The Nine Tailors is a quartet of sober-minded intellectuals who were inspired by the title of a Dorothy Sayers novel to call themselves after the term for the church bell death toll in 17^th century England, a toll in which “the lowest bell was sounded nine times in succession to announce the death of a man,” explains Kurt Schuler, guitar and vocals of The Nine Tailors. “We want to write songs that have somewhat of the same effect as that low ringing bell. We want to be heard like thunder… We want to draw people out of their busy world of distractions into a place where they can be confronted by the inevitability of death and the urgency of the struggles presented to us in our everyday lives.”

All avid readers translating writing skills to an audio format, The Nine Tailors put stories to strings drawing from the philosophy of J.R.R. Tolkien and a vast horde of literary references. I keep thinking of For Whom the Bell Tolls, the romance of inevitability; but this is a skin-deep comparison and relies on the accident of “bells” and “tolls,” the “inevitability” of “death.” The Nine Tailors are improvisers. Their literary flair is organic. “I sometimes get frustrated with songs that seem to be just a mess of cool-sounding images or phrases,” comments Schuler, “Our songs… are a lot like short stories, with plot lines and characters.”

To understand The Nine Tailors, understand Flannery O’Connor’s grace of reckoning and darkness. Understand the sub-creation of Tolkien and the undiscovered world of potential beneath your talented fingertips. “It’s not that artists are saying anything new,” says Schuler, “They just find new ways of telling old stories… good literature can do this and I think good songs can do this as well.” They keep returning to Tolkien: now they’re referencing his philosophy again, this time, Of Fairy Stories.

“The problem with language is that words lose their meaning over time,” concludes Schuler after brain-storming with his band-mates, “When it comes down to it, art is about defamiliarizing our ordinary surroundings so that everything that normally prevents us from seeing something beautiful or true – clichés, cynicism – can be bypassed for a moment.”

Through lyrical dark-chocolate rock with a smooth mellow tone and a bittersweet edge, The Nine Tailors bypass now to the moment at that funeral we have all attended where kebang! for a moment, we empathized with the corpse and could feel that moment in between this world and the next. The word is sobering, reflective, and certainly nothing apocalyptic or bordering on death metal, although Schuler shared that he has a name in his pocket waiting for a death metal band. “The purpose [of The Nine Tailors] is not to get people down,” says Schuler, “But, rather, just to wake people up.”

Molly Miltenberger is a freelance writer with a knack for exasperating computer experts through no fault of her own.  She claims that the screws just fell out – and there was her hard-drive on the floor.  The docxs are now recovered, but iTunes is gone like Frank Sinatra… or Al Pacino’s cash, anyhow.  ”T9T” is a relic from the old hard-drive and ageing like cheese, so it’s high time for pub.

So Owl City stirs together a sound yummy enough to make the maddening crowd bounce off the walls: you might expect that Grim Eaters are going to sniff, and necessarily, hipsters are bound to squirm while they wait it out to see whether it’s more damnable to love him or leave him. N.B. Owl City isn’t called Postal Service, Jr.; Adam Young isn’t Incredi-Boy or Michael Cera hooking a date by dork-appeal.  Believe it or not, dork-appeal just isn’t that appealing. N.B. Please, whether you are on first-name terms with Ben and Zoe or not, watch your language.

That said, Why Hello, Owl City: TAKE TWO. Is that allowed?

“Meet Adam Young, the 23 year old front-man of a global sensation. Sporting a respectfully black suit, he skips to the front of the stage – yes, he does – and waves awkwardly while tweeny-bopping girls swoon. The cello warms the room and the music surrounds you. Why hello, Owl City, and well well well, hello to you, Adam Young. I think there’s someone you need to meet.

Young has something of the appeal of the vampyric genre: he’s pale but attractive, weak but passionate, he’s really, really talented and he’s, generally, sleepless. So hot right now, as Will Ferrell puts it, but please, disregard the crush appeal of a fad. Adam Young is an intriguing artist and a compelling personality on stage; he not only moves mobs by his sweet turns on the keyboard, but he creates a masterpiece of atmosphere with the twist of a melody.

A very shy person – an extremely shy person, Young doesn’t permit interviews in person, and could probably register as an introvert. “By the common definition,” Young wrote Pollstar, “I am the ‘shyest’ person ever to walk the face of the Earth.” When he vaulted overnight from the basements of Owatonna, Minnesota, to an almost R. Patt status after Owl City caught the roving eyes of Universal Republic by way of a well-aimed EP, it came as a surprise that he enjoyed mastering a stage. Young pours his soul into performance. He is interested in his audience; he plays to gift with music.  His concern establishes a remarkable rapport that is entirely missing from most mega shows I have seen.  Like an oyster on the stove, Young opens himself on the stage when he would shut tightly vis a vis.

Doubtless, it helps that Young’s close friend Breanne is dazzling her brunette smile behind the keyboard and harmonizing in Skittle colors. Their camaraderie eases an auditorium into a house-show atmosphere. “Adam is a happy clam,” Young exclaimed in an email to Stereopathic, and shared that he is inspired by the example of Jonathan Ford of Unwed Sailor, a musician noted for his ability to create a scene with only the voices of instruments as well as his penchant to man the band with a crew of friends. “Genius,” Young calls Ford with an e-sigh of admiration.

“I see warm motorcycles and giant polar crust devils with venomous, wet sucking lips when I sing,” Young confided to Stereopathic, a claim that gains credibility when registered with this fact that Young is an insomniac as well as an introvert, a clause that places him among a percentage of people who are 2.5 times more likely to suffer from depression and commit suicide than those who enjoy a healthy average amount of sleep. It’s true. “I can’t sleep unless I take sleeping pills,” he wrote to me, waxing eloquent, “I’ve been awake for 52 hours before.” It’s little wonder than an ideal day in Seattle would find Young “in bed,” as he said in his email, and that in a perfectly proper way, nor is it that his music swings dizzyingly into moody flights of exhilaration while expressing a ubiquitous craving for sleep. After 52 hours of wide-eyed exhaustion, an avalanche of strawberries isn’t a punk Care Bears fantasy and it certainly isn’t cause to bat an eyelash – the miracle is that Young’s sky rains stars and not razors, and that we actually would like to be in one of Adam Young’s dreamscapes.

Young sings atmospheres into being. His favorite thing about his home in Owatonna, MN, he writes, waxing eloquent, is its “hard, irony water.  It makes your hair feel like a stiff helmet after you take a shower.” Young is inspired by Greenland, by Iceland, by Antarctica, by Australia. His innovation is his ability to write beautiful songs that transport you to this place of happiness through witty perception and yet still don’t deserve to be on the next Disney hit soundtrack.

The songs of Owl City are the poetry of 2 a.m, half-hallucinated pictures of a world asleep and dreaming odd and surprisingly optimistic avalanches of thoughts. It is certainly more common for a good, a really good artist to crush your heart like his was and most mature listeners can empathize sooner with this and with disillusion or chronic unfulfillment than with metrical or emotional buoyancy, but that doesn’t make it misplaced for Young to sense a brighter horizon. Pour me a heavy dose of atmosphere – I like to feel the stars explode around me.

For those wondering, I seriously doubt that Young sparkles in the sunlight, but I forgot to ask.

Molly Miltenberger is a freelance writer with an interest in postcards and goldfish, and, incidentally, a love for owls and similar mollusks. Molly believes in second chances, and she is really excited that the new Vampire Weekend album is coming out in January.

The crowd at the hot Spokane venue The Filling Station undulated like a wind-swept sea. A black-suited man skipped across the black stage and was framed by a spotlight. He waved, awkwardly. A 15 year-old girl somewhere in that crowd, I’m sure, fainted. Hello, Owl City.

An inspiration to insomniacs everywhere, Adam Young spent the owlish hours of the night sprinkling fairy-dust on electronika and the pensive cynicism of Gen X groups like Postal Service. “I can’t sleep unless I take sleeping pills,” he says, “I’ve been awake for 52 hours before. I win,” (cheap shot).

A 23 year-old Baptist who enjoys fantasy (The Fledgling, by Jane Langton, in particular) and works by the inspiration, apparently, of sleep-deprivation, Adam waxed eloquent in an email. When he sings, “I see warm motorcycles and giant polar crust devils with venomous, wet sucking lips,” he says.

By way of a well-aimed EP, Owl City caught the roving eyes of Universal Republic after Adam, stirred perhaps, by the description of his inspiration Johnathon Ford of Unwed Sailor , vaulted Owl City from the basements of Owatonna, Minnesota to the status of global heart-throb at the “tender age of intent.” Ford helmed the instrumental Unwed Sailor on numerous tours manned by a crew of friends and trusted associates, and Adam’s entourage seems to be following a similar pattern. Breanne, the dazzling brunette smile behind the keyboard providing the candy-colored harmony (“Salt Water Room,” yes?), is a close associate. Adam commented, “She and Adam are friends… Adam is a happy clam.”

“Australia inspires me. Antarctica inspires me. Greenland inspires me,” Adam continued in his email, and “the thing I love most about Owatonna is its hard, irony water. It makes your hair feel like a stiff helmet after you take a shower.” That, dear readers, is the difference between boys and girls.

Thank you, Adam Young.  In the words of Owl City, this is a world of dreams and reverie where I felt the world explode around me.

Molly Miltenberger is a freelance writer with an interest in postcards and goldfish, and, incidentally, a love for owls and similar mollusks.

It “fills me with joy” to make music, says Sean Scolnick, the very slim guitar-man of Langhorne Slim. “It’s like singing or dancing when you’re alone and in the shower. Before I played guitar, I felt like I needed to make something – I’m lucky that I stumbled across guitar. I don’t know what makes you want do the things that you want to do – it’s just something inside of you that wants to come out, as somebody I think once said.”

A wild, sweaty, fiery cowboy is clawing his way out of Scolnick, dripping piano jam bequeathed by a jazz club over a voice that kills and an electric guitar that shreds the stage. Banjo and harmonica comb through as needed. The cowboy drove Scolnick through a regular, untalented childhood in Pennsylvania and into school in New York where a favorite professor liked his style, and directed him into the music studio. The other music students, spoon-fed with theory with their milk and porridge as tender tots, didn’t intimidate him from a career of following inspiration, and Scolnick followed his respected prof’s advice and let it rip. While the others stressed over their GPAs and the freshie 15, Scolnick created a band for his alternate ego, Langhorne Slim. Langhorne Slim rips and roars out barrel-dancing blues, and, like a rough and tough guy, waxes frankly tender.  Scolnick is that kind of guy – he doesn’t “get away with it:” he does what he wants to. He dances with wild abandon and he wears skin-skimming pink pants which my sister thought made dancing on the barrel over-kill. But that’s Langhorne Slim for you – the exaggeration, it works.

Molly Miltenberger is a freelance writer with an interest in postcards and goldfish.

At 8.00 p.m. we quite magically waltzed through the black door in the brick wall. There we were, the Goonite Club, 69 Rosebury Ave, Clerkenwell, London, ECIR4RL, a location that not even MapQuest could find that we reached through a metro station of which no one seemed to be particularly aware. Never mind, we were there, and on time. A muddy hall opened into a dark room with brightish youngish punkish things vaguely rocking out, and a man in a striped shirt shook my hand. “Ian,” he introduced himself, “Shall we have a drink?”

Next door at The Wilmington at Arms, the entire band gathered around the table and we fell into the land of Pocketbooks– the everyday world of a pop band in London that hasn’t jumped the Atlantic.  Spidery strings trail from their niche to those celebrated puddles of genius across the British Isles and Europe. A week before we came, Pocketbooks opened for their old friends, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, and a few weeks later, they planned to participate in Indie Tracks, a music festival held on a 1950′s steam railway in the middle of the Derbyshire countryside.  This isn’t about where they’ve featured or who they’re connected to, though, this is about Pocketbooks, an unassuming, unaffected indie-pop group of the pure at heart from central London with pure voices and the innocence of the undiscovered

“How did we get our name? That’s a good question ‘cause we literally have no idea,” says Ian. Andy, the band maestro and song-writer, admitted that he doesn’t know the answer to this particular question – but a pocketbook is something that you might carry with you everywhere, like a note book, and that’s how he envisions Pocketbook songs.

Andy writes with the lyrical wit of Belle and Sebastian that rhapsodizes on the charm of an ordinary day, and, rather than believe that circumstantial trivia is a mundane necessity, I’ll take Pocketbooks word for it that that moment just might have changed my life. His songs describe that moment at the bus station, the glance that you catch from across a street, the “Fleeting Moments” that perk an ordinary day.

Back in the Goonite Club, standing tiptoe in the audience, and skipping across the playground and swinging up, up and up into the sky with the helium bubble-pop, I felt that Pocketbooks would be lifted up and float away if I let go of the string, just like that pink balloon that slowly became a black dot and was lost beyond the clouds once at the county fair.  Andy’s tenor and Emma’s sparkling voice harmonize about a little of this and a little of that – sugar and spice and everything nice, their songs are made of things that I would be delighted to find in my pocket any day of the week.

Pocketbooks’ 1st album, Flight Paths, debuted into the hard world on July 13th ‘09. Cheers.

The Olympia band was started by songwriter Nicolaas Zwart, and the music’s topography reflects his rolling memories and past.  His love for mid-century American literature chimes through the songs, John Updike and Thomas Ford swim through the music in a “really obscure way,” he says, “It’s there through the lyrics, the feeling through the movement.”  The panoramic fantasy of the real Desolation Wilderness that borders Lake Tahoe in California, near to Zwart’s childhood home, is reflected in the band’s ambience.  The topography of the band’s music lazily follows the geography of lakes and mountain vistas and meets Updike somewhere upstream in the retro haze wafting amid what Zwart calls his “punk-rock ethics.”  “It’s where the sound does not drive [the music],” he explains, “The morals and ethics do.” 

Desolation’s next full-length album is scheduled for release in August.  They’ve offered a tasty nibble to hold you off till then in the form of their advanced single No Tomorrow, just released last week.  You can also download gems streamed with cameo appearances of friends like Ashley Eriksson and Eli Moore of LAKE and Shelby Turner (now Desolation’s bass) of Sundance Kids from the archives of Daytrotter.

Molly is a freelance writer and a recent graduate of New St. Andrews College with an interest in postcards and goldfish.  She interned for The Loop 21 and keeps – sporadically – the blog A New Amsterdam.

WIMBC gives a perf that is absolutely; so; watertight in reaction to the chaos the band observes around them.  The terrific control is killing: their mathematical precision cuts like a razor blade through the otherwise black prog.  It’s like Lewis Carroll splintering within from the points of numbers until he writes absurdity that profounds academics.  This experimental is the gold of Niekrasz’ and Brown’s existentialist quest for the transcendent.  “Why do humans exist other than to get away from the necessity of making food and shelter?”  Brown rhetorically asks the rather hazy night air, “To escape that excess and find time to do something else . . . art.”  If experimental rock is the gateway from this finite dirt, as Brown expresses, then Why I Must Be Careful has gone (oh no) to infinity, and beyond.  

Why I Must Be Careful– playing in a venue near you.  15 July 09, 7.00 p.m., The Empyrean Coffee House, Spokane.

Molly is a freelance journalist and a senior at New St. Andrew’s College with a special interest in postcards and goldfish.  She writes for The Loop 21 and keeps – sporadically – the blog A New Amsterdam.

Weinland

Weinland gets both the Most Public-Spirited and the Cutest Best Friend of the Portland folk community yearbook.  They’re honest, they have a strong sense of community, all five of them “avid” chess players, and they always have good things to say.  The band emerged from the jamming sessions that Adam Shearer, a singer and song-writer who went by the name John Weinland, and his friend Aaron Pomerantz shared with kids at a mental health facility for at-risk youth.  These sessions were too much of a good thing for Shearer’s buddies to pass by.  Rory Brown brought in a bass – Ian Lyles added drums – Paul Christensen played the keyboard – and John Weinland became the quintet Weinland.  “Other than that, there are a lot of rotating cast,” Weinland explains, “We are tight with our Portland music scene pals.”  The result is an  airy batch of folk that smells like a walk through a pine forest – it’s woodsy but light, it very likely favors flannel, and it’s quite companionable for your own Saturday afternoon listening-pleasure.  “Our primary aim is to make records that are timeless, that you creep up on you, and in the end stay with you for the rest of your life.”  

Their own regular folk rigmarole is often joined by friends like Laura Gibson, Adam Selzer (Norfolk and Western, M.Ward) and Rachel Blumberg of the Decemberists, M. Ward, Bright Eyes and Julie Holland.  In a good neighborly exchange, Weinland hosts The Portland Cello Project – a commune for the gifted cello junkies of Portland.  Weinland recounts fondly that “after many nights watching Adam drink whisky and interact with the audience [Doug, the founder of the PCP] thought, ‘this is what PCP needs… a saucy front man!’”

“Portland has a good thing going right now, not just based on the number of musicians and artists that live here, but the spirit of growth and the willingness of everyone to be helpful to one another.  We have experienced so much support and friendship from fellow Portlanders [that] we couldn’t imagine trying to do this anywhere else.”  The glitz of the Portland scene is more than on the surface.  

WEINLAND – playing Moscow Saturday, 2nd May 2009, 8.00 pm at Mikey’s Gyros. 

Thanks to Pomerantz and Lyles for tag-teaming as Weinland spokesmen – they say that they are excited to come to Moscow, which should warm your heart.

Betsy Olson, playing Friday night, 1st May, 8:00 p.m., with Sera Cahoone and Karli Fairbanks, the American Legion Cabin.  Don’t be late.