I enjoy this video to no end, and it alone puts Low up 20,000 points in my book.

For starters, IT HAS JOHN STAMOS!!!!!!, looking as fine as ever. The video itself is a throw-back to the days of black and white pictures. A romantic scene takes place between a couple as they’re driving in a classic car, a detached background rolling behind them the entire way. All the while, the song beckons listeners to “Try To Sleep” in an eerie way, like a mantra to be found in all the spaces between life and sleep, as well as between sleep and death. And yeah, the video takes it there, too (to death).

Directed by Travis Schneider.

Glasgow, Scotland’s Errors roam through all landscapes — terrestrial, aquatic, otherworldly, rave-y — in this video for “Magna Encarta”, sometimes with a chicken as their prime focus, and sometimes not. All landscapes become intertwined with one another throughout the course of the video, however, with the chicken remaining the only constant.

Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from this? Is this a literal take on the question of chicken or the egg? (But there are no eggs…)

Ohhhhh, no matter. Errors are soon going on tour with Mogwai, and it’s going to be amaaaaaaaaazzzzzzziiiiing! You need to go. There’s a reason these guys are killin’ it in the UK (and the chicken has only a little to do with it).

Poor This Will Destroy You. Due to the fact that the band is from Texas, and due to the fact that the quartet play the rousing, crescendo-heavy music that Explosions In The Sky made popular in the United States, TWDY seem to always follow in their big brother’s footsteps. The thing is, This Will Destroy You are not EITS little brother. They aren’t even half-brothers, step-brothers, or even second cousins — and the band’s new release Tunnel Blanket does everything to supply the DNA evidence.

TWDY have always been a very dark and brooding instrumental outfit, and not much has changed this time around. If anything, they are treading further and further down this alienating path. Tunnel Blanket opens with the soft guitar notes of “Little Smoke,” a song owing more to light-hearted ambient tunes than post-rock stylings the band so earnestly seeks to avoid. But a ways into the beginning opus, “Little Smoke” comes into thunderous awareness with heavy drum hits and reverberations of heavy distortion. The song, at that one point, owes nothing to post-rock anymore, bringing in more elements of distorted shoegaze and the meticulous slow tendencies of doom metal. As the song progresses, the vocal shrieking (or guitar wailing — tough to tell) furthers this doomy, ambient notion. “Black Dunes” creeps and closes out with the best of the ambient artists around the world.

That isn’t to say that TWDY have completely lost their post-rock influences. Songs like “Communal Blood” bring out some traditional post-rock elements, high guitar strumming, crashing cymbals, and explosive crescendos. But the band still slathers it in a mix of distorted ambiance — more fuzz than actual clean and crisp sounds. “Killed The Lord, Left For The New World” is a page almost taken straight out of EITS’s book, but just as quickly as the band dives into these post-rock soundscapes, songs like “Reprise” head straight down the ambient path, progressing at a snail’s pace, where you can practically hear the band breathing throughout the recording.

Tunnel Blanket is really This Will Destroy You’s greatest achievement so far. The band works hard to shed the post-rock label that it is so commonly associated with, and the elements of doom, ambient, and shoegaze almost make you forget about the easy Texas comparison. But TWDY haven’t totally changed just yet. The simplistic elements of post-rock that make it so easy to label every single band without vocals under the genre are still there… because maybe This Will Destroy You are still a post-rock band at heart. If that is the case, and if Tunnel Blanket is any indicator, the band won’t remain that way for long.

This Will Destroy You-Tunnel Blanket by GirlieAction

In a feat of pure wonder, Brooklyn-based quartet Screens have managed to evade the magnetic lure of musical stagnation with their latest album, Dead House. Without adhering too closely to any one genre tag, they pull bits and pieces of influence from “pop,” “psychedelic,” “noise,” “post-punk,” and “post-rock” when and where they need it, incorporating all of these musical styles expertly without falling victim to the confining qualities of subgenres.

Diverse influences, textures, and techniques number many on Dead House, providing soundscapes which bubble up in every journalist’s head a steady stream of descriptive adjective-and-noun combinations. The album begins gently with “Dead House,” in which a simple piano track becomes slowly swallowed up by by interference. “Saturdays” follows, exploding into raw, heavy beats which conjur images of drum circles. Here, vocalist Breck Brunson’s hard-to-pinpoint vocals are introduced, in the form of a distant falsetto which descends into incomprehensible blathering.

Uncommon visuals come to mind throughout the duration of Dead House. With its aggressive siren-like cycles, “Man Down” provides a soundtrack for one to evacuate a burning warehouse, and piano-heavy “Radio Tabaloapa” may be what a drowning individual hears moments before being sucked into a beckoning underworld. One of the most traditionally accessible tracks, the album single “Pop Logic” contains chiming synth progressions which meld circus parade and funeral march into one bittersweet event.

In a big picture sense, Screens are remarkably distinct — as there are not many bands like them around — but the release is distinct within itself as well. Every track seems like an experiment in Screens doing whatever the fuck they want. Dead House seems uninhibited by tradition, inspired by what it is to create art in the moment. When one listens to the tracks individually, out of context, one can’t help but ask what captive audience Screens can possibly hope to attract with their schizophrenic nature. In context, though, cohesion lies in the album’s non-cohesion — which is truly contradictory, but only when left undefined. Though perhaps thematically linked, the tracks on Dead House are so stylistically different from one another that they are bonded by their dissimilarities.

Screens are not a band made for genre tags. In a way, they transcend them by incorporating so many of them. Dead House has a sophisticated and finely-plotted arc, with atypical songwriting. It is not a shallow album full of singles waiting to be individually hyped, but art rock for those who love organic creation, birthed from a desire to experiment and a penchant for exploration.

Despite its hollow name, Dead House feels like a real, living entity, constantly stirring darkness within itself, while maintaining a facade of lightness. All complexities aside, the prevailing simple sentiment is this: engulf Dead House in its entirety.

“Pop Logic” Music Video

Errors

Fellow Glasgow residents Errors took the stage for their first ever visit to Seattle. The crowd eagerly lapped up the quartet’s brand of electro-rock. Errors opened up their set with a couple tracks off of last year’s solid release, Come Down With Me, but it took a shade of time for the band to really get the butterflies out of their collective stomach. As their set progressed, the band fell into a greater groove, churning out an equal mix from their two albums, as well as what appeared to be a couple newer tracks. By the end of their set, the crowd was dancing away to Error’s version of the instrumental style of almost glitch, Tron-like, data rock, from a scene similar to that of fellow United Kingdom dwellers, 65daysofstatic. The beats drive hard and the guitars drive harder. And just like a page out of Mogwai’s book, they’re very, very loud.

Mogwai

After a half hour setup of fine-tuning and tinkering, Mogwai took the stage to a sea of cheers and applause. It is tough to emphasize the influence that the band has had on one single genre, but with as many post-rock/instrumental bands that exist today, it is quite easy to find elements that Mogwai churned out a decade ago in everyone’s sound. For unknown reasons, many of the Seattle denizens were new to the Mogwai scene, or perhaps took the “loudest band on Earth” as a mere hyperbole, and were standing around earplug-less: a rookie’s mistake in the worst possible fashion.

This is because it is not a hyperbole or an overexaggeration; Mogwai pretty much is the “loudest band on Earth,” and although there is no scientific data to back this up, the band’s reliance on reverb, distortion, and senseless need to turn the volume up way too loud are live trademarks they are known for. As the band opened with “White Noise” and “Rano Pano” from Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, the crowd segregated into two two different options: those who slowly and methodically bobbed their heads to the churning beat and those who jammed their fingers as far as possible into their ear canals.

The band was backed by a slight visual element, projections which generally didn’t really add that much extra to experience, save for the nicely done outdoor shots used during “How To Be a Werewolf.” Overall, the band played an impressive set lasting almost 100 minutes, mostly of material from the latest decade, but of course reaching back for the definitive crescendo machine of “Like Herod” from the band’s legendary debut album Mogwai Young Team. As “Like Herod” ended, and the individuals who didn’t have their earplugs sonically devastated from their ears took them out, the crowd filtered away from the ebbs and flows of distorted drones echoing from the many, many amplifiers. The band cheekily left off the fan favorite “Mogwai Fear Satan”, but then again, this was a tour for the new album, not a reach into the early years for 25 minutes of live material.

To watch Mogwai live is like watching your old favorite musical stalwart play on stage — the one whose music provides life to legions of new young bands and is still able to tightly cut it on stage. The band is often largely lifeless on the stage, with only guitarist Stuart Braithwaite taking the time and energy to put any sort of motion into his guitarwork. But while the rest of the band sits on stage, it is clear they are interested in letting their brooding brand of rock and roll speak for itself. Although prone to sudden post-rock-esque crescendos, Mogwai has long been a band, that produces music which turns into its own beast, that plods along at its own rate. Live, Mogwai is a band for fans. If you have never ever heard of them, you may not come away impressed; but if you’re a fan of their albums — any of their albums — you will come away beyond satisfied.

Photography by Kerosene Rose, at the Portland, OR show at Wonder Ballroom

The debut full-length album from Stockholm brother-sister duo Dag För Dag, entitled Boo, starts off with a short introduction track. At the end of this 30-second preface, there is a distant, “One… two… three… four,” and immediately track two, “I Am The Assassin,” commences. With a compelling bass and drum line, followed by a sleek weave of guitar and synthesizer sounds, Sarah and Jacob Snavely create one of the strongest songs on the whole disc. Two other tracks follow in its footsteps of intensity: track three, “Hands And Knees” and the final song on the disc, “Ring Me, Elise.”

This trio of songs can be threaded together into what I am calling “seductive trances”. “Hand And Knees” propositions the object of its inspiration with variations on the lyrics, “If I had you in front of me/ On my back I’d surely be,” while “Ring Me, Elise” pleads to its subject, “You’re gonna cut me in half/ You’re gonna sew me back/ you’re gonna make me whole.” After studying this album, I feel that the remaining songs find themselves in one of three other thematic groupings: distant longings, dark marches, and The Jesus And Mary Chain head-nods.

Tracks four, five, eight and twelve are of the distant longing variety. In “Wouldn’t You,” Sarah Snavely sweetly but sadly calls out, “I’ll take you there/ Straight into thin air/ Wouldn’t you?” and Jacob Snavely earnestly but unrequitedly answers, “I wouldn’t know… I’d be so low,” and then both these vocal lines become progressively layered over one another, thickening the weight of the song. “Came In Like A Knife” solemnly partners a steady tambourine hit with layers of keyboards and a grounding bass line. This provides a beautifully depressing canvas for an equally paradoxical relationship between vocal melody and lyrical content, as a delicate voice describes a potentially violent circumstance.

Track seven, “Seven Stories,” is a Joy Division-like number, complete with a haunting bass lead, evocative vocals, pronounced and patrolling drum hits, and a careening guitar presence. And “Traffic Jam,” a kindred song to “Seven Stories,” offers Murder City Devils-style instrumentation, but with a slowed pace and layers of high range vocals. These songs hold down the dark marches category.

Track six, ten, and eleven are inadvertent homages to The Jesus And Mary Chain, which meld the three other subdivisions together simultaneously. These songs are seductive, longing, and also dark. The comparison to The Jesus And Mary Chain has a great deal to do with the fact that Jacob Snavely’s vocals have a similar sound to those of Jim Reid, as can be heard on several tracks off of Psycho Candy. “Silence Is The Verb,” marches along with its pacing drums and staggers with its guitar bends until the vocals and guitar erupt into a sense of desperate howling. “Animal,” which is also the band’s latest single, has heavy darkness that gives it industrial flavor, even though Dag För Dag is definitely a cross genre outfit. I hear folk tendencies, a loungey vibe, and even an indie rock essence in Boo.

That said, I feel it personally important to mention that besides the Stockholm connection, the Snavelys also have a strong origin tie to San Francisco; so besides spanning more than one musical field, they also span more than one country.

Dag för Dag – Boxed Up In Pine by Ceremony