Pages tagged “issue 33”

Worlds collide gloriously on the streets of Brooklyn

Too much is just right on the third album from this Aussie (not Finnish) sextet. With singer/songwriter Cameron Bird now relocated to the great melting pot of New York City, Architecture in Helsinki is a joyous example of eclecticism at its best: Chunky funk grooves and lilting tropical rhythms enfold feverish pop tunes as burping analog synths sound an enticing note of party-hearty nostalgia. Creating a sense of barely controlled chaos by constantly shifting moods and textures, Bird and company squeeze every tasty drop from these cluttered, raucous tracks, making for an action-packed 32 minutes. Although the self-conscious embrace of visceral styles echoes such cerebral types as Talking Heads, The B-52's and Devo, Bird's roaring, half-drunk vocals are his own creation, suggesting a crazy ringmaster. Places Like This could easily have been a self-congratulatory exercise in cross-cultural dabbling, except for one thing: The people responsible for the wild-eyed swagger of "Lazy (Lazy)" and the Duran Duran-gone-haywire "Same Old Innocence" are clearly having a wonderful time.

As rock reunions go, few have been more anticipated or gradually realized than this year’s Police tour. For twenty-odd years, a fair number of interviews with Sting and pretty much any interview with Stewart Copeland or Andy Summers eventually descended upon the question. The Police have three living (and frankly age-defying) members, plus a catalog of amazing songs that have seeped their way into the post-New Wave consciousness without spawning horrific legions of carbon-copy imitators. Having initially quit not far from the zenith of their career, there has always been a sense that a Police reunion would have some meat and gravitas to it, a resolution of unfinished business and perhaps the promise of something more.

Seeing an early show at the Staples Center in L.A., there is an undeniable joy in seeing those three people onstage, doing their songs, together. And yet while there hasn’t been enough decay to make it seem as if they’re covering their own songs, there’s still some sense of emptiness in the gesture. Sting’s sugar-free jazz instincts have seemingly won the day, slowed the songs and eviscerated whatever last traces of punk existed in the band. Aside from raw, rusty moments where tempos get dropped and near trainwrecks are averted by a Copeland fill, there’s a waft and a languor to the whole affair that perhaps offers a slightly unflattering snapshot of what 1987 might’ve brought had the band stayed together. Simply put, the 1982 Police run rings around the 2007 Police, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either charitable, lying or not an attentive enough fan to really tell the difference. But does it really matter? The heart still skips a beat when “Every Breath You Take” starts up, and there’s a thrill to celebrating these songs that perhaps justifies the price of admission. For someone too young to be a concertgoer when the band first reigned, this is the closest and best that can be done—far better, certainly, than never seeing it at all. Right?

Rock reunions are a strange beast. The prevailing cynical logic, of course, is that they tend to be empty and exploitative money grabs, designed to prop up aging musicians’ spending habits or prime the pump for a glut of reissues. And certainly in some cases, the profit motive can’t be denied. At SXSW this year, Pete Townshend candidly admitted that early Who reunion gigs bore some financial imperative for bassist John Entwistle, and the truth is that often the non-songwriting members of various rock-star ensembles have far less bank than the casual observer might suspect.

Still, some of the most vaunted reunions (The Eagles, for example) bring together individuals who probably don’t need the money. So why do they do it? And when they do it, why do we care?

The reunions that feature an older vintage of artist often have the feeling of an extended victory lap, as artists with greying hair and growing paunches give boomers the chance to flock to corporate boxes and break out the tattered T-shirts of yesteryear. For the fans, there’s either a nostalgia trip or the chance to a see a version (faded as it might be) of something they weren’t alive or old enough to experience the first time around—or just a chance to hear a great set of songs from (at least some of) the original artists who wrote them.

For the artists, perhaps the instincts are more complex. One suspects that older rock bands often suffer from the Roger Clemens/Michael Jordan phenomenon in which retirement proves maddeningly boring and empty, and there’s a desire to jump back in. It may be that Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour never ends in part because life on the road has become his natural space, his way of constructing his days, months and years. And for a band like Kiss, where there’s a certain degree of egomania, yet another farewell tour offers a few more months of arenas full of screaming fans and frenzied limelight.

Further down into the personal psychology of it all, reunions are likely a recourse for bands who find everything they do with the rest of their lives overshadowed or hounded by questions, remembrances and suggestions of that one affiliation that brought them to stardom. In this sense, the reunion is a form of exorcism. Certainly a monkey leapt off of Sting’s back this year. Moreover, perhaps on some level there’s a sense of obligation and a desire to honor the wishes of fans who (by way of letters, journalist’s questions and huge financial offers) beg and plead for one last glimpse. There is, of course, a whole flock of artists who refuse to reunite unless there’s a record to be made and new art involved beyond a tour-souvenir live disc or video. When interviewed, The Jesus and Mary Chain, for instance, treat the eventual creation of new material as an essential part of their recent reformation, and fellow Coachella second-time-around debutantes Crowded House and Happy Mondays are offering new albums this year. The Stooges and the New York Dolls (well, at least two of them) have also spent the last year touring on (middling) new material. For these bands, the attempt to rekindle the creative process is an integral part of the act of reconnection, even if the results don’t always fit the band’s brand standard.

Sadly, in the canon of reunion records there are few standouts. The indie ranks have generally more contenders, as Mission of Burma, American Music Club and Dinosaur Jr. have all cranked out high-quality reunion records. The passage of time favors those who wait one decade, rather than four, to get the band back together, and the reunion album often fits into the arc the band was on before the first break (in many cases a state of free-fall).

For all its intrinsic flaws, the rock reunion may be an index of the music world’s health. The depth of yearning for certain reunions is part of a process of sanctifying great music. As the barriers against reunions are gradually lowered by their increasing commonality, perhaps some great albums will be recaptured in the afterlife of, say, a Green on Red or even some day Soundgarden or Pavement. As rock moves from one generation to the next, perhaps the rules of time, entropy and the myth of beautiful flameouts need not always apply. If that means some older bands haunting the stage as shadows of their former selves, so be it. At least they’re friendly ghosts.

With seven years of music journalism under my belt, I'm no grizzled veteran, but neither am I so green that I can't recognize a suicide mission when I see one.

"No way," I said when my editor asked me for a piece on the weirdest music on MySpace, your one-stop shop for self-released tunes, demographic research and profound social alienation. "Forget it. You guys already made me read a 300-page book on freaking grunge music last month."

"Think about it," said my editor, diabolically twirling the waxy tips of his mustache. "It'll be fun!" He waggled his fingers at me and pinwheels spun in his eyes.

"Yeah," I droned, mesmerized, "fun."

Snookered, I had to figure out how to go about finding the weirdest bands on MySpace, which is kind of like trying to find the weirdest needle in a haystack comprised entirely of needles--so, a needlestack. I decided that for five days, i.e. one working week, I would spend at least one hour per day trawling the needlestack that Tom built (and that Fox Interactive Media co-opted to its sinister ends) to weed out the true charismatics.

DAY 1: Mother of God, where to begin? As of this writing, MySpace Music contains 9,498 profiles--that begin with the letter "A." The total number of bands on MySpace is incalculable, because I can't find my calculator, and my abacus isn't doing the trick. Suffice it to say that, in impolite company, the volume of bands on MySpace might be called a "shitload," which in this case is only partially figurative. It occurs to me that--in a world of culturally acceptable performance art, noise music and The Frogs--"weird" is difficult to quantify. But when I stumble across The Ghetto Kampayne, a trio of white, suburban sex rappers from Illinois, I know that I'm hot on the trail (to borrow Didion's perfect phrase) of the real soufflé, the genuine American kitsch. "The Ghetto Kampayne has zero friends." Art imitates life?

DAY 2: I owe The Ghetto Kampayne a debt of gratitude for helping me figure out what, exactly, I mean by "weird." It isn't the sonically weird that I'm interested in, it's the totally inexplicable; the stuff of mind-warping cultural miscue. So I'm feeling pretty good about myself until I discover ARTEMIS & the Olympians. It is patently impossible to feel good about one's self while listening to ARTEMIS & the Olympians. Some of it is boho spoken-word with deeply unhealthy psychosexual implications; some of it is Casio-driven singer/songwriter fare with deeply unhealthy psychosexual implications; some of it is harpsichord covers of Casio-driven singer/songwriter fare with deeply unhealthy psychosexual implications. All of it makes me feel as if I've lost the plot in some fundamental way.

DAY 3: Slept poorly last night. Every time I closed my eyes, horrid flash animations welled up inside my eyelids. The idea of wading through countless emo bands with names that are either remarkably long or remarkably generic in order to find music that will probably harm me seems much less charming than it did on Day 1. Dispirited, I decide to check out the "Q" section--there are only 397 Qs. I barely begin to scroll down the first column when I discover Quilted Sox Monkey Jungle. Consider that they're filed under "comedy." Consider that their ripe acoustic ballad "Claim to Fame" includes a lyric about having sex with dead girls. My mind!

DAY 4: I am not well. In my peripheral vision, evil smiley faces call "Hell-o-ooo" from unblockable banner ads. I can't shake the feeling that I really could use some free ringtones. I find a profile filed under "Other" called I'm gay like fuk!!! I'm gay like fuk!!!'s art seems to involve posting songs like Lil' flip's Sunshine under titles like "jamms 2." I am not well.

DAY 5: After listening to "spainish balad" by "I abandoned my daughter cuz im a piece of shit" in its 53-second entirety, I come to three conclusions: I'm rather glad they don't have a profile picture because I'm not ready to gaze into the eyes of unmitigated madness, and when this Web 2.0 thing kicks off, it should include some sort of crazylyzer that won't let you start your browser if your blood-crazy level is too high. The third conclusion? That under no circumstances should I listen to IAMDCIAPOS's other offering, "gino's song." But I do, oh Lord, I do. In a way, I've been listening to it ever since.

It's 11 p.m. in Stoughton, Mass., the town of 27,000 where Lori McKenna has lived since birth. The kitchen light is on, but the rest of the house is completely still. Her husband, Gene, is at the pub with friends after a long day plumbing for the local gas company, and the boys—Brian, Mark and Chris—are all asleep (it'll be years before the final two members of the McKenna clan, Meghan and David are born).

On the table is a notebook—a journal of sorts, but with song lyrics—and in her hands is an acoustic guitar (not the one her brother Richie will give her when she finally ventures out to play an open-mic night). She has no reason to believe the songs she’s writing will be heard by anyone (much less covered by Faith Hill and Mandy Moore); they’re just an outlet to process her life as a housewife, living in a small town, raising three kids. It’s a cozy kitchen in an even cozier house (a far cry from the stately white one where the family of seven will move after Lori appears with Hill on Oprah and signs her own record deal with Warner?Bros. Nashville).

McKenna grew up just down the street, the youngest of six children, and lost her mother when she was six. Her older siblings took piano lessons, but by the time she was 13, it was much easier on her family’s schedule for her to learn guitar like Richie. Brothers Bobby and Richie both wrote their own songs, and soon Lori was doing the same. But where Bobby used his songs to start bands around the neighborhood, Lori’s were always just for herself.

By 16 she was dating Gene McKenna, and by 19 they were married with a baby on the way. The young family lived with Lori’s father, and Gene traveled to Western Massachusetts each week for a plumbing job until he’d saved up enough money for a house of their own, the one with the cozy kitchen with the light on.

"When we got married, we had a bedroom and a half-bath,” Lori says in her brand new, much more spacious home, “but we would eat dinner with my father and my stepmom—and my sister lived there. ... I’m sure that if I’d had the money I would’ve wanted to live in an apartment or anything else—but I literally had three adults helping me figure out how to raise this baby. I had never even changed a diaper before I had Brian. Looking back, it was such a blessing because I had all these other people that helped me, which they still do. Gene just worked his ass off and saved his money in a year-and-a-half to put down on a house, and we lived there for 15 years.”

Lori worked part-time jobs, including a stint selling Tupperware, and kept writing songs at night, but played them for only her closest friends until she was 27. “It got to the point,” she says, “where a couple times a year, friends would come over and we’d just sit around, play cards and drink some beers, and then at the end of the night I’d play a song. I got comfortable enough to where I’d play in front of my friends.”

When Lori’s sister Marie and her sisters-in-law Andrea and Nancy finally tried to talk her into playing an open-mic night, she had no idea what they were talking about. “We have such a booming local music scene,” Lori says. “You can’t spit without hitting a local songwriter in town, and I had no idea. [My son] Brian—as soon as he was 16 and old enough to drive, he was driving himself to shows. I never tapped into that and had it figured out, ever. And then when I discovered it, I was like, ‘Good Lord! This is amazing.’”

Her goal became playing a show at The Old Vienna Kaffeehaus up in Westborough, run by local folk guru Robert Haigh. When she finally worked up the courage, it became an event. Family members piled into Andrea’s minivan, where they ate hors d’oeuvres on the hour-long drive. As an unknown artist, her set came toward the end of the show. “I did my two songs, and sat there through a few other people, and then we [left]. And then I’ll never forget—I walked downstairs and my brother was holding his guitar that I borrowed, and all of a sudden, we hear, ‘Hey!’ Robert had followed us out. I turned around and he said, ‘You should come back sometime. You did good.’ And my brother Richie was handing me his guitar—‘Keep it! This is yours! This is amazing! He followed you outside!’ I still have that guitar.”

She returned a month later, and Haigh told her to save up her money to make a CD. “It was like $5,000,” she says. “But that’s a shitload of money for someone who has three kids and a mortgage. And basically, we did it over time, and my family helped me—my brother Donald paid for some of it; my brother Richie paid for some of it. And Robert, who helped me so much, would never take a dime from me. He helped me that whole year and got me gigs and radio [appearances] and never would take a penny from me. I was just lucky to be in a situation where all of these people would help me. And then I just figured, ‘I have to sell this many CDs to get my money back.’ And that’s really all my expectation of it was: It would be great to sell enough to make my money back. And the fact that that record still sells sometimes is kind of crazy.”

That debut was Paper Wings and Halo, produced by Seth Connelly in his basement studio. McKenna included three live songs to send out to venues in hopes of getting a show, something she says she never had the courage to follow through with. But Haigh booked her a CD-release party at Boston’s legendary Club Passim. She couldn’t believe she was going to headline. She told the soundman Matt Smith, “No one’s going to come.” He replied, “Are you kidding me? It’s sold out.”

The record got rave reviews in the local media, earning a spot on the Boston Globe’s year-end Top 10 list and selling nearly 10,000 copies as McKenna started playing out more and more in the evenings. Her songs—the unfiltered musings of a young woman who grew up without a mother, married young and quickly had three children of her own—connected with audiences precisely because they were never intended for anyone else. One of her earliest fans was Jim Olsen of Northampton-based record label Signature Sounds.

“There was definitely a buzz about her on the Boston coffee circuit,” he says. “I liked the album a lot, but it wasn’t really until I saw her perform that I got it. She has a real charm and magnetism to her that attracted me as much as the music.”

Olsen signed McKenna to Signature for her sophomore record, Pieces of Me, and she began playing regionally and going on short tours. It’s always been something of a balancing act for the family. “To Gene,” she says, “it was, ‘This is inconvenient, but if she doesn’t do it, she’ll probably be unhappy, so we better make it work.’ And I think there’s still a little bit of that. I have to remind my kids and my husband that I actually do have a career. As you can tell right now, stuff needs to be done,” she adds as her three-year-old son David runs inside from swimming with his siblings. “But they shouldn’t have to worry about it, and I shouldn’t have to worry about it. They should just be kids.”

After a stripped-down album appropriately called The Kitchen Tapes, McKenna went back into the studio with a band to record Bittertown. It was the first record she didn’t have to raise money for up front, and it marked a turning point for her, both artistically and financially.

“When she made Bittertown,” says Olsen, “I felt like she was entering a territory where no one had been before. I kind of liken it to a female Springsteen—the blue-collar ethic coming from a woman’s point-of-view just has’t been explored that much in the past. We all knew when she finished Bittertown that it was going to be a really important record. We put it out and did our best with it, and it seemed like the ears of Nashville perked up.”

Those first set of Nashville ears belonged to Melanie Howard, widow of renowned country writer Harlan Howard. Her publishing company had just added songs from McKenna’s labelmate Mary Gauthier to her husband’s catalog. Gauthier told Howard about McKenna, and they listened to Bittertown online. “I couldn’t believe Lori didn’t have a publisher,”?Howard says. “I called Lori, and we chatted about her songs and publishing, her kids and life in general. We met shortly thereafter in Boston.”

“[Howard] said, ‘I wanna go back to Nashville and play songs for people,’” McKenna remembers of that first meeting. “And two weeks later, she called and said Faith [Hill] wanted to hear everything I’d ever written. So, of course, my husband was like, ‘That lady’s crazy. She’s on crack.’ And I thought ‘maybe he’s right,’ because Gene is so practical and the opposite of me—I’m the crazy dreamer and he’s as grounded as he could be. But I definitely thought, ‘That’s really nice, but nothing will ever come of it.’”

But Hill recorded four songs of McKenna’s, and three of them made it onto her most recent album, Fireflies, including the title track. Hill took McKenna under her wing, inviting her on Oprah, and Hill’s husband, Tim McGraw, signed McKenna to his StyleSonic label in partnership with Warner. As I sit with Lori in her home and David drags a box of Shrek-themed yogurt tubes to her before falling asleep on her shoulder, the family is preparing for the Soul2Soul Tour with McGraw and Hill, on which they’ll play arenas across North America.

It’s only been a month since the McKennas moved into their new house (among David’s first words after I entered were,“Can we go home now?”), and a little longer since Lori traded in her old Ford Windstar with 150,000 miles on it, many of them from touring. Lori, the four boys and her five-year-old daughter, Meghan, will hop on a tour bus with a nanny and drive from Omaha, Neb., up through Canada and back to Boston, playing venues with corporate monikers to hundreds of thousands of people. “I’ve been lucky enough to always have the kids jump on the ride with me,” she says. “I go away for four days at a time—tha’s my limit—and by the fourth day, I’m practically losing it. I’m back at the airport, wanting to steal a child from somebody else.”

Being on one of the biggest tours of the summer with kids in tow may be the only experience as surreal as her time on Oprah. Her first reaction was to think that the date of the taping was no good for her because it was the kids’ first day of school, but she quickly realized she’d be foolish to say no. “Faith sang ‘I Surrender All’ in rehearsal just to warm up her voice,” McKenna recalls.“And Oprah wasn’t there, but we were sobbing watching [Faith] warm up with her vocals. So the next day, Oprah asked her to sing the song. And if there’s anybody that sings better than that, spiritually, I don’t know who it is. It was like going to church, but it was better than going to church. And Opra’s holding my hand, and she’s singing, and she’s sobbing, and it’s like, ‘What’s happening to me? How did this happen?’ It was the strangest experience.

“And after all of that, they do photos. Oprah’s onstage with Faith, and then they said, ‘Oh, come on up and get your photo done!’ And Oprah was between Faith and I, and it was so strange because Oprah meant the photographer’s light, but she was pulling me closer to her and Faith, saying, ‘Stand in the light. Stand in the light.’ And I felt like ’d been born or something; it was the strangest thing. The whole day was filled with these highly emotional [moments]—we sang ‘fireflies’ twice that day because the first time, Faith was tearing up, and I was tearing up, and it’s hard to sing and cry at the same time. It was just this whole day of things that kept bringing me back to ‘How did I get here? How did I deserve this?’”

Olsen is thankful for the way McKenna has been thrust in the limelight, but he has a different take on the TV appearance. “I have to say, I found it a little strange—you know Oprah kind of sugarcoats everything, sort of like Faith Hill discovered Lori in her kitchen and discovered this great songwriter, belittling the fact that Lori had been at this for seven years. She’d been on the road, and she’d done a lot of great things. She’d played the Newport Folk Festival, the Sundance film Festival, won a bunch of awards, all of that. And yet it’s all sort of been airbrushed out of the story—I found [that] a little strange and a little distasteful, but I’m really glad that Lori got the recognition, and if it helps her break through, then I’ll feel better about it.”

At least in her hometown, it’s made her a celebrity. Last year, Stoughton High School inducted four alumni into its Hall of Fame. After the Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, a chemist from the Manhattan Project and a renowned architect spoke, the 1987 graduate/songwriter thought to herself, “Shit. I don’t have a speech.” Then she thought back to her high school days and about her life now and delivered this understatement to the assembled students: “I almost didn’t know that this was what I wanted to do, because when you’re in high school, you don’t know sometimes.”

But there’s no doubt that she’s doing it. She has a new record out this month, Unglamorous, and the label is gearing up for another assault on Nashville, this time with McKenna as a performer. The album was produced by Tim McGraw and Byron Gallimore, and includes a few songs co-written with other Nashville heavyweights, including Liz Rose and Mark D. Sanders. One of the most poignant is “Leaving This Life,” written with Sanders and sung from the perspective of McKenna’s mother, knowing that she was dying and knowing that her daughter was losing her. McKenna says that many of her songs, like “Paper Wings and Halo” and “Never Die Young” have been about her mother, whether consciously or not.

“I feel like the first record—every song was about my mom,” she says. “And in talking about it with other songwriters, I realized that she probably affected me more in being gone than maybe she would have if she were here. It’s so strange in a way, because I always had that strong feeling that she was watching me. If your mom is home in the kitchen and you’re going out to do something bad, you’re like, ‘She’s never gonna catch me.’ But in a way, I was kind of a good kid because I felt, like, the fear of God—I had this person who was obviously watching over me, so I couldn’t do something bad.”

The title track was a direct result of the Oprah appearance. Rose was in Stoughton; when she told her waitress that she was there to do some co-writing, the waitress said, “Oh my God, Lori McKenna? We all watched the Oprah show.”

“Liz called me,” says McKenna, “and said, ‘People think that you live in this beautiful house and that you have it all figured out, and they don’t know that David’s throwing food at us’—because God forbid I ever have a babysitter. She’s like, ‘We have to write a song about what your life is really like. It’s unglamorous—it’s the opposite of what people think it is.’

“And it’s so funny, it’s such a fun song to play, but my music has always been really important to me, and it always would be, no matter what, whether I was sitting here doing this or if nobody knew who I was and I was putting the kids to bed at night. But if I tried it [as a career] and I didn’t get anywhere—if at that first open mic, someone had told me I sucked—it wasn’t gonna kill me like it sometimes does to people, because I had these other things in my life that made me happy. So I always feel like if I hadn’t had [the children], I wouldn’t have had the guts to try, because if that was going to wreck me, it would’ve. But it couldn’t, because I had so much anyway. So it was like, ‘Oh, let’s give this a try, and if it doesn’t work, if people tell me I suck, I’ll never leave the house again and I’ll just sing to the kids.’ It’s funny because, at the end of the day, you still have to come home and make somebody a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and change a diaper. To them, i’s not like, ‘Oh, I should ask mom to make dinner, but she’s a songwriter.’ They don’t care!”

So her life has changed. I’m not the first one to give her a hard time about writing a line like, “They’re building up houses big enough to lose your love,” and then moving into a neighborhood she could’ve been singing about. (“We’re just careful not to lose the love,” she assures me, laughing.) And unlike the “one TV set, no cable” line from “Unglamorous,”?she admits the family is no longer cable-free. But when you’re raising five kids, age 3 to 18, and surrounded by a husband and father and siblings and nieces and nephews who’ve all stayed close by, it’s a little easier not to get caught up in the glitz of Nashville. Before our photo shoot, Meghan took full advantage of the hair-and-make-up artist, and David was jumping from the chair (which Lori advised me not to sit on—something about melted chocolate) to the couch. When we drove to the high school for more pictures, Lori got caught up in a discussion with the principal about Brian’s graduation. Even on a star-studded tour, her duties as a mother will be at least as demanding as her performances. And if she’s going to write a song tonight, it’s back to the kitchen table after all the kids have gone to sleep.

Platform: Xbox 360

Let’s turn the clock back to 1992, shall we? Setting: Orlando, Fla. It was a halcyon period in my early adolescence when anything—as long as it was extremely cheap or better yet free and ended before 9:30 p.m. and was within bicycling distance and didn’t involve a scowling doorman or cashier asking to see ID—was possible.

Playing on the middle-school soccer team and eyes-open frenching my girlfriend Dana after seventh-period math just weren’t giving life the kind of meaning I craved anymore. Little did I know: Things were about to turn around in a big, BIG way. first, a kid in my band class asked me if I wanted to buy a black Yamaha electric guitar for $20. The headstock had been shattered and glued sloppily back together, like the skull of some dude who’d sustained a mosh-pit injury at a Pantera show and decided the ER was for sniveling pansies. This guitar was my golden ticket. (Playing the tuba certainly wasn’t attracting any ladies.) So I talked my mom into writing a check.

Weeks later I fortuitously sat beside a kid named Jeff on my school bus. He owned a guitar with a snake-skin paint job and shared my love for hair metal. After school he taught me the chords to Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” and it wasn’t long before we started our own band… Alice Gone Bad! The notebook sketches of our T-shirt designs involved Alice grinning maniacally, holding a smoking .45 and standing over the corpse of a blood-geysering Mad Hatter.

How my dreams of heavy-metal super-stardom unraveled is not the important thing. What is important is the promise of escape that rock ’n’ roll offered during my tedious seventh-grade existence. Even though my prepubescent voice was still high-pitched, my guitar could speak for me—or rather, growl for me.

The makers of Guitar Hero II understand the power of the rock ’n’ roll fantasy, more specifically the guitar-god fantasy. In what alternate universe does the camera lens ignore a band’s lead singer because it’s so busy trying to follow the guitarist’s fret-melting ecstasy? Only this one, I assure you.

Back in early February I entered a Guitar Hero competition called Battle of the Hands at Lenny’s, an awesome dive bar near my house. Since I knew that, in addition to my raw score in the game, I was going to be judged on stage-presence and crowd response, I cut the sleeves off a yellow T-shirt, wrote “LOOSE CHICKS” in big block letters and drew a really crappy-looking hand giving a thumbs-up. Oh, and the clincher: I wore a Jack Sparrow pirate hat/wig combo.

That night I went head to head with 16 other aspiring Guitar Heroes. Organizers projected the game on a ratty white bedsheet. We played wireless guitars. I banged my head and flailed my bead-ornamented pirate locks. I fell to my knees. I played the strum bar with my teeth. I even licked the projected image (Gene Simmons, eat your heart out—no, seriously, cannibal-style).

I left my dignity on that stage. It was enough to lock up third place. Then I stood in the crowd, exhausted and sweaty, screeching like a chimpanzee getting run over by a riding lawn mower while the final two players attacked the solo section of the game-closing “Freebird.” One of the event organizers poured a 24-oz. can of PBR over their banging heads. Beer and sweat flew in all directions. Crowd response: pandemonium.

My seventh-grade band Alice Gone Bad never played an actual gig. But it was all preparation. I would one day rock Atlanta senseless with a plastic guitar and five colored buttons, then get bawled out by my wife the next day for climbing into bed smelling like I’d spent the evening touring a Marlboro waste facility. Honestly, that’s about as rebellious as I get these days: giving cleanliness the finger when I arrive home late from a video-game tournament.

But that snotty little 12-year-old—the one whose mom dropped him off at Fantastic Sam’s with a $10 bill so she could run some errands while he got a haircut, and who then talked the stylist into shaving half his head gleaming white—still squirms and kicks inside my brain every time I strap on the Guitar Hero controller. The Mad Hatter’s been dead for a long time, but it takes more than a flurry of bullets to off a dream.

Hometown: Dallas, Texas
Sole member: Annie Clark
Fun fact: Clark began composing songs on music-software package Cakewalk when she was 14.
Why she’s worth watching: Clark sent a few demos to friends once she’d completed her album. The response surprised her, especially when she started getting MySpace messages from Capitol Records.
For fans of: Joanna Newsom, My Brightest Diamond, Rufus Wainwright

St. Vincent, aka Texas native Annie Clark, loves a crowd. The singer and guitarist spent time in The Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens’ backing band before going solo. She’s also one of nine siblings, so it’s no wonder she sees those bands as big families. “Whenever you get that many people together on stage making music, there’s this transformative thing that happens, just by the sheer volume of heartbeats on stage,” she says while on break from touring with another multi-headed beast, the Arcade fire.

Though the 23-year-old enjoys the group dynamic, her solo debut, Marry Me, also has people excited. It’s filled with delicate orchestration, winsome instrumentation and the kind of sweeping fancy that makes you think Paris, France, not Paris, Texas. Track names like, “Jesus Saves, I Spend,” hint at the record’s dry wit. “I love it when a really macabre or dark lyric is done in a sweet way,” she says. “That kind of frightens me, and I like that.” first single “Now Now” is another example in which a nursery-rhyme-like refrain (“you don’t mean that / say you’re sorry”) turns more sinister through each insistent repetition of the phrase. A cheerful children’s backing chorus only adds to the eeriness.

There’s something disconcerting about the maturity of Marry Me, given Clark’s age. Even more surprising? Clark started writing some of the album’ songs when she was 15. But at 15, she’d already been playing guitar for a few years, and was composing songs on her computer and managing tours for her aunt and uncle, two jazz musicians who took her along on European tours. “Having them be successful working musicians … it’s like anything—your dad’s a banker, so you say, ‘Oh, well, that’s possible.’ They were working and traveling musicians, so I said, ‘That’s possible for me.’”

Mexico, I believe, is a bad place to be when you’re half dead, and our family friend Bill wasn’t even half dead. “I’m all the way dead,” he kept croaking.

And he wasn’t in Mexico, either. Not yet. But he was close. We were in San Diego. I had come here thinking I’d be visiting Bill in the hospital, but since, according to Bill, they did what they could to kill him there, he checked his own lymphoma ass out before my plane could arrive, and after a bunch of panicked phone calls I found him in a hotel next to a freeway that leads to El Centro.

He looked about as bad as I expected he would—not any worse, which is good. Back in the day, he and my mother had been Las Vegas junket junkies together, always hopping on a bus full of other couples with coupons in their fists to make the eight-hour drive to Vegas and stay for two days nearly free in some sub-quality hotel, returning with big stories about what they’d won or almost won.

“I wanna go out with a bang,” Bill complained, hugging me but barely, he was so weak. “Know anybody who can build a truck bomb?”

He was on his way to the same Tijuana clinic that had finished my mother—to strengthen his heart so he could come back and live through conventional medicine. I was there to go with him. Bill was my mother’s best friend when her life was leaking out of her like air from an old beach ball in the same clinic where he was now headed. I drove him there then, too, for regular visits with her, and one memory that stands out during that time is of the Haiti-trained doctor, who kept asking me and my sister to knock on his arms.

“Knock right here,” he’d say, indicating his forearm, and we did as he asked. Oddly, his arms were hard as wood and seemed just as hollow. He claimed their condition was due to some illness he’d cured himself of years before, some illness that slowly hardens you, evidently, until, unchecked, you become stiff as a board and just as dead. Luckily, though, he’d caught it at the arms and lived to open this here clinic to cure other people of their sicknesses. Every day he would administer non-FDA-approved cancer treatments to his patients, but since they’d been left for dead by the American medical industry, they figured they didn’t have anything to lose by journeying to this place that offered hope, even if it was just in the form of a wire-haired old acid vat walking from bed to bed brandishing his forearms as evidence of a cure. “Knock on wood,” he’d laugh, and everybody did, even my mother, who couldn’t lift a hairbrush.

I used to have to carry her from her bed to the bathroom because she refused to use bedpans. She started kicking the second she saw the doctor coming through the door with a bedpan under his arm. Once she knocked it right to the floor, where it clamored loud enough to wake the whole wing.

Now, whenever I wonder if I have the strength to deal with something seemingly insurmountable in my life, I just remember that Tijuana cancer clinic and how I had to cradle my own mother like an infant as her life faded from her. At that I know I can face anything, even this fresh journey with Bill, because it’s times like these that define a person, they serve as a denominator of your character, and I’m grateful they were bestowed on me. But barring the fact that my mother didn’t make it, Bill seemed determined to take on the same sojourn. I had my doubts, but I also had the memory of my mother alive and kicking in a Tijuana clinic, knocking bedpans to the floor and going out with a bang.

But when I awoke the next morning Bill had disappeared again. Later I learned he’d died on Christmas day in a casino, and not just any casino, but one of those big blow-ass casinos that look like an electric oasis in the middle of the California desert. I have to smile at that. Bill always loved to gamble, and he always bet big. So I guess he decided against the Mexican clinic for unconventional treatment after all. I guess he had his own treatment in mind. I guess he didn’t want to gamble his last days on a fight he figured he couldn’t win, so instead he headed for his idea of heaven on earth so he could go out a winner, and out with his own bang.

I’ve been struggling for the best way to explain what it’s like to “live” in a massively-multiplayer online game (MMOG) like World of Warcraft. After all, these games draw thousands of people into the same virtual community. They gossip, argue, work together and build a sense of fellowfeeling, just like a real neighborhood. So what is it like to be their neighbor? It’s a hard experience to define for anyone who hasn’t tried it. (And if you haven’t, go find a Warcraft trial disc and give it a try. It’s a strange mind-out-of-body experience, like the first time you ever watched yourself on television.) But a good way to start may be to talk about my life in online games. Usually, I’m a schmuck.

I’ve tried several online games, including a year of on-and-off Warcraft play, and in the social hierarchy, I’m always a nobody. Most of us are. You play these games in a virtual world, surrounded by thousands of players who look a lot like yourself. Everyone gets an adventure, but unlike a single-player epic, no one gets to be the hero. As veteran designer Richard Garriott puts it, most players lead a “mediocre” life: You crash through the same castles and battlefields as everybody else, and nobody gets the chance to save the world.

Now, I don’t mind being an average Joe. Playing with so many other people is pleasantly sociable, like bowling in a pick-up group or knowing you can find a game of Capture The flag anytime you’re up for it. But I’m also comfortable with it because I’ve given up on the idea that the whole world should revolve around me. And I’ve started looking for something else: I want to be a citizen. Modern MMOGs know how to entertain their players, but they don’t ask for much in return. In the same way that Disney World will hum along with or without a given family of five, World of Warcraft is always open, and the game will keep running if you don’t show up that night. Some of your fellow players may get to know you and count on you, but the community at large could care less. Compare that to some other virtual communities, like Second Life, which started off as nothing but scrubland and blank terrain: Everything that’s in the game is built, maintained and shared by the players. And as Second Life grows and evolves, a good section of those players speak out about new policies, rate changes and other issues. Their word carries weight: Without them, there is no Second Life. And plenty of other games live or die by their communities—from online gaming on Xbox Live, to alternate-reality games and augmented scavenger hunts like I Love Bees or Perplex City. If you pay the fees but don’t use your voice, aren’t you just submitting to taxation without representation?

Game designer and scholar Jane McGonigal has talked about the difference between the “superidol” and the “superhero.” With the idol, everything’s about me; but everyone can be a hero, in his or her own way. And while commercial games like Warcraft sometimes invite their players to a gamewide cause, it happens rarely and it rarely makes a difference. When you want to believe in a world, duty is as compelling as freedom. So in the next generation of online games, I want to be somebody—even if nobody knows it. I want to be called to service (like jury duty), or at least know there’s a service I’m blowing off (like jury duty). I don’t want to tell people I saved the world: I want a game that makes us feel as if we’re all saving it. And that it wouldn’t be the same without every single one of us.

Before MTV, stuff really happened

It’s a great book idea, the kind that flares to life after eight PBRs, guzzled at a bar near the Day’s Inn in Corpus Christi where, the bartender mentions, the former president of Selena’s fan club shot the 23-year-old singer then held off police for nine hours.

Hmm, Mr. Beer Glass—what about a book on all the famous music places like that?

Epting, veteran pop-culture journalist, has this enviable idea between covers now, a 600-entry word-and-picture tour of the notable musical landmarks of the last 60-odd years. The book is photographed in black and white, and it’s not especially pretty, but, oh, the places you’ll go!

Where did the real Partridge Family live? (Burbank, fool.) Where did Dick Clark host American Bandstand? (Philly, phool.) Where’s Zappa now? (Westwood Memorial Park, L.A., not far from Roy Orbison, pushing up those five-octave daisies.)

So many sites, so little time.

On a balmy Wednesday in May, the Montreal airport’s international lounge is swollen with waiting passengers and the subsonic moans of departing planes. Tegan and Sara, the embryonically sympathetic rock duo (they’re twins), are traveling to Los Angeles to tussle with their record label over the treatment of their stupendous new album, The Con.

“I actually come from a very broken home,” says Sara, “so I have some skills for this.”

“We’ve always been somewhat self-conscious about how trivial it seems to be in a band sometimes,” Tegan adds. “Sometimes it seems like it’s more about selling product than meaning. That’s where The Con stems from, like, ‘Is this really just all a con?’ Having a career, buying a house, getting married—do any of these things really give us comfort?”

The Con is the twins’ fifth album, arriving in the wake of 2004’s So Jealous, a career-defining moment that garnered a Juno Award nomination, a slot supporting The Killers and the admiration of The White Stripes, who paid the duo a backhanded compliment by recording a ragged cover version of Tegan and Sara’s breakthrough U.S. hit, “Walking With A Ghost.” A darker and more adventurous affair than its predecessor, The Con was produced by Death Cab For Cutie’s Chris Walla.

“During mixing, the board set on fire twice,” says Tegan. “[Walla] stayed really calm.”

In the airport, passengers continue to waddle out of the customs checkpoint, carrying shoes and repacking bags. “You don’t want to write about the road or things most people won’t understand or care about,” says Sara. “I wanted to make an honest record about the things that were stressing me out. For the most part, this record is an anxious one for me.”

A departure announcement crackles from an overhead speaker. “Like, you know, what is the point of being here?” asks Tegan. “The record is sort of the Tegan and Sara version of that—if you don’t have a deep-set faith in religion or spirituality, you have to ask that question every day. For me, it will probably remain unanswered for my whole life. But I’m trying to become more comfortable with asking it.”

Director: Patrice Leconte
Writer: Patrice Leconte, Jérôme Tonnerre, Olivier Dazat
Cinematographer: Jean-Marie Dreujou
Starring: Daniel Auteil, Dany Boon
Studio/Running Time: Fidélité Productions, 106 mins.

In My Best Friend, François is an antique dealer whose self-interested business practices have left him with no real friends. Bruno is a taxi driver who alienates everyone around him with his constant recitations of trivial facts. Director Patrice Leconte, as you might guess, brings the two men together in a comedy that—although visually appealing—isn’t quite as funny or touching as it could’ve been.

It’s hard to fault Daniel Auteuil for playing François as rather likeable (his subtly snarky facial expressions in the opening scene alone won me over), but it’s one of the many ways Leconte and his actors undermine the logic of the silly premise while remaining yoked to its plot. By the time we get to the end, when Bruno appears on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and, yes, puts the phone-a-friend lifeline to the test, the two men seem to have learned a lesson, but I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is. Robert Davis

Sweet Land
Director: Ali Salim
Writer: Will Weaver, Ali Selim
Cinematographer: David Tumblety
Starring: Elizabeth Reaser, Tim Guinee, Alan Cumming
Studio/Running Time: 20th Century Fox, 100 mins.

Anyone nostalgic for the stately Americana of PBS’s vintage American Playhouse series will appreciate this modest yet overachieving memory play, ushered into existence with a hand from actor/producer Alan Cumming, someone usually known for friskier excursions. Conceived as a stylish evocation of the Norwegian settlement of northern Minnesota in the 1920s, the film belongs to a pop-cultural lineage that stretches from the bucolic banalities of Garrison Keillor to the heartland harmonies of The Jayhawks. It’s an affirmation of land, faith, work and love, all of which triumph against provincial prejudice and the small-mindedness of village groupthink.

Director Ali Selim, a Minnesota native, has an innate feel for the particularities of time and place. His precise observations are heightened by Mark Orton’s chamber-pop score, which subtly juxtaposes whimsy and melancholy. Cinematographer David Tumblety gives it all an epic, sweeping majesty. His minimalist vistas of blue skies and yellow wheat fields have the timeless tint of a forgotten postcard. The camera drinks in the horizon and calls to mind the visual primacy of Terrence Malick’s plow opera, Days of Heaven. This, even if Selim’s drama of social diplomacy suggests a bit of Merchant Ivory transposed to Paul Bunyan territory.

Elizabeth Reaser is a little-known actress whose widest exposure came as the anonymous Jane Doe on several episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. Yet, watching her carry Sweet Land through nearly every frame, many viewers will feel as if they’ve known her forever. She’s all fine-tuned nuance as Inge, a mail-order bride who arrives in small-town Minnesota by train shortly after World War I. Her new husband-to-be, Olaf (an excellent Tim Guinee, expressing deep feeling with few words), is expecting a lady of pure Norwegian heritage, and he’s in for a surprise. Inge is German, which is not a very good thing to be in these circumstances. The war is still fresh in everyone’s minds, and the insular Norwegian community is wary of such an outsider. As the news leaks and spreads, the uptight Lutherans who preside over local protocol discourage the couple. first, the minister (John Heard) refuses to marry them, then shuns the pair from the church when they cohabitate under the same farmhouse roof.

Much of the story, told in a contrived double-flashback, feels like padding; it’s filled up with the small details of how Inge and Olaf not only work their land—there’s much vigorous trudging and threshing—but sympathetically come to terms with each other: two strangers in a strange new land, further estranged by their choice to commit to each other. Of course, the adversity faced by the couple is what helps knit them together, aided by the understanding shoulder of Olaf’s best friend Frandsen (played by Cumming, whose telltale impishness survives even his Lutheran drag). Frandsen is far more successful as a buddy than as a farmer, and his failing fortunes anticipate a crisis when the bank opts to foreclose on his property. Ned Beatty, in one of several prime supporting performances, plays the porcine money-man come to auction off the land. It’s here that an impulsive act cracks through the steely veneer of the village fathers, with unexpected consequences.

The film’s pleasures come less from plot development, of which there’s little, and more from the spirited engagement Reaser brings to her role. She has a fire burning under her bonnet, and is rather fiercely disinclined to indulge the claptrap imposed by her would-be neighbors. Her defiant courage—and willingness to dig deep into the dark Minnesota mud with her mate—has a proto-feminist zeal that’s probably a lot closer to the frontier spirit than quaint homilies about Middle American values. If Sweet Land seems a bit precious in its devotion to period detail, and what surely must be a kind of Minnesotan creation myth, its generosity to its cast is equally lavish.

Strum As You Are: How the flannel brigade saved and killed rock in one fell stroke

And so in 2007 I find myself thinking about the genre known as “grunge” more than any sane person rightly should. Popularized by Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and, of course, Nirvana, grunge was based entirely on alienation, nostalgia and loud/soft dynamics. It was joyless, self-righteous and predicated against a demonized mainstream. As a teenager, I sucked the stuff up; revisiting it now feels like stumbling over a yearbook picture of myself with zits and a rat-tail.

Kyle Anderson, an editor at Spin, knows the feeling. As someone who cares enough about grunge to write a book about it, even he acknowledges that grunge has not aged well, and so instead of trying to redeem the genre, his book wisely sticks to chronicling its history and examining its cultural significance.

If rock ’n’ roll is a genre for the people, it was hard to tell in the late ’80s, when the airwaves were ruled by plasticized hair metal so divorced from the average rock fan’s reality that it seemed more fantastical than any Lord of the Rings fantasy Led Zep could have cooked up. Like any gilded Babylon, hair metal’s foil would have to be its opposite: something dark, messy and utterly average.

A constellation of young Seattle-based musicians answered the call. They dressed down in flannel, favored unglamorous heroin over flashy cocaine and presented themselves as politically aware yet economically indolent. They packaged all this anti-glitz ideology into loud, sludgy music that took its cues from Black Sabbath-style metal and wanky ’70s rock. Pace-setting grunge bands like Green River and Mother Love Bone, with their working-class mien, unwittingly sparked the “accidental revolution” that would topple the towers of hair while screwing up rock music for a good long while. Anderson’s book does a solid job of navigating the details of grunge’s brief lifespan. Like the ascent, the burnout happened remarkably quickly: Cobain committed suicide; imitators like Candlebox diluted grunge’s claims to authenticity; the genre’s testosterone-fueled alienation metastasized into Nickelback’s grunge-lite and Limp Bizkit’s abominable rap-metal.

Anderson correctly argues that the grunge explosion paved the way for the greater phenomenon of 1990s alternative music. He has some interesting things to say about how grunge was one of the last mainstream genres to play out before the ’90s Internet boom changed the way we think about bands forever. He makes a fine point in noting that grunge’s sexless introspection doomed it from the start, since rock ’n’ roll has always been about sex. And he occasionally pierces the crystallized view most of us hold of the genre, noting, for instance, that the grunge scene’s prolific use of Ecstasy is mostly forgotten because heroin fits the narrative better.

Would that more of the book offered such canny insights. As a summary, it’s helpful, but Anderson’s occasionally sharp analysis is marred by incoherent argument. For someone so aware of “the shifts of historical significance over time,” he seems awfully unconcerned with penetrating myths. For instance, he neglects to investigate Nirvana’s backstory, claiming that “Historical details don’t matter to legends—when you are immortal, the past becomes wholly irrelevant.” Unlikely propositions and circular arguments pepper the book—like this one, on idealism in the movie Singles: “Though it seems naive today, it made perfect sense in 1992. The fact that it did make sense and the sense that those ideas ultimately failed is why it seems so naive now.” Aroo?

In the end, you wonder if this book might’ve been more useful written by someone who doesn’t have such a blindly adoring view of rock music. Anderson makes no effort to disguise his disdain for genres not played on guitars by white people. One glaring example: “While there are ideas and concepts to be analyzed in hip-hop, trying to draw hidden meaning from Dipset songs just seems like a massive waste of time.” (This from someone who regards Soundgarden titling songs “665” and “667” as a “tremendously high-concept joke.”)

This bias makes Anderson seem obtuse—he’s constitutionally incapable of recognizing rap as the unified mainstream craze that grunge once was. His analysis might have been more sound were he willing to acknowledge the possibility that his rock-hero vanguard is obsolete, and that grunge was its last gasp. But no: “There will always be a need for guitar-based music,” he writes in his conclusion, as if the statement were self-evident. But given the prominence and expressive possibilities of other genres, given that music naturally evolves over time, given that guitar-based music has had a good run, is it really?

For those who believe in dinosaurs

Boys can always be divided into two categories: those who throw rocks (the popular majority) and those who collect them (the inevitable outcasts). It’s from this latter category of fossil fanatics that mammologists, paleontologists and other such obscure professionals emerge—professionals like Tim flannery. The scientist’s most recent work, Chasing Kangaroos, is fundamentally about—no shocker here—flannery’s personal journey to understand the kangaroo. While there are bouts of humor and anecdote, the memoir is regrettably often as lackluster as it sounds.

Still, despite lapses of intrigue, Chasing Kangaroos has actually done something quite novel. In a time where pride in one’s country is a rarity, flannery has written a love letter to his, a piece of literature that hasn’t been drudged through the mire of politics. Just as much as Chasing Kangaroos is about the evolution of a creature, it’s also flannery’s acknowledgement of Australia’s inherent uniqueness, a uniqueness he begs is not casually lost in the growing conformity of the global landscape.

SoHo? So so

Beatrice has what it takes to be one of those reality-show/Internet vixens that muck up the pop-culture discourse these days: a mess of beauty and sex and dubious potential. A staggering beauty, at 25 she is a thesis short of a college degree, lives on a modest trust fund, and doesn’t do much else. Her artist-on-the-verge husband—and, it seems, just about everyone else she knows—doesn’t need her for more than sex (or the prospect of it).

This would be enough of a life if she had a webcam. Problem is, author Spanidou sticks Bea in 1970s New York, where one at least needed to be interesting, if not gainfully occupied. The Vietnam War, The Who’s lyrics, even a Lou Reed cameo—somehow all feel extraneous here. SoHo, as a factory wasteland of daily, violent crime, isn’t drawn convincingly enough to erase visions of the Prada Epicenter. Before feels like it’s been stranded in a past that denies it any relevance.

Songwriter gladly wanders outside the box (or boxes)

Kim Richey’s first album in five years is not as much a return to form as a joyous abandonment of it. Whereas Richey’s previous work relied heavily on expert songcraft and a particular world-weariness, Chinese Boxes finds her stepping into brave new sonic territory while digging even deeper into the inexhaustible resource of human relationships.

Produced by Giles Martin (son of Sir George) and recorded in Richey’s part-time home, London, Boxes combines the laconic textures of ’70s singer/songwriter pop with her singularly wry take on the state of things; like an Aimee Mann album, only more happy-go-lucky. Richey broadened her cache of writing partners for the project, and to great effect, collaborating with Mindy Smith (“Drift”), Bill DeMain (“Chinese Boxes”) and Neilson Hubbard (“Turn Me”). Chinese Boxes is a testament to resilience, an encouraging soundtrack for emotional expansion.

Scandinavian troubadour has a head full of ideas

While Thomas Dybdahl may be too offbeat to lead a Norwegian invasion (the outgoing Sondre Lerche suits the role better), his gently majestic sophomore effort could easily inspire serious cult devotion. Science carries on the brooding chamber-folk tradition of Jeff Buckley, Elliott Smith and endless others who’ve sat in a lonely room murmuring desolate tunes. Despite shivery vocals, however, Dybdahl never feels depressing, because his craftsmanship is exhilarating to behold. The beautiful, terse melodies resist easy sentimentality, and the intricate arrangements prize subtlety and variety, adding strings, vibes, bass saxophone and steel guitar to familiar acoustic settings. Dybdahl’s songs constitute a single introspective suite touching on disillusionment (“Always”) and regret (“Dice”), but also striking some surprisingly positive chords. Powered by soulful Hammond organ, “U” recalls an old-fashioned R&B seduction ballad, and the bubbly “B A Part” urges a troubled friend, “Hey man, don’t feel sad … Don’t let yourself go down.” Intimate yet never self-indulgent, Science turns one man’s busy inner world into an intriguing drama.

In the awkward first-date dynamic of the average music interview, the interviewer usually has the dramatic advantage of prior history.

With the help of a few press clips, he can identify the thrice-beaten dead-horse topics for any given band, and — depending on the mood and flow of the conversation—either humanely forego re-asking about them, or else buy time with their pathetic deployment. For The Magic Numbers, consider the following topics officially scorched earth: A) the fact that the band is composed of two brother-and-sister pairs, B) the Stodarts’ circuitous travels from a politically violent Trinidad to New York to the U.K., and C) any sonic kinship with the Mamas and the Papas or Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys. It’s perhaps a testament to Romeo Stodart’s warmth, charm and basic good sportsmanship that we discussed none of these things.

The interview itself was something of a breakthrough. After being obscured by the storm of dust kicked up by the merger of the Capitol and Virgin labels within the EMI family, the U.S. release date for sophomore disc Those the Brokes was repeatedly delayed, while the band was redirected to Astralwerks, who, Stodart explains, “were interested from day one. It all turned out to be a positive thing.”

With the American release happening this summer, things seem back on track even if the larger universe has shifted slightly. More interesting than even record label politics is The Magic Numbers’ unique space in the modern musical landscape. At a moment when the U.K. is rife with so many guitar-wielding Cockney street gangs clattering back the echoes of a Paul Weller tube ride, The Magic Numbers stand apart from any of the reigning “scenes.” “You see all these bands that look the same,” Stodart comments, “hopefully we’ll coexist alongside all the other stuff.”

When the band debuted in 2005, its distance from the New New Wave post-punk explosion was equally dramatic, and the English press in particular vivified le difference by waving the Next Big Thing flag with abandon. But to place The Magic Numbers on a pivot point between some imagined, rootsy realm of more personalized songwriting and folk-inspired integrity and the current crop of well-marketed angular rock seems overwrought, particularly when the shorthand inevitably involves some parsing of what the word “pop” might mean at a time when just about everything popular in rock circles is somehow “alternative,” and true pop music in its Beyoncé form basically has had nothing to do with Brian Wilson since the days of The Ronettes.

‘MORE SOULFUL’
There is no doubt that The Magic Numbers can at times be warm, fluffy and cooing in ways that must inevitably be described as “sun-drenched,” but on their second album Those the Brokes, the performances are looser, livelier and echo from places less predictable than Laurel Canyon or Malibu. For instance, the jaunty but insistent guitars and rolling bass line on “Take A Chance” casually mirror Dave Grohl’s brooding intro on the Foo fighters’ “Everlong,” while opener “This Is A Song” simmers with electronic flourishes at the outset.

Romeo Stodart finds other analogues. “This record’s more soulful,” he explains. “We’ve been listening to a lot of Stax records, with those great drums and bass. We started playing some songs like that, and it felt like a departure for a bit, but within a few hours of working on stuff it becomes The Magic Numbers. Generally, we listen to soul music, country music and singer/songwriters, the emphasis being on songwriting.”

“Undecided,” with its Memphis lilt, plays out the suggestion, as do the soul-gospel opening slides of “Slow Down.” If there’s a ’60s fetish to be found here it’s in the tendency to treat male/female harmony as a basic plot point in a far more Bradyesque and chipper way than, say, the Frank Black/Kim Deal deadpan siren/gutterball howler approach that frequently prevails in harder acts.

C’MON, GET HAPPY
The fact that The Magic Numbers’ choice of sonic textures winds up with a vibe that’s somehow “happier” is not lost on the band, who, for their part, are keen to have a Magic Numbers show be a fun experience, particularly at festivals where they’re not always preaching to the converted.

“For a festival we want to play more of the uptempo stuff. But we also try to make it really intimate. The best shows are the ones where you feel so involved with the group you’re seeing. When we leave and walk off the stage, you thrive on the idea that people connected and enjoyed it,” Stodart notes. But he’s quick to point out that a proper Magic Numbers show is not as committed to a single mood. “The perception is that we’re a happy, sunshine, summer ’60s band, [but] when we get more than an hour we can have more of a journey. When we walk offstage we ask each other how the show went and if it’s a quieter show sometimes it will feel really meaningful to us but the crowd might be quieter and we’ll ask ourselves, ‘Did they enjoy it?’”

On tours with everyone from The flaming Lips to U2 to a forthcoming jaunt with Rufus Wainwright, The Magic Numbers have had a chance to be fans themselves. “A lot of the bands we love and listen to, we’ve been able to play with. Touring with Rufus Wainwright — that’s a set we’ll watch every night.” Another component of the Numbers’ touring life is constant writing. “I’m always writing,” Stodart admits. “I’ve always been suspect of bands that take three months off to write records. Lyrically, I’m always writing things in a book. … You never get that hundred-percent thing on the road, but once we went into the studio, hearing it all back it fell into place. Because we were producing this record ourselves, we really tried to get the band across in terms of performances.”

The goal is an earnest connection. “We really want people to feel it,” Stodart muses.

The Magic Numbers’ essential wish is both lofty and simple. “I hope that we’re a band that people can believe in. We write about life and love and relationships that have gone wrong, and we’re trying to get that out. Listening to music you want to feel like this song is there to help you and comfort you. There are so many groups, but — given the chance — we’re a band that can hopefully have a long life in music. I want our music to be there for people.”