Zac Pennington: I have to warn you, I tend to ramble in these interview sessions…so, you’re certainly more than welcome to pare down. I used to do interviews with people all the time and I feel like I overcompensate because I’d always be very bummed out when people gave me very short answers and left me nothing to work with.

Nick Hanover: I actually prefer when people go off on discussions. Most of the time when I interview people it’s like that, I prefer to have a conversation rather than a straightforward interview. So rambling sounds perfect to me. I actually interviewed Ian Svenonious a while back…

That guy can talk!

Yeah (laughs). I kind of just said one or two sentences and then he gave me a whole manifesto, it was great.

He’s good at that.

So, are you in Portland right now? Or are you on the road?

I’m in Portland. We just got done with a big tour…a couple big tours, actually. So we’re kind of on a break for now.

I actually caught you down here in Austin, with Los Campesinos! at the Parish, it was fantastic.

Oh! Do you remember which show you went to, which of the two?

I went to the first night. I spoke to you briefly at the merchandise booth, it was one of the best shows I’ve caught in a long time. I remember even Gareth from Los Campesinos! was commenting on how you guys were showing them up during the tour.

He was being very kind, that was a super fun trip. I love those guys, it was really nice to be able to spend a lot of time with them. We went on tour with them before, years ago, so it was nice to have another shot at hanging out with them.

Yeah, I remember when I interviewed him during that tour and he was going on about it, “Oh, have you guys heard this band Parenthetical Girls?” It was great talking to him and hearing him geek out so much on another band.

He’s been very generous with us, for sure. He’s a great guy, we’re pretty good friends.

It was interesting too because during the show you were talking about how you weren’t going to be coming down for SXSW because you feel Parenthetical Girls isn’t really a “SXSW showcase kind of band.” You said you’re better suited for venues like the Parish. I’d be curious to hear you elaborate on that, because I understood what you were saying– with the theatricality of what you do I can see how it’d be hard to make that translate for SXSW– but I wanted to hear more about your experiences with that festival.

Well, it’s less about really translating…certainly the Parish is a beautiful venue, and an ideal place for any band to play, but I feel like part of the thing with SXSW, in our limited experience– we only went there one year and especially with the time we went there since our band was slightly different– we walked more of a tightrope, and occasionally things would go awry. It was a precarious band, so it kind of took an audience that was more invested in the project to be able to fully appreciate what we were doing. We’ve never really been a band that…we’re not really salesmen, ultimately.

I feel like we’ve been getting to a place where we’re depending on the bands that we’re touring with, and Los Campesinos! is a good example of that; if an audience is sympathetic to the kind of thing that we do– and I think Los Campesinos! fans definitely are– it’s easier for them to engage with it than an audience that has no preconceived notion of what it is that we do. But I feel like at SXSW, the bands that do really well are bands that play live in such a way that’s kind of undeniable, whereas with us it’s a crapshoot sometimes, whether the audience is going to respond to what we do, because it’s a very specific thing and it appeals to a very specific audience.

So the generalized audience at SXSW is not ideal for it. And also, there are bands who do really well at SXSW and I think the experience that I had there, they’re bands that are a little more versatile than we are. We don’t bring our guitar and plug into the amp that’s sitting there at the venue, we sort of have to have more control of the environment than most people get at SXSW.

Right, and there’s probably plenty of places at SXSW where you have to completely change your aesthetic for the room you’re currently playing for.

Yeah, I mean, we try not to, but it’s kind of hard to overcome. I’d love to go to SXSW as a spectator, but I don’t know that there will come a time where it will make a lot of sense for us to play SXSW again. I’m sure I will be eating those words before long.

Your sets are also structured almost like a story; with the way you structure the songs, it’s not necessarily a straightforward narrative but it seems like there’s a narrative to what you’re getting across. Is that something you purposefully do when you’re putting together your set list?

I don’t feel like it’s that way so much, or it’s not intentionally that way…what we do, ultimately, there’s a diversity to what we do, and what we end up doing is try to showcase all the different avenues of what we think Parenthetical Girls means, I guess. So because of that, I think there’s a very natural ebb and flow to the songs when we play live because there’s not a lot of sameness to the songs that we play.

Your music has also made this shift over the last couple releases, to where it seems like you’re moving to a more literary and experimental form of New Romanticism, in comparison to the more baroque traits of the first two releases. Did that come out of doing more shows and the changes happening in the lineup? Or was that something you had been planning for a while?

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s not so much about the shows, though it has been challenging to translate a lot of the things we’ve done in the past to a live band and feel satisfied with it. Certainly all of Entanglements is a cumbersome thing to try to play through with a live band. I think more than anything, I’m a pretty impatient person and so I think it’s hard for me to settle for playing music that’s one kind of thing and one particular way. I feel like I’m foremost a fan of music, which is a cheesy thing to say, probably.

So I think that trying to make music that has some sort of linear component between the albums we make, there’s a thread that goes throughout all that we do, but we try to make the albums as different as possible every time we do them. It’s kind of a goal. Because like I said, the reason the set list we play has an ebb and flow is because the songs are…there’s a really common word I’m trying to use here… There’s a lot of different stuff going on (laughs). There are a lot of different aesthetics in the songs that we play.

Right, it’s very eclectic…

Eclectic! Thank you! See, that’s a really embarrassing one not to come to. They’re very eclectic, our sets. That’s mainly because there aren’t bookends on what we think Parenthetical Girls sounds like, I guess. We try to not limit what Parenthetical Girls is as long as it feels like it’s not not Parenthetical Girls when we’re recording it and it’s a good fit. I think it fits largely because I sing on all of the songs and for better or worse I think my voice, and my lyrical voice, are consistent on all of the songs we’re recording.

My first exposure to you was as a writer for The Stranger and while there are a lot of people who are former writers or critics who have turned and focused on music, I’m amazed by how you’ve managed to almost completely transplant your writing voice to the music you make. Even in terms of the aesthetic, it’s interesting to me how it matches up. Because when you think back to, say, Bob Geldof, what he was writing for the NME was totally different from the music he was making. I’ve always been curious about whether you made a conscious decision to bring that writing style to life through music or if it’s something where your writing voice and your musical voice come from the same exact place.

I guess it’s fair to say that they come from similar places. I think that I had a very hard time when I was working at The Stranger, and when I moved down here and was working at the Mercury, the sister paper, I found it really challenging to have energy to do both things. I found that after working at the paper, the creative energy part of my brain was sort of expended. I never really cared about what I was writing when I was working at the paper, which I always felt bad about because there were a lot of people who would have loved to have had those jobs at the time I had those jobs, getting out of journalism school and wanting to write for a living and all. I know I never really wanted to be a writer in terms of a paper; it was a job, it wasn’t really my vocation. It wasn’t my calling, I guess.

But it seems like that led to you doing more interesting things as a result. One of the pieces that always stood out to me was when you had yourself buried alive in order to help you overcome the fear of being buried alive. That stood out to me as trying to do something different with the writing.

I don’t believe I was ever a very good journalist, maybe because I didn’t feel as invested as I should have been. But I did feel like when I was writing, there were things I wanted to say and things I wanted to do and it allowed me to do that. But the throughline for me, I guess, of having worked at both those places and having had The Stranger be a real anchor in terms of understanding what writing was supposed to be when I was a teenager growing up in the Seattle area is that there’s a cynicism inherent in both those papers and I’m a pretty cynical writer in both music and in print.

There’s also a bleak, morbid humor to both those papers and I feel like that’s a throughline in your work as well…

Yeah, for sure.

And both those papers have a history of filmmakers and musicians working at them, like Sean Nelson of Harvey Danger and didn’t a couple of the guys from Dead Science contribute at one point?

Yeah, Sam wrote for The Stranger pretty regularly. He still does some writing, not for The Stranger, but in New York and stuff. When I worked at The Stranger, Dan Savage was the editor-in-chief there and one of the charges that was often brought against The Stranger at that time was that it was a lot of gladhanding. A lot of the content and the people who were featured in it were just friends of the people working at the paper and there was a tremendous conflict of interest all the time. I’d say those charges were fair in some way but I also feel like Savage’s primary intention was to surround and fill the paper with people who were deeply invested and plugged into the city. So the notion of conflict of interest was if you’re not friends with the people you’re writing about, you should be. There was a lot of crossover.

It seems like in a way once you left the city of Seattle, that led to an epiphany of sorts for you too. You grew up around Seattle, right? The Everett area?

Yeah, I grew up in Everett.

I remember that was kind of the genesis of the funeral piece, since the first time you attended your own funeral, you were leaving Seattle for Portland and said you felt like you were burying a part of yourself. Have you found that moving to Portland has helped inspire you musically?

I don’t know. That’s a good question. I kind of knew what I wanted to do when I came here. I started doing things in Seattle when I still lived there but I feel like when I moved to Portland I had a much more adversarial relationship with Seattle than I do with Portland. And I felt like I was much more invested in what was going on in Seattle musically and kind of thought I had a stake in it, considerably more than I did when I moved to Portland. Mainly because when I was in Seattle, there was nothing going on that I cared about and I felt the need to be invested in it. I set up a lot of shows for people that I wanted to see play in Seattle but who couldn’t find shows in Seattle.

And when I moved to Portland, I guess the things that I cared about were kind of already acknowledged and celebrated here and so I became less invested in the music culture than I had been in Seattle. There was nothing to fight against, I guess. But in terms of being inspired, I mean, there was always a lot more going on in Portland that I cared about musically, and ideologically I feel like the way people make music and the reasons they make music in Portland are just more in line with what I am invested in.

Yeah, that makes sense. I spent a lot of time in Seattle and kind of went through the same thing, you just get tired of seeing the bands that you don’t really feel are the best music get the exposure and you want to do something about it…

Yeah. Did you grow up in Seattle? Or did you just move there?

I actually moved there my last year of high school, my parents moved us out there, so it was especially fun (laughs). I just recently moved down to Austin but I had been trying to decide between here and Portland. So it’s interesting to me to hear other people’s experiences trying to find that city that, even if it doesn’t inspire you, motivates you to create more.

Yeah, for me, Portland is less about being motivated, because I think it’s similar to Austin in that it’s a very unmotivated city. I’d say Portland is affordable and open enough and supportive enough that you can kind do whatever you want, that’s a thing that’s inspiring about it.

I’ve never been that interested in the notion of “scenes,” or “communities,” or creative communities or anything. I mostly always work by myself when I’m actually working on projects. I’ve never been a team player, which isn’t something I’m particularly proud of, but I have a hard time getting invested in communities. And so I don’t think I’m inspired on an immediate visceral level but I am inspired by the fact that people do what they want here…

Yeah, that makes sense.

And can afford to.

And with your music, as you were saying before, part of the throughline with Parenthetical Girls is your vocal voice and your lyrical voice, which guides the direction so much. It’s interesting to me to because it seems like you guys get a lot of comparisons to the Smiths, and it’s not even necessarily like you’re doing the same thing musically, but you have something in common in terms of philosophy and from the direction the band takes. Is that something you work towards? Has that been a major influence on the development? I mean, I know you’ve covered the Smiths, too…

Yeah, the Smiths are my favorite band. We don’t really try to sound like them, and if we did, we’d be failing pretty miserably. I feel more for Morrissey than I do for anyone. Early on we talked about this a lot but I’m kind of embarrassed to talk about it in recent years, but I think Parenthetical Girls in my mind sort of comes from a more punk rock lineage than indie rock lineage and I think there’s a certain urgency in what the Smiths did that has that punk rock ideology but it’s translated to a very specific kind of energy, a different kind of energy from what people would consider punk rock energy.

They also came from a punk rock background themselves…

What I’m really excited about in music are a lot of the same things Morrissey was excited about in music in the early ’80s.

One thing that always surprises me is when I bring people to your shows, they’re kind of amazed by how humorous the stage banter is. You have this attitude that is very clever and charming, but also very biting. People are always blown away by that but when I point out specific lyrics, it’s clear it’s always been there in your music. Do you feel that that’s been an especially big influence of Morrissey on you? Because it seems like people always forget how funny he is…

A big part of the way that I feel we present ourselves as a live band is about trying to communicate this to an audience. And as I continue to do this, I feel like I spent a lot of time being alienating. At this point I feel like I want to have a conversation with the people who listen to this music and I want to be able to…like in the case you’re describing, with somebody who hasn’t seen us and who doesn’t necessarily have the same kind of investment in the music as, say, Los Campesinos! audiences. Depending on who’s watching, it’s difficult for them maybe to get past certain aspects of the music that we make.

This might also sound sort of cynical but I feel like there’s a lot more to us as people than the sort of heart-on-sleeve…we have these deeply emotional, dark songs. And I feel like, like the Smiths, people get a weird impression about what our band is about based on our associations and based on our presentation. It’s important, I think, for me to make the music as available to people as I can. I think that kind of communication is important and it’s pointless to continue to work in a vacuum if no one engages with it.

I find that the thing that I always attribute to Morrissey was the gallows’ humor of all of it and those people who are really, really deeply affected by the Smiths, I would hope that for most of them, that’s a part of it, too. There’s an absurdity to everything that guy did when he was young and there’s an absurdity to what he does now but I think it was really crucial to what was important about those guys. That’s the thing, I think our show is campy in the same way that the Smiths were campy, and emotional in the same way. I would hesitate to say that without “I guess,” because that would be blasphemy…I guess. But we strive to do things in a certain way that’s cut from a certain cloth and that would be the cloth.

You spoke about the presentation and I think it’s necessary to bring up the videos you’ve done now, especially “The Privilege.” It’s a very simple video but there’s just something captivating and different about it. “The Pornographer” is a similar thing, where you have this stark, minimalist presentation. But then when you perform that stuff live, it has a completely different feeling. When you were making the videos, what were you going for in particular?

Well, those two in particular, I directed those. And I don’t know, I guess that’s part of the problem with our presentation, because I have a very particular aesthetic and that aesthetic lends, or tends to make us seem so serious. People call the work that we make “pretentious,” a lot, and I think most things that I care about probably had to face that title as well. I think anything that’s worth engaging in is a little pretentious. But I also think that both of those videos– in our minds, or at least in mine– are really funny. I think that all of the videos that we’ve made more or less, with one or two exceptions, they’re not really meant to be taken very seriously, or maybe we’re holding our cards too close or something.

There were a lot of people when we made that “Common Touch” video that was like a dance piece…we took ourselves seriously when we were doing it, it wasn’t all for a laugh. But the notion of us doing it in the first place, I think, at least, is kind of hilarious. And the same thing is true with “The Pornographer” video.

I would hesitate to say it was a joke but I feel like there are tongue in cheek aspects to all of those things that are maybe not as similar to what we were talking about as the humor that was involved in the Smiths’ records. They’re not the most forwarded aspect of the piece that they’re intended to be…they’re supposed to be multi-dimensional, maybe that’s the easiest way to put it.

Well, it definitely seems like you can kind of put it through your own experiences…I guess I wouldn’t have seen it as humor in “The Pornographers,” but more a cynicism, where it’s got this soft focus feel to it and it’s a very static image and seems to reference modern pornography and the emphasis on amateur, individual experiences. And then at the same time, it’s very beautifully shot, and lit, and there’s that element too. So it seems to me that there’s a juxtaposition between the seriousness of the presentation and the humor of the situation that it’s framed in.

Right, it’s totally absurd for me to choose to make a music video that is inherently pornographic. There’s just a base absurdity to that and also the notion with that video in particular, when I was working on it, it was meant as commentary on the phenomenon of the Not Safe for Work video. And specifically two ideas: 1) the idea that in all of these videos the NSFW aspect is typically a topless woman who has nothing to do with the band, walking around in the context of the video, which I found a little distasteful and 2) the idea of the indie rock musician moving closer and closer to being a purveyor of pornography and a pornographer…

Especially with the rise of Tumblr…

It seemed like a good jab. But I don’t know that anyone…I hope that you don’t need to feel that kind of cynicism to, I don’t know, I was going to say appreciate it, but that sounds really lame. It’s just a picture of me (laughs).

It’s interesting that you bring that up, because I’ve shown it to people and they almost always ask, “Why is this marked NSFW? There’s no nudity in it…” And my thought was that that was exactly the intent.

Right.

It’s fascinating to hear that other aspect, which I hadn’t really thought of, but now makes perfect sense now that you’ve mentioned it. Especially since a lot of artists are now using Tumblr to get themselves out there, and it’s like half music, half porn.

Yeah. The other thing is, a lot of people who posted that video were like “I don’t know why this is NSFW,” but I would not want somebody to walk behind me while I was watching that video. Maybe there aren’t tits in the video, but I think it would be equally as mortifying to be caught watching that video at work. But I don’t know, maybe it depends on where you work.

Right, right.

Yeah, I mean, the title of the song…it’s supposed to be a metaphor, but it’s also…I like the literal aspect of just making a video that is contemporary pornography.

It’s interesting too because the way you’re releasing music now is both modern and vintage, in a way. Because you’ve been putting Privilege out as limited vinyl EPs. With the new one, part of the collector-fetish aspect of it is even that it’s “hand lettered in the blood of Amber Smith,” but at the same time you’ve made these gorgeous digital videos to go alongside that release, so in a way it’s both completely of this era and completely outside of it. Was that meant as kind of a way of commenting on how music is transforming now? And how things that were old in music are new again? Like the way vinyl is making a gigantic resurgence and also people being less interested in albums and more interested in EPs or singles and bite sized portions that can be put together with other media…

It’s not so much a comment as it is a practical response, because I feel like we take a long time to make things. Even this project has taken so much longer than I hoped it would and the idea when we finished our previous full length was the time we spent making a full length before anything else came out just seemed horrible, I couldn’t imagine it. So I kind of liked the idea of having this experiment to see what it would be like to release an album as a series of EP, making these fetish items out of these records.

My additional intention was that there wasn’t going to be any digital release at all of the music, it was just going to be the EPs and the videos. And the videos were going to act like the preview MP3 that comes along with every album now. Practical purposes made that kind of impossible from a financial standpoint. But the idea of making…I mean, there are cynical aspects to this too, but the idea of just stretching out the material and giving it more breadth rather than just dropping an album full of songs that no one would ever listen to was just appealing to me, because I feel like even my relationship with music has changed, as much as anyone’s. And it feels unfair when I am a person who primarily when I listen to new music, I don’t listen to it the way that I used to.

I don’t listen to albums nearly as much and there are rare new albums that I do listen to but most of those come by way of me seeing a video, or hearing a couple MP3′s and the idea of just having to approach an album in its entirety in one sitting is just so daunting, even to me. Even though it’s incredibly narcissistic and presumptuous to assume that anybody is going to want to buy five EP’s, rather than just buy one record, I think it’s also pretty presumptuous to assume that the album is the only way that a person should create a product. The people who are, just from a business standpoint, best at communicating with an audience are people who are able to work in shorter form.

There’s also the example of Les Savy Fav, putting together Inches over a decade…

Yeah, yeah, that was an inspiration for the idea of breaking it up like that. And there were other inspirations, like Weirdo Rippers, the No Age record where it was a compilation of these series of things. It was more of a gambit, I think, for us, because we had to pull out full length records before and rather than this being a compilation record, the concept of this was as an album. It’s different at least in the way that we’ve approached it as something other than just after the fact compiling a bunch of 7″s or something. I’m not entirely sure that the experiment succeeded. I mean, I think it has so far succeeded from a creative perspective, ’cause I think we’ve done things that we wouldn’t have done if we hadn’t done it in this fashion, and so that has justified it to me. But I don’t know if the material has reached as many people as it could have otherwise, or I feel like it merits.

Do you have plans to release it all together?

That would be the ideal, though, at present we’re still working out the details of how that will happen. I don’t want to just re-release all this stuff again. I feel that we’ve kind of reached the audience we can reach by having done this alone, but we’ve yet to find a good home for it. So we’ll see.

It seems like the reception to the touring you’ve been doing alongside it has been really great, though. I mean, everywhere I’ve read has gone out of the way to speak about you guys playing alongside Los Campesinos! and how great the set was and I’m noticing a lot of people who you previously weren’t on the radar of, you now are. People are getting into it in the live setting…

Yeah, which is really, really strange to me. I mean, it’s great, I think we have started gaining some momentum after a long time of being stagnant for a number of reasons, with part of that being lineup changes and an inability to tour as a result. There have been a lot of roadblocks along the way but finally we’re kind of a functional thing again and we basically just toured for two months straight in the U.S. We took two laps of the U.S. with pretty notable bands, though I think we’ve run out of bands that it makes sense for us to tour with now. I don’t know what our next tour will be (laughs).

Well, there is that rumored Smiths reunion…

Not gonna happen, man. How fucking embarrassing would that be, to open for the Smiths?

I don’t know how anyone would be able to manage that. For one, there’d be the whole Morrissey/Marr black cloud to contend with…and then just the pressure of being the band to open for the reunited Smiths, how fucked would that be…

Well, it’s just like, conceptually, it’s like…I don’t know if you’ve seen Morrissey play in the last ten years or anything, but every time I’ve seen him play the band has been some kind of joke, some super sub-rip off Smiths band or something, or like some Morrissey solo ripoff band. It’s like, what’s the point? I felt the same way when I heard the Chromatics were opening for Pulp, which at first seems like a great combination. The notion of having the burden of opening for Pulp seems so mortifying, like a band you really care about and which has had a very palpable effect on what you do, it’d be so terrifying.

But at least in their case, it’s not like there’s a legendary break-up that’s part of the equation…

No, that’s true.

But it’s like these rumors pop up constantly. And what you brought up about Morrissey is so true, didn’t he tour with Louis XIV or something just recently?

I think he did, yeah, I think he did. [Actually, it was Girl in a Coma -ed.]

I wondered if it’s an ego trip thing, like he purposefully picks band he knows will just be mocked…to make himself look better. It makes me think of Mark E. Smith and the Fall and all these people he brings on tour with him, like he’s just torturing them…

Yeah, I feel like Morrissey, with those openings bands, he wants to be the guy to discover the band, but…and Louis XIV isn’t a good example here, but I feel like most of the bands he tours with are bands you’ve never heard of before and will never hear of again. And I don’t know what his thinking is at all. But I’ve never seen an opening band at a Morrissey show that I thought was worth watching. But that sounds really horrible (laughs).

Not when it’s true. You can’t really argue with that opinion there. How close are you to Privilege being wrapped up? Is it going to end with four parts?

It’s supposed to be five. This is getting agonizing too. We recorded the fifth installment. My primary collaborator is this guy named Jherek Bischoff and Jherek is a very, very busy man. He has a solo album coming out real soon and has been occupied. So we’re still waiting to mix the fifth EP and actually finish it. All the tracking is done and we just need to finish it. I don’t know when it will be done…it will be done this year…sometime (laughs).

Well, it’s been a really exciting project, I’ve loved listening to it and seeing all the other things going into it…

I’m glad, that’s so nice to hear. I’m going to be glad when it’s over with. It’s sad in some ways that we just finished that Perfume Genius tour, I just sold out of all the records. So I don’t have any more records to sell, which makes me more nervous about not having part five done, it’s sort of a bittersweet feeling to be sold out since it’s been such a long process. And my house has been cluttered with these records for so long, it’s kind of sad to see them go.

The most recent volume has been out for, what, five or six months? Is that right?

God, I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to count.

But that’s good! To sell out that quickly, that’s a good turnaround there!

Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing, we’ve been sitting on them forever, but unless you’ve been touring, unless you’re one of the 250 people who will buy it from me on my website without fail– “knock on wood”– people just don’t have access to it. None of these records sell without me handing it to somebody, or putting it in the mail, which, I don’t know, has its charms but it also limits accessibility to people: if they don’t see me or pay me directly they might not even know it exists.

That’s another weird thing, having these records be in this odd purgatory of being below the radar and sneaking through the cracks and still having a video come out on Pitchfork or something like that. A lot of people have talked to me about not having any idea that we are still making music. Which is weird…or it’s not weird, it’s a shame. During the Los Campesinos! and Perfume Genius tours, I had people come up to me after and be surprised that we were still functioning. The attention span for these things is fairly quick these days.

Yeah, if you’re not on Pitchfork each week, you’re kind of lost, right?

Yeah! Which is, I don’t know, a struggle. It’s not the kind of struggle I’m really interested in, or in participating in. But it’s one that’s kind of a necessity. And I’m not saying I’m not interested in participating because I’m above it, I’m just saying it seems like a lot of energy to expend on something that is, at least for me, not part of the process of making the things I want to make. It’s cool for people who I think are really, really prolific and can just churn things out but I just can’t…it’s a game that I’m bound to lose, that I’m not interested in playing…God, I sound so smug when I say “it’s not a game that I’m interested in playing.” It’s not because I feel that it’s not meritorious or something, it’s just because I know I’m going to lose.

No, I know what you mean. I interviewed Wavves a while back, for instance, and that’s a guy who just generates controversy without having to do anything.

Yeah!

And he’s just fit for that stuff. He’s also prolific but with what you guys do, it’s obvious that there’s a lot more craft and detail that has to go into it. His whole aesthetic is built around that antagonism and aggressively lo-fi sound anyway.

Right, and it’s a really strange thing that as much as people talk about indie rock being so narrow, the field is so wide; we’re playing totally different games on the same field. Which is another reason why SXSW– to go back full circle– felt so discouraging, because it was like we were playing on a field that we had no interest in playing on. The same way we put out records, where, while I do have a lot of nostalgic notion of DIY culture and the ideology behind that, I feel that for me all of these things are out of necessity, not by choice, necessarily.

We’re an indie rock band because I’m impatient and I have to do things all by myself all the time and if somebody was going to throw us a ton of money and said we could do what we want forever, well, obviously anybody would take that. But I mean, I have no particular romance about putting out our own records anymore. I enjoy the process of doing it because I love making physical things, but the romance of working alone and fighting against some greater whatever, I kind of lost that. I don’t know that I ever had that, it was just that we’ve always done these things because it’s the way they happened and we’re not very good about waiting for people to come to us, we try to come to them. Which is why we perform the way that we do as well, we’re not very good at waiting for people to come to us.

Well, that’s part of the appeal, isn’t it? Or at least that’s a big part of why I personally think people like your group so much. At least what I’ve noticed is that people aren’t into your band in half measures. That’s more fascinating to me specifically as a writer and a musician, reaching people and having a true impact rather than just being there.

Yeah, I’m fortunate that people aren’t ambivalent about this band. If they’re aware of it at all, they have an opinion, which is certainly better than the alternative. I would hope no one ever thinks that what we do is just fine. I’m happier with people totally hating it than being ambivalent about it.

So now you just need to hire somebody to impersonate you and start feuds on Twitter with Kanye…

I would totally do it. I don’t need to hire anybody. If they would give me the mic, I would start feuds left and right, I would happily be feud guy. Feud guy’s a great guy. I would love to be an echo chamber every week, but they’re not pouncing on my quips as quickly as they do some other people. I think they have to like your band more.

Or dislike it more…

Yeah, maybe that’s the problem with Pitchfork, they’re just ambivalent about Parenthetical Girls. Which isn’t a problem with Pitchfork, actually, that’s a problem with Parenthetical Girls.

Yeah, you need to get one of those coveted 0.0 reviews…

I know! I need to get some darkness from those guys.

Tom: No ketchup! (I’m slamming my fist down on the desk) I’m glad you answered with unfounded confidence because, secretly, I was wondering if you could get duck with unfounded arrogance. I might have been asking you to simply procure our aquatic friend, but on the inside I was thinking to myself, “Good luck finding that in Philly, pffft.” It was my New York exceptionalist jerk-wad side shining through, as if finding mildly obscure ingredients was the sole provenance of New Yorkers. It’s not like Philadelphia is some out of the way Nova Scotian satellite island that gets a food delivery once a week. Hardly. I’ll even confess, I find your native city quite charming (sports teams aside). Anyway, duck. Listen to me Stacey, duck is the meat of the gods, you’re in for a treat. The evil scientists who concoct frozen foodstuffs could never dream of a filling so righteous to stuff their peppers with.

Stuffed Peppers with Ratatouille and Braised Duck Legs

4 duck legs
½ cup celery, diced
½ cup carrots, diced

1 medium yellow onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

2 Tbsp canola oil

1 cup red wine

½ cup red wine vinegar

1 cup chicken stock (low sodium)

½ Tbsp fish sauce

2 sprigs, thyme

1 red bell pepper, seeds removed, diced
1 green bell pepper, seeds removed, diced
1 yellow onion, diced
2 tomatoes, diced

1 eggplant, cored with seeds removed and diced
1 zucchini, cored with seeds removed and diced

¼ Tbsp thyme, chopped

1 red bell pepper, seeds removed and halved

1 green bell pepper, seeds removed and halved

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Heat a large oven proof pot or large skillet (that has a cover) over medium heat and add the canola oil. Once hot, brown the duck legs, skin side down first, this should take 5-8 minutes. Flip them over and brown the other side for three minutes or so. Remove when fully browned and set aside. Keep the skillet over medium heat and add the carrots, onions and celery and cook them until they are soft and translucent, about 3-5 minutes. While they are cooking, thinly slice two cloves of garlic and add them. Cook for another three minutes and then add the red wine, red wine vinegar, chicken stock and fish sauce. Season with salt and pepper, place two whole thyme sprigs in the broth and let that come to a boil. Once boiling, turn the heat to low, add the duck legs, cover the pot and stick in the oven for an hour and a half.

Stacey: Hmmm, I see before me many, many vegetables that need to be chopped up. If only there was some sort of kitchen device that could assist in “processing” this food! Oh wait, oh right. Dammit. Well, all I got at the moment is one big Hitchcockian “Psycho” knife and a few IKEA steak knives at my disposal. OK, this might take a while so… music. It seemed like the right time for the bittersweet MCA tribute I suspect we’ve all been holding lately. Also, if anyone might possibly shout out “stuffed peppers,” “ratatouille” or even “duck legs,” in their lyrics, my guess is that I’d hear it from Ad-Rock. I don’t have to tell you how much fucking fun it was to dice celery, shake my rump and get all “Beastie Boys known to let the beat/ Mnnnnnn…drop!” Best feeling.

For the ratatouille: (do this whilst the duck is a-cookin’)

Stacey: I love how that sounds all Bugs Bunny cartoon…

Tom: Can you tell I have a four year old whose taste in cartoons runs old school?

Put a sauté pan or skillet over medium heat and add two tablespoons of olive oil. Add the onions and peppers to the pan and cook for five minutes, until they have softened. Add the zucchini and tomatoes next and cook them for five minutes. Add the eggplant last and cook it all together for another three minutes. Season with salt, pepper and the chopped thyme, add about 2-3 tablespoons of chicken stock. Let that come to a boil and then take it off the heat.

Take the last two peppers and halve them. Brush them with olive oil all around. When the duck is 20 minutes from being done, put the halved peppers on a baking sheet, cut side down, and put in the oven for those remaining 20 minutes.

Stacey: OK, I won’t lie. It was right about now when my boyfriend said, “It’s 10pm, I’m going to Wawa to get a burrito,” and I might have asked him to pick up a hot dog for me. Seriously, chopping that much by hand with shitty utensils and zero technique took forever. And my mood had taken a dive as the Sixers were tanking Game 5 against the Celtics. A stuffed pepper might’ve made more shots than Jrue Holiday did in the second half.

Tom: At this point in our little experiment I’m thinking we might have put the cart before the horse. A big, decked out, 18 wheel cart in front of the horse. Maybe we should try out some simple things like knife technique before all this gourmand lunacy. Also, the fact that I reside squarely in the middle of the Philadelphia/Boston sports continuum prevents me from commenting on said teams. If you have nothing nice to say…

To assemble:

Take everything out of the oven but keep it on. Put the duck legs aside on paper towels or a plate. Keep the roasted peppers on the baking sheet but flip them over. Once the legs are cool enough to handle, separate the skin from the meat and set the skin aside (sweet, sweet duck skin, ahhh…). Shred the meat using your fingers or a fork if that’s too ugggh for you. Mix the meat with the ratatouille and spoon enough of the mixture to fill each of the four halved peppers. Quickly wipe the skillet the ratatouille was in clean and put it over medium heat with two tablespoons of olive oil. While that’s heating up, put the stuffed peppers in the oven for 10 minutes. While the peppers are cooking, take the sweet, sweet duck skin that you set aside, dice it and then add it to the hot skillet. Cook until brown and crispy. When you take the peppers out of the oven, top with the crispy duck skin and serve immediately.

Stacey: Wow. Well Tom, I know how much of a duck guy you are, and now I feel like I have this illuminating insight into your Tom Volk-ness having shared this culinary conversion with you. I get it; I so get it. The duck meat has a perfect pungency in this dish that is otherwise so earthy and fibrous. Chicken would’ve been too bland – and as a result of this baptismal experience, I can barely bring myself to even mention ground chuck. Honestly: ground chuck? It embarrasses me!

Lastly, the duck skin. Yes, the very idea is yuck to me, and I know as a meat-eater that that is an untenable position, and yet the reticence is real. In the rare instance that I’m cooking and have to deal with icky bits like skin and fat and other unidentifiable anatomical things, I find myself saying out loud something like, “It’s fine it’s fine it’s fine,” and then huff out a final “Ew!” when it’s all said and done. I thought the duck skin was just like a tangential “circle of life” garnish here. Is it weird to say I feel like it makes the whole dish? The crunch! The saltiness! It totally saves this from tasting like a mouthful of fleshy vegetables. Oh, the terrors and the rewards of being a guilt-stricken carnivore…

Things to think about/remember: Price out Cuisinarts or consider employing a line cook. Knife skills may deteriorate in proportion to steep declines in foul shooting percentage. Duck is the new hot dog. And Check Your Head is underrated.

Thanks, friend! You’ll be relieved to hear the ketchup bottle remained securely holstered in the refrigerator door…

Tom: Oh thank god. I think if we’ve learned anything tonight it’s that duck skin is your friend and that I will now have to fight the urge to say that things have a certain Volk-ness as much as I like the sound of that.

If the name Moss Icon isn’t very familiar even to the most name-dropping rock nerds, distinctive elements of the hardcore band’s sound probably are. Moss Icon wasn’t a directly seminal group to later rough-edged rock acts the way, say, Giant Sand was to desert-parched rock — in fact, Moss icon didn’t even outlive the release of its first album in 1994 — but punk in the decade that followed clearly owed some of its approach to Moss Icon’s unique brand of fury, philosophy and grit.

Much of this obscurity is the logical conclusion of a tremulous and short-lived stint as a band with a scattered set of demo releases over a few short years. Temporary Residence’s Complete Discography is a comprehensive, exhausting re-release of their entire proper discography in two discs, beginning with their first demo tape (“Mirror”) and including with their only true LP, Lyburnum Wits End Liberation Fly. Moss Icon formed in 1986 while its four founding members were still in high school, and that album demonstrated a shockingly singular identity behind a level of youthful band dysfunction that led to Moss Icon’s breakup by the early ’90s. Covering a string of varied and powerful tracks, most of them released as hard to find demos or singles able to impress on their own, Complete Discography makes it pretty clear all the reasons this band is canonized in punk’s lore despite being little more than a namecheck to many of its most ardent fans. “Divinity Cove” and “Happy (Unbounded Glory)” set a frantic beat than lurch maddeningly into new tempos and rushes of volume or bleak almost-silence, vocalist Jonathan Vance shouts out some songs but mumbles others in hypnotic, trippy incantations over extended lines of repeating guitar arpeggios, and all of these songs barely contain a frantic energy that manifests itself in assaults of noisy clatter or tense droning that sounds remarkably like Slint’s Spiderland, stretched to similar lengths. This reissue also sounds remarkably good — the bass web sludgy and round, the plucking of strings audible behind amped up grind and drums sharp and punchy.

And then there’s the lyrical content of Moss Icon’s songs. Vance’s performances might betray a youthful origin, but his words are gouging and audacious, abstract and emotive, taking on war politics, what sounds like jungle trekking vision quests and the cringe-inducing story of a runaway slave with no shortage of grisly detail (“As Afterwards the Words Still Ring”). Moss Icon approached hardcore with a unique willingness to try things from unexpected angles and record exactly what their tangled inspiration offered up, like the splintered stanzas and clauses that make up “Guatemala,” its riveting exploration of the same couple bars ground out over and over and over again. The title track from Lyburnum Wits End Liberation Fly covers nearly 12 minutes and numerous sub-melodies. Throughout, Vance emits a strained, unsure mix of sky-gazing conversation (with a pretty ambiguous subject), story and lecture, Monica DiGialleonardo’s bass rippling and Mark Laurence’s kit ebbing as the song plows on into minute after minute of possessed fervor. The song is clearly one of their most distinctive offerings, and is reason enough alone to consider this album or any of these recordings.

Critics like to point to Moss Icon’s layers of emotion and penchant for waxing lyrically when they cite the band an early prototype of what would become hardcore and punk’s emo offshoots, but they were more than just an ensemble of disgruntled shredders with a rather masterful sense of poetry and composition. Complete Discography repeatedly offers up tracks that defy categorization and absolutely demand attention while trying some pretty crazy stuff. Moss Icon was a short-lived band but their work burns awfully hot, especially bound together in a package that’s well over an hour and positions all these singular pieces into a tremendously strong whole. If Moss Icon was relegated to obscurity and their influence could only be measured in the most ethereal of ways, Complete Discography is fully capable of changing that archivist’s standing by presenting its short, unstable existence as a powerful and complete body of work.

Oslo, August 31st follows Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), a recovering drug addict, through a 24-hour period, beginning on August 30th and creeping into the early morning of the 31st, as per the film’s title, at which point Anders injects a potentially lethal dose of heroin. That the dose is lethal is hinted at by director Joachim Trier’s choice of source material, a novel entitled Le feu follet by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, in which its protagonist, an alcoholic, does indeed commit suicide. But this detail is largely inconsequential, because Trier’s film is not primarily about life and death but about the individual and society: Anders’ final act rewires the entire film and forces us to look at his actions in a new light, seeing his rejection of recovery and sobriety as a rejection of conventional life within society. Despite our near-universal consensus of disdain for heroin, Trier skillfully brings Anders’ interior state to life to such a degree that we regard his final act as being somewhat courageous, however improbable and ghastly this might seem. This is a painfully bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also the truth about Anders that Trier discovers as he digs with grubby fingers through the dirt of Anders’ life. If we cannot accept this final act, it may be because we will happily never end up like him, but Anders’ actions nonetheless quietly call into question our established sense of normality.

Anders is a deeply unhappy man, and watching him throughout the film feels progressively like an act of self-harm on our own part, awaiting impending doom. Self-preservation is the principal rule of the human race, and it is particularly uncanny to watch someone actively work against this biological dictate. In fact, though cinema has broached many controversial topics, it has rarely dared to present with sympathy and understanding a suicidal protagonist, one who moves about like a limp body always waiting for the end. Recently, Lars von Trier captured this so stunningly in Melancholia, whose affectless protagonist Justine resembles Anders here. What unites both films beyond their surface plots, though, is an interest in their characters’ underlying condition, more spiritual or metaphysical than psychological: on some level, Melancholia’s depression and Oslo, August 31st’s addiction are the same form of blight. It’s an aspect of human experience few want to face, and consequently, it’s standard in films to use suicide as a shock device, as if to emphasize how unthinkable the act is for the audience. Mia Hansen-Løve’s recent The Father of My Children used suicide as a non-gratuitous and effective plot device, one that focused our empathy on the surviving family as they attempted to make sense of their lives in the aftermath of losing their father. But with Oslo, August 31st, Trier has crafted a film with a self-destructive protagonist whose own plight engages us in unexpected and surprising ways.

Trier’s protagonist possesses a calm, inscrutable surface that barely registers the churn of emotions underneath. This forces us to observe him more deeply and attentively. There is an impermeable boundary between him and us, rather like the gulf between those who suffer from addiction or depression and those who, having had no similar experiences, try in vain to understand them. Anders Danielsen Lie is an ideal actor to embody this character: he’s entrancingly handsome in a moody sort of way, yet he exhibits an emotional reticence, as though drawing himself inward, transforming his face into a mask. This aloofness defines Anders’ identity. In a job interview, he becomes flustered when asked about a gap in his resume, and he proceeds to admit that he’s a recovering junkie. But his forthrightness here also seems like a barely perceptible taunt, the type of risk a man sincerely devoted to recovery would not likely take. This ambivalence is complex and tangled. After the interview, Anders sits in a cafe, and in a virtuoso sequence, Trier shows how his attention shifts from one banal overheard conversation to another. We cannot decide what to think here: are these conversations really so vapid as to deserve Anders’ apparent scorn, or do they actually indicate that everyone around him is healthy and happy, that this is how “normal” people talk? Either way, it’s clear that Anders sees himself as being on the other side of a wall separating him from this “normality.” More troublingly, it’s not even clear that he wants this to change.

After the blown job interview and a failed attempt to see his sister, Anders goes to a party where he begins drinking. The moment he picks up the glass should make a knot form in the pit of any viewer’s stomach. The incident is tiny, but it’s the trigger that could lead to the end of a recovering addict’s life. Anders no doubt understands this—he demonstrates an advanced intelligence throughout the film—and maybe even desires to rebel against the determinism of his addiction, the feeling that he does not control his own life. From that point in the film, Anders descends into self-destruction with a directness that is absolutely horrifying. In an ensuing club scene, Trier’s camera conjures up a beautifully nightmarish vision, at once attractive and repulsive, the culture of hedonism splayed and left for dead in a dingy alleyway. After dawn, Anders takes the heroin he purchased earlier to a house owned by his parents. He plays a piece of classical music on his family’s out of tune piano—a symbolic gesture that would seem gracelessly overt if it wasn’t such an endearing cry for help on the part of Anders—and then proceeds to inject the heroin. It doesn’t seem far-fetched that an intelligent, resourceful man like Anders could stay sober. But in this case, it doesn’t particularly seem like he wants to join the rest of society, and his final, suicidal act implicates the conventional life he rejects in a haunting, unforgettable way.

Barış Manço’s name may not be instantly recognizable across most of the world, but he’s a legitimate musical superstar in Turkey. While measuring popularity through Facebook “likes” may not be an exact science, the fact that Manço’s page sports over 289,000 is ample proof that the man has a significant following. He attracted that large fan base by being part of a small group of forward-thinking Turkish musicians (including Cem Karaca, Erkin Koray and Edip Akbayram) credited with creating the genre of Anatolian rock in the late 1960s – a fusion of then-current Western rock music sounds and traditional Turkish folk. Spanish label Guerssen has reissued his first three albums on CD and LP, and they offer an interesting glimpse into his musical output from 1968-1985.

Released in 1971, Dünden Bugüne was Manço’s first full-length album, although it’s just a compilation of his singles from 1968-1971, with one previously unreleased song, “Lory,” thrown in for good measure. This was an era when music was changing rapidly, and Manço was trying hard to keep up with changes, going through no fewer than four backing bands during these years. The revolving door musicianship lead to a state of flux that is palpable in these songs, which are at times jarring in their juxtaposition of clashing styles and varying level of production value. “Dağlar Dağlar” opens the album on a folky note, with Manço’s voice accompanied by an acoustic guitar and a bowed Turkish instrument called the kemençe. It‘s a pretty if unassuming song, which was also his biggest hit, selling over two million copies. But don‘t write Barış Manço off as some hippie-dippy acoustic folkie. The man could rock out when he wanted, doing so quite well on “Derule,” a muscular garage rock number, complete with a manic fuzz-tone guitar that could have just as easily been on a Yardbirds song. Elsewhere “Seher Vakti” and “Ağlama Değmez Hayat” are poppy folk-rock numbers that sound like a Turkish take on the mid-‘60s West Coast sound of the Byrds and Monkees. The only song that falls completely flat is the previously mentioned “Lory” which is sung in English and is just a bad song by all measures.

Coming four years after Dünden Bugüne, 2023 was the first Barış Manço album that wasn’t a compilation of previously released singles. It’s also flat-out bonkers – a concept album about the future, it found Manço dipping far heavier into traditional Turkish instruments and melodies, while updating the rock side of his sound to incorporate progressive rock elements. The album is loaded with long suite-styled songs, spoken narratives, and some of the era’s best whacked-out sci-fi keyboard sounds not found on a Parliament-Funkadelic album. It may be laughably dated and pretentious but it’s also utterly exotic and charming in its heady commitment to combining old world and new world sounds. Besides, you haven’t really lived until you’ve heard all 12 minutes of “Baykoca Destanı.”

Gelir Zamani was yet another singles compilation, which means that some of the long-winded proggy tendencies of 2023 have been shed, and in its place is a new found funkiness that plays nicely with the Turkish instrumentation. In fact, the tight grooves and foreign flavor make this a great album for crate-digging DJs looking for exotic beats from off the beaten path. Specifically, “Hal Hal,” “Ben Bilirim” and the ridiculously funky opening of “Gönül Dağı” are all practically begging to be turned into rap beats. (Madlib, if you’re reading this, the ball’s in your court.) Two of the album’s original songs have been left off this reissue for contractual reasons. but they’re replaced with six other tracks, a few of which come from the ‘80s.

These albums might sound goofy or dated to many – you certainly wouldn’t set out to make music that sounded like this in 2012 – but for adventurous listeners looking for something different, it’s an “em-Barış-ment” of riches.

Upon its release in 2009, Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control barely scraped together a half-million dollars at the box office and met with reviews typically ranging from the flummoxed, half-hearted thumbs up to the outright pan. Other than a brief rave by a retired Jonathan Rosenbaum, I don’t recall coming across any stirring endorsement at all. I, however, was entranced. Aided by Wong Kar-wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Jarmusch’s style is made more precise and deadpan than ever before even as it is warped into a vibrant abstract. The result is unquestionably alienating, but also the most sumptuously gorgeous of Jarmusch’s works.

On some level, all of the director’s movies are travelogues. The title of his first film, Permanent Vacation, was a prophetic encapsulation of his pet themes and narrative structures. Usually, Jarmusch profiles some kind of outsider, either a foreigner or merely an outlying native, to probe around an area of the United States and deconstruct its image into something weird and tactile. The Limits of Control reverses this setup, taking the American and thrusting him abroad, in this case Spain. But then, the “American” is Ivorian actor Isaach de Bankolé, who plays a hitman archetype so stripped down he is only credited as Lone Man.

Wasting no time in making the movie as weird as possible, the director begins with Lone Man receiving not instructions for his assignment but cryptic nuggets of quasi-philosophy delivered in French, Créole and Spanish by the person giving him his task (Alex Descas). True to Jarmusch’s playful approach to language, he both subtitles Descas’ speech and has it verbally translated by a companion. Upon arrival in Spain, Lone Man will get nearer and nearer to his destination through a series of meetings with operatives who also speak cryptically, their conversation invariably begun with the code phrase “You don’t speak Spanish, right?” This is said, of course, in Spanish.

These encounters provide a breadcrumb trail that does not generate tension in the protagonist’s hunt for whatever it is he’s seeking. Instead, each minimalistic presence, itself reduced to some existentialist signifier like Guitar (John Hurt) or Blonde (Tilda Swinton), wallows in listless chats about art, music, film, science, even hallucinations. Half the time, these odd figures nearly forget to even pass along the next bit of information, traded via color-coded matchboxes containing messages Lone Man glances at before covertly eating them. The point, clearly, is not in the destination but the journey, which is true of all Jarmusch films but is taken to a defiant extreme here.

Nevertheless, the gentle, smooth nature of the film is so elegant that, even at its weirdest, The Limits of Control is too gorgeous not to command one’s attention. Doyle’s color-rich cinematography gets longer, more sumptuous takes than he typically enjoys with Wong, replacing the sensory overload of the Hong Kong auteur’s frenetic bliss with muted reflection and analysis. Even with Jarmusch’s preferred hard cuts between shots, the film attains a dreamlike, lilting quality more fluid even than the fades of Ghost Dog. The camera glides elliptically, and even when it stays still, it captures curved mise-en-scène. Nowhere is this more pronounced than when the film is in Madrid, frequently returning to the Torres Blancas, a beautiful work of architecture with nearly no right angles.

This circular motion defines the film’s philosophical thrust, that everything is connected. One messenger pontificates on violins and musical instruments to Lone Man, who later looks at a modernist painting of a violin in a gallery. Likewise, he looks at a painting of a nude woman before going back to his room to find a nude woman (Paz de la Huerta) waiting for him posed like Brigitte Bardot at the start of Godard’s Contempt. Jarmusch himself went one further, suggesting the shape of a violin lined recalled a woman’s bust, and that the molecules that make up the violin link up to the discussion of molecules on the train. The film even boasts metatextual connections, the matchboxes used to convey messages all bearing the image of “Le Boxeur,” the character de Bankolé would subsequently play in White Material, made by Claire Denis, who got her start as Jarmusch’s assistant director. My own connection to the film involves this circular, repetitive movement: it was this film’s open reference to The Lady from Shanghai that made me want to see Orson Welles’ own trippy noir, and when I finally watched that film recently, I was reminded to come revisit this one.

But there is a point to all this playful reflexivity. Back in 2009, I was struck by the odd parallels between this abstract film and Quentin Tarantino’s steadfastly formal Inglourious Basterds. Both films are structured around an open love of cinema, referencing other movies across a broad time period, from golden age Hollywood classics to European arthouse staples. The two are also linked by their use of cinema and art as a weapon: Tarantino uses cinephilia to kill Hitler, taking the vicarious sense of victory and wish-fulfillment of all World War II movies to their logical endpoint. Jarmusch, on the other hand, uses his stringing-along of references to art and philosophy to reach the conclusion of his cultural critique of America begun with his scathing anti-Western Dead Man. Here, the inner critique of American violence and interpersonal isolation expands to a global level, demanding that the United States act like a part of the world again. Small wonder, then, that when the director’s own trail of reflexivity leads him to a foul-mouthed American official (Bill Murray) hiding in a remote, guarded, soundproof bunker, it would seem that he has traded the thrill of burning Nazis for a chance to get his hands on Dick Cheney.

That old chestnut about how “the only constant in life is change” applies particularly well to electronic music. Audiences demand creative evolution or they get bored. Change is necessary in order to stay one step ahead of shifting trends. This places purveyors of electronica in a precarious spot, one that demands that their sound continually progress and mature, while also maintaining the integrity of their creative voice.

Over the course of three studio albums as Simian Mobile Disco (SMD), Londoners James Ford and Jas Shaw may have changed more than most. After spinning off from four-piece band Simian, the kinetically-named act sprung onto the scene with 2007’s Attack Decay Sustain Release, scorching the dance floor with such bangers as “Hustler” and “It’s the Beat.” The duo saw a minor sophomore slump in 2009 with Temporary Pleasure as they changed course to collaboration-heavy electropop — Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, Gossip’s Beth Ditto and Yeasayer’s Chris Keating all contributed. Whereas Attack (with tracks “Tits and Acid” and the shimmy-shimmy-cocoa-popping “Hotdog”) was like an all-night kegger and Pleasure (“Audacity of Huge”) was more along the lines of a graduate pounding laps around the old high-school parking lot in a tricked-out Mustang, the streamlined refinement of recently released Unpatterns acts as though the duo is cinching up ties and heading to the office.

SMD has grown up, favoring ambiance over adrenaline, and opting for brooding minimalism rather than bombast. Bereft of featured guests, and consisting mostly of instrumental tracks sprinkled with trancey vocal loops, Unpatterns is different from anything SMD has done before, yet still maintains that crucial SMD electro essence that sounds as though it’s generated by Tesla coil. But unfortunately, as an album, Unpatterns is as efficiently uniform as a row of cubicles.

Opening with a high-frequency pulse accompanied by a standard four-to-the-floor beat and nearly indecipherable vocal swell, “I Waited for You” eases the album into motion rather than providing a kickstart. “Cerulean” injects astral melodies over a subdued beat, and first single “Seraphim” adds forlorn vocal loops over wobbly bass. An SOS-ing Morse code effect skitters over “A Species Out of Control” and other borderline abrasive tones converge with a churning percussive groove that may be the first on the album to induce much movement from the listener. By its very title, Unpatterns seeks to stray from the often formulaic nature of house music, but its most effective track “Put Your Hands Together” succeeds precisely because it follows the steady build format inherent to that genre. With a surging and receding vocal loop, the pulsing beat glimmers with a sinister sheen that many fans likely expected to hear throughout. But this hypnotic track is an exception on an album that’s otherwise mellow and atmospheric. “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” showcases often amelodic keys without the benefit of an engaging beat, and while “Your Love Ain’t Fair” employs a catchy vocal hook and some bounce, there’s simply a void in vitality throughout the album that’s impossible to ignore.

Without their excessive flourishes, SMD end up sounding ordinary. Rather than a wiser more sophisticated form of maturation, this album is on par with earlier bedtimes or dutifully repaying student loans. And SMD does owe a debt to their past; they rely on name recognition to draw the benefit of the doubt from the listener. While Unpatterns feels like a misstep into monotony rather than a creative evolution, there’s at least a few transcendent moments to cling to as a reminder of what ragers SMD used to be before they got so damn grown-up.

The most popular bit of Drive’s sparse dialogue among reviewers last year was Albert Brooks’ gangster describing his equally seedy past life as a maker of B-pictures. “I used to produce movies. In the ‘80s. Kind of like action films. Sexy stuff. One critic called them European. I thought they were shit.” The line perfectly captured the contrast of the film’s tones, at once arty and cheap, unadorned and pretentious. This admission of lofty and low-rent aims could apply equally to a growing number of inexpensive gems that take their inspiration from late ‘70s-mid ‘80s genre pictures typically made by rising auteurs making a name for themselves without money.

Beyond the Black Rainbow, Panos Cosmatos’ debut feature, is the least thought-out of a trio of recent throwbacks that includes the Michael Mann-indebted Drive and Carpenterian Attack the Block. Yet it also displays the most ingenuity, not merely porting over the tone and style of old genre fare but the technology as well. Cosmatos doesn’t just make a film that references 2001, early Cronenberg, THX 1138 and Dark Star. He makes one that looks as if it could have been put together during that general time period of the ‘70s and ‘80s, using lo-fi effects and in-camera tricks to achieve what now gets done with more advanced measures, even in low-budget movies. Most importantly, Cosmatos films on actual film, giving Beyond the Black Rainbow a textured grain so woefully absent in an age where using digital is the first means of saving money.

Set in 1983, the film begins with a promotional video for the Arboria Institute, a place designed to help patients find ultimate happiness through nature, inward reflection and just the tiniest push from some powerful drugs. As a gentle electronic score rolls over shots of nature and one-line text pitches for emotional transcendence, the head of the institute, Dr. Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers), sonorously invites viewers as he sits in a darkened, red-lit studio that instantly casts him in a sinister, cultish light. Naturally, within the institute’s walls lies not a utopian beauty but the opposite, a psychotropic nightmare kept in check only by the deadening power of pills. This place isn’t calm, it’s numb.

Nyle crams the institute with grotesque sights, living experiments warped beyond recognition for his own amusement. The doctor’s favorite test case is a mysterious, mute girl named Elena (Eva Allan), whom he monitors and perhaps controls with a glowing white pyramid. The girl exhibits some sort of psychic powers, speaking her only lines through mental projection and possibly causing her caretaker’s (Rondel Reynoldson) nosebleeds. Or is the pyramid triggering these attacks? Whatever the case, Elena knows she must escape this hellhole, and when she gets the opportunity, she exits her cell and sleepily wanders through the institute’s madhouse collection of freaks.

Nothing in the film makes much sense, the political and Oedipal implications of the plot mere window dressing for the visuals conjured by the resultant head trip through Cosmatos’ funhouse. Oh, but what visuals. Norm Li’s cinematography plunges every frame into overwhelming color, the thick grain dirtying the clinical lights to give the dark reds, pale blues and rich golden-browns a touch of decay. In one shot, red and blue lights mesh as if in some throwback nod to the current 3D craze. Elsewhere, superimpositions and double exposures appear in flashes even hazier than the main image, ghosts of ghosts swirling around Elena as she moves from one room to the next. And like John Carpenter, Cosmatos and Li use an anamorphic aspect ratio and gliding dolly shots to get panoramic views of confined spaces. This increases the tension within the frame, leaving unsettling gulfs of empty, bordered space around the handful of characters that one naturally assumes will be filled by something. And in the film’s many close-ups, the frame stretches out beyond the dead-eyed actors to match their eerie remove.

There are too many memorable moments to mention, but the highlight of the movie must be a show-stopping flashback triggered by a nervous Nyle visiting his mentor, Dr. Arboria (Scott Hylands) after Elena escapes her cell. The withered old man has a Burroughs-like presence, an old, intelligent gentleman whose veins have collapsed from drug injections and who appears to be fading into an incorporeal presence rather than simply dying. Nyle’s visit thrusts the film back to 1966 as he recalls taking Dr. Arboria’s pill for the first time, producing a trip within the larger trip of the film that is utterly bananas. Faces literally melt, the titular black rainbow appears, washed-out monochrome makes everything invisible save for hair and penises and Nyle emerges from a giant ink blot and vomits his own Rorschach test. Kenneth Anger is invoked throughout this section, and speaking of, when did he get so popular? Between Cosmatos and Nicholas Winding Refn, the experimental filmmaker might be getting more exposure now than ever.

The end of the film kills the mood somewhat, turning like Danny Boyle’s Sunshine from an intriguing sci-fi trip into a wan slasher movie. Nevertheless, Beyond the Black Rainbow is such a sumptuous visual feast that it delivers on the expectation of its opening credits, played over a repeating shot of a pupil dilating, the eye expanding with the mind. Not to be ignored is Jeremy Schmidt’s brilliant score, which aurally replicates the pristine-yet-scuzzy feel of the institute, flecking digital and analog synth tones with a dirtiness that gives his fuzzy bass blasts a grimy edge. Someone on Twitter said that if there is to be a Tron 3, Cosmatos should direct it. I agree; that franchise is also locked in a parallel world of regressive futurism, and this director instantly proves himself able to spin a parallel future out of an outdated past. I’ll take this techno-fever vision over the repetitive neon chiaroscuro of Tron: Legacy any day.

Baltimore noise rock quartet Dope Body has been amassing a steady stream of confident releases since their debut EP in 2009. With a heavy dose of fuzz and a schizophrenic sense of rhythm and melody, their stellar 2011 debut LP Nupping served as a massive welcome party that saw a young band hit the ground at speed, branching up from the underground toward wider appeal and recognition. With the backing of Drag City, a label more rooted in folky Americana than grimy punk rock, Dope Body have toned down the dissonance, but have refused to leave their penchant for straddling the line between noise rock atonality and post-punk directness.

The dreamy wind chimes interrupted by feedback and a nauseatingly heavy bass line on opening track “Shook” is an immediate encapsulation of Natural History’s aesthetic and its core creative values. Dope Body situate themselves between sludge-devoted metalheads and hook-friendly, nuanced pop-punkers, and on the opening track, which sways back and forth on a ragged two-chord progression, lead singer Andrew Laumann screams prophetic, existential non-sequiturs like a grunge-influenced Jim Morrison. It’s a slow, mesmerizing nonstarter that shows Dope Body are prepared to take their time with song construction and atmosphere, dialing back the fire and fury of their debut’s distorted outbursts.

“Beat” is equally as guttural and fierce, guitar feedback barely resonating while a heavy bass line slides in and out of the arrangement. It has potential to be a crowded, frantic piece of speed metal, but the reins are pulled back, giving each schizoid element plenty of room to breathe. Unlike Nupping, with Natural History Dope Body has crafted a record with calculated spaces and nuances; it’s a significant step forward that doesn’t see them sacrificing their punishing sonic force, but rather enhancing its effect through contrast and variation.

“Twice the Life” boasts a jittery, 8-bit-esque guitar lead that sounds nearly computer processed, underscoring Laumann’s growling vocals with a tinge of ska influence. The shifting between blown-out power chords and pedal-board experimentalism will certainly fuel the fire of Rage Against the Machine comparisons, but where Morello and company used their manic blend of hip-hop and hard rock to punctuate their political messages, Dope Body are crafting deliberate, swirling rhythms to ground their heady mysticism; it’s 13th Floor Elevators psychedelia as viewed through the lens of Splint and Clockcleaner. Album highlight “Out of Mind” comes to life with a driving bass line and a frightening, indecipherable ticking sound somehow produced by a guitar. Laumann elongates his vowel sounds, shape-shifting each verse with a possessed fury.

As the album closes out, becoming more and more tense, dissonant and disintegrated with each minute, Dope Body conclude with a fury of straight-up sludge metal. “Weird Mirror” pulses to life, whirring and cutting-out like a broken hard drive before settling on a frantic three-chord hook; it’s the most punk rock Dope Body get and the result is a blazing four-minute anthem. “Laze Slave” employs stop-and-start guitar, the silences and palm-muted runs accentuating Laumann’s unpredictable snarl.

While there’s times when Natural History sounds like it might slip into hard rock complacency, there’s always an unexpected, experimental use of echo and delay – or Laumann’s frontman vocal posturing – to render rigid genre markers useless. Some might find that Dope Body have compromised their edge with their move to Drag City, pulling back their freak-out tendencies in exchange for a more accessible approach to sonic deconstruction. While Natural History may not have as much bite as Nupping, there’s a remarkable consistency and playfulness here that elevates Dope Body above their underground beginnings. It’s a significant step into sonic experimentalism that suits the band’s constantly shifting genre influences.

Paul’s Boutique must be the most successful fake business of all time. Since its release, Brooklyn’s Beastie Boys’ masterpiece has influenced the sound of hip-hop for two decades and counting, as well as their own internal sense of composition. Not to make it sound like they’ve been derivative: quite the opposite. The raw energy and eclectically tight smash-up of samples that the Dust Bros laced the boys with was only a stepping stone, albeit a brilliant one. While Paul’s did the rare thing of breaking the sophomore slump and establishing the group’s legitimacy, their catalog only evolved and refined since them. Their 1998 release Hello Nasty was met with solid sales and critical acclaim, but has been direly overlooked in favor of older records and their 21st century comeback, To the 5 Boroughs. Hello Nasty is almost the perfect storm of a Beastie Boys record, in that it’s a thorough meshing of every iteration – their grungy debut, the variety of samples and sequencing from Paul’s Boutique as well as their instrumental prowess and experimentation from the Check Your Head and Ill Communication era.

“The Grasshopper Unit (Keep Movin’)” features slick, bass-heavy production and opens with a reference to someone “Thurston Howlin’,” which proves the boys hadn’t lost any sense of their playfulness. Some critics praised the production of the record and said the lyrical content was unsurprising, but frankly, any album that features the phrase, “I’m the king of Boggle/ There is none higher/ I catch 11 points off the word quagmire” doesn’t have to prove itself to anyone, as “Putting Shame in Your Game” does with its ominous click track production, sounding like the RZA dodging laser blasts. “Unite” also features a spacey and warped out synth line, brought to life by Mix Master Mike’s animalistic scratching and one of the dearly departed MCA’s finest bars: “I got books with hooks and looks like rain/ Will someone on the Knicks please drive the lane?” The Beasties have always been well regarded for their video content and Hello Nasty proved to be a rich and fertile ground for them. “Intergalactic,” the big single, aside from being a synth-soaked and bass-rattling piece of time-displaced Beasties genius, also provided with one of the band’s most beloved cuts.

One of the things the boys always do well is meter out instrumentals, giving their albums a good stride and pace, and on Hello Nasty these are expertly timed in, almost giving the listener a break from all the crazy. “Song for Junior” could easily have been a mix-in on “B-Boy Bouillabaisse” with its slinky tropic groove and flute interludes – it miraculously sounds like a different band and yet so familiar at the same time. Strangely, this tends to signal a change of tone for a bit, as it’s followed by the mildly melancholic and noticeably down-tempo “I Don’t Know,” where a flighty acoustic guitar line meets with hushed vocals – it’s a baffling transition, but not necessarily a bad one. The energy soon picks up on “The Negotiation Limerick File,” a prime contender for Best Song Title Ever. Over a glitchy, digital horn and even a sly cowbell line, all the doubts that one could have over the group’s diversity are suplexed into submission and the inclusion of Lee “Scratch” Perry on “Dr. Lee, PhD” is like the one last zinger on the way out – impeccably timed and all the more resonant for it.

Hello Nasty is fantastic and as a Beastie Boys album it’s even better. It’s not as frighteningly original as some of their earlier and even later output, but it’s a confident and thoroughly complex record that proves their dedication to the craft. At 13 years in 1997, they could have been content to coast on name alone, but through their career they have only managed to strengthen their core as absolute musical geniuses. Hello Nasty is a rooted and powerfully diverse battle-cry from a group that could never, ever be accused of jacking someone’s style. With this album, it’s the Beasties who proved they are the ones getting jocked like Jeter and whose influence will live on like Celine Dion!