File under: Unnerving, serrated-edged, spacious art-punks who love dissonance and contrast

For fans of: Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Sonic Youth, Arab Strap, Xiu Xiu, The Birthday Party

From: Omaha, Nebraska

Personae: Jack Begley (guitar, vocals), Noah Sterba (guitar, vocals), Jeff Sedrel (bass), Kevin Donahue (drums)

Yuppies took a very long time to make their first album — the band formed in 2007 and has released a handful of singles and a split EP over the past few years, but their self-titled, full-length debut has just appeared on Parquet Courts’ label Dull Tools. It’s a terrifically unsettling record, flowing from quiet, spacious passages (with main vocalist Jack Begley muttering or chanting lyrics that sound like every phrase is in a separate set of quotation marks) to out-of-control punk slaloms like “Hitchin a Ride,” which Noah Sterba screams so hard his voice cracks. And the band’s years of playing together are evident in the way they run every song into the next, without a pause.

There’s a lot of history audible on Yuppies — the atonal hammer-and-release textures and shambling rhythms of some of these songs echo the late ’70s no wave scene, and Begley and Sterba’s voices recall the Midwestern punk rock of the ’80s. But it’s also an assured, startling take on the psychogeography of the Dust Belt landscape that spawned the band. “All right, all right, we’re going for a ride, whether you like it or not,” Begley snaps at the beginning of “A Ride,” and that’s Yuppies’ attitude, right there.

eMusic’s Douglas Wolk talked with Sterba as the band geared up for a month-long tour.

On the band’s origins in high school corridors:

Me, Kevin and Jack all grew up together. In high school, I was writing songs, and Jack was writing songs, and we knew Kevin played drums, so we started playing together. Our earliest stuff was very primitive and…”young.” We were learning to play our instruments as we were playing songs. As we’ve gone on, we’ve kind of gotten more competent. We graduated from high school in 2007, and then in probably 2010, Jeff joined — we’d just been guitars and drums, and we thought, “Oh man — we gotta have some low end!”

On geographical separation and making their first album after six years:

Jeff lives in Virginia now, and Jack lived in St. Louis for a year or two. We’ve only had two or three years of being in the same city as a band. But once we got Jeff, we couldn’t play with anyone else. Even if after this tour we can’t play for another year, we won’t stop being a band — we’ll just kind of try to work with what we have and where we are.

The album’s definitely been a long time coming. One or two of the songs on the album we’ve had for four or five years; there are a few that we’ve thrown out, then reclaimed and put on the record. Most of the songs flow together, but I’d almost say that’s not something we consciously did — we’ve had a lot of space between times when we could practice, so the songs form their relationship with each other. Which is pretty cool.

On their nonstop live sets and how that translated to the recording:

Our shows are high-energy and anxiety-ridden. There are a lot of moments of chaos. We don’t take any breaks between songs, although we’ve got a bunch of different sets. We don’t have very long attention spans; we try to push ourselves to do new things at every show. The first side of the album we did in one long take. We recorded it live except for the vocals, and we thought, “This could take all day if we keep fucking it up 15 minutes in,” but we got the whole thing in one take. The second side we did in two parts — the first few songs run together, and then the last two.

On “What’s That?”:

That was one of the coolest songs to be a part of. We never talked about the writing of that song, we just started playing, said, “That’s kinda cool!,” practiced it again and started playing it at shows. When it started out, it was so different from how it turned out on the record. We never once talked about the structure of the song until the day before we recorded it. It was a bizarre process to be part of, watching this thing form itself.

On what they do when they’re not being Yuppies:

Kevin and I play with Simon Joyner — I’ve been playing with him for three or four years, Kevin just joined the group this year. We just made a new record and it’s awesome — more of an experimental record than Simon’s ever done. Simon lent me a space with an 8-track, and I recorded a solo album where I play all the instruments — that was released on Unread Records. Jack had a solo tape close to a year ago. And Kevin and I work at a diner that our friend owns in Omaha. Jack also works in a restaurant, and Jeff works in a restaurant in Richmond.

On the band’s favorite reactions to their music:

I’ve had a lot of people come up to me after a show and say, “It was good, but it made me feel really weird.” To be able to conjure up an emotion in someone, just from the sounds we’re making — to be able to create a feeling and have them really feel it too — that’s so flattering to me.

Spanning three years but holding together as a single release

The ongoing Black Tar Prophecies sessions from Portland, Oregon, instrumental post-rockers Grails function like deep-space side ventures from their normal output. The first three prophecies came after the hypnotic, but monochromatic buzz of their second full-length album, 2004′s Redlight. The songs were culled from collaborations and rarities, and displayed the band working with elements of Krautrock, dub, ambient, psychedelia and classical.

The second batch, Black Tar Prophecies Vols. 4, 5 & 6, matches, and possibly exceeds, the potency of both the first Black Tar releases and their 2008 high-water mark LP Doomsdayer’s Holiday. The Vol. 4 tracks are from a 2010 EP, Vol. 5 from a split with Pharaoh Overlord and Vol. 6 is new and previously unreleased. Even though they span three years, the music holds together as if intended for a single release: From the wavering apocalyptic hum, ’80s videogame sound effects and bluesy electric guitar of “Wake Up Drill II,” the nightmarish samples and reverberating feedback of “New Drug II,” and the soft, steady beat, classical piano, strings and minor key bass melody of “A Mansion Has Many Rooms,” the collection has a fearlessly wide-ranging diversity that nonetheless folds into the anything-goes atmosphere Grails have cultivated through their career. Whether they are recalling early Pink Floyd, Can, Neu!, White Room-era KLF, Goblin, King Crimson and Guru Guru, or spaghetti westerns, Grails remain themselves, their only goals to enlighten themselves and their listeners.

Which is not to say they’ve forsaken their roots. They’ve still got punk attitude and country hearts, but the music on Blur the Line feels, on the whole, more thoughtful and controlled. The new confidence might explain why they’ve also decided to drop the shared “Darlin’” last name, embracing instead their real identities (Jessi Zazu, Nikki Kvarnes and Lynwood Regensburg) as opposed to the characters that had served as a sort of protection for so long.

While the Darlins were at a tour stop in Florida, eMusic’s Ashley Melzer spoke with founding guitarist Nikki Kvarnes about the Blur the Line and the band’s new attitude of self-acceptance.

How long after Screws Get Loose did you start thinking about the next album?

Immediately, I guess. We’re kind of always working on stuff. We set up a chunk of time over the winter where we were just focusing on that and we weren’t touring. But yeah, that’s something we’re always kind of working on.

Did you go in with certain ideas?

It kind of all just fell into place with what was going on in our lives collectively, me and Jessi especially.

Like what?

Just time to reflect on the past couple of years. Like, actually spend some time with ourselves and dive deep into some stuff that’s really personal. This is the first time — well, not the first time, but it was a different kind of way of writing the album. Jessi would work on her songs and I would work on my songs, lyrically, and then we’d come together and go, “Well, what about changing this?” or, “What do you mean by this?” It was just a different approach than trying to write really personal songs with another songwriter.

There does seem to be a level of patience about this new record. Is this the first work you’ve done with Roger Moutenout?

He was suggested to us by our manager a while ago. We did a 7″ with him and we did a couple other recordings with him. He is just a joy to work with. He’s helped us grow a whole lot. We love the studio. We love working with him. So we were all about working on the album with him and trying something different, working with a different producer, ’cause we’re kind of a different band now too.

What has that transition been like?

It’s been really good. It’s been gradual. Adrian started playing with us right before we went into the studio for a couple months, just fleshing out the songs and trying to tighten things up, talk about all the parts that we’re doing. Also, this is a transition because [in the past] we’ve always switched instruments. It’s always kind of been up in the air who plays what role. This is the first record where Jessi and I are playing guitar, we sing our parts, Lynnwood plays drums and Adrian plays bass. It’s always been kind of a clusterfuck of “Well, what do you want to do?” and on the last album my arm was broken, so I wasn’t able to play on the album.

Is there a reason why you wanted to streamline that way?

Yeah, it’s made us a way more solid band. It’s more defined what everyone does. It gives time to focus on exactly what it is that you’re doing and giving yourself a specific sound.

In looking back at your press over the years, you’re constantly being pigeonholed as “wild women” or reckless. How do you feel about that?

I mean, I understand why, because when we first started out we were really wild and crazy. We were just so excited to be in a band, we were just going all the way, all the time. There was some focus on music, but I think the performance and engaging people was what we were concentrating on, whereas now it’s a little bit more introverted. We still really want to interact with audience members and we want it to be an experience. And, whatever, people can think whatever they want about us, but they’ll know in the future what this album is and what the band is, and that it’s not just, “Let’s get drunk and party. These are a bunch of fun, silly songs.” There’s some depth behind it and we’re exposing ourselves a little bit more instead of these characters we’ve built over the years.

Listening to the record, I almost felt a level of regret in regard to that. Do you think that’s a theme? Like the song “Optimist” seems to have that as a crux of it.

Jessi wrote that, but no, no, not regret. It’s less regret and maybe just more awareness of how people perceive you. It’s not a song about regret at all. It’s about being an optimist and you realize that maybe not everyone’s as optimistic about what you’re endeavors are or, I don’t know, getting a hard time because you’re doing what you want to be doing. This is really broad — I’m being vague about it because I don’t want to describe a song that she wrote, because I’m sure she has way more to say about it than I do.

Well, which of your songs on the album do you think captures that theme of identity most for you?

Each one of the songs are reflections of who we are and sides of ourselves. “In the Wilderness,” that’s this idea of people being wild, but it’s deeper than that. It’s more about struggling to want to be in a mysterious place, or the depths of your subconscious and how hard it is to grasp imagination for this generation. I want people to know there’s this other side of me that’s very in touch with, I don’t know, the animalistic nature of man and woman and the facades that everyone puts up. That’s kind of a representation of the album: the man and woman and the black and white and the opposites of everything, and creating a balance between the two.

Right, I think there’s a part of the album that’s a voice for the misfits, people on the fringe. Or maybe just people who are comfortable with sexuality and vulnerability.

Absolutely, because there has to be a balance. You can’t just be this overly confident person throwing all your ideas out there and being like, “This is the way things are.” You have to be humble and you have to be vulnerable in order to grow and to be optimistic and able to just expose yourself as a whole human being.

Were you worried about the way the cover of the album art would be received at all?

Oh, no. I mean, there’s a reason why we put it out there. We feel like that represents what this album is and who we are and to break down that whole like idea of people pigeonholing us, to just be like, “This is us. This is a part of us and this is us all together and this is what the band is now.”

What do you want a listener to take away, to hear in the difference from Screws Get Loose to Blur the Line?

Maybe just kind of identifying with themselves, being like, “Whoa, I feel that way about myself, and I didn’t even really know I felt that way about myself.” There’s a lot of self-realization in this album on both sides, me and Jessi. The songs we wrote are like, “This is OK. I’m going to show my beauty, all my ugliness and all my fears and all my strengths,” and maybe just for someone to realize that it’s okay to be fucked up, but also be really strong and intelligent, simultaneously. I guess, just self-acceptance.

File under: Dour but hooky jangle-pop with a decidedly Anglophilic edge

For fans of: The Smiths, The Housemartins, The Lucksmiths, The Go-Betweens

From: Brooklyn, by way of Florida, by way of Connecticut

Personae: Andrew Marr (vocals/guitar), Jared O'Connel (bass), John Barinaga (guitar), Jake Beal (drums)

Ski Lodge’s debut Big Heart opens with a jangle and a pout, a tumble of giddy guitars, a handclap drum track and frontman Andrew Marr sighing, “You don’t have to be like me/ You don’t have to make the same mistakes.” And while the go-to easy critical reference point for this Brooklyn band has been another band with a Marr in it, Big Heart is more than a mere Manchester mimeograph. Its songs sway and sashay, guitars wreathing the edges like fine lace on velvet shirt sleeves. But all that frilliness masks a bruised heart: Throughout Big Heart, Marr laments his inability to connect with lovers and friends and his frustrations with his own shortcomings.

eMusic’s editor-in-chief met up with Marr at a New York coffee shop to talk about Florida, emotional alienation and the perils of teenage drug culture.

On the early influence of the Grateful Dead:

I was in a jam band in high school. We did a lot of Grateful Dead and Phish songs. I started to sing a little bit for the first time in that band. I still respect the Grateful Dead. I was obsessed with them for a while, then I went through a phase where I started listening to more indie music and thought, “Well, I can’t really like the Grateful Dead and Phish if I’m liking this other music.” I’m kind of getting over that now, and realizing that they were great songwriters, and that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. I think a lot of the distaste for those bands has to do with the type of people who like that music and not the music itself. I mean, have you ever been to a Phish show? It’s such a ridiculous scene.

On the downside of growing up in a wealthy community:

I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. It’s pretty suburban — it’s about 45 minutes from New York. It’s a pretty wealthy town — that’s usually why people have heard of it, though my family wasn’t super wealthy. It was a great place to grow up, but it’s kind of fucked up also. Kids there just have access to a lot of money. There are a lot of drugs, and that had a big impact on me. High school basically revolved around doing drugs and trying to do as little school work as possible. I was fully in it. I started by just experimenting [with drugs] with friends in middle school — a lot of my friends had older brothers, so it was just out of curiosity mainly. But then I just fell into that group of people, and that was just what we did. It got bad. I crashed a couple cars, so my parents kind of caught on after that. [Pause.] They were their cars.

On being exiled in Florida:

I went there for rehab — I think a lot of people end up there for the same reason — and then I just got stuck there. I started in Del Rey Beach and then moved a little north to the West Palm Beach area. I was there for four years. I didn’t really like anything about it, to be honest. I just kind of stuck around because I couldn’t really get my shit together. A year or two before I moved up here I finally got a band together and we played out a little bit down there. The scene there, there’s just not much going on. Touring bands don’t really visit there much. Miami has a pretty good venue, but it’s just way out of the way from where I was. I saw Radiohead while I was down there, but not really much else.

On his slow departure from the jam-band scene:

A friend of mine played [Death Cab for Cutie's] “I Will Follow You into the Dark” on guitar one time, and he was singing it, and I was like, “That’s an awesome song — who sings that?” And he told me. And I got really into Plans and Transatlanticism, and I listened to them a lot. That was the first band in that world. I got into the Shins right around that same time, too. So then when I was in Florida, I was writing a lot of Death Cab-inspired songs on the piano and just recording them into my laptop. At some point I was just like, “I want to start writing on the guitar — I’m kind of missing this whole other feel.” So I started messing around with it on my own and wrote songs based on my ability. As I’ve gotten better on the guitar, my songs have gotten a little more advanced than they were initially.

On songwriting as biography, and therapy:

None of the songs on Big Heart were narratives about other people. I’m more of a biographer. I get these little snippets of ideas and I try to piece them all together. “Anything to Hurt You” is just about being a bad influence on somebody else — looking at my mistakes, and saying to someone else that they don’t have to go through the same shit. And the title track is about a death, a figurative death. I’ve always had a hard time connecting with people — both knowing what other people are thinking and telling people what I’m thinking. Songwriting is a way for me to speculate on what relationships are really like, or what another person’s intentions were when I really have no idea. So the title track is a personal song about my inability to open up to people — in relationships, specifically. My girlfriend used to say I had no heart. And she was fucking around with me, but that’s what inspired me to think, “What does it feel like to not have a heart? And what does it feel like to open yourself up but then have your heart crushed?” That song for me is about the struggle between closing yourself off to everything versus opening yourself up and dealing with pain. I’ve gotten better — I’m going to therapy, and I’ve gotten better at telling people what’s going on in my life, but before that I was totally closed off. So I think songwriting is a useful tool for me. It’s part of my process.

Creating another facet of their constantly evolving identity

If 2012′s Divine Providence was Deer Tick’s last-call bar-romp, Negativity is the Rhode Island quintet’s bleak morning-after. Much more introspective and subdued, Negativity largely ditches the group’s trademark drunken swagger for emotional and musical depth.

Singer John McCauley wrote Negativity in the course of a year in which he suffered a broken engagement and his father’s incarceration for tax fraud, all while alternating between smoking cocaine and trying to clean up. As such, the lyrical content of Negativity is appropriately abject: The quasi-ballad “Mr. Sticks” addresses McCauley’s dad and “The Wall,” “Just Friends” and single “The Dream’s in the Ditch” all depict various broken relationships.

The album is also the most musical in Deer Tick’s nine-year career, as the band employs keys and more melodic guitar lines for a fuller sound. Negativity is also punctuated by horns courtesy of Austin, Texass’ 11-piece Grupo Fantasmo on songs like “Trash” and “The Rock.” The emphasis on technicality and sobriety, unfortunately, take away some of what made Deer Tick special to begin with. They deserve credit for creating another facet of their constantly evolving identity; it’s just a bummer that negativity isn’t as much fun.

Rock's instrumentation, chopped so finely it stutters like R&B

The Los Angeles sister band HAIM — their last name, one that rhymes with “time” — employ rock’s instrumentation, but chop it up so finely it stutters like R&B. They’re not the first to do this, of course, but HAIM’s blend, a mix of bright, brittle percussiveness and soft sisterly harmonies, feels unique, a sound that’s both nervous and resolute. It feels like youth, that knowledge that everything’s already been done before, but that you’ve nevertheless got to make your own mark. Providing most of the instrumentation as well as the singing, Este, Danielle and Alana Haim do exactly that.

There are other precedents to HAIM — Tango in the Night-era Fleetwood Mac in the precision of the production and the assuredness of the hooks; the sunniness of the Mamas and the Papas or Wilson Phillips. But because the songwriting is as strong as the sisters’ delivery is nonchalant, there’s an immediate and assured identity here that’s striking, and it transcends its many influences.

Nearly every cut exudes the confidence of a single: There have already been four of them, and that doesn’t even count “If I Could Change Your Mind,” a soft-rock plea punctuated by handclaps and hi-hat from the disco gods. And yet there’s plenty of weirdness too: “My Song 5″ features not just Tom Waits-goes-dubstep moves and a righteous double-tracked fuzz bass solo, but also super-distorted virtual trombones that essentially fart along with the vocal. Wilson Philips never thought of that.

When Moby requested we interview Cold Specks as part of his takeover of eMusic, we were all too happy to oblige. The debut from pseudonymous songwriter Al Spx topped our list of eMusic’s Best Albums of 2012, and her live show had grown more riveting and more assured each time we saw her. Her performance on Moby’s record Innocents contains all of the things that made her first album so stunning — enigmatic lyrics, deeply-felt vocals and a free-floating but undeniable sense of spirituality. eMusic’s editor-in-chief J. Edward Keyes caught up with Spx by phone to discuss her new record, her collaboration with Moby and her paralyzing perfectionism.

I’m interviewing you at Moby’s request, because he’s taking over our site for a week, but it’s kind of convenient — your album was our No. 1 record of last year.

I heard about that!

So I thought this would be a good time to see what you’ve been up to since then. Where are you right now?

I’m in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I’m in a studio recording some songs for the next record.

How long have you been working on that?

Well. I don’t know. It’s kind of — [pauses]. Some of the songs have existed for a while, some are brand new. We didn’t start tracking until maybe a month ago.

So there were still some songs from your original batch that didn’t make it on to I Predict a Graceful Expulsion?

There’s just one. It’s existed in many forms, and I finally forced the son of a bitch to give in recently. I won’t tell you which one. It’ll ruin the surprise.

I was going to ask if it was the one you were playing on tour.

Well, actually, OK — I got that wrong. There’s two that have existed in a few different forms. The one that you’re speaking of — where did you see me play?

I saw you at Glasslands, then at Mercury Lounge, then at Piano’s.

OK. So you probably heard a bunch of the new ones. There’s a song… [stops suddenly] I don’t want to say!

You don’t have to!

Oh, I’ll just say it, whatever. There’s a song called “All Flesh is Grass” and a song called “Let Loose the Dogs.” “All Flesh is Grass” is probably written around the same time as “Blank Maps,” but it didn’t make the first record because I hadn’t figured out the arrangement for it, and it’s taken a couple of years to get right. The other one was written when I first started touring.

You talk about these songs existing in a few different forms — how do you know when to say “stop”?

I know it’s done because when I listen to it, I become filled with delight and satisfaction, and I know that I can’t make it any better. My producer, Jim, and the assistant here are probably realizing that I’m incredibly anal when it comes to the studio, but these songs exist forever, so I just want to get them right. I’m kind of a perfectionist. I want and I need for everything to be absolutely as perfect as I can make it.

What was the moment you started becoming aware that the first record was really resonating with people?

I guess when I started to tour the record, I would notice the crowds start to get bigger. We’d be playing tiny shows in small towns in the middle of nowhere — like, say, Denton, Texas — and there would be loads of people who knew and loved the songs. I guess that’s when I started to realize that I was doing something right.

One of the things that really struck me about the record was the way you took Bible verses and either recontextualize them or manipulate them in certain ways. How conscious a choice was that?

Not very conscious. The record is a representation of loss in many forms — mostly just loss of several relationships. I studied English and noticed Bible verses are common in literature. It’s the best piece of fiction in the world as far as I’m concerned. There are some really beautiful lines in it, and some lines really just stuck out to me. I don’t really like to go into detail about what the songs are about. I’m a very private person and my songs are very vague and I really do love it when people interpret it and take it in different ways. I think it’s incredibly fascinating.

A lot of the story around the early record was about the falling out between you and your parents. From what I’ve read, it sounds like things are better now?

It’s all good in the hood. It was kind of blown out of proportion in the early days. It was mostly just growing pains, really. My parents wanted the best for me and they didn’t necessarily believe that music was the best for me at first, but they’ve come around. It’s all love.

Does that mean you’ll start using your real name?

[Laughs.] No, I’m a very private person. I write music and I enjoy doing it, but because I do it, I think it’s completely unnatural to perform day in and day out and give yourself to people — a collection of strangers — every night. I’d much rather have a stage name and remove myself from it all.

So you take on this persona of Al Spx to maintain a sense of self.

That’s exactly what it is. Al Spx is a character, and she exists because I created a project called Cold Specks, and people kept asking me who Cold Specks was. And I thought I’d given enough at first, but evidently I hadn’t [laughs]. So I came up with a stage name, and that’s all I’m willing to give. I just got so uncomfortable attaching my real name and myself to songs that are incredibly personal and have the tendency to be morbid. It’s not a reflection of me, and I don’t feel entirely comfortable with the songs completely defining me as a human being, because it’s just one side of me. So I have a stage name.

I’d imagine it also allows you a degree of sanity because you can step out of that character when you’re not performing.

Exactly. When I’m not touring, I go back to the girl I am and remember who I am as a human being. It can be incredibly grueling at times. Al Spx is a tough bitch and she can deal with that, but when I’m at home, I want to just be me.

One of my favorite lines is on “Blank Maps,” where you sing “I am a goddamn believer.” What are some things you believe in?

I’m not sure. I’m still figuring it out. That particular song is — [pauses]. That particular song is about a boy, and I think I was just trying to let him know some things.

Have any of the people these songs are about heard them?

Probably. [Laughs] I’m not sure. I don’t know. I’d rather not say.

Let’s talk about the new record. Thematically, how do the songs relate to the songs on the first record?

It’s different. They’re louder. There aren’t any acoustic guitars — I’ve been joking that I’ve gone all “Judas” on this record [laughs].

Is this for real, or are you doing that thing you like to do to interviewers where you pull my leg and then I report it?

[Laughs.] I’m not! I’m not. I’ve stopped doing that. It’s more playful this record. The first record was a delicate record, and it was a moment in time and a reflection of a fragile girl. For this record, I’ve grown a lot as a human being. The songs on the first record were written when I was a teenager and in my early 20s, and I’ve grown a lot since then. I think I also got a little tired of being depicted as an “emotional songwriter.” That sort of seeped into my songwriting. So this one’s just playful.

So more major-key songs?

I actually can’t answer that for you, but only because I don’t know anything about music. I play in two tunings, and they’re both, I guess, minor tunings — it’s always gonna be minor with Cold Specks — but I don’t actually know anything about music. I play guitar and write all the songs and I sit down with the boys and tell them what I want. Like I said, I’m incredibly anal in the studio.

I’m curious as to how you think other members of your band would describe working with you.

Chris Cundy, the woodwind player, has a phrase — he says I’m “predictably unpredictable.” And that’s accurate. I’m the most disgustingly indecisive person. I think I know what I want, but I really don’t.

Let’s talk a little bit about the collaboration with Moby — how did that come about?

We’re on the same label, Mute, and I think he was looking for singers and Daniel Miller from Mute mentioned me, so he looked up all my stuff and really liked it, and we just started working together.

Was the song already finished by the time it got to you?

“A Case for Shame,” he sent an instrumental. There’s a studio in London that I work in occasionally and I recorded some vocals and sent them back to him. It was a very creative and collaborative setup. The other song we actually recorded in his home studio. I had a day off on my last North American tour, so we stopped in L.A. and I went over to his house and recorded the second song. Very quickly, actually. He already had the instrumental and I had it for weeks but couldn’t come up with anything. The night before [we were recording] I scribbled some notes on my hotel notepad and went in and we did it in about an hour.

How is his process different from yours?

He’s not an anal piece of shit like I am.

That seems like you’re being pretty hard on yourself!

I like to think I’m funny with my harshness! [Laughs.] He goes with the flow, Moby. He doesn’t overanalyze. It’s something I learned from working with him. I can spend a lot of time just picking at things and just doesn’t do that. He’s a very free and open and creative man and he’s not at all disgustingly over analytical. It’s a really refreshing thing.

I’m sure some of that comes with experience, though.

Yeah, I’m only making my second record now. He’s had a lot of time to grow as an artist, so he knows what he wants and he gets there quickly.

I know you have a lot of influences outside of music. I was curious to know what you’re reading now.

There’s a book by Milan Kundera called Immortality that I just picked up the other day.

What kinds of books do you tend to be attracted to?

I like really descriptive stuff, and I like really short and sweet stuff as well. I like ‘em all.

Are you living in Canada when you’re not on the road?

I don’t live anywhere. I just finished touring. I’ll probably be moving back to London soon. I like it because it’s a very big city — I think it’s the best city in the world. It’s huge — there are cities within the city. So many people, so many things to do. It’s just a wonderful city.

Since Moby asked us to interview you as one of his favorite artists, I was wondering who you’ve been listening to lately and who you admire.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Scott Walker. Michael Gira from Swans. There’s this band from the UK called Savages that I really like.

I could almost hear a collaboration between you and Scott Walker.

Oh God, I would love that. The guy who did our latest music video did the video for that song “Epizootics!” from the last Scott Walker record. That’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to Scott Walker.

The Flaming Lips have never shied away from life’s unavoidable existential dramas — Death, Love, Depression, The Afterlife (or lack thereof). But The Lips have never made “depressing” music: Steven Drozd, the band’s multi-instrumentalist and chief sonic architect, has a flair for melodic, rainbow-hued arrangements, and Wayne Coyne, their outsized frontman, plays the role of psychedelic jester, particularly on stage, where he crowd-surfs on inflatable bubbles, pours fake blood on his face, and preaches his deep ruminations to a cult-like fan-base in his cracked warble.

The Terror, the band’s 13th studio album, is a bleak — often morbid — change of pace, filled with repetitive synthesizer textures, ghostly choral voices, and dark lyrical mantras. Inspired by a dread of mortality and deep personal turmoil (Coyne’s recent divorce, Drozd’s brief heroin relapse), the duo recorded the album mostly alone, working quickly and spontaneously instead of layering the songs with overdubs. eMusic’s Ryan Reed spoke with Wayne Coyne about the album’s intimate recording process and complicated themes.

In an interview with Pitchfork, Steven Drozd said: “The Terror is this internal feeling you get that you and everyone you love is going to die. Everything in your life might be good, but there’s still this notion…that there’s more pain and suffering to come down the road.” It’s interesting to compare that quote to “Do You Realize,” which basically says the same thing but puts it in a beautiful, uplifting sense.

I think that’s what optimism is, in the end. You go, “We can’t bear this,” or you go, “We’ll find a way.” Sometimes music tells us so much about how we feel, and I think that’s why we like music so much — because it fills in. We utterly know what it means while it’s playing, but the minute it stops, it’s like, “I don’t know anymore.” I don’t think one way of thinking has to negate another way of thinking. I’m certainly not “Do You Realize.”

It’s a dramatic song, and I think it’s most powerful when it’s used at these dramatic moments. Most people I’ve talked to that have used it have done so at weddings and funerals, even the birth of their children. They see it as the sound of this big moment, where this other sound — this sound that we’re doing on The Terror — it’s this moment that’s with you all the time. It feels depressing and triumphant at the same time. A triumph isn’t “Hey, this is the greatest thing! We’re gonna live!” A triumph is saying, “We’ll just get through this.” We don’t have to make it any more sparkly than that.

When I read about the album’s dark themes, I expected the music to be depressing. And it is in a way, but there’s also a comfort in the sadness. There’s a bleakness to it, but it’s also really beautiful at the same time.

When we were making it, a lot of it reminded us of church music. We don’t go to church now, but when you were young, you’d sit there and try your best, not knowing what the fucking words were, to sing along with these simple mantras that people would sing in church. And it wouldn’t be about a singular singer. I think that’s what a lot of this music feels like as well. It’s not coming from a point of “I’m the singer.” I call it “the voices from beyond.” There are only a couple of songs in which you can hear me trying to sound like to sound like me. It’s just melody and words that are in the cloud of the sound of the song anyway. For me, it’s not meant to be this big statement by this big character.

So from what I’ve read in other interviews, Steven’s dark period was what really set the tone for the album. But I also know you were going through some heavy shit during that time. What was it for you that sparked this mood and the idea of The Terror?

We’ve always hinted at this type of music. But the main difference is: Even five or six years ago, if we were having a semi-big production going on, like some of these songs are, with drums and overdubs and a lot of voices being recorded — in the early stages of a lot of our records, we start early on with really primitive demos. But now we don’t do that anymore. A lot of times we’re just recording, and we’re not really doing a demo of a song. We’re just creating it right there. There isn’t gonna be a second version or a third version — it just is what we create.

And now we can do that without anybody being there. So you really are, in a sense, kind of a painter in a dark corner, painting whatever you want and not always thinking anybody has to see it. It used to be, no matter what we would do, we were surrounded by people who were helping us record — engineers, technicians and producers, and everybody is in there listening to everything you do, and sometimes openly judging us, sometimes not. But you’re not doing it in isolation of your own creation, and I think that’s the main difference.

I think we’ve always been able to do expressionistic, internal music, but it’s very hard to do that sometimes. In the past, we’ve never been alone making it. When you get musicians together, they want to do music. They want to say, “You play that, and I’ll play this.” This wasn’t music like that. It’s simple, repetitive…a lot of it’s even out of tune and out of rhythm with itself — it just happens to be something we liked. If Steven liked it, and I liked it, that’s all that mattered. We don’t care if it’s good or bad. If we’re happy with it, let’s go. So I think that’s really powerful and great luck — this kind of music that we’re drawn to is this cold, distant, unsettled thing.

I’m really curious how you guys were able to sustain this mood throughout the album. Is it a situation where you guys started to capture this mood so you noticed that pattern and said, “Let’s shape the record in this way”? Or did a lot of it just happen subconsciously?

That’s a narrow path to walk. Part of it is you want to stay in this color palette. Not to simplify it, but you have Picasso’s Blue Period, or whatever, they’re all reaching for the same thing. But that can also be limiting because you can start cutting off possibilities, and we don’t like to do that either because sometimes you think, “Oh, it couldn’t possibly be this,” but then you hear it and you say, “Well, it’s absolutely that.”

We really struggled with the song, “Butterfly…How Long it Takes to Die.” We struggled with that one in the beginning, because it felt too snappy. It’s well played, but I think it’s the only song on the record that has this little moment of funk in it. With Embryonic, we were doing that all over the place — being very clumsy and funky and primitive. And this wasn’t doing that. For whatever reason, we were on another trip. And when we were confronted with that song, we thought, “What do we do?” And we just rejected it for the longest time. And I didn’t think about [the lyrics] very much, I just said cosmic shit that you think of with the music. Then we re-looked at it, and we thought, “Why don’t we make it more like what the lyrics are talking about and see if we can make another version of this bleak, un-chromatic landscape.” I think it works — over the last three or four songs, you really feel like you’re no longer looking for the answer. To me, it sort of feels like you’ve found the answer. And sometimes with really distinct rhythms, that’s kind of what it’s saying. You know which path you’re on. Earlier in the record, we begin with a rhythm that isn’t very solid, but kind of dissolves into almost-rhythmless rhythms. They’re rhythms, but they don’t really push forward with a lot of confidence, and none of it rushes ahead. And by the end of the album, we kind of get something back. We know something different. That’s how it feels to me — I don’t know if it really is true, but that’s how it feels to me as a piece of music.

“Try to Explain” is absolutely beautiful, and it epitomizes everything I love about the album. That could be one of my favorite Lips melodies.

It does that thing we talked about, almost being a “voice from beyond.” It never seemed as though it was a singular person singing it. Even though I’m singing it, it’s almost like music that’s always existed, and someone sang it somewhere in time. And I think when we do music like that, where there is no character involved, it allows you to be vulnerable and say things that you probably wouldn’t say if you were being you. You wouldn’t say something so crushing. When that big crescendo of all those harmony voices break into that line, “Try to explain why you’ve changed,” it’s unbearable. It’s as though nature has been split open or something — that’s why I sang that line. It just sounded like that to me. That crescendo really was an accident; we stumbled upon these harmonies just willy-nilly. Steven did one or two, and I did a third one or something, and it really became emotional. We added the lyrics — the music always carried the message, but we just added the lyrics like, “Of course, this is what the music was saying.”

The song is just enough sad, and it’s just enough powerful, but it doesn’t last very long. Sometimes that’s the hardest thing to do in music because you want to do it again and again and make it bigger — but if you leave just below the hottest temperature, it’s almost like you can have it forever, because you can handle it. The temptation with dumb artists and musicians like us is that you want to go all the way. If it’s big, make it bigger; if it’s loud, make it louder. But if you’re lucky, you don’t do that. When that happens, it can be pretty powerful.

I think the biggest anguish and pain people have is when they can’t find the answer. Your mind can’t stop searching, and it keeps you looking and keeps you wondering. And that’s really where your psychic pain is: Knowing the answer may be painful, but I think your imagination is something your worst enemy. Your mind sometimes goes to the worst possible place, and before you know it, you’re living in some unlivable hell. Most people I’ve talked to, without knowing it, have all pointed to that song and said, “I know what you’re talking about there. I can relate to that. There’s something about that piercing thing.” It’ s not demanding an answer — it’s longing for one. It’s crying out for something, saying, “I just wanna know!” It’s powerful, but I don’t know if I have any answers. Sometimes I know I’m singing something that’s trying to channel your subconscious. That’s a hokey thing to say, but for me, it’s not always, “There’s this thing happening in your life, so you sing about it.” Sometimes it’s just there.

Here, Bratton walks us through some of his favorite Cascine releases.

File under: No-wave hardcore; harmony meets disharmony in an unpadded cell; the sound a Kathy Acker novel would make if it was a band instead of a book

For fans of: Free Kitten, Arab On Radar, Destroy All Monsters, Scissor Girls, Magik Markers

From: Oakland, California

Personae: Marissa Magic (guitar, vocals), Jaime Clark (drums), Vanessa Harris (guitar, vocals)

Oakland’s Stillsuit mix experimental noise rock with punk politics, creating a feminist soundtrack to the confusion of sex and violence in a gendered world. Loud treble guitars in weird tunings duel while drums pound away in another time signature. Their live show lays waste to squares who cover their ears, clear the room and even pull the plug.

Stillsuit is the best band in America, and their legitimacy is not predicated on outside approval. Like all great underground groups, they make up their own rules. Listen and learn.

On noise vs. punk:

Marissa Magic: Sometimes I describe us as noise-rock, but I also kind of hate that [term].

Vanessa Harris: [Noise] is where a lot of my personal history lies, but it can be limiting. My conception of a punk band means that you care about things. I want to be explicitly feminist and care about the ways in which we do things. We are a punk band in that sense, but maybe we don’t totally sound like one.

On moving beyond the “man/woman” show and intersectional feminism in 2013:

Jaime Clark: The feminist scene in the Bay Area isn’t just about women or cisgendered women, it’s about gender-non-conforming people and people of color. It also considers class dynamics and so many aspects of people’s backgrounds that are not necessarily directly related to gender.

Harris: There’s also a lot of non-feminist punk stuff that’s going on too and that can be a bummer — some of those “man/woman” shows that happen —

Clark: — as in, “men” and “women” are at the show, and that’s it —

Harris: And they are very much acting out roles that are traditional. Being in consideration of all those things is what good feminism is. What inspires me about feminism is that it can encompass anything. It should be asking questions about race, class, gender, queer — I don’t know, everything.

Magic: Sometimes we get asked to play bigger noise shows and we are the only women on the bill — or it will be, like, very man/woman situations — I think it’s important to play those shows but it can be challenging.

On what they dislike most in popular music:

Magic: I don’t like music that sounds like it’s made by hippies on cocaine. Like ELO, Steely Dan — I just hate groovy-talented-guys doing groovy-talented-things in really expensive studios and everything sounds slick. Also a thing that bums me out is that a lot of the music I really like sonically is either lyrically or aesthetically really fucked up.

Clark: Generally I dislike Bruce Springsteen and I dislike “Don’t Stop Believing” — things that are sort of like “songs for every guy out there.” Also, drums or percussion really make or break a band for me. I don’t like music where it feels like whatever percussion has no life. I like a lot of music that has drum machines or pre-recorded beats, as long as it seems like life got put into creating it.

Harris: I hate ’80s synths. I hate the new ’80s noise dudes doing ’80s synth-music thing. It’s so unappealing to me. I love Steely Dan. I don’t like Journey, but I like Boston. But I would pay money if I never had to hear that song “You Spin Me Right Round” again.

Magic: The other day she said “I would pay $5 to never hear that song again.”

Harris: Yeah, I don’t care that much. But I could do without it.

Their most clear-headed and well-rounded album to date

The make-or-break moment on Kings of Leon’s sixth LP is “Comeback Story,” a grandiose, slow-burning arena-rock anthem built on lonely guitar twang, a ghostly choir, and (what?) pizzicato strings. Depending on what kind of fan you are, it’s either the band’s syrupy tipping point — or their maximalist masterpiece.

Really, it’s both. The Followill boys aren’t the same scrappy backwoods teens who once earned the title “Southern Strokes,” haphazardly garnishing their power chords with hormonal rebellion. Their evolution has been subtle, but substantive: They’ve embellished their sound with bits of fractured art-rock (2007′s Because of the Times), glossy pop-rock (2008′s Only By the Night), and honest-to-gosh country (the mellower bits of 2010′s Come Around Sundown). But with Mechanical Bull, they’ve managed to synthesize all these elements (and some unexpected new flourishes) in ways that feel fresh and vibrant.

The main catalyst is a practical one: Bull arrives after a three-year interim, their longest to date. Following his now-infamous drunken stage tantrum in 2011, frontman Caleb sobered up and started a family. It can’t be a simple coincidence — Mechanical Bull is their most clear-headed and well-rounded album to date. First off, it’s richer sonically. Where Come Around Sundown sounded stifled and squashed, Bull is a full-blooded beast. There’s added muscle to Jared’s bass and brother Nathan’s reliably dextrous drums; Matthew’s psychedelic guitar spasms now reach an Edge-like grandeur only hinted at previously.

More impressive is the album’s sprawling breadth. For the first time in years, they sound liberated from the expectations of what a “Kings of Leon album” should sound like. Instead, they seem to simply be enjoying the process of crafting their songs: From the blistering power-punk riffs on “Don’t Matter” to the atmospheric power-ballad “Beautiful War” to the funky, swampy blues strut of “Family Tree,” they’ve hit a bull’s-eye on every target.

Shouting her newfound confidence from the rooftops

Since striking out on her own in 2009, former Vivian Girls/Crystal Stilts drummer Frankie Rose has sounded more self-assured and willing to take risks with each album. Herein Wild, which follows last year’s excellent Interstellar LP, is no exception. The album features more polished production, emphasizing the emergence of ornate instrumental details like cinematic orchestra shivers (“Cliffs As High”) and muted trumpets and strings (on the otherwise acoustic “Requiem”). As a singer, Rose is more confident in her ability to express varying depths of emotion; in particular, her slightly mysterious vocal delivery turns an electropop remake of the Damned’s “Street of Dreams” into something closer to a spy movie theme.

Despite these additions, Herein Wild feels like a logical progression from Rose’s past work. Like Interstellar, the record contains plenty of lush, keyboard-gilded indie-pop — highlighted by the lilting Sarah Records homages “Sorrow” and “Into Blue” and the burbling, Stereolab-like “Question Reason” — and textures influenced by the Cure’s bleakest early days (the frantic drums and deep-cutting bass line of “The Depths,” cyclone-like synth spirals on “Minor Times”). The difference is that Herein Wild‘s more deliberate approach adds gravitas to Rose’s longing and melancholy, and lightness to her more optimistic moments. Both ends of the spectrum are evident on the fuzzy opening salvo “You for Me.” The song alternates between quiet verses and stomping choruses, creating intensity that mirrors the self-awakening described in the lyrics. By the end of the song, Rose sounds positively giddy as she repeats the phrase “Can you see?” as if she can’t wait to shout her newfound confidence from the rooftops.

A so-called difficult album with moments of near-transcendence

Nirvana’s third album was burdened with expectations almost as soon as it was even an idea; the success of Nevermind, their 1991 breakthrough, thrust them under a high-performance microscope, onto the gossip pages, and into the rumor mill. Stories that In Utero, recorded by noise king Steve Albini, did not please the band’s label (because it was uncommercial) abounded in the months leading up to its release; Kurt Cobain told SPIN he felt like he was “stuck in a void” because of its tormented birthing process.

“Teenage angst has paid off well; now I’m bored and old,” Cobain drawls as the record opens; he had turned 26 during the album’s recording sessions. This slyly-expressed weariness defines much of In Utero; Cobain’s screeched “Get awayyy!” as Dave Grohl bashes behind him on the grimacing “Scentless Apprentice” could have been directed at any number of people lusting after his newfound fame, while the defiantly downcast “Rape Me” is a wide-eyed challenge for people to do their worst to one another, from the repurposed “Smells Like Teen Spirit” riff on down.

What much of the chatter about In Utero‘s rawness misses, though, is the moments of intricate beauty hidden underneath the self-loathing and yowled lyrics. The low-in-the-mix harmonies on the chorus of “Pennyroyal Tea” undercut Cobain’s clenched vocalizing of the title’s abortion-inducer; the album’s closer, “All Apologies,” has a haunting cello counterpoint (played by Kera Schaley) that gets increasingly frenetic as the song sways toward its resigned conclusion. “All in all is all we are,” Cobain groans to close out the track, one of his band’s most lasting radio hits. In Utero‘s reputation as Nirvana’s “difficult” album is undercut by moments like these, when Cobain’s pain and his bandmates’ musicianship create moments of near-transcendence.

North Carolina?

155 years after its publication, the phrase “Paradise of Bachelors” graced the spine of the first album released by a couple of Tar Heel Staters — Brendan Greaves and Jason Perlmutter — who had no idea they were launching one of the most promising labels in the Southeast, arguably the entire country. “What a title for a story, especially one by an author we consider to be a paragon of American literary excellence,” says Greaves, co-founder and Melville fan. “I just thought the title was so compelling and humorous. That was my primary justification.”

It might seem like an odd literary reference for a label so focused on American — specifically North Carolinian — regional music, but Greaves says the name has taken on new weight and significance since its first release, a compilation of homegrown soul songs written, produced and originally released by a stereo salesman named David Lee. “It’s a story about labor,” he says. “That idea appealed to me because when I was in grad school, I wrote a bit about labor lore and occupational booklets — the culture and everyday experiences of work among Americans. And in retrospect, the fact that half the story is about lawyers has become particularly relevant. You deal with lawyers a lot in this business, and that can be both educational and extraordinarily frustrating.”

Neither Greaves nor Perlmutter (who runs the site Carolinasoul.org) had high expectations for their 2010 maiden release, Said I Had a Vision: Songs & Labels of David Lee, 1960-1988, but surprisingly, it sold out before it even hit stores. “We thought maybe we’ve got something here,” recalls Greaves, “maybe we can do another project.” Next on the docket was Poor Moon, the new album by the Durham-based band Hiss Golden Messenger.

As the label grew and matured, Greaves and his new partner, Christopher Smith (late of the band Espers) would work to maintain a sharp balance between intriguing new music (such as the self-titled debut from Nashville folk-rock upstarts Promised Land) and fascinating archival releases (such as Chance Martin’s Music Row obscurity/absurdity In Search). “I’d like to braid the two together in a compelling way,” says Greaves. “I’m interested in older music to the extent that there’s more of it. There’s a lot yet to be discovered.”

Based in Durham, Greaves — a New Englander who moved to North Carolina to study folklore — handles copyright research, oversees most of the graphic design, and writes liner notes. His wife Samantha handles the bookkeeping, and Smith (based in Philadelphia) is in charge of A&R and artist management. “That’s his background. Through Espers, he has had intensive tour experience and understands these matters from the artist’s perspective. I don’t really have that. It’s a shared burden.”

Despite the many miles in between Greaves and Smith, Paradise of Bachelors remains entrenched in the culture and traditions of North Carolina and is becoming an increasing presence in the bustling Tar Heel scene. “One could argue that North Carolina is the birthplace of country music in a broad sense,” says Greaves. “There were a lot of important early country recordings in Charlotte before Nashville took control of everything. All the old-time banjo music string-band traditions, all the bluegrass traditions came from here. And then there’s this amazing wealth of African-American musical traditions, both secular and sacred.” He sees local acts like Hiss Golden Messenger, Megafaun, and Horseback as continuations of those traditions.

Even so, as Paradise of Bachelors grows, Greaves understands that its scope will transcend state lines. In fact, the label is planning a new set of reissues for a UK artist, which would fulfill the transatlantic nature of its namesake story. “We’d like to maintain and even accelerate our pace,” he explains,” without losing attention to detail or our ability to represent our artists effectively and accurately.”

Speaking by phone from his home in North Carolina, Greaves elaborated on some the label’s small, but growing catalog.

Reigniting everything great about Mazzy Star

Like a chimera in languorous opposition to earthly indie-rock, Mazzy Star was a beguiling apparition in an age of grubby grunge. Touring rarely and dispensing three-yearly studio albums out of the blue, they were an enigma in an era that rewarded only rock’s growlers, grafters and insatiable self-promoters.

Though they wound up on Capitol Records, their one hit, ’93′s “Fade Into You,” only seemed to define their elusiveness, thanks to David Roback’s hazy acoustic strum and Hope Sandoval’s wispy vocal melody. Mazzy was the kind of band whose music might soundtrack an arty love scene in a Bertolucci movie (as it did in ’96′s Stealing Beauty). And then suddenly they were no more, as sultry Sandoval and gently psychedelic Roback, who were romantically involved in the beginning, went their separate ways.

In the intervening 17 years, their horizontally-inclined sound has become veritably iconic, “inspiring,” to say the least, boy/girl groups like Beach House. According to Roback, they’ve never stopped writing or recording, even while he now resides in Norway and she divides her time between San Francisco and rural Ireland. “We don’t really keep track of time,” she says.

Indeed, on their first record since ’96′s Among My Swan, time often seems to stand still. The magic of old lights up every track, but there’s plenty on Seasons Of Your Day that furthers the Mazzy brief. The album glides into “In the Kingdom” on near-church-y organ riff, Sandoval imagining taking “a train into the city,” drifting out on an easy rhythm exquisitely coloured by Roback’s sublime, reverb-heavy electric twang.

It’s easy to forget how this duo’s every tune conjures a different emotional world. “California” may be one of the bleakest numbers ever written about the Sunshine State: Against complex strumming, Sandoval breathily muses about returning there, “drifting across the ocean/ I can watch the skies turning grey.” Vague, portentous and — like the similarly wintry title track — utterly captivating.

Roback’s texturing of unamplified and amplified six-strings is the growth area this time, as well as a new fixation on bottleneck, which takes the album’s latter half in an agelessly bluesy direction. On “Spoon,” he duels with the late Scots folk legend Bert Jansch, while Sandoval intones, “Ain’t nobody gonna spin me round.” Seasons Of Your Day reignites everything great about Mazzy Star, while enforcing onward artistic progression with quiet yet unerring rigor.

So, it’s no surprise that when Barlow sat down with eMusic’s Robert Ham in the kitchen of Portland’s Bunk Bar recently to go over a handful of songs from his career, the 47-year-old musician didn’t shy away from addressing the tougher aspects of his life — including the subject that dominates Defend Yourself, the first Sebadoh album in more than a decade: the end of his 25-year marriage.

Deep Wound, “Lou’s Anxiety Song”

This is really strong stuff for a band in high school.

Yeah? Really? Huh…I wrote it myself!

Was it weird for your classmates to know someone in a band?

No one knew I was in a band. The only other guy who knew was in the band with me, Scott Helland. Literally, in a school of 500 kids in my class, no one in my graduating class. I could be exaggerating, but I think they had no idea.

There weren’t any other punk kids in school?

I’d say two of us. The other ones really weren’t punk. They dabbled. We were the only ones that were really into it.

You got together to do a one-song reunion back in 2004. How was that experience?

That was pretty special. It was a benefit show that my mother had helped set up. J played a solo set, Sonic Youth played. Sebadoh — Jason and I as a duo. Jay was playing solo came off the stage, and the other three members of Deep Wound came out. We said, “Hey J, get up here and play drums.” So we picked up Sonic Youth’s gear and did “Video Prick,” the slowest song on the record.

Dinosaur Jr., “Poledo”

Was it hard to get the rest of the band to accept the idea of what that song was?

It really wasn’t. I invested a lot of anxiety into it. I went up to J and said, “I really want to put a piece, a tape thing at the end of the record. Are you cool with that?” He said he was. That was that.

When you did the All Tomorrow’s Parties shows where you were playing all of You’re Living All Over Me, how did you present this song?

Just playing ukulele, doing the songs that were in there. I didn’t bring my laptop and blast everybody out.

Sebadoh, “Kath”

What came to mind when I was listening to this recently is that you can almost track the entire arc of your relationship with Kath through your Sebadoh albums.

Yeah. All of my really major relationships. For sure. Definitely my relationship with Kathleen, my relationship with J, my relationship with Eric Gaffney, John Davis.

Is it a version of therapy?

I think it is. My girlfriend now doesn’t really understand this concept. If I wrote songs about difficult times and sing about them continuously, it’s a way of overcoming those. Where she says, “Aren’t you just living through that every time?” I’m not because there’s a logic that goes through those songs. I don’t think that my songs are rooted in self-pity or negativity really.

The sense that I get is that it is very matter-of-fact or a kind of reportage.

I’m kind of explaining it to myself. That’s what it comes down to.

Sebadoh III was your first record with Jason Lowenstein. Why did you decide to add that extra element to the band?

To be a band, to play live. Eric and I experimented as a duo and that was cool but it’s hard for two guys to shut a whole room up or at least be loud enough to go over the talking. Especially with what we were. We weren’t a folk act. If we were punk, we weren’t loud enough. I really liked the concept behind the ukulele and two drums, but it just wasn’t practical for playing live shows. We weren’t self-conscious and arty enough to go, “That’s it. This is our thing.” We weren’t that precious about it. In the end, we just wanted to rock.

How was it going through all that material that you had that ended up on the Sebadoh III reissue?

It was a battle between me and Eric. Eric initially wanted to remix every one of his songs. The worst idea ever. You can’t do that. We fought and we fought about it, then I just said, “Go do it.” I got him the original tapes, sent him to the studio, came up with this mixes, and I said, “Eric, I’ve listened to the mixes. They’re fine. But we cannot under any circumstance replace the original versions on the record. And I will not allow this reissue to happen with those.” I let the conversation happen for a while but then just shut it down.

Was that before or after you did those reunion shows?

It was before. It was at least a two-year e-mail war. He had all of these accusations and ways that I’d fucked him over — I was hell bent on making these reissues happen, I was hell bent on getting him back into the band. We went point by point-by-point for, I swear, two years. And it drove my wife Kathleen crazy. “Why are you doing this? This is insanity!” I said, “No, I’ve gotta do it, and it’s gotta happen. We have to do it in a way where he’s really involved.” And we did and it culminated in the Sebadoh III reissue. It was a considerable amount of negotiations.

Did you foresee that there was going to be an endpoint to it? That Eric would be part of this and then that was going to be the end?

I don’t know what I was hoping for. I just wanted him back. Jason and I had done a bunch of shows as a duo and that was great. But we were missing the element of the drums so we brought Eric back. And by that time, Eric was much more concerned about playing guitar and being the frontman of the band. Which is fine, but his drumming to me was so crucial, his spirited drumming. When he came back, he would barely hit the drums. He’d get up on stage with a polyester jacket and complain about how hot he was. He was not going to throw himself into playing the drums. I needed to know it could never happen again. And I found out. He would never put as much of himself into it ever again. I had to come to terms with that.

The Folk Implosion, “Mechanical Man”

This was your only album on a major label.

Well, The Sebadoh was half Sire, half Sub Pop, but Sire dropped us one week after the record came out.

What was that experience like?

They were cool and totally hands off. I signed with Interscope because John Davis really wanted to sign with them. It was just bizarre. They cared so little about music that it was shocking to me. They had the golden ears, apparently. They were living on that idea. They didn’t give a shit about anything else. There was no love there. They funded us to make a record and we did it, and it ended up selling half as many copies as our last record on Communion did. So, they dropped me when I tried to make another record.

What was it about John that made your creative relationship work so well?

He and I just had this really great connection. He was a bit younger than me. That might have had something to do with it. He came to me as a fan of my early work. But we just had these long conversations. We talked all the times. And our conversations became musical. He was easily the most satisfying [musical partner].

There’s a real sense of playfulness to all of your work with him.

It really mirrored our conversations. He was better educated than I. He went to Brown and read a lot. I was just loved him. I thought he was the funniest and sweetest guy I ever met.

But there was another Folk Implosion record that he wasn’t a part of.

Yeah, he quit pretty much to the day that One Part Lullaby was released. He’s an incredibly sensitive person. And I’m…not. What I realize, in comparison to him, he’s really fragile. And I barely made it out of high school, and have been living on my wits for a long time. I’ve been through so much shit that I’ve let a lot of stuff roll off my back. Even though it doesn’t seem this way, I don’t dwell on things. I just move forward. We were in a really intense situation with Interscope. I was a mess personally. My personal life was on fire at that time. He bailed. I never heard from him again. No fight or falling out. He just said, “I’m out.”

Dinosaur Jr., “Recognition”

Is it a surprise to you that you are still going forward with Dinosaur Jr.?

It’s been eight years [so it's] hard to be a surprise. When we got back together initially it just worked so well. And I’d been through so much weird shit by the time I got back to J Mascis, it was like this is nothing. “At least this guy knows what he wants.” It was a relief — I’m actually working with someone who knows what he wants. With all due respect to everybody I’ve worked with. J is a fucking train on his track, and to come back to that, I’ll just ride. It’s not this emotional thing. It’s pretty easy to handle. Dinosaur’s the only band that I can play with that I can walk on to a festival stage and go, “Fuck yeah. There’s 30,000 people here and who cares?” Because if it’s me just playing a guitar, it’s a nightmare.

On all the three newer records, you only have two songs on them. Is that normal?

I tried three on this last record. J is so funny. He still has his dickish tendencies. He’ll do interviews with people, and say, “I don’t know. Lou really won’t write any more songs for the record.” He has the patience for about two songs on any record. This one, I was like, “I’m doing three songs.” The best of them is not on the record. I got J to improvise guitar on this pretty strong backbone that I’d come up with. And he fucking canned it from the record. Fuck you! I did my three songs. [Laughs.] He is very protective. He does want to keep a grip on that. And I respect that, actually.

When you’re writing Dinosaur stuff, are you specific about what you want from Murph and J?

I wasn’t at first, and then on the second record that we did, it was a nightmare. Both of them just sat there, like, “I don’t know what to do.” “You’re supposed to play the guitar! You’re supposed to play the drums!” They just wouldn’t do anything. I don’t think J’s used to collaborating, really. Murph needs someone to tell him exactly what to do. For one song on the second record, we worked on it for a week and he wrote all these drum parts. But then when we went to record it, he refused to play them. We played it for two days straight, and he refused to play it the way he wrote it. “I don’t know, I’m not really feeling it.” “What does that have to do with anything? We’re professional musicians, my friend. Whether you’re feeling it or not is immaterial.” It went right down to the wire. “I’m literally leaving in two hours I’m going back to L.A. with no songs if you don’t do this.” And he did it. So the last record, I had a whole different game plan. I had a really vivid dream where I walked up to [Melvins drummer] Dale [Crover] and asked him to write songs with Dinosaur. It took him two hours to write drum parts for three songs. “Oh, wow. Dale played on them?” Then they listened to my ideas.

Sebadoh, “Oxygen”

You said this wasn’t an issue playing the songs night after night, but: Was it difficult to write these songs, considering what was happening to you? Or did you just feel like this is what had to be said?

I had made a huge radical change in my life. I left my wife. Up to that point, I couldn’t speak honestly. I didn’t know how to finish those songs. I was dealing with years of repressing so much stuff. Once I made that actual break, all the words just wrote themselves. I don’t think they’re the greatest lyrics I’ve ever written, but they’re all true. I’ve been singing songs about jerking off for ages, so I set the bar pretty fucking low from the very beginning. There’s a part of me that’s so exhibitionist and so self-involved on that level. I don’t think that it’s that unusual or shocking or anything. I cut my teeth on punk rock, and these are people that were saying whatever. It was the truth. They were just laying it out there. That’s the inspiration I took. There were no boundaries. And the more real and uncomfortable it is, the better it is.

Has Kathleen heard the record?

No. No.

Is that something that you worry about at all?

It’s not really a concern. I put her through hell already while we were together. [Pauses.] Hopefully I’m not too mean in the songs. I would worry about that, if I was really calling her out on specific things. But I haven’t thought about it. I just can’t. Even my girlfriend now, she didn’t know anything about Sebadoh at all. She had no idea. She’s really into Ryan Adams, who is someone who writes beautifully poetic songs, my stuff is like, “Whoa…my god, do you really have to put that out?” Well, as a matter of fact, I do. I do need to put that out.

Do you feel like your approach to writing songs has changed?

I don’t know. Now I just have so much other shit going on in my life. Used to be every day I would just do whatever I felt like. Now it’s considerably more complicated. Because I’ve got kids and I’m supporting like five other people right now. My life is so fucked, but in a great way.

How are you kids holding up with everything?

My daughter is rip shit. She’s really mad. My daughter saw a lot of shit going on. She wasn’t spared anything. We had these heartbreaking moments where she would be between us going, “Mommy and daddy, don’t fight.” Fuck…never wanted that to happen! But she loves my girlfriend and is fascinated by this life I’m living. But she’s also rip shit at me. My son’s three years old and he’s just fucking crazy so it doesn’t matter. But it’s funny; he’ll say, “You’ll be nice to momma?” “Yeah, I’ll be nice to momma.”

Twisting and turning their good taste into something vibrant

Yuppies are one of those delightful, weird bands that offer smart, slippery glimpses of other delightful, weird bands amid their own abrasive art. These four Omahans clearly have a great record collection: The way their songs churn and often butt up against one another recalls the ramshackle, rollicking aesthetic of the Minutemen. The ranting of “A Ride” comes straight from Mark E. Smith’s This Nation’s Saving Grace notebook. Their runaway jams evoke a mix of both early Touch & Go and mid-period Dismemberment Plan, and the speak-singing intro of “I Don’t Know” is a direct descendent of either John Darnielle or Patrick Stickles. (Maybe both?) “Hitchin a Ride” borrows actual lyrics from The Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man.”

Far from nostalgists, though, Yuppies twist and turn their good taste into something vibrant. There’s an uncomfortable intensity throughout Yuppies that, coupled with the band’s oft-frenetic sound hints that they’re a ferocious live band. Plus, they love action verbs. If they’re not moving around while they play these gritty jams, they’re at least talking a big game — “Getting Out” sounds like it’s trying to avoid its parents, “Race to the Finish” is an ominous, slow-and-steady, tortoise-and-the-hare affair, and “Hitchin a Ride” is as twitchy and uneasy as a murderous hitchhiker. Even the band itself seems confused — and maybe a little irritated with this whole glorious mess.

Staying the course, three LPs and 10 years into their career

Happiness is hard to come by in the world of Crystal Stilts — heavy on Joy Division, not much joy, plenty of White Light, White Heat and a total dearth of sunlight. And yet, there’s something extremely comforting about the NYC mope-mavens, as they inform you that the Velvet Underground, Flying Nun and Lee Hazelwood records that got passed down from your cool uncle to your older sister to yourself (and onto your teenage cousin) can and should be required listening for anyone who considers themselves a fan of indie rock. Now 10 years into their career, Crystal Stilts have about five decades’ worth of ironclad credibility giving them reason to stay the course on their third LP Nature Noire. There are certain, incremental tuneups that sound colossal within Crystal Stilts’ fully-formed aesthetic: Real-deal strings illuminate “Memory Room” and “Future Folklore” integrates blue-collar classic rock of the ’60s into their ’70s-based, all-black art-rock. But the quintet aren’t going to fundamentally alter what got them here in the first place — rhythmic interplay that never advances beyond “perpetually hungover” and Brad Hargett’s baritone drawl going for “Most Dour Man in Brooklyn,” something like The National’s Matt Berninger for the non-showered, non-blue-blazered. Is it starting to get a little stifling this far in? Certainly, but that’s kind of the whole point of Nature Noire — there are all kinds of advances being made in society and music, but those are someone else’s concerns here. And that’s comforting.

One of his most consistent solo efforts

Since On Patrol first came out in 2010 on the experimental label Not Not Fun, Long Beach psych acolyte Cameron Stallones has released a steady stream of material — notably, last year’s Icon Give Thank, an album recorded in Jamaica alongside M. Geddes Gengras and roots reggae legends The Congos. As that effort unexpectedly climbed the World Albums chart, Stallones and Gengras were busy founding their own Dancehall imprint, Duppy Gun Productions. At its best, this wild ingenuity carries over into Stallones’s music, where he wades through a morass of sound to find an undercurrent of life.

On Patrol remains one of Sun Araw’s most consistent solo efforts. These nine compositions, which lean heavily on improvisation, take well-crafted textures and then subtly warp them through repetition. Earlier works, like 2009′s Heavy Deeds, exploited immediately recognizable elements of psychedelia — Theremin-like wailing, reverberating vocal swashes, the modal drone of Indian ragas — but On Patrol finds Stallones plucking through his influences’ gutted frames and re-evaluating the usefulness of their parts. As a result, the sound is leaner, more pointed, and moves closer to the mantric ideal of drone.

This relative consistency allows Stallones to subtly shift his tone while exploring the possibilities of a loose narrative frame — the funky “Beat Cop” slides from amused to aggressive, elemental opener “Ma Holo” takes on a gradual note of psychosis. Even the sketchy motif of a dystopian police procedural that threatens to overburden the music loosens its grip with repeated listens. What ultimately binds On Patrol together is Stallones’s balance of deliberation and uncertainty, an approach that has since expanded into a multi-faceted and highly collaborative career.

Successfully diving headfirst into the world of bubblegum

They may be a band of garage punks, but when the Dirtbombs pay homage to different genres, they don’t slack on the job. They do their research, whether that means nailing down a Stevie Wonder cover (like they did on Ultraglide in Black) or going slightly more stiff in their delivery for their Detroit house album (Party Store). For Ooey Gooey Chewy Ka-Blooey!, as the title suggests, they dove headfirst into the world of bubblegum. They studied the cheerful hooks from Saturday morning cartoons and the Archies’ discography, and then, they turned that research into an album filled with sunshine, lollipops, sugar and spice, etc. Ooey Gooey is packed with idealistic notions, schoolyard elation, phrases like “eenie meenie miney mo” and words like “groovy.”

These songs have one significant edge over their archival bubblegum counterparts: They’re performed with muscle by a band of Detroit garage punks. Like they did on Ultraglide and Party Store, the band stays faithful to the source material’s blueprint — the song structures, melodies and tone are spot on. And while most of the material here is saccharine, they aren’t afraid to implement a long, spacey, quiet interlude. It’s happy, but the menace in their fuzz pedal stops it from ever nearing schmaltz. It’s 2013; who knew that a “punks meet the Banana Splits” record would be so compelling?

Enough little surprises to distinguish themselves from the dream-pop hordes

Proving that Tame Impala and Pond aren’t the only bands with their spinning eyes on Australia’s psychedelic pop crown, Cloud Control won the Australia Music Prize with their 2010 debut Bliss Release. Success at home encouraged the quartet to settle in London in the quest for a wider audience but Dream Cave suggests that they would much preferred to have relocated to another astral plane. Drifting through an expansive innerspace full of pop wormholes and shifting melodic sands, singers Alister Wright and Heidi Lenffer just about keep it together enough to articulate a sense of dazed ennui and dreamy romance, mined with enough little surprises to ensure they distinguish themselves from the dream-pop hordes. The Portisdread crackle of “Tombstone” and the baroque doo-wop of “Promises” operate at the record’s outer limits, but there’s a steely pop scaffolding under the blurry disorientation, especially on the woozy theatricality of “Scar” and “The Smoke, The Feeling,” which takes a turn around the dancefloor with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. “Nobody would expect these colors to compliment the rest,” sings Lenffer woozily, but Dream Cave is harmonious in every way.

Fourteen years later, the angst is still there

What can it mean when a band whose defining trait was angst comes back after 14 years and sounds exactly the same? That’s Sebadoh’s Defend Yourself, their first full album since 1999′s The Sebadoh, whose ballad-heaviness made it among the lesser-loved items in the band’s catalog. The folks who missed the gnarlier guitars and faster tempos of classics like 1994′s Bakesale have their wish granted here. Defend Yourself is outright sprightly in places, whatever the lyrical temper: “This is how we waste our time,” Lou Barlow croons on the pop-punky “Oxygen.” He also milks his depressive streak for laughs on “State of Mine”: “Failure is a state of mine…It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done/ And I haven’t even done it yet.” He’s helped up from the slough by the riffs — Jason Loewenstein’s guitar parts are springy throughout, even when the words are as wound up as when both men were a lot younger. Yet the album carries its makers’ age gracefully — the craft makes even the crabbier moments sing.

Ranging wildly, though never falling far from the '70s

There may be no synthesizer more chameleonic than the Arp, which has provided cosmic tones for Sun Ra, Stevie Wonder’s earthy funk, the monstrous stomp of “Frankenstein”, even the voice of R2D2. So it’s fitting that in naming his solo project Arp, Alexis Georgopoulos has himself shape-shifted with each album. As a member of Tussle, he played pliant dancepunk, while Arp’s first album In Light basked in the gentle kosmische tones of Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream. His follow-up moved more toward dystopic drones and the drum machine-propelled songs of Cluster.

With More, Georgopoulos ranges wildly, though never far from the 1970s. Opener “High-Heeled Clouds,” with its buoyant upright piano line, could come right out of John Cale’s Paris 1919, while the gentle “Daphne & Chloe” with its “bah-bah”s serve as an elegant update of The Velvet’s “I Found a Reason.” Cribbing from the VU playbook is nothing new, but Arp also investigates those who did the same, like Bowie and Eno. “A Tiger in the Hall at Versailles” mixes wordless vocals, puttering drum machine and harpsichord like some strange “Heroes” outtake. And the catchy “Judy Nylon” namechecks Eno’s girlfriend and emulates the buzzing siren guitars and snare thwacks of “Camel in the Needle’s Eye.”

Arp is prudent to pull from resources besides glam, though. Tucked into the album’s corners are field recordings, audio collage, a smattering of doo-wop saxophone. And at the center is “Gravity” a six-minute exercise in minimalism dedicated to the mesmeric pianist/composer Charlemagne Palestine. Accruing overtones on piano, Georgopoulos layers strings and fuzzed guitar, the piece building to an ecstatic peak; he then strips it back to reveal the analog synthesizer at the heart of it all.