Indy Tunes at the Library

Venerable Bloomington-ites the Impossible Shapes returned loudly this year with their self-titled new album on (also Bloomington-based) Secretly Canadian–a continuation of their efforts to place noise-rock on a collision course with New Weird America. Tum, their last outing, was mostly an organic-sounding click-and-whir-filled singular statement, it takes less than a minute of the new record for the first track, “Hey!” to burst into it’s anthemic chorus, “Say hey, hey / Let’s make it happen / Say hey, hey”. They channel a proto-Stones riff into incredibly detailed guitar histrionics by the time the bridge rolls through your headphones; and all of a sudden one thing is abundantly clear, the Shapes have arrived with a pure “rock record”, one that could only be made by them.

“Our Secret Operation” takes another pounding riff from the Stooges/V.U. wasteland, forcing its bulk through the eye of a needle into an effervescent chorus which echoes more-than-slightly of Tom Verlaine treble-heavy fretwork. But the album’s not all so hard-driving; “Dreamspeak” is anchored by drummer Mark Rice’s excellent tom work and bassist Aaron Deer’s always-solid rhythms, both blending seamlessly with interwoven guitar melodies. When the horns hit at the close of the song, the dream-state erupts into stately, slow-burning alt-Country; all hinging on the quiet calm of vocalist/guitarist Chris Barth’s restrained-but-pure vocals. While voices so high on the register as Barth’s often divide listeners into “love-‘em-or-hate-‘em” camps, Barth varies his approach throughout the record, almost speaking on “Infinity’s Lips” before breaking into song, backed by breezy group vocals while on “Make Art” he begins in an almost-whisper.

“Let the People Build What They Will” is guitar majestry; guitarists Barth, Peter King, and Jason Groth at the height of their shredding-abilities. The song can barely contain it all, evidenced by the so-free-its-unhinged guitar solo that carries from bridge back to the verse progression. It’s not all so heavy and serious, though, as shown in the swing-and-bounce of “A New Way to Have Fun” which joyously punctuates its heavy country-punk feel with extended guitar bursts. Closer “Please Tie Me Up” is as close to a guitar-ballad as the Shapes get, Barth calmly asking “Please tie me up / Tie me down” over a sorrowful riff punctuated at the end with plenty of distortion and fuzz. This is as good as it gets for an Indiana band, the Impossible Shapes sticking to their own idiosyncratic song style-and-structure and still managing to release a guitar-rock record accessible to any mind that can open itself wide enough. It’s a record full of realization, for both maker and listener, which find a strangely satisfying union, best explained by Barth in “Infinity’s Lips”. “Our brown hairs will turn white / Our hearts a little hardened / We will wake up in the dark / In the middle of night.”

For more information, feel free to browse their label, website, or myspace page.  Better yet, jump right in and request their latest from your local library branch!

–Drew DeBoy

The last story I heard (until recently) about Clint was when he was five or six and had scaled the down spouting arrayed on the back side of his parents’ house to stare into a second-story window at his poor mother who was up there cleaning, nearly causing her heart failure. That was over twenty years ago.  Much more recently, I learned of his musical adventures, listened to his CD, and thought, Wow. I contacted his mother, who was much more pleased with this endeavor, and she provided material for this brief bio about Clint and his music:

Clint Crowe was born in Indianapolis and grew up in Plainfield.  He started playing acoustic guitar at age 18 and is self taught.  He began writing his own music and in 2006, with a lot of prodding from friends and family, he made his first CD, titled “Vine St.”  He used a 4-track recorder to add instruments and harmonies to his songs. Although it sounds like several people, it is only Clint playing and singing.
    
After “Vine St.,” Clint continued to write songs and as his style and skills matured, he decided to make a compilation CD of his favorites.  His music is heartfelt; he has a smooth, storytelling style.  His songs are happy, sad, and silly, but all are original and if you listen to the words, I’m sure you’ll find one you can relate to.
   
Clint has played at several venues, but the one he has played at most in Indiana is the “Monkey’s Tale” in Broad Ripple, where he always had a positive response to his music. The song “Right Now” was also included on a CD called Midwest Rockers for Life which is part of a drunk driving prevention campaign to educate young drivers about the dangers of drinking and driving.    

He now lives in Horsham, Australia, where he has recently married Elizabeth. (You might hear her name in a song.) Clint reports that he’s still doing shows “down under” and that there is another cd’s worth of songs waiting to be recorded one day.

–Tom Probasco

With frequently-requested original songs such as “Conversation’s Free” (from Goldmine Pickers) and the title track from their latest album Lonesome Gone often heard on both The Fields Of Bluegrass Radio Hour and The Free Zone on WICR 88.7FM, this national touring act hailing from betwixt Goshen and Syracuse in the northern part of the state has built a loyal following in our area.

The Goldmine Pickers have a deconstructionist approach to 21st century traditional song that is an eclectic “mixed bag” incorpororating jazz, bluegrass, folk, and Celtic elements in a pure and unpretentious way.  They place the emphasis squarely on melody and the essense of the song.

With a reputation for fine ensemble playing that is spirited and technically dazzling, this is a band that is mighty fun to watch perform live. And they don’t shy away from nuance and understatement, either. The Pickers’ music lends itself well to an “unplugged” house concert listening room environment. 

– Cary Allen Fields, Host of Fields of Bluegrass and The Free Zone, WICR 88.7 FM

First and foremost, we would like to thank Taco Bell for the literally hundreds of meals they provided us. Thanks to Anna Jennifer and Missy, they’re our best friends, and we couldn’t do much of anything without them. Thanks to our families and our neighborhood, we couldn’t have asked for a better environment to grow up in.  Thanks also to all the bands we’ve played with, especially: Three Kings, Callahan, PRS, DiStill, Track 32, Karate Chop Avalanche, MN 40, *67, STCAH and many, many more.  Joe, Mike, and Jen from the Irving.  Lazy Daze.  Ohio.  All the venues that let us play.  Jim Kauffman for recording this CD.  Our friends, and anybody we’ve ever met . . . except the owner of The Attic (OH) and the dog that attacked Michael.  Watermelons.  Nudity.  Long car rides.  Cathedral, Scecina, ISI and anybody who goes there.  Refrigerators and pirate ships.  Will Ferrell.  God.  Ocular Herpes.  And anyone that’s ever come to one of our shows, given us a hug, or given us money.

This is for you Joe Ajamie, our friend, our band mate, but most importantly, our brother.  We love you, and we’re sure that your view from heaven beats the hell out of ours here.

Where’s the Cake? is:
Joe Ajamie (Guitar/Vocals)
Cory Constantine (Drums)
Noah Droddy (Guitar)
Michael Preuschl (Bass/Vocals)

– Noah Droddy (from the liner notes)

Regional minister sings of faith, love, and a dog named Jesus on new CD (7/28/08)
by Rebecca Bowman Woods
A voice from the past led Dean Phelps to record his third CD, Give Us a Song.

Last summer, Phelps, a regional staff member with the Christian Church in Indiana, received an email from a woman asking if he was the guy who used to sit and play guitar in a courtyard at the University of Kentucky years ago.

He was. Turns out Phelps had recorded a few songs for the woman and her roommate when the three of them were UK students in the 1970s. She still had the tape, and she sent it to him.

For Phelps, hearing that old cassette brought back a flood of memories. “It’s really an interesting experience to see 50 coming over the hill at a gallop, and to hear yourself when you’re 19,” he says.

It also motivated him to return to the studio two years after releasing This Old House, his second CD. “Give Us a Song” includes updated versions of two numbers from his 1970s dorm room recording session, including the title track by singer-songwriter Jonathan Edwards.

The CD features folk tunes such as John Prine’s “The Hobo Song” and Kate Wolf’s “Across the Great Divide,” and updates of the traditional hymns “Marching to Zion” and “Leaning On the Everlasting Arms.”

“Give Us a Song” also includes “My Dog Jesus,” a song Phelps performed live, but had never recorded on a CD until recently. “My Dog Jesus” was written by C.J. Watson, a friend of Phelps’ who lives in Nashville.

“It’s the most lyrically clever thing I’ve heard in a long time,” Phelps says.

When he heard Watson sing it, he asked for permission to add it to his own repertoire.

Once Phelps started performing it, people would come up after the show and ask which CD had the song about the dog on it, he says.

“I had to do this CD so I could quit having to say ‘I haven’t recorded it yet,’” Phelps confesses.

Phelps considers himself mostly a “refinisher of old songs” who occasionally writes his own.

His cousin’s struggles with her 19-year-old daughter inspired him to pen “If You Come Up Empty,” one of the CD’s standout tracks.

“As song developed it took on kind of a prodigal quality,” he says, referring to Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son. The mother in the song reminds her daughter that no matter what, she’s always welcome at the table.

Phelps love of folk, gospel, and Americana music dates back to his childhood in Maysville, Ky. He started playing guitar at age 9. His father was a skilled carpenter and an engineer but also a self-taught musician. “If it had frets, he could play it,” Phelps says.

At the University of Kentucky, he majored in music and directed church choirs during and after seminary at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta. He released his first CD, Going Over Home, in 1997 — a collection of favorite hymns and gospel music. His second CD, “This Old House,” was “a broad exploration” that included rhythm-and-blues and rock influences.

“Give Us a Song” is more of a return to his roots. “I wanted it to sound like music you’d hear in the living room, or on somebody’s front porch,” he says.

In between his day job as director of church multiplication for the Indiana region, Phelps plays the occasional coffeehouse or church gig. So far most of those have been in central Indiana, but he hopes to venture further out with his new collection of songs.

Before he joined Indiana’s regional staff in 2005, Phelps served as the first called minister of Cherry Log Christian Church, in Cherry Log, Ga. The church was founded a few years ago by Disciples preacher Fred Craddock, known for weaving storytelling into his sermons. Phelps met Craddock while studying at Candler School of Theology.

Looking back, Phelps wonders if his love of music would be as strong if he had tried to make a career of it.

“It’s really a respite for me,” he says.

Used with permission, DisciplesWorld, Copyright 2008

Cornfields and Crossroads is a local bluegrass group, and Blues from the Heartland is their debut album.

The first cut, “Lonesome Fiddle Blues,” is a glory, but it’s misnamed. Fiddler John Watson’s personal life is a mystery to me, and for all I know he could be a lonesome guy. David Baker’s guitar, though, and Darrell Deuty’s mandolin, Dan Wethington’s banjo and Joseph Flowers’s string bass are all playing along, here. It’s a party, complete with cats and mice and bats in the attic. If you’re after lonesomeness, you’ve checked in at the wrong flophouse; and you need to move on to one of the album’s mournful vocals.

The second cut, for example, is called “Tennessee 1949.”

Pop psychology tells us that we should live in the present, turn the page, keep moving forward. But some movie characters and bluegrass singers aren’t with the program. In Napoleon Dynamite, Uncle Rico is always yearning for the glory days when he was (supposedly) a football hotshot. In The Lookout, Chris Pratt pines for his days as a high school hockey star, before the car accident that shattered his life. And in “Tennessee 1949,” the vocalist (David Baker?) wants to be back there and then.

I like both of these movies–The Lookout is the only heist movie that ever made me weep–but Chris makes me cringe and Rico makes me laugh. That’s how we’re supposed to react to these guys. If you really want to spend time with guys who can’t stop looking pathetically into the past, and you want to feel okay about their behavior, bluegrass is the perfect medium for you.

I wonder what became of Darlene Johnson/The girl who broke my heart at seventeen/I barely can remember what she looked like/But thirty years ago she was my dream.

Is that unproductive thinking or what? I love it.

The pattern of alternating instrumentals with vocals is sustained through the album, to my continued delight. Most of the songs, including these first two, are listed as traditional; but whether or not the group members wrote them, they all sound to me as though they’re coming through my back door, fresh as can be.

–Glenn Halberstadt

When I tell my friends and co-workers that Polkaboy is playing that night, they look at me with sad, pitying eyes and say, “No thanks, I’m just not into polka music.” It’s just as well, because Polkaboy is so popular, I’m not sure there is room for many more at the Beer Garden at the Rathskeller.  Polkaboy is not your usual polka band.  Sure, they play many of the traditional polkas, but there’s so much more. Think Frankie Yankovic meets Devo.  These guys rock the house with The Most Beautiful Music in Ze Vorld.

Both CD’s, the self-titled Polkaboy and the 2-disc Boy in the USA, display the band’s versatility and range.  Several of the standards appear on Polkaboy, such as “Pennsylvania Polka,” “Too-Fat Polka,” and “Beer Barrel Polka.”  Alongside these tributes to polka history are fun rockin’ covers of “My Sharona” and the “Squirrel Nut Zippers Hell,” and a version of “She Blinded Me with Science” that brings about dirty dancing in the aisles of the Beer Garden. Boy in the USA presents some of the band’s crowd pleasing favorites such as “In Heaven There is No Beer” and “Volare’”, and a cartoon medley that will bring childlike smiles to every boomer who hears it.

My only regret about these two CD’s is that they are studio creations, and Polkaboy is a band that must be experienced live, with all the bells and whistles, three accordions, tuba, drums, bass, trombone, trumpets, clarinet, guitar, and Ethel Merman singing Led Zepplin.  Trust me.  This is not your grandparents’ polka.

–Ellen Flexman

The following review was written by Travis Harvey, of Village Green Records.

Everything, Now! - Bible Universe - This album starts off with a choir of Crafty’s belting out a prologue claiming, “The End of Life will be something like the beginning!” Guitars and drums boom together, creating clamor in the tiny space between your headphones. This is a universe created deep in the dark of the Muncie night; entirely directed and executed at the hands of the young Jon “Crafty” Rogers. In a tiny blood-red nook of the Village Green Records store came the birth of a new universe, a big “BOOM” declared it a Bible Universe. Bible Universe claims the fairgrounds, astral-planes, tarmacs, and skull- cavities in the name of highly-literate, chaotic Rock and Roll. The album as a whole can be your trip of a lifetime, you just have to be willin’, and “Exile in Bible Universe” can be your feel-good hit of the summer. You thought Ziggy Stardust was from outer-space, Spiritualized were tappin’ into the mysterious voice of God, and Sun-Ra understood the outer sphere of your 3rd ear; well, Everything, Now! has created the hitchhikers guide to the Metaphysical Universe of Rock and Roll. A few months later Bible Universe was followed-up with the release of the ’sister’ full-length album Ugly Magic, the dance ‘legend’ to make sense of all of this. Prolific and brilliant, oh and don’t let all of this nondescript hubbub scare you away; this ‘universe’ can fill a psalm book with generous hooks and rock sensibility.

Everything, Now! Ugly Magic - The second album from E,N! this year; as a listener you are in for a 808-drum-machine-from-space surprise! Don’t mind that synth beat; groove down with that bass; and grow wicked with those grimy-dance guitar riffs. “You should stop using our favorite songs to sell silly products that we don’t want,” the Magic of Bible Universe is definitely ugly; filled with the beasts of corporate moguls, UPC’s, Reagan, and the Beasts that are the record labels. Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeaaaah! This album is in the deepest outer stratosphere of space; squatting on Ziggy Stardust’s spaceship, heading for Beck’s galaxy of dancy-alt-rock. Space banjo, no nukes, groaning mouthed-bass lines and mealtime conversations with Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Marie Curie are the bedfellows of the song “Metaphysical Meals”. I never imagined that Everything, Now!‘s Bible Universe album (released just a few months before) would give birth to the bizarrely danceable world of Ugly Magic. This is an amazing release continuing Jon Rogers’ efforts of placing Everything, Now! as the year’s most creative and prolific acts.

- Travis Harvey Village Green Records

If you’d like to read more, feel free to check out another review, this one by Ewan Wadarmi at Hybrid Magazine. Or check the online ‘zine Baby Sue. Nuvo also has a review up if you want to stay local. Additionally, both of these albums can currently be streamed (free!) from Last.fm: Bible Universe and Ugly Magic.

Both titles are also available from your local library branch, request them while they’re available! - IMCPL Staff

(This review was first published in Indy Folk News, February 23, 2008.)

Notes on Caleb Hawkins: Curbside

If you’ve ever seen Caleb at a gig, you know his get-up–britches, suspenders, collar-less shirt and a Derby hat.  A total stranger seeing him for the first time might be forgiven for thinking that Caleb was a “poser”.

That is until Caleb starts to play.  All his styles are old-timey–whether blues or Appalachian folk etc. — although some of his lyrics have a modern touch (such as On the DSL Line). They are often picked in a slight hesitation mode but always with authenticity and enthusiasm.

He is pretty good at turning a phrase too…

“You’re as cuddly as a cactus,
 You’re as slippery as an eel,
 Easy on the eyes,
 Hard upon the ear.”

“Bitter words get hard to chew the longer that they
 cook.
 The longer that they cook.
 Bullets don’t fly back into the gun from which they
 come.
 The gun from which they come.”

Caleb is confident with his instruments (banjo, guitar and violin) but he seriously needs to work on strengthening his voice.  If voices were beer Caleb’s would be a Light Ale (PLEASE NOTE, that’s a Light Ale NOT a Bud Lite.  The latter would be an insult!).

Added to which, from track to track the volume level goes up and down capriciously so be prepared to have the remote in hand or your hand near the volume dial.

Never the less, if you could pluck a late Nineteenth Century front-porch singer through a proverbial time warp into the here and now, what you would get is someone very much like Caleb.  Get-up and all.  

In the liner-notes Caleb thanks a handful of people including Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and our own redoubtable Frank Watson.  It must be trusted that being in such exalted company will not go to Frank’s
head.

–Dave Rowe, Indy Folk News member and contributor.

Flynnville Train is a country rock group whose members hail from Muncie. Brian Flynn is the lead vocalist, and his brother Brent plays lead guitar. Tim Beeler is on bass, Jeremy Patterson plays rhythm guitar and Tommy Bales is the drummer.

They play road music.

How do I mean that? Years ago, a fellow wrote in Rolling Stone that some music was meant to be listened to in your car on the highway, and some wasn’t. He had tried to listen to Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” while driving, and he’d almost crashed, because he’d allowed his mind to go where that song wanted to take it.

Flynnville Train won’t put you in that kind of danger. Based on my own history I would say that if you’ve been swimming laps, and your sinuses are glunked up, and you’re a whipped old dog but you’re happy, and you want to go sailing down Spring Mill Road (responsibly, of course), take the Flynnville Train.

Just don’t hold your breath waiting for a ballad. The album consistently romps and stomps. “Tequila Sheila” tells a familiar story, but it has a strong chorus, as does “Nowhere than Somewhere.” “High on the Mountain” is inspirational, though to what course of action I haven’t decided.

And if you think of  “Baby’s in Black” as a perfect Beatles number, then listen and learn: all these years, it has needed a fiddle. I love Flynnville Train’s version so much that I was going to add a mention of it to Wikipedia’s article about that song. But somebody beat me to it.

–Glenn Halberstadt