Patsy’s Rats are a Portland band. Their “Is It Alright” single is pure pop to the jugular. Reminds me of Let’s Active with the boy-girl choruses and jangly nature. If you don’t like singles, this is also on the compilation of singles the band just released on Bachelor Records. Patsy is Patsy Gelb, formerly of Scavenger Cunt and occasional collaborator of her father, Howe Gelb of Giant Sand. Her Ratsconsist of main-squeeze Christian Blunda (erstwhile Billy Jeans of Mean Jeans) and a rotating door of rock ‘n’ roll vermin-for-hire
Portland’s Sallie Ford has continued her post-Sound Outside evolution, which began on 2014’s Slap Back, with an album of fiery garage rock that leans harder into the wit and attitude that has made the singer a perpetual festival favorite. Soul Sick is a thrilling assemblage of disparate styles, from the growling attitude and casual f-bomb on “Get Out” to the sweet, malt shop-appropriate crooning of “Unraveling.” Ford’s voice has always projected a startling power, but Soul Sick feels like a breakthrough on the composition side of the spectrum, creating a web of jangly garage guitars and soulful organ accompaniment that suit Ford’s growl better than any of her backing bands to date.
Kelli Schaefer is an absolute trip. Let me just get that out of the way. Sporting a denim trench coach and backlined by some notable Freakout Record musicians (Jeremiah Hayden on drums, Courtney Sheedy on bass, EllySwope and Ryan Lynch on guitar), Kelli immediately sets you on edge with a controlled vocal style and two distinct personas on stage. Watching her perform is like watching a suspense movie that doesn’t climax. Your heart rate increases, breathing shortens and attention becomes wrapped in a straightjacket.
Much of this magnetism is due to Kelli’s imaginative hand movements and awkward body angles, but it’s her impressively dynamic vocal range that creates evangelists. It’s cruel and authoritarian one moment, charming and forgiving the next. She easily sings difficult melodies but also has the stamina to flawlessly extend notes.
Seeing Kelli Schaefer perform is an experience.
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No Identity is darker than Ghost of the Beast, growling with confidence – but with a sense of humor. Confidence was hard-won, coming out of the passing of her father and dealing with the unavoidable ripples from it, the record was as much shaped by life and life was shaped around the record. The title track of No Identity kicks off with a beat as strong as a heart and a guitar line threatening to explode. She sings in clear, close range:
In their current state of designed perpetual flux WIBG has found some serious footing. Since 2012 Justin Fowler, and Dan Galucki have consistently churned out shimmering, spasmodic psych rock of an exceptional degree. Since joined by Nathan Moore and Cory Gray in 2016, the crew has found a sort of chaotic cohesion. Many tours across the United States and Europe with the likes of FUZZ, Built to Spill and countless other groups of questionable individuals have left WIBG wise, weathered and thankful for the opportunity to shred. On tip toes and with bloody hands WIBG creates something more than songs. Their singular style is an organic cacophony of scattered metallic sway and lascivious throbbing that will leave you writhing and shaking into the wee hours.
This record inhabits a curious zone somewhere between acoustic alt-country and feedback-driven drone — some tracks (like the marvelous “Hey! Mr. Sky,” above) are largely acoustic, whereas others (like the 16-minute epic “Spirits”) drift off into free form explorations of atmospheric sound. As a whole, the record is a study in how effective it can be to combine two disparate sounds, and the contrast creates an atmosphere both distinctive and beautiful. Some three years after their last album, the boys and girls from Oregon are back with another set of long, stoned trawls through the backwaters of American folk, psychedelia and the avant garde.
For their fifth album Flags of the Sacred Harp, the Portland-based collective Jackie-O Motherfucker use the lessons of The Sacred Harp and other traditional blues and gospel sources as a point of disembarkation. On these seven tracks, the group patiently unravel their source material’s tangled threads.
All Girl Summer Fun Band started because, well, Thermals bassist Kathy Foster and three pals had the idea for an “all girl summer fun band.” They followed it up with two albums and an EP, but this self-titled 2002 debut remains the purest expression of the effortlessly infectious indie-pop harmonies that fulfill the promise of the band’s name. If you were on board for last year’s that dog. revival, This All Girl Summer dance party will leave you breathless and sweaty – hook after hook, All Girl Summer Fun Band pull you into the closet to make out and tell you they love you. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll dance, you’ll sigh. And when its over, you’ll dive to hit the play button on your stereo one more time.
For Johanna Warren, spirituality and humanity are inextricable from each other: “it’s all energy,” as she writes. The Portland singer-songwriter has been around a while her voice, clear as water, has shadowed the records of Iron & Wine, Natalie Merchant and Julie Byrne. But she broke out on her own in 2015 with her sophomore album, nūmūn, which was about transformation and healing in concert with the cycles of the moon. Come February 2018, Warren will release a new album, “Gemini II”, the twin album of 2016’s Gemini I. The first track to be released, “Here To Tell,” tells of one man’s liminal reverie and its implications for humanity.
Typhoon frontman and songwriter Kyle Morton released a solo album, What Will Destroy You, in September. The record’s a collection of compact and beautifully-recorded songs that get at different kinds of love, from the romantic to the twisted. It’s a far cry from the bombast and catharsis of Typhoon’s music, but very much in line with a recent project Morton made with his friend, filmmaker Matthew Thomas Ross, called “Book of Matches.” That series of films, each a minute long, required Morton to compose miniatures to match each film, and with an added limitation he gave himself: to write each one within a day.
For the new album, Morton wrote many of the songs in extended moments of ordinary life: waiting for his phone to charge, or while taking a walk. In our interview, he spoke about it in contradictory terms, calling this a “minor release” (free of the production demands or structure of a Typhoon record) and poking fun at himself for writing so much about death. But however simple, the record doesn’t play as a throwaway extra. In the more intimate spaces of these songs, Morton’s knack for small details, reach for meaning and ever-present sense of mortality, and bits of black humor make for a powerful listen.
To hear more about writing these songs — the romantic “My Little Darlin Knows My Nature,” and darker songs “Survivalist Fantasy” and “Poor Bastard” — plus news about the upcoming Typhoon record in 2017.
The debut solo album by Typhoon frontman Kyle Morton available everywhere now and on vinyl via Bug Hunt.
Typhoon is an American indie rock band from Oregon. The band has eleven members. They have released four albums, two EPs, a split 7-inch record with Olympia-based band Lake, and have contributed to a number of compilations. The band’s fifth album Offerings is scheduled for release on January 12th, 2018. The band originated in Salem, Oregon in 2005 but is now based in Portland, Oregon. They are signed to the indie record label Roll Call Records.
Typhoon is back with their LP Offerings. There are currently two variants. A blood red 2xLP which looks to be gone soon (19 left on the webstore) and the other is an indie exclusive gold edition limited to 1400 copies verified through Rough Trade as a 2xLP. This record sounds monumental, so get your hands on it before it slips away. Enjoy!.
Typhoon’s Kyle Morton performs an acoustic, piano version of “Prosthetic Love”, off of their album White Lighter
It brings me great pleasure to announce our new record. It’s called Offerings and it is a seventy-minute exploration of memory and sacrifice in three movements, the first of which is available now for your immediate listening pleasure.
Without giving too much away. I wanted to share with you an email I wrote to our manager back in May. I had just sent him the final masters and he was asking the sensible question: What is it all about?
It’s a record from the perspective of a mind losing its memory at precisely the same time the world is willfully forgetting its history. The urgent question becomes: without casualty, without structures of meaning, without essential features of rational thought, is there anything that can save us from violence / oblivion?
With no past and no future, there is only suffocating, annihilating present, looping on and on ad infinitum (to me, one plausible definition of hell) and the best you can hope for is that somewhere in the void there exists some small, irreducible certainty—a fragment, a kernel, something—that you may have the good future to stumble upon before it’s all over.
You know, a boy/girl-meets-girl/boy-everyone-dies-in-botched-attempt-at-neo-pagan-sacrificial-ritual-on-global-scale kind of thing.
FLOODPLAINS Down in the floodplains waiting on a cure Blessed be the water may the water make us pure Forms will be unborn in the mirror within the mirror Rejoice now, Rejoice now The Reckoning is here.
WAKE Wake and I have been reborn. The tide concedes that homely shore and I am benighted. All my lines unlearned. Cry out will God (or somebody) please turn the light on. Restore me to that empty room—expands out like hot air balloons. A woman comes she brings me food. I shit the bed in solitude. My life one brief unbroken loop—goes round and round with nothing left to hold onto. But if there’s nothing, if there’s nothing, then what’s that song that keeps hounding me? In the still dark of the morning. Just one more cradle down the creek. Au revoir my little memories. Tell me: This is not your loss. This is your offering.
RORSCHACH Eyes on the screen. We have all the information now but what does it mean? Reason’s a tease. Drank up all that hemlock, here I am just reading the leaves. Left wondering: what happened to the life we lost, that got lost in the living? All this fiction makes me nervous, turns out it was blood spilled on the canvas we admired just like some Rorschach painting. The film in your brain—it edits to remember, keeps the figure in the frame. A sacrificial violence, all those passed over in silence then cast out with the blame. And I’m trying to stay sane—meanwhile, the river of forgetfulness starts spilling the banks. Caught in a lie and instead of fessing up we’d sooner just go out of our heads. I’ve been holding up my end when I should have doubled down on my own atom bomb shelter instead.
EMPIRICIST Empty room. Cast about for a familiar object. Because my body needs coordinates to move. In the dark. Range of motion shrivels all around me. All my nightmares I am slowly being cocooned. A single calf in the hecatomb. Crescent moon. Hollowed out of all my fabled insides. Occam shave me down to primal truth—return me to the womb. Mother pulled from father’s ribs, little baby in a crib, hands reaching up. Before the blinding light is split through the prism of your organs into color. All that being and nothingness, on the same möbius strip. Sleep and waking up. On the first day. Wipe the blank slate. And you join the banquet. Served up helpless on a plate. You find your land legs. And you learn to imitate. You’ll wear any feathers and hope that your efforts attract a mate. One day your children find you, locked in the bathroom, staring in horror at the reflection of your face. You say you’re sorry to the guests at your party. But you can’t help wonder, who is this person you celebrate? And so the light fades. It’s still your birthday. Blow out your past lives like they’re candles on the cake.
ALGERNON A woman leans in her chair. Holds her face close to mine. She’s curious, am I comfortable? Would I care to give it one more try? She holds the picture up while she studies my eyes. I’m trying hard to recall the routine, but I can’t and so I improvise. This one’s of my father. Wearing ladies clothes. I walked in on him once as a kid. Must have thought nobody else was home. It’s a lie and she knows. But there’s no other use. And anyway what you want and what you want to be are easily confused. The moment stretches on. Like the first day of school and I’ve answered wrong. Like a self-enclosed short-circuit goes around forever until it’s gone. A woman shrinks in her chair. She says the picture’s of you. I have no idea what she’s talking about but I nod my head as if I do. Look at there such a strong man. All the virtues of youth. You led a good life by every account. There were people who looked up to you. I say enough is enough. You have found me out. You have called my bluff. I don’t know anything about this stuff. I’m just tired and I’m waiting for my wife to pick me up. A woman slouched in her chair disrupts the silence to say. The part of you that I love is still in there even if it doesn’t know my name. The moment stretches on. Like the colonnade at the Parthenon. It’s an unmarked grave but somebody’s laid some flowers for Algernon.
Typhoon is an indie rock band from Portland, Oregon.
Floodplains – featuring the songs “Wake”, “Rorschach”, “Empiricist” and “Algernon” – is the first movement of Typhoon’s forthcoming full length album, Offerings. Offerings will be released on January 12th, 2018 on Roll Call Records.
The Fat Angel Sings 