Wow & Flutter Golden Touch
(Jealous Butcher)
[POST-POST-PUNK] Even through the fuzz that clings to every song on Wow & Flutter’s Golden Touch, it’s easy to hear the irony dripping off the album’s centerpiece, “A Little Help.” Over glockenspiel, banjo and handclaps, a member of the trio (all three contribute vocals, but it’s near impossible to tell [...]

*And free.
Using a MacBook and the audio program Ableton Live, Easter Egg (SE Portland native Nathan Pham) has jammed 240 different samples into 70 minutes of complete mash-up madness onto his most recent album, Jackin’ For Beats. It was released as a free download last Thursday (click here or visit Easter EggSpace to grab it), [...]

[GOLDEN NEWBIES] It would be misleading to say that Nelson Kempf and Keeley Boyle—the ridiculously young duo that performs as the Old Believers—are coming into their own. From all indications, the Alaskan transplants were just born this way—playing crushing, refined Americana pop while most of their peers were lowering their expectations and applying to community [...]

[EXPERIMENTAL POP] Luke Wyland, the man behind local experimental-popsters Au, is a master of composition. As such, the band’s new record, Verbs, is a dizzying head rush of twists and turns. Beautiful and restrained instrumental passages lead into maniacal, choral group chants; vaudevillian theatrics nestle against almost-classical backdrops; accordions operate in waltz time. Yet, [...]

[TRUE SCHOOL HIP-HOP] In hip-hop’s long-gone lighthearted days—when the best rappers called themselves the kings of rock—groups like Animal Farm weren’t all that unusual. “Ragtime Gal,” a song entirely dedicated to using outdated Roaring Twenties vernacular (“Jump in my jalopy, baby, we’ll have a ball/ We can stroll down lover’s lane if you just [...]

Ladies and Gents, a web-only CD review from Michael Mannheimer. It’s not often that one man can perform both one of the best and one of the worst shows that I’ve ever seen. Yet whenever I think of Phil Elverum’s (formally the Microphones, now known as Mount Eerie) music, those shows, three years and polar [...]

[HYPNOTIC POST-ROCK] Expectations can go a long way in determining how we perceive a record. Just the cover and track list of Pacific UV’s sophomore full-length, Longplay 2, should be enough of a tip—in the land of one-word song titles and mostly white album art, orchestrated instrumental rock is king.
Yet it’s too easy to crown [...]

[TIME-CAPSULE COUNTRY] There’s a small contingent of singer-songwriters who are quietly saving country music, and Shelley Short is one of them. It’s not just thanks to her subtly twangy voice or string-laden music. Rather than waxing naively cute, à la Jenny Lewis, or idiotic (most modern country), Short encapsulates much of what makes old-school [...]

[WEIRD POP] Rachel Taylor Brown’s new recording begins with an unsettling collage of toy piano, ringing telephones, muted voices and scattered crowd noise. It’s an aurally arresting intro, and on most artists’ albums it would make a perfect, say, 30-second lead-in to the first song. But this is a Rachel Taylor Brown album, and that [...]

[FOLK-POP] Gena Gastaldi’s songs speak—or rather sing—to Portlanders. Like many of this city’s residents, Gastaldi is a transplant. The creative force behind Day of Lions, she moved from Alaska in 2004, and the folkstress has been crafting lovely, subdued folk songs with a rotating cast of musicians ever since.
But that cast has been solidified on [...]