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The Mountain Goats
Sometimes John Darnielle has found friends or collaborators to play with him, but for almost a dozen full-lengths on record, CD, and tape since 1991 the Mountain Goats have been little else but the Southern Californian native, his howling voice, and his furious acoustic guitar strumming. Darnielle believes in the inextricable power of the love song. With romantic love -- and it is almost always romantic -- at the heart of each song, he writes about several recurring subjects: hounds, the fall of Rome, Aztec deities, weather patterns, going to Georgia or Bristol or Chino. Nearly all those themes are on last year's Full Force Galesburg, in addition to a significant new obsession with word and language and the existential and interpersonal dilemmas they create. On "Masher," after coming out of jail -- "I don't mean jail exactly" -- Darnielle softly sings, "I am losing/ Control of the language again." And on "Snow Owl" his lover "took apart the alphabet letter by letter." Another new development: something approaching complex guitar playing; quieter, more confident singing; and a departure from worst-is-always-best boombox recording fidelity.
Kendra Smith
Someone once said that bassist and singer Kendra Smith was both the Nico and the Moe Tucker of the Dream Syndicate, the Los Angeles paisley underground band that made Velvets-esque devotional music. Later, with guitarist David Roback in the group Opal, Smith helped craft the hazy, lazy, addled prototype for Mazzy Star. After leaving L.A. and the trappings of civilization (like phones), Smith moved to the woods of Northern California, ostensibly quitting music and other people. A battered and chipped green pump-organ brought her back. That organ drones at the center of almost every wildly different song on 1995's Five Ways of Disappearing. It's the sound of invocation on "Bohemian Zebulon," a quiet hum at the back of "Temporarily Lucy," and foil to the guitar and harmonium that sparkle on "Space Unadorned."
Brother JT & Vibrolux
Brother JT is John Terlesky, who, like several of the performers at Terrastock, has about a zillion side projects. Terlesky's pedigree goes back to 1986, the genesis date for the Original Sins, a Pennsylvania band that pulled a magic bus into an oily garage. On solo records like 1996's Rainy Day Fun Terlesky flirts with Syd Barrett-style folkiness. His band Vibrolux give more method to his madness. That same year saw Doomsday Rock, with Brother JT & Vibrolux trafficking a darker, sludgier psychedelic warped by end-of-the-world movie samples and fuzzed bass -- on the bell curve of an LSD trip, Doomsday was not the rainbow explosions of the peak, but the twisted cartoons that keep you from sleeping at the end of a long come-down. In short, someone did eat the brown acid.
Brother JT & Vibrolux also open for the Bevis Frond (see next page) Thursday, April 16, at 9 p.m. at the Great American Music Hall. Tickets are $10.
Damon & Naomi
This pair -- two-thirds of the pretty, literate trio Galaxie 500 -- craft pretty, literate pop songs full of abstruse poetic references and philosophical questions masquerading as simple lyrics. More Sad Hits, recorded in 1992, was drenched in glorious reverb, courtesy of longtime collaborator and Galaxie producer Kramer. Playback Singers, the duo's third album, this time recorded on their own, creates moments of distance within immediate clarity on "Turn of the Century" and wistful longing born of love on "Kinetoscope." Nods to a Terrascopic planet include covers of Tom Rapp (the psychedelic folk singer who recorded as Pearls Before Swine) and Masaki Batoh, of Japanese throwbacks Ghost. The liner notes, quoting a slogan from Indian movie musicals, say, "Compromising quality of reproduction for the sake of nostalgia," and do not lie.
The Olivia Tremor Control
While not completely developed, the roles of the three first and still principal bands in the Elephant 6 collective are becoming increasingly defined. The collective's center of gravity, the Apples in Stereo (who aren't playing the fest), still deliver sugar and reverent nostalgia: They're the taste buds and the memory of the collective body. With smart lyrics and confessional singing on their second record, Neutral Milk Hotel (see next entry) are the brain and the mouth. The Olivia Tremor Control, who have not yet followed their debut triple album, sometimes experiment with found sounds on record but ground most live performances with delicious pop songs lushly played by the band's five core members and whomever they can pull up onstage. They are the ears and the fun. Or something like that.
Neutral Milk Hotel
"And also like all men perhaps there'll be an occasion -- maybe a summer night sometime -- when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too because he'll know it's just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important, really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind." -- Rod Sterling, 1959, quoted in The Journal of Ride Theory No. 3
Windy & Carl
Two of the purer practitioners of what is called space rock -- or more specifically the ambient side of the genre -- bassist Windy Webber and guitarist/keyboardist/effects pedal coordinator Carl Hultgren are more interested in texture than form. Portal, recorded in 1994 and 1995, used a few chord changes and song titles ("Ode to Spaceman," "Sound Ignition," "Gravital Loft") to establish a theme of space and exploration. The cool waves of compositional sound on Antarctica -- part of the local label Darla's Bliss Out series -- made the 1997 album into three pieces about exploration of a more terrestrial sort.
