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.

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.

1. Set up a browser (or browser profile) to delete all cookies on exit
   I like to configure Opera up for visiting unsafe sites, that way I can leave Firefox open with all the tabs I need for work.
2. Make sure it has all the latest security updates to prevent drive-by downloads
3. Close and relaunch the browser
4. Turn the speakers down!
5. Visit MySpace
6. Close the browser

I’ve been impatiently wondering when the first releases of 2008 from The Capstan Shafts would arrive, and just learned of all the goodies at http://www.myspace.com/capstanshafts. There are previews from both the new self-released EP Miles Per Famine and the upcoming Rainbow Quartz release Fixation Protocol. Also, there’s ordering info on getting gobs of the earlier and out-of-print Capstan Shafts releases directly from Dean. Big ups to Dan for giving me the heads-up.

You can also preview tracks from Ho-Ag’s imminent Doctor Cowboy at http://www.myspace.com/hoagsobject. I’m so pysched for this album. I’ve been wishing for a while that Ho-Ag would work with recording professionals who could capture the band better, and it sounds like I’ve gotten my wish. The samples from Doctor Cowboy are more vibrant than anything Ho-Ag has yet committed to plastic.

Slightly old news at this point, but Hallelujah the Hills have also raised their recording-quality bar with the Prepare to Qualify EP. It compiles the songs that have been trickling out from Stereogum and the like with some additional goodies; they’ve been re-mastered and sound super-fab.

And finally, I just stumbled on the Dirt Merchants site, from which you can download everything the band ever did, including the never-released The Speed At Which You Speak and several live sets. The only thing missing is a tip jar.

I love the cheap-sounding keyboards (Casio? I can live in hope). I love the also cheap-sounding and frequently fuzzed-out guitar and bass (Slates amps and Skinny Rat guitars? Sounds like they could be), the determinedly plonky single-note guitar lines they play, and the sudden sheets of blissful noise they make. I love Golf’s “what is pitch and why should I be bothered with it?” and “Do I think I’m Stephen Malkmus, or do I think I’m Andy Falkous?” vocals. I love that the song title “FKUSA” stands for “French-Kissing in the USA” and not the ruder thing it also might stand for. I love how that song devolves into its own remix, and then further devolves into what Jason Korzen* might call an “ambient industrial dronescape.” I love “Mlle Amy Dutronc”’s occasional backing vocals and her lead turn on “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray”. I love the “we can’t afford all those fancy microphones” drum tone. I love the unexpected, gloriously ragged horns that rip open “It’s Coming Straight for Us” just when you think you’ve pegged it as a foul-mouthed and perhaps uninspired rip-off of Aiden Moffat’s songwriting style.

I love how, while some of Smokers Die Younger’s influences are obvious enough, this band doesn’t sound especially beholden to any one of them in particular.

I love the sheer stones this band consistently displays: the potentially-offputting name, starting their album with the harshest, least-welcoming track (”Bad Driving School”), tackling a Patsy Cline showpiece song with nothing like the requisite equipment, avowing that their eclecticism warrants coining their own genre (”hard trasp”).

I love that I can listen to X Wants the Meat straight through and want to hear the whole thing again immediately.

Perhaps most of all, I love how Smokers Die Younger takes attributes that would usually be weaknesses and mutates them into strengths.

If you would like to see if you love them too, you can listen free to maybe my favorite song, “I Spy Dry Fear” at last.fm. Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation can hook you up with a physical copy if you’re in the UK or don’t mind international postage&packing; I got my 320K MP3 hookup from Pure Groove Digital, which I endorse despite a clunky download user interface; and iTunes Music store is another digital option.

* SDY sound nothing like the sprites, truly, but Korzen’s coinage is too apt to not swipe, and too good to not attribute.

• 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.