Work has been crazy. In my previous post about Office Park I should have thought to also plug their Iowa City show with Ed Gray, another artist one one foot each in folk and the avant-garde. But it didn’t happen. Sorry. I can only be expected to keep just so on top of things.

Went up to see Ember Schrag play at Stomping Grounds in Ames last night though, and that was cool. I don’t ordinarily go for the coffee-house-folky thing but Ember’s version has some real dirt in it, and her voice is well above the norm. Plus she’s kind of a friend now, and if you don’t show up to see your friends play, who do you show up for? She did a couple Office Park songs, which was an interesting to hear them in the acoustic setting, and caused me to notice how she can pull off this Mazzy Star kind of vibe with her vocals, and then deftly shift gears out of it and kick in some firepower. It was cool to hang out with Bryan Day too, he’s a real trip. Stomping Grounds has Hoegaarden on tap, I couldn’t pass that up. Ember’s doing an epic two-and-a-half-month tour starting at Ames Progressive on September 1.

The whole thing kind of reminded me of how cool a town Ames can be and why I once tried not to leave it when I really should have. I’ve been a bit wary of embracing it since that experience, the first of my lost years, when I first attempted in earnest to pass as a university student. I was troubled then, and when I’ve gone up there in the past year or so to play with Why Make Clocks, the memory colored things for the worse when I looked around. That color finally seems to be fading. Also my car made the trip with less trouble than anticipated, so I think I should try arranging to play some Distant Trains shows up there.

Joel from Teddy Boys sent me some mp3s of a solo thing he’s working on which, if the ID tags on the files can be believed, is called Little Victories. He was telling me about how he’s been getting really into stuff like 60s girl-group pop and is going for this real pure pop thing. Which seems to mean that what you end up with is something akin to an Alex Chilton idea of pop. Sugary melodies, but not overly so. Songs where every section could have worked as a chorus. I think it sounds awesome, but I may have promised him more detailed feedback than that, so I’ll need to give it a few more spins.

I’ve got some interesting potential collaborations in the works, but I’m not going to talk about them until much later on.

Lincoln, Nebraska’s Ember Schrag and Bryan Day seem like an odd couple on paper. She’s a bluesy/folky singer-songwriter much of whose 2009 album A Cruel, Cruel Woman seems to me like it would fit comfortably on Iowa Public Radio’s playlists (the song “Iowa” could almost be taken as a blatant bid for just such airplay); he’s an avant-garde composer and improviser who plays a wide array of his own self-invented, piezo’d-up instruments and operates Public Eyesore Records. For an undisclosed period of time now, however, they have been collaborating both romantically and on the house-venue Clawfoot House. I met them when Ember had me come out to Lincoln to play a Songwriter Power Ranger gig and ended up catching a show at Clawfoot afterwards, and had wondered what it would sound like if they were to collaborate musically. Well, now I have some idea. Here’s a rough demo recording of a song called “Sutherland” by their project Office Park, that was posted to Facebook earlier today. Reminds me a bit of the Amen Dunes stuff I just listened to on the WFMU blog the other day. Very nice. Looking forward to hearing more. Lucky Lincolnites can hear more tomorrow night at Clawfoot House at 8pm, when Office Park plays there, along with Rock & Roll Combo + Brad Krieger, Jeff Thompson, and KAMAMA in “Experimental Issue #15.”

Latest tracks by Office Park

As the cassette tape format has waned, there have been periods of time in which I found myself cheaply acquiring music on cassette faster than I could digest it. I’ve begun a campaign of slowly unearthing these treasures, by periodically grabbing a tape out of my closet and bringing it along in my car for a few days — I drive a 1993 Buick Century that still has the factory tape deck, in good working order, I don’t yet own an iPod to hook up to the tape adapter, and the XM radio frequently doesn’t have anything going on that I feel like listening to.

So to begin this series, I dug up the 1987 SST Records album Get Lost (Don’t Lie) by These Immortal Souls. A pretty intriguing album, and knowing nothing about the band, I noticed the sort of “dark cabaret with noise” thing they seemed to be going for, and right away thought of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Turns out, These Immortal Souls was headed up by Birthday Party guitarist Rowland S. Howard after the breakup of Birthday Party and subsequent breakup of Crime & The City Solution — the lineup is essentially the later C&CS lineup minus the lead singer — Rowland Howard, his brother Harold Howard on bass, and Epic Soundtracks on drums, — with the addition of Genevieve McGuckin on keyboards, and Rowland taking on the lead vocals. There’s an unsettling discoherence to the arrangements, though it could be the mix, which places McGuckin’s melodramatic grand piano right up front. Rowland’s laconic, off-key vocals take some getting used to, especially at several points when he goes for a lounge croon, as on the eponymous song “These Immortal Souls,” but it definitely suits the atmosphere of the music. Also, dude looked downright scary; check out this video for the band’s debut single and opening track of the album, “Marry Me (Lie! Lie!)” His lyrics are at least as frightening. This is some wonderfully dark stuff.

Anyway the album’s quite good, worth checking out if the Birthday Party lineage and that whole vibe interests you at all. I ran across a download of it courtesy of a blog called Michael Can’t Sleep.

Incidentally, These Immortal Souls cover a song (“Hey! Little Child”) by the recently-departed Alex Chilton on this album, and Rowland S. Howard himself died near the end of last year.