Somehow Mar survived two data of work. She gets breaks to go to classes. She comes home in the middle of the afternoon and sleeps ten hours.

Braids, Native Speaker (on the Kanine label)

This is a Canadian band, and there’s that winsome air of calling out into the wilderness about Native Speaker. (I’m stretching a geographical point here, since the band appears to be cityfolk from Montreal.) Everything sounds like a soft rain. But it’s a compelling mood, not one that doesn’t let you in to the singer’s fretting. Raphaelle Standell-Preston both confronts and counters the soundscape around her, standing on her own little mountain peak. There’s a neo-classical edge in the echoey repetition, but again this is prepared (if unfettered) pop, not some jaunt into the far reaches.

[Another batch from Christopher Arnott’s 45 collection]

The Swansons, All These Things EP. Three-song 45 rpm rarity from a New Haven band which was flying pretty close to the sun in the early ‘90s—signed by a major, with a sound perfect for the commercial grunge trend of the time. Unfortunately for the sonic arts, the Swanson’s songwriter/guitarist chose to pursue the career choice his Yale degree had prepared him for, the label lost interest in touting a band that had changed line-ups before its debut LP was even in stores, and the band dissolved after a national tour.

I was blessed to cover The Swansons from their very first shows through their gradual dissolution, and still have cassette demos from whence the well-produced (by Glenn Rosenstein) tracks on this vinyl came. With clean riffs and Lauren Fay’s soaring vocals, The Swansons sound far less dated than a lot of the moody pop acts of their time.

Blair Carriage, Tepid/Everyone I Know. I dug Blair’s Carriage—they hailed from Massachusetts, and played pretty regular at Rudy’s Bar & Grill, the bar I lived next door to. But I would have gone out of my way anyhow to pick up a single with an A-side titled “Tepid.” (I remember seeing an add for a bar band called Tepid once, and wondering if the musicians knew what it meant.) Peppy pop stuff in the Gigolo Aunts vein, a very pleasant era of Boston rock & roll.

Catwalk, Livin’ on the Edge/Thinking About You. Catwalk was as well known in New Haven for a court settlement as for their slick metal-pop songs. When MTV announced a series about a struggling fictional rock act called Catwalk (a name the network thought they’d sewn up the rights to), the real-life Connecticut rock act Catwalk sued. For dropping the suit, the band was promised professional assistance from the big-deal producers involved with the show. It didn’t work. When not catwalking, singer Amy Crelin was a mainstream FM radio disk jockey, and Bob Crelin created inlaid designs for classy guitars. Crelin, a dedicated stargazer, later became a crusader against light pollution.

Snowplow/Madelines, split single. Don’t know where this came from—probably sent to the Advocate offices to promote an out-of-town gig I missed–but I’m glad I have it now. Both bands are from Burlington, Vermont, a thriving music scene worth studying and preserving. This is from 1993/94 and sounds it—droney beats from Snowplow and raw rangy harmonies and fuzzy guitars from Madelines. But both pack surprises, especially those reckless Madelines guitars.

Giogolo Aunts, Mrs. Washington/Ask. This is the second single version of “Mrs. Washington,” from 1994, produced at Q Division studios in Boston. The flip side, “Ask,” was done at a different, equally renowned indie-friendly Boston studio, Fort Apache. It’s classic Gigolo Aunts in the first flush of their never-quite-fame. The band was a decade old by this point, but had only been releasing records for a couple of years before this. The beautiful harmonies and ‘60s AM radio sound is here, but so are the unexpected raucous rave-ups which keep the studio technique at bay.

The Illegal Briefs are in a brouhaha. They signed a label deal just a short while ago, and turned their demos into professionally mastered album tracks in, ahem, record time. Now the label wants them to tour, and two of them can’t take time off from their day jobs. Or perhaps just don’t want to. “This started in such a casual way, we’ve having trouble formalizing it,” says bassist (and occasional keyboardist) Connie Nash. “Part of us doesn’t want to.” Going on tour isn’t a deal-breaker for the record deal, the group’s legal-eagle saxophonist Flint Gennessee tells us, but it helps for bands to be accommodating. Strangely, the hardworking lawyer isn’t one of the ones who’s unable to pull up stakes for a few weeks and head westward one club at a time. “I take long vacations every year,” he argues. “Most of them are about recovering from work. This would be the most forward-motion vacation I could ever have.” You know you’ll be hearing more about this. First, however, you’ll probably get to be hearing the debut Illegal Briefs single and album, due out mere weeks from now.

The college on the hill plays its rival valley this weekend, and the crowds are already going wild. Some big britches have been booked into area venues to boost tourism: Dollaire’s just added Forty Rifles for Thursday,  and already announced Young Marauders Friday and Winner Lose all Saturday.. The Bullfinch is actually closed for a private party on game day, but has the incredible My Son My Son on Friday… Not to be outdone by My Son, Hamilton’s checks in with Night of the Wolf and the Murdered Party….

Mar was so scared she’d oversleep for her first day at work that she stayed up all night. Drinking.

This is the kind of live-sounding album that you’re impressed has been captured so well in a studio, and which makes you want to rush out to see them in a club, even if it’s not entirely “your kind of thing.”

Rest assured that the band isn’t really a thing. It’s an impatient trio whose scant numbers belie their massive sound. Formed by drummer Thomas Pridgen, late of The Mars Volta, The Memorials take a rangy jazz/prog view of speedy psychedelic rock. It’s an appealing, enveloping sound, as if Living Colour had invaded a production of the musical Hair. With most songs in the four-minute range and one running longer than eight, this is a band that experiements freely, but does not deserve the dreaded word “jam”—this are thought-through funk, punk, soul and rock concepts layered elaborately upon each other to the point where the idea of a mere threesome creating this universe disappears and a cloud of sound permeates the space. Subjects range from politics (“We Go to War”) to partying (“Let’s Party”), with some existential moments in there as well (“Why Me?”, “Real”).

Curiosity about the Memorials live can be sated in Connecticut May 20, when they play the Heirloom Arts Theatre in Danbury as part of a 30-city tour.

Welcome to my life. Here are three unmissable things happening tonight, and I have to miss two of them.

1. It’s opening night at the Long Wharf Theatre for John Patrick Shanley’s old play Italian-American Reconciliation, in what promises to be a thoughtful new production directed by Eric Ting. 7:30 p.m.,
2. The Benjamin Verdery-curated Guitar Chamber Concert tonight, 8 p.m. in Yale’s Sprague Hall (470 College St.) features a guitar-based rendition of Terry Riley’s immortal work In C,  sharing the bill with the homonymic composition “Toward the Sea” by Toru Takemitsu, written in 1981 for Greenpeace’s Save the Whales.
3. The epic local power trio Kimono Draggin’ is calling it quits, after enduring for the better part of a decade. While the band (as well known for their conceptual antics and imaginative lyrical frameworks as for their spacy hard prog-rock sounds) will be releasing a final album this summer, tonight’s gig at BAR on Crown Street is billed as their last live show.

I’m doing the Long Wharf, for the simple reason that I committed to it before I knew about the other events. But I know I’ll be having “What’d I miss?” visitations for weeks.

A musician you may have heard of, who escaped from town and found a modicum of fame as a songwriter and producer in a warmer state, returned under cover of darkness last week. Quickly tiring of family reunions, he ventured downtown in search of a good band. How had the scene been since he graduated?

Our scene is diverse and majestic, but astonishes randomly, not reliably. Its pleasures are surprises more than guarantees. But our tourist happened to arrive on a magical night. Or perhaps you believe that the presence of someone whose interest in local music is genuine and deeply felt—not based on which bar stool he wants to sit in that night, or which musicians he happens to know from work or school—is the spiritual stimulant that makes a scene rise subconsciously to a new level. Or maybe the good fortune is that this interloper stumbled upon the best of all possible tour guides—yours truly.

Our tourist’s trek started badly, he related, but only I gave him vague directions and he stumbled into the wrong bar on Olympus. We take it for granted, but the Bullfinch has only been booking live bands for a few years now, and the only place on the block which our wandering friend remembered having any kind of stage was, of course, Sirens. He soon realized the error of his ways, and I found him happily at the Bullfinch while on my own rounds.

To be continued. He was realllly wandering. This may take a while.

Helluva club night coming this Thursday, never better. Could stray at any one venue and have a blast, but we’re gonna try to hit em all with friends plumbing in updates. Really, that good all over: Dying in the Post-War World and Stolen Away at the Bullfinch, Damned in Paradise and Carnal Hours (who do a killer cover of “Million Dollar Wound”) at Hamilton’s and a true legend, Majic Man, at Dollaire’s, with locals Neon Mirage opening. Our plan is to start at the Bull, then hit the middle of the Hamilton’s bill, then trace our steps back to the Bull. Majic Man is known to start late and play until after closing..,

Mar got the job! She has to get up at 4 a.m. And boil bagels.

[A brand new feature on this blog, since I find myself listening to some new or newish music nearly every day, and miss the days when the newspapers I wrote for would run record reviews by the dozens. A clarification: The Rock Gods serial is fiction, but this section rocks for real.)

Those Darlins, Screws Get Loose (on the Oh Wow Dang label, http://thosedarlins.com)

I downloaded this into my iPod without hearing it first—having, in fact, never heard of this three-fourths female band before, though I now learn they’ve been around four years or so and that this is their second full-length. When the songs started appearing on shuffle, it never occurred to me that this was a contemporary pop/rock band from Nashville. I thought these were loose tracks from one of the many New England indie comps I have from the ‘70s and ‘80s. It’s high praise in my book to be mistaken for what I consider the golden age of indie music. The raw vocals, everything-mixed-up-front production and occasional tricky girl-group harmonies are just captivating. “Hives” has everything—a Buzzcocks pace, Merseybeat melodies, vocals that sound straight off old comps like Girls in the Garage, a guitar solo that has to fight through those vocals to break out (and does, for exactly the right amount of time). “Fatty Needs a Fix” is even better, so Britpunk you feel the safety pins and hear the sirens. There’s a goofiness and giddiness on this album that you can’t make up, and which a lot of dumb producers deliberately try to subdue. The twangy accents and heavy strumming proclaim the Nashville roots, but this is universal darlin rock, fitting right in with the coastal extremes of the Runaways and the Shangri-Las.