Hi There! A&SB is totally back from its post-holiday lull. Actually, my Mom bought me and Jason these totally wicked remote control cars and we haven’t been able to put em down.

But then today Jason drove mine into a puddle and now it just makes this squeaky-dying sound. It’s okay though, I don’t want his car, since its infected with cooties from that girl he’s been hanging around.

Anyways. We have new music to suggest, as always.

Today it’s Queens’ own The Shivers. These awesome folks play the most catchy and endearing new york-centric rock I’ve heard in this city.
If you doubt my proclamation, check out their Myspace and listen to Remain In The Pain Zone

“I was at the gas station where I work, like a fucking jerk. Some bitch with a mustache came along I was a-humming my pain song. She was doing that thing where you take hormones to alter your bones – to look more like a dude.”

Normally, I’d say this is all you need to know – but that’s not all The Shivers are. The 5-piece outfit place their tunes squarely in the heart of the loneliest city in the world, desperately massaging it – hoping it will beat again.

If only everyone in NYC listened to The Shivers… Whether you’re in the big apple or not, these fiercely unpretentious and personal tracks are a must-listen. So what are you waiting for?

oh. me to stop rambling on. right.

Haven’t ever heard Liarbirds? It’s okay, pretty much no one has. But I’ve had the pleasure of knowing these gents since high school back in Milwaukee.

If I had to describe the sound, I could only say nail your radio to your skull and put some napkins aside for your bloody eardrums. Liarbirds are indie rock, and indie rock is Liarbirds, got it? Good.

Anyways, they’re finishing up a debut album at the moment, and the headline of this post is A&SB’s official suggestion for their album title.  Watch out for these guys, Liarbirds are liable to smash the scene into a million pieces and scream at it for crying like a girl.

So with New Years coming and all, I thought I’d re-share my story about a new years party a while back where they played and everyone got drunk.

by Bassey Etim

The levels are way off, but it doesn’t matter. Everyone is packed tight and jolly off a bitter keg that sits in the corner under a canopy of cobwebs. Those who didn’t pay the five bucks clutch the bottom of someone else’s warm champagne bottle, comfortable in the self-delusion that its rightful owner will never return. Everyone else who’s just unemployed or too cheap to buy a tiny plastic cup takes guarded swigs of the whiskey sitting in the cupboard and washes it down with stale water. No one can stand to be sober in this place.

It’s fucking filthy and mangy hipsters are sketching all over the walls.

“After that drawing, you gotta stop. The landlord doesn’t like those,” one of the guys who probably lives here says.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and if we had a picture of this place and a brain cell that wasn’t treading in a shallow pool of booze, we’d be out at some bar or hanging out with our parents or watching other people get drunk in Times Square on TV. But we’re all here, and that makes us a family — one of masochistic drifters who can’t stand all of the purpose that’s imposed on us every day, but a family no less. There is no purpose here, no reason and no ambition. It’s liberating. We all got some variation of the same call.

“Come to my New Year’s party. We’ll be drunk, and there’ll be bands playing in my basement.”

Some of us are in those bands, and others have a vague feeling their friend is in one. But it doesn’t matter which bands they are or who is in the bands because it’s guaranteed that no money will be involved in the transaction. When the musicians finish playing a set, they melt back into the party, and maybe one of the drunk girls with all the piercings and the radioactive hair would wave and chew her fingernails at him. Payment enough.

There’s a turntable missing, so I pull out my shitty, old laptop and spend 15 minutes rigging the rubber band that keeps it plugged in. The family filters into the concrete hole where their eardrums will be irreparably damaged by the giant amps stacked on either side of the microphones. None of my friends outside the people who live here even bother to show up, and I can’t blame them. Most people prefer to be bored by the reassuring repetition of a bar on New Year’s. After all, there you have a purpose — buy the beer, kiss the girl and make some asshole rich. All that makes too much sense for us, though. All that purpose is just a burden to be fulfilled.

We’re the only rappers here, and that’s a big improvement from being the weirdest act here at a normal hip-hop show. They’re mainly impressed by our set because we don’t suck like the rap they probably hear on the radio. Most underground rappers would agree that the best beats usually don’t even sound like ringtones and will never be made into them anyway. My colleague takes care to bring select women on “stage” (the area of grey concrete behind the amps and duct-taped microphones) and serenade them with the dirtiest lyrics in his arsenal. I elect to keep to myself and hide my own sleaze, figuring we probably shouldn’t be the same stereotype — I’ll play the revolutionary poet today.

The next guys yell lyrics into the microphone over driving three-piece rock. Of course, you can’t hear a damn thing he’s saying, but that’s not the point. It’s that he’s saying something, and you can hear his face and his inflection and the push of a mosher behind you and the body of the one beside you fly into some poor sap as you lower your shoulder. The crowd stands inches away from the band, banging bodies with guitars and swaying melodically in a trance where someone’s sitting on the fast-forward button.

Wait. The stocky kid whose hair is under siege by strings of gray grabs the microphone. 5…4…3…2…1… The make-out session is interrupted by alternating sticks that crescendo to a haze of strings ordered haphazardly by the hum of bass. The tall pretty girl whose father would probably kill us all is overtaken by the epic grandeur of the whole scene, and snatches the stubble-filled face of the lead guitarist and drives her tongue between his lips. We all cheer, and he somehow keeps up the song, but we all feel uncomfortable because she’s still eating his poor face.

The shows ends and so does the beer, but there’s still whiskey that’s been sitting out a while and water to go with it. The ladies pass it around, letting it slosh brilliantly onto the floor. Everyone appreciates it. The lead guitar smiles in the living room, reminding us that he’s got nothing to complain about. The tall pretty girl is attacking another face in the dining room.

Concerts are great, but they’re not real. All that precision and all that purpose and the crush of expectation turns them into theatre. Damn entertaining, but everyone, even the audience, is following a script. Insert stimulus A and expect reaction B — hands in the air, mosh, clap, cheer, boo, be quiet, watch for the klieg lights, ask for another helping (if you don’t, you’ll get it anyway), and go home.

It’s not the dank basement or the bitter beer that makes a real music show. It’s the people who make the music playing your music because they are you. No elevated stages or checks to be written or merchandise to hawk.

It’s your family sharing no purpose. Just be there and let yourself be with everyone else who isn’t capable of imagining having it any other way.

by Tim Williams – A&SB Contributor

Welcome to the 0th anniversary of the Fairly New Music Anti-Listicle Listicle! Herein, I choose eight or some other convenient number of mostly recently released popular (or not) music sensations, sort of at random, but not really, because if the song is kind of boring I’ll pretend I thought I was about to sneeze and thus overcompensated and clicked the wrong track. Then, I will arbitrarily weave these threads into a sweeping narrative, with all the pandering and pseudo-relevance of a Rolling Stone listicle and the self-importance and digression of a Pitchfork album review. Everyone wins. Except for James Taylor.

Or does he? A James Taylor covers album titled, for extra laziness, Covers, seemed ripe for skewing. Especially after Taylor greeted my visit to his website with a Telethon-style video, imploring me to sign up for an e-mail newsletter and punctuating his every word with a hand gesture (for unknown reasons, but maybe it’s like how old people feel the need to shout into telephone receivers when they’re calling long distance).

It didn’t help his case either that the two most palatable-looking songs on Covers were On Broadway and Hound Dog. But as I listened, a terrible conflict in me came to a head, which can only be explained through extended personal anecdote.

I was recently aptly described as a pop-culture overcompensater. This is mostly the fault of my father’s undying love for James Taylor. Though, even in my rebellious youth, I can’t say I was ever strictly offended by the uncoolness of it. But the bland, bright-eyed lyrics and the same light jazz drum accompaniment to every song of the never-ending collection of repackaged hits were enough, especially when Alanis Morrisette was the alternative, to put me off from pop music for a good decade.

Didn’t Taylor, and my father, live during the protest era? Where’s the passion? Where’s the creative force? It’s admirable to resist making your craft political for the sake of being political, and I understand the appeal was he was of the folk movement but simultaneously a throwback to the era of white people discovering jazz. He was safe. What gave better music of the ‘60s and ‘70s its bite was its specificity; the need to only hint at events triggered a rebirth of lyric poetry in lyric writing.

It’s telling that the only James Taylor song I like, Line ‘Em Up, is one of the few grounded in an actual event, and yet also one of the most ambiguous. And he didn’t even write that until the ‘90s. The clarity extends to the composition: the melody and structure avoid most of Taylor’s traps: folk meandering, simplistic improvisation and irritating backup vocals. (Full disclosure: I wrote that bit before listening to it again: There’s actually a fair bit of irritating backup (including a cowbell); the song beats the title phrase to melodic death; it’s pretty maudlin; and, are you kidding me, wind chimes? But I’ll just put this part in parentheses and then the argument is safe, right?)

So, Covers. Let’s leave the obvious money factor aside, for a moment, and sincerely ask, why do artists do cover albums? Lately, this phenomenon has fallen into two categories. The first is the Scarlet Johansson (whose name doesn’t seem ridiculous until you have to write it out) Cover Album: the celebrity without musical talent not being merciful enough to spare us their records entirely, but at least sparing us the pretension that they can both sing and write music. Already you see the problem with this neat classification: Although it’s hard to say what Johansson’s contribution to the album besides a non-descript low alto voice was, Anywhere I Lay My Head is fairly compelling. TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek (and, seemingly so he can claim to have made a cameo in every bizarre pop culture item since his birth, David Bowie) don’t disappoint, reinventing Tom Waits for the noise rock set. Which sounds terrible, but so does Scarlet Johansson doing Waits covers, so whatever.

The adult contemporary counterpart to Anywhere I Lay My Head is Covers. (Just one more bend, and then I’ll devote a couple sentences to the actual album and call it a review). It may shock you to hear that at a certain point in your life, you will no longer want to seek out bleeding-edge pop music trends. Or at least, that was the thinking before the Internet—maybe we’ll continue to be up-to-the-minute on disposable art until our last breaths. Anyway, covers in the 40-plus world exist to extend the range of has-been stars so their fans don’t have to find new bands. (We are not over 40, so the idea that perhaps new is not necessarily better will not be addressed.)

If you’ve been paying attention, here you may think I’m going to reveal that James Taylor has done with Covers to the adult contemporary world what Scarlet Johansson did with Anywhere I Lay My Head to the actresses-capitalizing-on-their-teen-fanbases world (i.e., be neither bland nor offensive). This is absolutely not the case. There is not one song (and, dear reader, I bravely clicked on them all) that breaks Taylor’s mold or is even interestingly awful, and really, the whole thing is a poor subject to write a column about.

So! I think I’ve managed to not fulfill any of the stated goals of this round-up, and thus have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Look forward to the next installment of Themed Article next week!

$10 Buy | Myspace

With precision eerily reminiscent of Coldplay, Copeland has created an album in which every tiny note is a deliberate step toward an atmosphere – You Are My Sunshine – that carries all the joy of this phrase and it’s solemn dependence.

Copeland’s latest is a box of pop treats from a group of guys who have mastered the technical wizardry required to make an epic modern rock disk. But sometimes, you can’t help but think you’ve heard this album before.

There’s a lot of carefully crafted contemporary rock out there, thanks in large part to the success of groups like Copeland. They range from New Atlantic, who unapologetically wail pop anthems over rhythms more finely tuned than an atomic clock, to Pompeii, whose forlorn storytelling perfectly matches music that changes tempo as fast as a leaf turns brown in fall.

Copeland’s strategy in You Are My Sunshine at first seems to be out-majestic everyone else with ambitious (Don’t try this without adult supervision) instrumentation and Aaron Marsh’s typically soaring vocals.  They may not have one trick that’s better than everyone else’s, it’s just that Copeland brings a bigger bag of tricks.

Sumptuous bass and appropriately scattered synth effects define tracks like “Good Morning Fire Eater,” which make this album a must recommend for fans of any and all rock music. After all, great craftsmanship should never be taken for granted.

Probably the most memorable track is “The Day I Lose My Voice (The Suitcase Song),” which blends skillfully understated keyboarding, tasteful slabs of bass and an occasional plodding horn that captures the slow compounding dread of stuffing your worldly possessions into a suitcase.

“As sure as the floor ‘neath my toes/ And somehow not surprised/ That I was superimposed/ Somehow in this life/ And if my friends or my foes/ Would just drop me a line/ That’d be nice,” Marsh sings at the song’s open. “You see love is a drink/ That goes straight to my head/ And time is a lover/ And I’m caught in her stead … I’ve got my life in a suitcase/ I’m ready to run, run away.”

You Are My Sunshine is the sort of album that grows on a second and third listen, making it a welcome addidtion to any music collection. It’s sincere, fun, and offers and array of sounds you wouldn’t expect after listening to the first few tracks out of context.

$12 Buy | Stream

From the first tones of the opening track “Genesis,” an epic makes itself apparent. Forgive Durden’s latest album, Razia’s Shadow: A Musical, is just that – an ambitious piece performed as stagecraft and backed by instrumentation reminiscent of the orchestra pit.

What stands out most, however, is the endlessly imaginative writing of Thomas and Paul Dutton, who construct a world, inflict it with love and tear it all down over the course of 13 tracks.

Indeed, Razia’s Shadow is a reminder that the best music isn’t all that different from a good book. Each builds a landscape in your mind with full characters that are enriched – not confused – by an endless smattering of new detail.

At this point, you’re probably thinking ‘musicals are lame and I don’t wanna listen to 63 minutes of some overbearing jerk with curly hair wailing about fairies and heartbreak.’ Yet somehow, this album doesn’t come off as pretentious drivel, and that fact alone is a minor miracle.

All of the cheesy and uneven elements of musical theatre are skillfully affixed to the sensibilities of  contemporary rock music in a way that makes it obvious Dutton and his cohorts close their eyes and imagine these tracks as the backdrop to an epic Broadway production.

No song better encapsulates the album than the 10th, “Meet The King,” in which our hero, with the help of the princess, plead for the King’s blessing of their love. Like the rest of Razia’s Shadow: A Musical, this track is marked by a frantically changing pace and amusing storytelling, giving the project an exceedingly high replay value.

The 12th track, “Doctor Doctor,” has our star-crossed lovers desperately seeking to cure the princess’ affliction.

“Now I’m sure you’re wondering what’s in it for me, surely I would not perform these miracles for free, I’m not asking for a lot, it won’t cost you a dime, I just want the princess here with me until the end of time,” the Doctor leers as his menacing laughter crescendos into the foreground. “I promise to take care of her, more rather she’ll take care of me for the rest of her life in the dark fulfilling Doctor’s fantasies.”

Perhaps the most stunning aspect of Razia’s Shadow: A Musical is the synthesis between its pitch-perfect production and storytelling depth, buoyed by narration from plainspoken voices and an ocean’s-worth of sound that breezily communicates elaborate simplicity.

“Oh, the scientist was the author and the architect, the angels were his ink-slingers – his actors and actresses – his two purest were Ariema and Niedria, two destined hearts bound by the same idea,” the narrator says near the end of the intro track. “The unrelenting constancy of love and hope can rescue and restore you from any scope.”

Razia’s Shadow: A Musical is a tribute to an earnest love for sonic craftsmanship and one of the best albums you’ll listen to this year. Basically, what I’m saying is: This is one musical you’ll want to buy tickets for.

2003′s Logic Will Break Your Heart was great. 2006′s Without Feathers was boring. So now why would The Stills‘ newest record, Oceans Will Rise, be one of our most anticipated releases of 2008? Because any smart band would follow up a lackluster effort with ambition and a reinvented sense of who hey are (and who you want to think they are). A 30 second clip of their lead single, “Being Here”, has more raw energy in it than every track on Without Feathers combined. Looking at a release on August 19th, Oceans Will Rise will rise could potentially be the one record this Summer that finally stands out, so don’t forget to put down that frozen margarita and pick it up!

Pre-Order: The Stills – Oceans Will Rise