barely-rapped verses, are, even more than usual, borderline incomprehensible. In ‘Let the Beat Build’, over a Kanye West beat that could’ve been a Common leftover, Wayne says something about “the wave pool, at Blue Bayou/and then I waved, fool, as I blew by you.” Maybe he’s shouting out to Louisiana, but it seems more likely that he’s just too lazy not to say the first thing that comes into his head — even if that means making a reference to a tiny water park in Baton Rouge (had to Google that one). More importantly, he makes a bizarrely clever insult out of it and it somehow makes up for the fact that the whole line is nonsense. Wayne’s a pro at this whiplash factor — the sudden recognition that he’s turned a dirty joke for his teenage fans into a perfect couplet, and then followed it up with a few more.
Still, the rapping is predictably weaker than his mixtape stuff, but the production picks up the slack. Almost every track sounds radio-ready: Kanye’s faux-Coldplay crooned ‘Shoot Me Down’ comes off way better than similar attempts by Lupe Fiasco and Kanye himself, plus he nails ‘Comfortable’, with an R&B chorus so one-for-the-ladies he brought Babyface out from behind the curtain to sing it. Wyclef Jean supplies a blatant summer jam called ‘Mrs. Officer’ — the hook is Bobby Valentino singing a siren noise in between Wayne lines like “all she wants me to do is fuck the po-lice” and “Lady, what’s your number/she said 9-1-1.” It all distracts from the lack of any real hard rapping on Wayne’s part: Carter III is a tight, fun record from someone who’s spent the last couple years gleefully stomping on other people’s tracks, unlike Carter II, which came from a Lil-er Wayne still trying to prove himself.

At the beginning of ‘Mr. Carter’, a song premised by the fact that Wayne and Jay-Z have the same last name, he rants, “I feel BIG — not big in the sense of gaining weight or nothing like that…like, colossal.” When he says it, he sounds a little shocked, but it’s his one point that can’t be argued. People can debate whether he really is as next-level as he claims, but there’s no denying how much he believes he’s the best rapper alive, more genuinely than anyone else in recent memory. If Kanye West makes an act out of his ego, Lil Wayne lets his speak for itself. Really, neither of those should seem like positive choices, but it’s hard to imagine any rappers right now, let alone two of the most successful, going any other way.

It’s tempting to write off Unwed Sailor just from all the weird, overblown fantasy themes of their artwork and song titles. Not to mention some of the text on their website, which characterizes them as “a two-hearted octopus with every arm working twice as hard.” For an instrumental band, they have a lot to say — it almost betrays Johnathon Ford’s roots as a mid-90s emo-core vet, where long, clever song titles were pretty much the norm. But the words got really out there on 2003’s Marionette and the Music Box, which was supposed to chronicle the story of, well, a marionette searching for a music box, though there was also, not improbably, a unicorn involved. And while the record alone didn’t quite illuminate this story arc, it did work on a completely different level: as a well-composed post-rock album comprised of a series of carefully brief vignettes.

Little Wars, their new record, shares its name with an early-century H.G. Wells book laying out the rules for staging battles with toy soldiers, and the title is oddly apt — not that there’s anything too brazenly militaristic, but there’s an abounding grandiosity to the whole thing that’s played out on a relatively small scale. It’s thanks mostly to the drums, carrying over the big, hollow sound Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan established on their first EP. Drums have always been paramount to Unwed Sailor’s ability to distinguish themselves from the tons of other instrumental post-rock bands floating around — for one thing, they tend to recruit great drummers, and, for another, it’s the main instrument that keeps lots of their more ambient songs, especially those eking into the six- and seven-minute range, from sounding like background music to Myst.

Most of it is far more accessible than any of their other post-Marionette records, and that’s due in large part to the omission of all the lofty, almost prog-inspired fantasy concepts. The best moments on Little Wars are songs like ‘Aurora’ and ‘Echo Roads’, which are essentially structured like pop songs that could, conceivably, have sung melodies and lyrics. But thank god they don’t, because who knows how ridiculous those words would be.

Almost a year after releasing Post-War in 2006, M. Ward appeared on Late Night to give a hushed, almost ethereal reading of ‘Chinese Translation’. It was an amazing performance, enough to elicit the kind of animated reaction Conan O’Brien reserves for musical acts you can tell he actually enjoys, but equally notable were Ward’s friends at his side: Neko Case cooing and strumming an autoharp, Kelly Hogan doing the same, and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James playing acoustic guitar and even singing a whole verse. It was a well-framed family portrait of some key players from the indie-folk clique that had grabbed the spotlight in the few years prior, banded together for something so minor as a one-off TV spot.

Ward and James entered the circle touring with Conor Oberst after he concurrently released two acclaimed Bright Eyes albums at the beginning of 2005. Though Oberst’s Saddle Creek Records clan had always been notoriously interdependent, there was this new crowd that would hoist indie-folk to more mainstream success: a calmer, less emotive Oberst; James and his band’s touches of psychedelia; Ward, with his impossibly antique production style; and Jenny Lewis, a fellow Saddle Creek alum, eventually taking over as the genre’s alpha female. For a short while they were everywhere, on stages and records together and apart, and, as a friendly group of young musicians collectively churning out pleasant music like the great folk circles of decades past, they were a welcome presence. But despite the familial bond seen in moments like that Conan performance, the past year has been mostly barren for this crew, the lukewarm reception to Bright Eyes’ 2007 follow-up having been almost a foregone conclusion. Their whole brand is now just sort of there, existing for the pleasure of extant fans and maybe NPR listeners, but never pulling any surprises and hardly producing anything fresh.

So it’s a precarious role that Zooey Deschanel is stepping into as the first new face — and voice — this crowd has seen in a while. As the “she” in She & Him, she’s paired with M. Ward, who spends most of their Volume One producing, hardly lending his husky voice at all. Deschanel, herself a film analogue to Jenny Lewis as an indie-turned-mainstream crush object, has a capable voice, but she doesn’t have the distinctiveness to rescue a stagnating genre, micro- as it may be. Nor does she, in her functional, oldies-inspired songs, establish any semblance of personality beyond the smart, cheery but vulnerable pose one could assemble from pieces of her film roles. But that being said, the pair have thrown together a record that still thrives on the kind of collaborative energy Ward and his crew have always maintained.

He — or “him,” or whatever — treats her voice plainly, dressing it with plenty of reverb but keeping the arrangements tastefully simple. At least on the front half, he calls to mind the mildly restrained Phil Spector of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, an album that’s coincidentally a touchstone for most of Deschanel’s songs. Only after the run-through of ‘You Really Got A Hold on Me’ do they shift from ‘70s-style folk-pop into country, Deschanel resembling Lewis more and more as she affects a dainty twang. Fortunately, though, she carries none of the latter’s baggage as a looser sort of indie-rock lyricist, which proved the major setback on Lewis’s solo folk/country debut. Instead, she’s just Zooey, the plain-voiced good girl who tends to get burned.

While Volume One’s no sea change for the indie-folk brand, it’s a healthy reminder of what drew people toward it in the first place. Ward and Deschanel are playing themselves: he’s not exactly reinventing his career by channeling decades-old production styles, and she has virtually nothing to precede her except an audience. Having built her film career on reputable indie roles while never standing for something affectedly so (unlike, say, Ellen Page’s turn at the Moldy Peaches), she’s the ideal sort of public figure to sidle into a scene of staunch revivalists, fairly popular though still existing, albeit barely, on the periphery. Now, she and Lewis can really duke it out — though maybe they’ll just duet instead.  •