Big Shots

FOUR INDIE BANDS THAT CAN EXPECT A BIG YEAR.

by Doug Wallen

Bands of a Feather

“His pupils were really dilated,” she remembers. “He was like, ‘I’ve got magic inside my bones somewhere. Your skin has a switch and it makes a slingshot come out. You have magic spells inside of you.’”

Sexy Sachs: Animal Collective love Tickley Feather. You will too.

Weird stuff. That makes it a natural fit for Sachs’ bittersweet and insular songs, which find her warbling mysteriously over cheap keyboard beats and echoing melodies like a princess trapped underwater. “I wanted to incorporate that because he’s a big part of the reason why I started recording,” explains Sachs, “which is being stuck at home through my single parenthood.”

Sachs grew up in the small town of Lexington, Va., and studied some in Richmond. She moved to Philly almost five years ago just after finding out she was pregnant. She ultimately split up with Aiden’s father, moved into her own apartment and devoted herself full-time to motherhood. Her musical output soon followed, aided by the gifts of a four-track recorder and keyboard from her mother and a RadioShack microphone from her father. An ex gave her an effects processor as a long-term loan, and Tickley Feather was born.

“I burned some CDs for friends back home and I wanted to make up a funny name that signified I was just joking around,” she says. “I decided Tickley Feather sounds like a tarty name.” Using the equipment she had, she recorded songs that wound up on two split 7-inch singles released on friends’ record labels. One of those made its way into the hands of the “it” indie band of the moment Animal Collective, which asked to release a Tickley Feather album on its Paw Tracks imprint.

Most bands dream of an offer like that, but it psyched out Sachs. “I got scared. I became really self-aware,” she admits. “I battled with that. I was trying so hard to leave my own head.” That’s when she decided to compile the album from existing Tickley Feather songs instead of recording new and improved ones. “I probably couldn’t have moved on until I got this out. I feel like this stuff is really honest. It’s like coming out of the closet.”

Take the hip-hop-sounding “Sorry Party.” “This song is so, so silly,” she says. “It’s about drinking too much beer and being like, ‘Sorry I spent you, money. Sorry I drank you, beer.’” Several songs sound like eerie nursery rhymes, while “Convention” starts as a sleek instrumental only to segue into pricklier territory.

The album is slated to come out in late April, and it’s a given that Animal Collective fans are curious to hear it. They got a taste when Sachs toured with the band last year, playing to sold-out crowds. There were lots of teenagers in the audience, including obnoxious boys, but there were also girls who beamed up at Sachs while she played. “I remember feeling that way, but all I had was, like, Courtney Love. I was glad to be that for them.”

Rebel yell: YMD's music will eat you whole.

Must-See YMD

“I feel like we’re more of a punk band than a rap group, as weird as that sounds,” says Bryan Poerner, half of the Yah Mos Def, over a vegan Korean dinner in Old City with Rick Mitchell, the band’s other half. If you’ve seen the YMD live, you know where Poerner is coming from. The two may sling schoolyard boasts and esoteric references over blotchy beats and left-field samples, but they also thrash around like a hardcore band, and scream over snatches of Sonic Youth and Bikini Kill.

“After our first show we realized we couldn’t get onstage and just rap in the traditional sense, because it’s really boring live,” recalls Mitchell. “We realized we had to actually perform, and I think that influenced the way we wrote songs.”

“Even my favorite bands I can’t watch for 45 minutes. So our longest set is like 19 minutes,” says Poerner.

Mitchell adds, “I’d rather punch people in the face and walk away.”

He’s speaking metaphorically, but it’s an apt description of the sweat-drenched intersection of punk rapture and hip-hop bounce that the YMD inhabit. Take “Global Liberation Army,” a thumping entry on their long-awaited full-length Excuse Me, This Is the Yah Mos Def.

“If you listen to it, it’s a hardcore song,” Poerner points out. “The cadence of our voice makes it sound like it’s a rap song, but it’s definitely a hardcore song.” The track’s Minor Threat sample underscores his argument, but it won’t garner them any fewer comparisons to the Beastie Boys, who themselves began as a punk band.

Poerner and Mitchell have been friends for years. Mitchell was once in a band called the Clocks that was signed to Poerner’s Track Star Records. In 2004 Poerner thought up some rap-like lyrics while running, and crafted a beat that night from a record by the ’90s hardcore act Groundwork, enlisting Mitchell along the way. Then came the moniker, which links the defunct punk band Yah Mos and the rapper/actor Mos Def.

A lot of people took the YMD as a joke in the beginning, if they knew how to take them at all. But gradually, thanks to furious live shows and infectious recordings, the project grew larger than Poerner and Mitchell had ever planned. Copies of the self-released Plays Ugly for Suckers EP (a Nation of Ulysses reference) began flying off merch tables, people outside the band lent a hand with beats and production, and online buzz crept into remote corners of the country.

“We’ve probably both been in bands since we were 15 or 16,” says Poerner.

Adds Mitchell, “But this is the first one that’s sold 2,000 records. It’s weird because it was like a hobby for us, just something fun to do.”

The Yah Mos Def’s album, out next month on Princeton-based My Pal God Records, is raw and raucous, sneaking wiser-than-expected lyrics into their wiseass delivery. On “New Direction” the YMD shrilly command Philly, neighborhood by neighborhood, to “pay attention,” capping with the rhyme “from East Falls to these balls” and a nod to the Bouncing Souls. “Stockton to Malone” is more reserved, letting the guys’ thorny tradeoffs breathe more, while “Jive Like Jehu” references the Main Line as easily as American Psycho.

A few songs, like the Television-sampling “I’m Gonna Be Under Your Bed,” were left off the record because of potential legal issues. But everyone they did ask for permission said yes, including a representative of Ween. “He said, ‘Just steal it. That’s what we’d do,’” Mitchell remembers with a grin. “That was probably the coolest response we got.”

Weird beards: Pattern Is Movement went from a five-piece to a duo.

Dangerous Duo

With no more guitars, it’s just Andrew Thiboldeaux singing and pounding all manner of keys (including bass notes) while Chris Ward attacks the drums. Maybe that’ll shake the “math rock” tag that haunted the band’s first two albums, 2004’s The (Im)Possibility of Longing and 2006’s Stowaway.

“It was new for sure but we were really excited about it,” says Thiboldeaux of the shrinkage. “These days it’s not uncommon for a two-piece to work. And I think it’s working live because we wrote the songs as a two-piece.”

Ward admits he has to write drum parts differently now that there are no guitars to link to in the songs. “Now there has to be a connection [to Thiboldeaux] at all times,” he observes, adding, “I’m still at the front of the stage. That hasn’t changed. I got that idea from my mom. She said, ‘You shouldn’t be in the back.’”

Pattern have been playing out as a duo for less than six months, but they had plenty of practice while recording their third album All Together in North Carolina with engineer Scott Solter, who recorded Stowaway and later remixed it into a whole new album called Canonic. They chose to work with Solter again not just because of how well those records came out, but also to have a sonic theme between Stowaway, Canonic and the new one.

“We knew what he was capable of,” says Ward, noting they took 30 days to work with Solter on All Together, nearly twice as long as they had for Stowaway. “We broke it up into four stints, which made it feel like forever. And we spent four or five months at home, demoing it. But we knew that more time with [Solter] gave him more time to work. He’s part of the process. We wanted to give him that freedom, and have the freedom to fuck up takes.”

The result is a record that breathes so deeply and vividly, you scarcely miss the guitars. Ward’s drums bristle and explode under Thiboldeaux’s daisy chains of melodies, which manage to sound different on every song. “A lot of that has to do with Scott,” says Thiboldeaux. “We used only a few keyboard instruments but he manipulated them beautifully.”

There are also bouts of serious orchestration, especially on the already-out single “Right Away,” a dizzying cloud of strings and other lush additions. “It was the first song we recorded,” Ward recalls. “The orchestration is a throwback to The (Im)possibility of Longing. Stowaway was bare, just because we didn’t have time. That’s Andrew’s forte—a massive amount of orchestration.”

The combination of Thiboldeaux’s swooning, near-operatic singing style and Ward’s fierce yet deconstructive drumming, surrounded by flurries of shimmering keys and sometimes strings, makes Pattern Is Movement more unusual than ever. The only band one could rightly compare them to is Radiohead, what with the jaunty song structures and opaque, repetitive lyrics. In fact Pattern now cover Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” in every live set, a nifty feat that goes a long way toward roping in new listeners.

All Together is due out in April on the Colorado-based label Hometapes, which released Canonic. It’s poised to be the long-awaited breakthrough for a band that’s always been an oddity. “We met over an ice cream cone at a rest stop at a fundamentalist youth retreat trip when we were 13,” says Thiboldeaux of his first run-in with Ward. “We were talking about Dr. Dre.”

Take Drugs: Secretly Canadian's War are poised to break out.

War: What It’s Good For

Adam Granduciel sits in his rumpled bedroom in the three-story Fishtown house he’s been renting for years, cigarette smoke and the sounds of Eno & Fripp’s Evening Star wafting through the afternoon sunlight. You can hear the influence of ambient music in Granduciel’s band the War on Drugs, as well as other records scattered around his room, from Lou Reed to Bob Dylan. The latter may be most evident, between Granduciel’s airy, jaunty singing and journeyman guitar strum, but there are worse people to sound like than Dylan. “I love him,” Granduciel says. “It’d be hard to get rid of him as an influence.”

He moved to town from Oakland, Calif., a half-decade ago, after taking a cross-country Amtrak ride with a friend on a whim. “We lived on Third Street, like Third and South. It’s the shittiest apartment I’ve ever been in.”

Undesirable though it was, while living there Granduciel fell in with his future friends and collaborators the Capitol Years and songwriter Kurt Vile.

“When we moved into this house, Kyle [Lloyd of the Capitol Years] moved in too, so they would practice downstairs,” he recalls. “And I had all my organs down there. They’d be practicing and I’d play organ and do whatever, like shred. They [asked me to] play a couple shows. Then I went on tour with them.”

Thus he became the multi- instrumentalist fifth member of a nationally known band that’s opened for the Pixies. Having already written and recorded songs of his own out West, Granduciel began jamming with Kurt Vile and others under that most memorable of names, the War on Drugs. “It sounds like a name I can always release different kinds of music under. It’s funny when people reference it as some sort of conspiracy, and it’s nothing to do with that. I just like the way it sounds.”

The War on Drugs weren’t much more than a footnote to the Capitol Years until Granduciel self-released the Barrel of Batteries EP, and from there his bedroom band grew into a dense six-piece with two drummers and lots of effects pedals. After someone at the Indiana-based indie label Secretly Canadian heard the recordings, a record deal was quick to follow, and the band’s first full-length is due out this spring.

Asked about his deadline for finishing the album, Granduciel demurs, “I think it’s tomorrow.” He’s not quite finished, so is he stressing? “I wasn’t for a long time. Then the last couple days … there are these three songs we’ve been working on that I can either finish as is or they could be something better.” Either way, he says the album will retain the instrumental interludes heard on the EP as well as the more traditional balladry.

It should also include the EP’s two warmly reviewed standouts, the title track and “Arms Like Boulders.” A newer song, “Taking the Fall,” bends a drum machine beat and soulful harmonica toward a crowning blend of pop and ambient.

“I was trying to make it like ‘The Boys of Summer,’” laughs Granduciel.

Another new one is lighter and spookier. “This is like the stuff we’ve been doing lately, real loose. There’s so much room to move around in there. You’re real free. It’s 11 and a half minutes long.”

That’s good news for listeners who admire the War on Drugs as much for their marathon dreaminess as for their postcard choruses. Come spring, we’re all in for a treat—as long as Secretly Canadian doesn’t mind giving Granduciel some breathing room where deadlines are concerned.

Other Indie Acts to Watch in ’08

ILLINOIS

Bucks County’s swaggering country-rockers will release their first album in April, following an ’07 spent touring with the Hold Steady and scoring a song on Showtime’s hit series Weeds. Half the record was produced by Girls Against Boys’ Eli Janney in Brooklyn and half by Mickey Petralia (Beck, Eels) in L.A. As for their signature banjo, frontman Chris Archibald cites the Mummers’ “frailing” technique as a bigger influence than bluegrass. “If you’re from Bucks County, everyone has one banjo in the attic,” he says. “I have three. It’s better than one. The strings break on the son-of-a-bitches all the time.”

Brown Recluse Sings

Though last year’s Black Sunday EP is steeped in bedsit twee, this sweet six-piece is lush and animated live, channeling Lovin’ Spoonful sunshine through Zombies melancholy and Three Dog Night freakouts. Their 12-inch EP The Soft Skin is due any day now via the Girard Avenue record store/label Tequila Sunrise, and they’re contributing to a split 7-inch on the revived Slumberland Records. “It’s the full band. The first EP was more piecemeal,” says guitarist Herbie Shellenberger of the new stuff. “It’s more rocking. I’m sort of the only person in the band who likes [twee]. Everyone else is into psych-pop.”

Aunt Dracula

Freaky and frazzled, Aunt Dracula popped onto Philly’s radar out of nowhere and were soon headlining local shows and touring the country, all without an album. That’ll soon change, as Aunt Drac plan to release the full-length Face Peel—recorded locally with Relay’s Jeff Zeigler—next month and tour like mad behind it. Early buzz for the trio centered on goofy antics like having a werewolf make waffles during their shows, but their erratic, reverby sound has eclipsed other quirks. The album, meanwhile, is “more chilled [and] tropicaled out,” offers singer/guitarist Scott Daly. “There aren’t so many guitars.”

Papertrigger

The five members of Papertrigger, all natives of Syracuse, N.Y., reconvened after college in Roxborough, of all places. Since then it’s been a tidal wave of blog love, major- label interest, and exposure on NPR and Spin.com, thanks to nutty live shows and the boisterous Riot Lovers EP, a tankard-sloshing collection of sing-along rock spiked with piano, sax and brotherly harmonies. All that attention for the EP came before it even hit the streets, so the band’s psyched to see what happens when they tour and complete an album this year. “Usually nothing happens with an EP,” says drummer Brian James Dwyer. “It’s exciting.”

Drink up Buttercup

Drink up Buttercup are the youngest band here, both musically and in terms of age—their drummer is 17, and they’ve been playing together only since last March—but they’ve already done two local residencies and have a third at Piano’s in New York next month. Following a demo recorded with Bill Moriarty (Dr. Dog, Man Man), the Bucks County quartet is working hard on an album. “We’re having a tough time capturing it,” says frontman Jim Harvey of the band’s crunchy, kinetic psych-pop. “For as bright and poppy as it is, it’s still really rough and loud.”

A Sunny Day in Glasgow

Marrying heavy shoegaze with ginger pop has been a boon for Ben Daniels and his twin sisters Lauren and Robin. Pitchfork gave a rave 8.0 to their album Scribble Mural Comic Journal, which will be released in Japan this year and also on 180-gram vinyl Stateside. The band hopes to follow up the digital-only Tout New Age EP with a 12-inch in the spring, just in time for an appearance at South by Southwest. So is it weird making music with one’s siblings? “A little bit,” says Ben. “It’s like the only thing we’ve done together besides growing up.” (D.W.)