Interview

El Perro Del Mar, the nom de guerre of Swedish chanteuse Sarah Assbring, has returned with her third album Love Is Not Pop (The Control Group) (released in the US today),  a burst of beautifully textured and refined pop songs exploring the melancholic side of love.

For it, her third release, EPDM steeps her sparse and simple songwriting in a new sonic brew with the help of Rasmus Hägg, one-half of the virtually ungoogleable Swedish electronic duo Studio, whose notoriously clever remixes and album of sun-drenched kitschy grooves "Yearbook 1" have blown a few minds in the last several years.

The emotional thrust of Love Is Not Pop comes from the natural feel of their partnership. Hägg's production disguises the line between analog and synthetic instrumentation as if it were a metaphor for the difficulty of identifying when love is real, the album's thematic core. For an album that explores the darker side of devotion, lust, infatuation, and tender weaknesses, it's an inspired, though short, collaboration.

I caught up with Assbring over the phone from Stockholm where we talked about Bertolucci, why so many Swedes prefer singing in English, and her fears of opening up the creative process to the unknown.

ALEX SHERMAN: Can you tell me a little bit about how your collaboration with Rasmus worked out?

SARAH ASSBRING: Ever since I heard Studio for the first time, I had Rasmus in the back of my mind for some kind of collaboration. When I started drawing sketches for this album, I got in touch with him and we started talking about what we could do together. But it was just a discussion because we didn't really know each other. Especially for me, I've always been a bit afraid of bringing someone too much into the process of making an album. He was the same way, also kind of a control freak.

So we talked a lot–a lot!–because we were afraid of what might happen. Finally, we just said, "Let's just stop talking," and after that everything was so simple. All of the things we spoke about and decided theoretically were put aside and we just worked together. It was very organic and the best recording situation I've ever had.

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Kurt Vile, Philly's self-ordained "Constant Hitmaker," emerges from the City of Brotherly Love with his first proper full length after unleashing a bounty of folk pop nuggets under the apt billing Constant Hitmaker (Gulcher). That record began with the impeccable opener "Freeway," a road song so intuitive, deceptively simple, and instantly pleasing to the ear, it would have been AM gold in a past era. (PHOTO CREDIT: SHAWN BRACKBILL COURTESY OF MATADOR RECORDS)

"Freeway" led to a dream come true for the Philadelphia-born guitarist. Plucked by Matador Records on the heels of another notable signing–an obscure, distorted rock band called Sonic Youth–both are worthy of being celebrated as hallmarks of the label's 20^th anniversary renaissance. His latest album, Childish Prodigy, came out earlier this month and can be streamed in its entirety here.


ALEX SHERMAN: Do you get a lot of people asking if your name is made up?

KURT VILE: Yeah I do. People seem really insulted when they hear it's not. That other Kurt Weill doesn't even spell it the same way.

SHERMAN: It's kind of a beautiful pun.

VILE: Well, thanks. But like I said, it is my real name. And I always thought it was a good name. But then some people think it's too good, so it's bad. They think I'm making a bad joke.

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                 Sonic Youth in 1988, courtesy of Michael Lavine; Grunge; Abrams Image; 2009

Thurston Moore broke into the underground rock scene almost thirty years ago with his noisey, distorted, strange, dissonant, and intense rock band Sonic Youth. The sound they created was both incredibly singular-no band could make its guitars squeal quite like theirs-and yet sounded perfectly comfortable among the various scenes and sounds that ebbed through the American underground like glacial flows.

In the process, Moore has evolved into something like punk rock's chief public archivist. For years, he's penned the Bull Tongue column for new music with rock historian Byron Coley in Arthur Magazine and  has produced and edited numerous books about music subcultures. This fall, Moore has once again teamed up with the art book publisher Abrams Image to produce another book about a punk rock, Grunge.

By no means a definitive history of the era and its music, Grunge is more accurately described as a collection of photographs by the acclaimed New York photographer Michael Lavine, who started chronicling the unique street punk style of Seattle's Capitol Hill as a fledgling photographer in the mid-1980s. Lavine later developed a relationship with Seattle's Sub Pop record lable, famous for signing many of the era's biggest bands including Nirvana, Mudhoney, and Soundgarden, and photographed them in his now-iconic high contrast black and white style.

ALEX SHERMAN: Can you help me out a little bit? I'm having trouble understanding why you felt an urgency to make a book about grunge music.

THURSTON MOORE: It was not supposed to be a book about grunge. The initial idea was to do a book with [photographer] Michael Lavine. He's someone I've always worked with since the 80's and he has such a history of work when he first started shooting bands like Mudhoney, Nirvana, Buttonhole Surfers, and Pussy Galore. We started looking at this really early work he did as a photography art student at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, when he started going to Seattle and shooting all the punks hanging out at Capitol Hill. It was all black and white and evocative and beautiful and it sort of dawned on us that the style of the individuals he was shooting led into how a lot of the so-called grunge bands started looking and dressing and presenting themselves. It's sort of the most genuine survey of what people know of grunge as a style, but we never thought we would have called the book that. There was a very close relationship between what was going on between these kids on the street and these bands, so we started calling it "The Grunge Book" just as a working title.

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As bands like Grizzly Bear and the Dirty Projectors capture hearts and minds by breaking towards fussiness stylistically and eastern sounds hemispherically, The Shaky Hands, a four-piece rock outfit out of Portland, indulge in the musical equivalent of an In-N-Out Double-Double, i.e. fast, tasty, reliable American comfort rock, blessed with the divinely scratchy vocals of founding Hand Nicholas Dellfs. (PHOTO BY MIRANDA LEHMAN)
 
Although Nick would probably dispute the beefy metaphor. He wrote the songs on Let It Die, the band's third album, after a six-week pilgrimage to the holy Hindu city of Vrindavan in Northern India, where it's a sacrilege to crave anything, especially a slider. While abroad, he immersed himself in eastern philosophical and musical traditions and the study of Krishna consciousness. But as soon as he boarded the plane back to the United States, he pocketed the Bhagavad Gita and cranked the Tom Petty, infusing the Shaky Hands newest set of enlightened songs with the weightiest meatless riffs his band could muster.
 
We caught up with Nick before the Shaky Hands embark on a U.S. and European tour. We talked about the spiritual heavies he met in India, George Harrison's legacy of wrapping eastern thought in western sounds, and the importance of sticking to what we do best.

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