Interview

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.

MORE »

The first thing that comes to mind when listening to "Eros and Omissions: Sycophantastic Confessions & Renditions of Contrition," the new album by the LA-based LANDy, led by indie darling actor, writer, director, and musician Adam Goldberg, is Bill Murray's classic line from the 1982 film Tootsie. "I don't like when somebody comes up to me the next day and says, ‘Hey, man, I saw your play. It touched me; I cried.' I like it when a guy comes up to me a week later and says, ‘Hey, man, I saw your play... what happened?'"

"What happened?" here registers a new level of surprise, after considering that the man who may be too well-known for playing the farcical Jewsploitation "cult" superhero the Hebrew Hammer is behind these spacey sounds.

So Goldberg faces a challenge. Is he just another actor heeding the "But What I Really Want To Do Is Sing?" impulse? He's committed to obliterating that prejudice with his debut fastidious freakout, recorded over the course of six years in his home in the Hollywood Hills. You can hear the otherworldly touch of his recording partners Steve Drozd of the Flaming Lips and members of the Black Pine on the John Lennon-esque ballad "I Believe In Jack," the mixtape-ready single "BFF!" and the hypnotic "I'll Be Around," which I can't seem to get out my head.

ALEX SHERMAN: I get the impression this album owes a lot to Brian Wilson's thwarted opus "Smile." It's a psychedelic smogasbord and you seem to have named your band after Wilson's controversial psychiatrist Dr. Eugene Landy.

ADAM GOLDBERG: That's subject to interpretation. This LANDy is your LANDy, this LANDy is my LANDy. Over the years I had become not so much Brian Wilson obsessed, but more for that era of the Beach Boys career and what it did to him. "Smile" was his greatest achievement and he never felt higher on life. Whether it was a combination of some mental illness and the pressures of recording, all of these forces just sucked the life out of him.

AS: So "Eros and Omissions" was a total personal immersion for you, like Wilson's?

MORE »

Dave Longstreth, the principal songwriter behind Dirty Projectors, is building a house. Over the course of four albums, a compilation of cassettes, three EPs, and with the help of countless collaborators including Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend (a longtime friend), Longstreth and band have grafted the off-kilter time signatures of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band with African and North American musical vernaculars, and an intrepid sensibility (and voice) reminiscent of Arthur Russell.  (LEFT: PHOTO BY SARAH CASS)

But such comparisons don't do the band's new album, Bitte Orca, justice: It really doesn't sound like anything other than Dirty Projectors. What they all share is the uncanny ability to overlap and combine opposites in a way that sounds natural and pushes the boundaries of what pop music can sound like. "It's like I'm gradually putting something together where anything belongs, and it works," Longstreth said over the phone from Portland, Oregon, where the band has begun a summer tour opening for TV on the Radio that returns to their home turf on June 5 at Central Park Summerstage.

MORE »

Did Homeland Security come calling? Last time we heard Love Is All's bouncy single "Last Choice," the Swedes were decked out in Halloween costumes with lead singer Josephine Olausson disguised as Osama Bin Laden pounding away on a casio sampler. The one-take, grainy black and white video had everything but a distribution deal with Al Jazeera. Now, the Swedes have upgraded, channeling the peppy single through a Michel Gondry-inspired video that matches the song's ecstatic Scandinavian energy. The vid recalls the precious majesty of old Gumby cartoons, Matt and Kim's papier maché video for "Yea Yeah" and pays homage to Harpo Marx's classic pea-eating routine. Out with the old, in with the new.

MORE »