Shearwater
The Golden Archipelago
Matador
While many groups wear their influences on their sleeve, Austin’s Shearwater defies typecasting. The band’s dramatic musical arsenal spares it from making mere pop Xeroxes: Singer Jonathan Meiburg plays with eerie falsettos and operatic growls; the group’s swoops and leaps in volume are like a symphony’s (albeit one with electric guitars and booming drums). Shearwater has honed its approach over a decade, and its sixth album, The Golden Archipelago (Matador), is impressive. Meiburg is a devout naturalist, and the material is sea-soaked, focusing on the world’s islands, their fate at the hands of man, and man’s ultimate fate at the hands of nature. Lyrically, there’s menace and foreboding, but there’s also a Paul Bowles—like global curiosity (the CD comes with a fifty-page travel dossier). Heady stuff, but it’s buoyed by lush arrangements (“Uniforms”), Steve Reich–style minimalism (“Hidden Lakes”), and moments of riveting intensity (“Black Eyes”). Songs are short, and some come off as fragments. But when, as on “Castaways,” the band rolls all its strengths into a three-minute burst, the results are breathtaking.
Patty Griffin
Downtown Church
Credential
If someday a history is written of Patty Griffin’s recordings, 2007’s Children Running Through will no doubt stand as a milestone: The Austin songstress discovered she could really thrill her audiences by letting loose. It was that album combined with another, a session with her idol Mavis Staples, that convinced Griffin to record gospel tunes. Downtown Church (Credential) was produced by Nashville Svengali Buddy Miller, who put Griffin at the pulpit in a Civil War–era Presbyterian church and let her go. He rounded up a few of his bandmates from the Alison Krauss/Robert Plant Raising Sand album, and as a result, Church has a similar rootsy vibe. Griffin leans toward the folkie end of gospel, though her song selection is diverse. A couple of original duets seem out of place, as does her take on “Virgen de Guadalupe” (though, oddly, Big Mama Thornton’s decidedly secular “I Smell a Rat” fits right in). But mostly it’s just Griffin and her remarkable voice digging into great numbers by everyone from Dorothy Love Coates to Hank Williams. She’s having a blast, and as time has proved, when Griffin has fun, so will you.
Midlake, the acclaimed psychedelic folk band from Denton, has a curious background. All five of its members were jazz musicians at the University of North Texas; they formed in 1999 to play Herbie Hancock–influenced fusion. Leader Tim Smith has been up front about having to educate himself about the rock world, which makes sense: The band does sound as if it is making things up as it goes along. Its third album, The Courage Of Others (Bella Union), mines a drowsy, delicate mid-tempo vein. Smith’s voice has a Thom Yorke quality to it—Radiohead was the band that flipped him from sax to guitar—but Midlake lacks the English band’s drive. Courage is largely a somber affair peppered with flourishes of English folk; Smith claimed in an interview that he wanted the band to sound more like Jethro Tull (!), yet even Tull rocked out now and then. Smith’s songs are artfully assembled, though every one is sung with the same harmonies, and the melodies and lyrics meander. Only a few manage to stick. There’s just not much excitement here; maybe it’s time to work some Herbie Hancock back into the set.
Gerard Cosloy
The music exec, who lives in Austin, is the co-owner of Matador Records, a label with a huge presence in the indie rock world: Its artists have included Teenage Fanclub, Pavement, Liz Phair, Yo La Tengo, and Cat Power, plus Austin acts Shearwater (see review) and Harlem (which has a new album out in April). He has just released the all-Texas compilation Casual Victim Pile.
A lot of people know you through your work in the eighties with Homestead Records, which signed bands like Sonic Youth and was highly influential in the alt-rock world. What do you remember most about those days? I remember we didn’t have a lot of heat in the office. I remember that the records sold rather poorly. I remember a lot of angry people calling up, wondering when they were going to get paid. But I feel good about a lot of the records that were out during that era.
How did Matador Records get started? [Founder] Chris Lombardi had been a sales guy at [indie distributor] Dutch East India Trading, which owned and operated Homestead, and he and I were in a car pool together. Around 1989, after he’d left Dutch East, Chris attended a show that I put on by an Austrian duo called H. P. Zinker. A few days later, Chris put them in the studio to make a record. I started helping him out with contractual stuff. There were a lot of projects I steered in his direction, and after some months, he asked me to join up with him. Our very first record was an H. P. Zinker twelve-inch, followed by a Dustdevils twelve-inch, and I can’t remember if our next was Superchunk or Railroad Jerk. But it was Teenage Fanclub that put us on people’s radar.
Why did you end up in Austin? It was not a tough decision. I like it here. There was a lot musically that I’d been a fan of, from the 13th Floor Elevators and the Moving Sidewalks to the Dicks and Big Boys and Scratch Acid and the Butthole Surfers and Nice Strong Arm and Spoon and Trail of Dead. There’s a long history of bands I’ve been crazy about over the years, and that hasn’t changed.
Which brings us to the Casual Victim Pile compilation, a great anagram for “live music capital.” Thank you! Credit must go to the Internet anagram generator.
The band list includes some pretty obscure choices. Some are veterans of considerable repute. The Golden Boys just put out their fourth album. I hope that people know Harlem, or else Matador’s been doing a bad job. But as far as the others go, that’s the point of the record. There is an infrastructure in place in this town, but for bands who are hard to classify, there’s not as much of a safety net.
It’s invigorating to hear all these new groups. Did you find them yourself? It’d be an overstatement to say I’m in the clubs every night. These are bands I like. I made a short list, and at the end of the summer of 2008, we had a finished fourteen-song master. But I had a large house fire last August, and that destroyed all the artwork. The weird stroke of luck is, it gave us time to include an additional five bands, which made it a much better record. I hope people like it; it’s a very arbitrary overview.
Some people know you for a nonmusic venture: your hugely popular sports blog, Can’t Stop the Bleeding. I’ve always been a sports fan. I’m interested in the mechanizations of sports media and how that collides with things happening in people’s lives. The blog isn’t limited to who won or lost; there’s a lot of other stuff too. I hope the humor comes through.
If you were as frank about the music business as you are about sports, this might be problematic for you. Perhaps. There have been times when I’ve been pretty frank about the music business, and, well, that hasn’t always done me a lot of favors.
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