Metal Mountains, Golden Trees.

Those who still carp that Radiohead have never looked back to OK Computer should wise up and start looking elsewhere. Metal Mountains is as good a place as any—winding gentle journeys into smart soundscapes of reflective meditative. Misty but not zoned out. Psychedelic violin sounds from indie rock’s string accompanist of choice Samara Lubelski mingle with the spacy guitar and demure vocals of Helen Rush (of proto-neo-folkies Tower Recordings) and the atmospheric guitar of P.G. Six himself, Patrick Gubler. Heck, it’s ALL atmospheric. Seals up every crack with plaintive swoops.

Look among the titles in the banner of this site (underneath the picture of a teen me balancing a beer bottle on my head) and you’ll find “McLuhan ’67,” a scholarly goof  I wrote in 1984 for the Tufts University student journal Omnibus.

I’ve edited out some of the most sophomoric sentences (I was actually a senior at the time), but I find the research is still useful, and it demonstrates my life-long interest in McLuhan better than anything I could start writing now.

Some of my wordplay (in the unabashed style of McLuhan, to whom all was pun and subtext) is so audacious it makes me wince with awe at my younger brain.

I grew up on college campuses, and from when I was in kindergarten until second or third grade I can’t remember seeing a coffee table in my parents’ social circle that didn’t have a Marshall McLuhan book upon it. My father, on account of hthe marionette productions he did of Greek plays, was interviewed by McLuhan for the journal Counterblast.

I’m still a devoted McLuhan fan. Tremendous material on him is still being released, from the bonus interviews included in the DVD version of the 2007 documentary McLuhan’s Wake to the 2003 collection Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews (edited by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, MIT Press).

Don’t call it scat. They’ll think it means something else. But Tomit and Vommy, the punk twin brothers who front two drunk two screw, have devised their own musical language.

It’s startlingly similar to old jazz records where a vocalist mimics a musical instrumental, or where a clarinet closely apes a trumpet solo. Similar, only it’s yammering soused twin brothers.

Spot sprinkle, flurry chance and tapering at the Bullfinch (rescheduled show from the bad weather in January)… Aging jam band High in our 30s at Hamilton’s, with party sunny (featuring sonny degrassi)…Guitar legend strat nimbus and local pickup band the four casters ( who’ ll also do an opening set sans Strat) at Dollaire’s…

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.