Without resorting to the type of cheap Mayan calendar reference that... well shit, that I just accidentally conjured starting this sentence (OOPS LOL), 2012 will certainly be a year of change. At least for me. And maybe John Cusack. So happy new year... let's get to it! Since I started this silly project with the ill-conceived pun in June 2008, The Decibel Tolls has provided a resounding sense of fulfillment for me, and hopefully, for some of the readers and artists we've championed. When I launched the blog, I found that a few serious niches needed filling - [...]
Ho ho ho, assholes! With the Christmas holiday coming up this weekend and we're already two days deep up on the Hanukkah tip, it's very much time to drop the annual The Decibel Tolls Holiday Mixer . You know the deal - a carefully curated collection of skewed, brain-burning, monolithic Christmas gems that totally sleigh. Get it?! Sleigh? Slay? It's a homophone, you guys! Ugh... never mind. Tough crowd. Anyway, these yule-time canticles exalted on high can crush shopping malls and magically spike egg nog, true story. For this year's mixer, you'll recognize you'll recognize some jams from previous year's mixers, [...]
The most wonderful time of the year, right guys? 'Twas the end of December, and all through the blogosphere, not a creature was stirring, except for the sounds of music writers springin' chub, strokin' egos, and Bon Iverin' via the storied tradition of the "best of" list. Well, The Decibel Tolls participates in that jive as well, save for the latter. Be it as it may. So yeah, man... 2011... shit. 2011 was a turbulent and gnarly year, and as such, we've been treated to some truly stellar music. Funny how that works - civic and economic tension [...]
![[Photos + GIFs] Cropped Out Fest – 11.11 thru 11.13.11 – Louisville](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/3913937_lg.jpg)
Cropped Out Fest not only succeeded in coming back a second time, a feat not easily accomplished, the stridently fringe festival also returned in bigger and better fashion - in terms of attendance, community enthusiasm, facilities, and that intangible festival vibe that can make or break a multi-stage weekend event. Cropped Out 2011 certainly became the product of learning what worked and what didn't from the inaugural fest last year. Though the weather is beautiful in this part of the country during the fall, it can also act unpredictably, as we learned during Cropped Out 2010 - [...]
Eric exists on Twitter as the pizza doggie , one of my absolute favorite online personalities. Visually and sonically, he's Spooky Cheddar , and these two somewhat nightmarish round-trip tickets to the altered side are guaranteed to trip your shit out, like if someone slipped some real mean psilocybin into your King Vitamin this morning (if you're lucky). A cool thing to do is to click play on these joints, then maybe see some more over at his YouTube page . I love these things. That fuckin' pineapple, dude.
Land of Tomorrow is no stranger to mixing audio and visual art mediums. The meticulously curated fringe art space in downtown Louisville celebrated its 2010 opening with a free Bear In Heaven show. Noise and avant garde musicians often provide the soundtrack to a variety of multimedia installations. Land of Tomorrow's exhibits aim to highlight the fluidity between visual art and music - no where more evident than The Expanded Music Project , opening this Friday, November 18th. The exhibit, which runs throughout December and into the new year, features some extremely exciting names [...]
Magic Milk is a Chicago based minimalistic garage rock band, lead by the imaginative "Fuckin' Kenny" (no relation to our Kenny). Fuckin' Kenny is as much worried about the music as he is making Magic Milk a performance piece. They've got a great self titled EP with possibly controversial cover art apropos to a creepy constructed persona. That seems to go over oddly well for Magic Milk. Their music is a washed-out, messy brand of surf rock, packed with lyrics that are seemingly written by an angsty-ass teenager who just broke up with his girlfriend and was introduced [...]
![[Photos + GIFs] Amen Dunes, Woodsman, and Dustin Wong – 285 Kent, Brooklyn – 10.21.11](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/3852179_lg.jpg)
New blog feature, you guys! Animated .gifs! Corny? Perhaps. But I like them. And when I noticed that many of my photos were shot very sequentially, I couldn't pass up the chance. Besides, with a bill like this, these dudes deserve something more encapsulating than static images. I was in New York for CMJ this year, but mostly for business. While I didn't get to catch a lot of the shows I wanted, I made a special appointment to see a blockbuster-ass bill at the celebrated Williamsburg DIY space 285 Kent (co-promoted by mah boi Ric ). [...]
Mix all the shit that you and I like - kraut, walls of noise, atmospheric melodies, tremolo, bliss outs - and add a few dashes of sacred geometry, Alejandro Jodorowsky-style surrealism, and Egyptology, and you'll achieve something close to LA's Vinyl Williams . A multimedia artist that takes spiritual exploration and sonic intensity very seriously, Vinyl Williams' first proper full-length, Lemniscate , offers an amalgam of both the timbre and ideas of psych rock that traverses three decades and myriad locales. That's not to say this spectrum of sound comes across as a [...]
Earlier this year, Woodsman released Rare Forms , a full-length in which the band explored both the grimy industrial labyrinth of '70s German experimentalism and the rustic, bucolic light flights that resemble sunshine-saturated psychedelia. During my interview with the band in early April, Trevor Peterson revealed that Rare Forms did not, conceptually speaking, represent where the band is now - a result of the gestation period required to properly release a record and Woodsman's never-ending creative stream. That was no hyperbole, as just nine months later, [...]
What a highly appropriate title for the rippin' new 73 from Melbourne's Love of Diagrams - In My Dream . This is extremely well crafted, C86-informed (they even look the part) dream punk in the vein of The Vaselines, Bikini Kill, Axes -era Electrelane, Shop Assistants, and No Joy. I don't post much these days because I kinda hate music anymore, but this 2-track release got me jivin'. "Too Long" is dome crushing. In My Dream is out November 11th via their Bandcamp . STREAM ::: [...]
...because you're gonna need a pair for a show this brutal. LOL, did you guys see what I just did there?! It's called a double entendre. Dude, that was so good. High-larious. Winning. Okay, obnoxiousness over... let's talk about what happens Friday night at Headliners . The Black Angels have had to twice cancel their Louisville appearance. Dudes made up for it in a big way with a blockbuster-ass bill for attempt three, which includes Spindrift kicking things off shortly after the 9 p.m. door time, and Dead Meadow , responsible for [...]
![[Interview] Pigeons](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/3797691_lg.jpg)
Bronx, NY folk-rock unit Pigeons concoct dark, kaleidoscopic soundscapes populated by loose pop structures and abstract dissonance, shades of wintry stillness, and a hauntological layer of dust. Recently, they expanded their line-up to include acoustic noodlers from the No-Neck Blues Band and Black Twig Pickers , and got to work on their third full-length. They Sweetheartstammers , out next week on Soft Abuse , is packed with hypnotic psychedelia, Francophilia, cobweb-laden sonic spaces, and shadowy retrofuturism, balancing moods of wonder and foreboding with an artisan's acumen. The founding power duo of partners Clark Griffin and Wednesday Knudsen took some time via email to [...]
Enlightened Atlanta-based power trio The Natural Extension Concept, usually denoted simply as The N.E.C. , dropped a propulsive, damn-near masterpiece in 2010 titled Is - a body of work that flawlessly explored the strata between Nuggets and Psychocandy at gulf stream velocity. Ready for another go this year, The N.E.C. reaches even further past the edge of the observable universe with the forthcoming cosmic punk manifesto Pineapple , a seven-song collection that packs an expanded sonic palette and some befuddling, Dark Side of the Spoon -evocative artwork. The [...]
![[Photos] Midpoint Music Festival – Cincinnati, 9.23 + 9.24.11](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/3768962_lg.jpg)
Cincinnati's Midpoint Music Festival is awesome. For 2011, the organization got their shit together and observed what works and what doesn't with multi-venue urban festivals like CMJ and SXSW, while also making the three-day festival a uniquely Queen City venture. As opposed to past years, Midpoint condensed their territory to strictly the Central Avenue and 12th corridor between downtown and Over The Rhine. No venue was more than a 10 minute walk from MPMF's epicenter - the Midpoint Midway, packed with visual artists, installations, delicious grub solutions, and a giant Connect Four game. This meant that non-venue spaces [...]
Swiftumz , aka Bay Area witchdoctor and Hunx & His Punx collaborator Chris McVicker, comes from the Pink , Maus , and Moore school of home recording and personal eccentricity. But he adopts a distinctly Apollonian approach. His debut, Don't Trip , sounds like a relaxed, experimental pop art version of C86 and Factory refracted through a dirty prism. In its brisk run-time, McVicker navigates through idyllic psych-folk crooning, demented disco, and silky synth anthems with a touch of tasteful retro-futurism. "Angelita" is the [...]
![[Premiere] Chord Gets Diminished](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/3756285_lg.jpg)
We introduced you to Chicago's Chord last fall. The novel project, which features our friend Trevor de Brauw of Pelican fame, concocts compositions based solely around the construing and exploration of the notes or combination of notes within a single chord. Truth in advertising, eh? The resulting fury sounds like a freeform, tone driven cross-pollination of John "El Jefe" Cage's high-brow modern compositional theory and the tenacious apocalyptic drones of Sunn o))). Chord offers up a simple yet high impact approach to avant-leaning ambience. The dudes just [...]
Just in time for Halloween, what's more spooky than creepy old men and religious imagery? Not much, and recent HoZac acquisition The Band In Heaven 's got all of the above in their beautifully blue-washed video for "Sleazy Dreams." Trippy, scary, feedbacky - good clean fun. Czech 'em on the Bandcamps .
![[Photos] Xiu Xiu – Zanzabar, Louisville – 9.22.11](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/3751153_lg.jpg)
Xiu Xiu scares audiences in the live setting just as much, if not more, as they've unsettled listeners over, what, nine albums. Geez, didn't realize until just now that Jamie Stewart is the reigning Stephen King of exorcism pop. And last Thursday, demons were excised at the Zanzabar, yes sir. Lots of yelling, interspersed with a dash of catharsis. And of course lots of the skewed, almost anthemic fist pumpers Xiu Xiu has been known for since around 20042s Fabulous Muscles . Don't get it twisted though, the show was as intense as [...]
Sheeeeeeeeit. Do these artists need an introduction if you're reading this blog? Surely not. But for the uninitiated, here's the skinny. Scratch Acid was the David Yow and David Wm. Sims' pre-Jesus Lizard supersonic freakout vehicle that reunited this year for a limited run of North American dates. If you don't know, ya better call someone. The second big addition is the mighty Sun Araw and his scorched acid dub that wiggles inside your brain and straight lifts your cognitive processes. This festival just level-upped. [...]
The Decibel Tolls
Watch: Trailer for Dave Grohl’s documentary, Sound City
Childish Gambino - "Heartbeat" (Official Music Video)
First Aid Kit – Emmylou
Hardwell Bootleg Pack 2012
James Blake – Live Album
