Partly this is because Hussalonia is really good*, partly it’s because they (mostly just he — Jesse Mank basically is Hussalonia, although he has some collaborators on some tracks) is strikingly diverse, encompassing minimalist folk, musique concrète, power pop, heavy metal — too many genres to list. Like the work of many of my favorite songwriters, Mank’s songs are frequently funny and serious simultaneously; they’re seldom straightforwardly jokey. (His track-by-track re-invention of Billy Joel’s 1980 new-wave cash-in album Glass Houses is no joke; it’s a revelation.**)

“For Those About to Rock, We Ignore You,” is one of those tunes that makes me smile and wince at the same time and it melds a couple of Mank’s aesthetic directions. It’s about how unpleasant it can sometimes be to make it through a local band’s set to hear the band you came to see (or are in). This is certainly familiar territory for me.*** Mank approaches it with delicate picked acoustic guitar and a hushed, appropriately world-weary vocal. But what lifts it into the realm of the extraordinary are the underlying layers of guitar feedback — noisy, but melodically smart, and at least partly belying the sentiment of the lyric. (Another of Mank’s projects, Satan Among the Sofa Cushions, is a heavy metal EP that is too successful as metal to be dismissed as parody, even if Mank’s tongue is clearly in his cheek.)

Jesse Mank is manifestly uninterested in participating in the industry part of the music industry; his recent catalogue is only distributed digitally, and he gives the vast bulk of it away free on the entertaining and informative Hussalonia website.

*Triple-threat good: he’s an outstanding songwriter, a gifted multi-instrumentalist, and displays much more solid recording chops than I expect from indie home-recordists.

**Glass Houses was one of the first three LPs I ever bought, but while I still like Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 74-78 and even some of Foreigner’s self-titled album, Glass Houses was the first record I disowned. I used an exacto to cut up the cover so it said “Mr. Shit” instead of “Billy Joel.” I hadn’t thought of that in years, and certainly never regretted it until Mank’s amazing renditions made me want to A-B against the original.

***For a couple years I’ve been trying to finish writing a song that starts “There’s not enough booze in this bar/To get me through another set by your band/And there’s not enough beer in my glass/To get me through one more song/But I’m too cheap to waste half a drink/So I guess I’ll buy another round.” Mank’s lyric is much better than mine; also, he finished his.

So maybe the most useful thing I can about “Mom and Dad Play Rock’n'Roll” is that listening to it makes tears well up in my eyes more than anything I can remember since Wilco’s Being There. I do think the song has ample quality in non-subjective terms. The lyric examines the plight of gracelessly aging amateur rockers with an odd mix of precision and compassion. The arrangement is masterful — I’m especially fond of the way the bass comes in at 1:11, right before “move the boxes, find the Gibson, dusty rust along the strings,” and the Cheap Trick-ish doubling of the last word of “your neighbors come to watch the house, and New York’s just two hours away.” I even learned to love the (thematically appropriate) fade out/fade back in and ramshackle finale.

It’s painfullly obvious to me, though, that part why this song cranks up my waterworks is because I, personally, have been wondering lately if I’ve already played my last show. The lyrics are all about the possibility of putting a band together again — but the chord progression knows that the possibility will remain forever unfulfilled.

It’s also worth mentioning that the album this song is from, Class Dismissed also features “Outbored Motor Boys,” the single best Bob Pollard pastiche I’ve ever heard.

Hat tip to Brian Block for hipping me to Krieger to start with.

The Capstan Shafts Chick Cigarettes

I was going to say that this album is to The Capstan Shafts as Propeller was to Guided by Voices — the dodgily-recorded breakthrough early album packed with catchy songs. Well, this album may not be as good as GBV’s Propeller. But it’s pretty durn good, and despite the obvious influence of Robert Pollard on Dean Edward Wells, it’s good in a very different, uniquely Capstan Shafts-y, way.

New Grenada Parting Shots



This release does not feature the excellent song “Parting Shots” (a.k.a. the “he’s constantly thinking about what you’re thinking about him” song); they saved that for the follow up Modern Problems. But it still has brainy co-ed spiky tuneful indie goodness a-plenty in songs like “Nerd Alert” and “Just Inside a Week.” And the design is gorgeous.

The Capstan Shafts Her Versus the Sad Cold Eventually


An instant classic. Wells dramatically expands his sonic palette, and improbably comes up with a batch of songs not overshadowed by their awesome titles. There’s “He Would Die for You (Were It Up to Me),” (a murderously green-eyed, yet lovely, piano interlude) “‘Lauren Behold’ (A Conversation with a Stripper over Canadian-style Health Care),” (acoustic pop song enlivened by squally electric guitar underpinnings), and “She Can’t Stand the Quiet (Unless It’s Me Shutting Up),” (a plaintive, atonal, but oddly compelling,lament) — and 17 more.

I loved it so much I bought several copies as gifts.

I appreciated many of I’s songs better live than on record. The stripped-down chamber music arrangements (ukelele, acoustic guitar, cello, and voice) left Merritt’s sparkling melodies and incisive and often very funny lyrics naked rather than masking them with layers of overdubs. (A live album from The Magnetic Fields seems unlikely, but I’d pay a pretty penny for one, for sure.)

I love the latest Magnetic Fields album Distortion, which swathes Merrritt’s compositions with washes of feedback and trebly, compressed drums not-entirely-unlike Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy (given Merritt’s hearing impairment, it seems likely he’s made an album he himself can scarcely stand to hear). But I was definitely eager to hear the soft acoustic cores of Distortion’s tunes . Since my wonderful girlfriend loves The Magnetic Fields at least as much as I do, it was a cinch that we wanted to attend both shows.

I’m glad we did. The Valentine’s Day show was a slightly off night for The Magnetic Fields; Merritt was clearly feeling under the weather, and there was at least one notable timing flub. Still, it was pretty magnificent. The surprise for me was that vocalist Shirley Simms has joined the touring lineup. Her voice has a harsher upper range than Gonson’s (not unpleasantly so; her timbre reminds me a bit of Neko Case) that expanded The Magnetic Fields’ harmonic palette substantially. The setlist ranged through other Merritt projects, like the 6ths, the Future Bilble Heroes, and the Gothic Archies. I was delighted to hear the magnificent, brooding, and funny “Crows,” from the Gothic Archies’ The Vile Village.

The second night Merritt seemed more comfortable and in better humor; the band was tighter. There were only a handful of repeat songs, mostly from the new album. Simms’ showpiece, “Drive On, Driver” was one of them. With the noise stripped away, it’s evident what a sturdily-constructed country song it is. Unlike earlier country efforts like “Papa was a Rodeo,” there’s nothing especially quirky about its lyric; I can easily imagine some Nashville star having a big radio hit with it. On both nights we were treated to Merritt taking the lead vocal on “The Nun’s Litany,” presumably saving Simms’ from potential embarrassment and/or catcalls that might result if she reprised her album performance of the nigh-pornographic lyric.

The Interstellar Radio Company opened both sets with radio-style dramatizations of two short stories, Poe’s classic, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (for Valentine’s Day, natch) and under-appreciated SF writer Robert Sheckly’s “Ghost V.” Actor Adam Green’s high-key, twitchy style was well suited to both stories (I can believe playing Dracula’s Renfield is his long-time ambition) but despite bravura stomp-box work from Green to simulate dialogue with a remote party, it was sound-designer Matthew Beals who really stole the show. He seamlessly melded old-school radio broadcast techniques with the high-tech audio processing power of an onstage laptop to frequently stunning effect. He went basic and traditional for the grisly bits of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” inspiring a ripple of audible revulsion through the audience even though everyone could see how innocuous his actions were. “Ghost V,” with its several fantastic monsters and other worldly setting, gave Beals some room to really go nuts with the computer. Streams are available at the Interstellar Radio Company site, but you’ll miss the fun of seeing the props arrayed and wondering, “what on Earth are they going to use that for?” and you’ll miss being impressed by how much isn’t down to clever digital manipulation.

• Fancy recording equipment
• A rock-solid sense of timing
• Rabid perfectionism about the recording process
• Long songs

Here are some things that Dean Edward Wells does have:

• A prodigious bounty of catchy melodies and riffs
• A bevvy of quirky lyrics set to the former
• A pretty good singing voice
• A modicum of proficiency at the guitar,bass, and to a lesser extent, drums

Comparisons to Guided by Voices and The Mountain Goats are inevitable and not unwarranted. Sound quality-wise, Wells is maybe even closer to John Darnielle’s legendarily cantankerous boomboxes than Tobin Sprout’s four-track.

I spent a bunch of time making notes on these songs, trying to find the ones where peaks of performance competence and melodic genius overlapped (”Grapples and Orangutangs”, say), but then I realized that was fundamentally missing the point. The guitar solo of “The Icecaps of Mars (Are Just Copying Ours” has some cringingly bad notes, but it also has a giddy exuberance that multiple takes might have worn down, and quite a few exactly right notes. None of the instruments are quite in time with each other, but it still pretty much rocks. If you have trouble reconciling these thoughts, The Capstan Shafts really aren’t going to be for you.

Wells has released these three EPs (and the older “Haluluah Moancoaxers!” and “The Sun Don’t Get Things Done Without a Little Help from Everyone”) as Creative Commons licensed downloads at archive.org, so if you think you might dig it, you can find out with no more investment than a little bit of your time and bandwidth. (I had some trouble getting the MP4 files into iTunes and the tagging was weird; MediaCoder and mp3tag were very helpful).

If you decide you’re as much of a fanatic as I am, there’s a world of CDs, lovingly hand-assembled CDRs, casettes, and out-of-print rarities to track down from the likes of Abandoned Love Records, Asaurus Records, Beat the Indie Drum, Fall of the West records, Kittridge Records, Rainbow Quartz Records, Slight, and Yellow Mica Recordings. Happy hunting.

Perhaps the most salient point is that I could be persuaded that virtually any B for Brontosaurus composition is actually a cover of an obscure gem from Jonathan Richman, Beat Happening, or Magnetic Fields. (Perhaps not coincidentally, all three are artists I’ve heard B for Brontosaurus cover.) Their songs variously evince the exuberance and childlike wonder of Richman, the frill-free, warts-and-all directness of Beat Happening, and the wry humor and gorgeous layered harmonies of Magnetic Fields.

The album packaging is also extraordinary. A still frame doesn’t really do it justice.