Wild Flag
Wild Flag
(Merge)
Where most so-called supergroups only sound good on paper, Wild Flag succeeds as an actual band. From the opening notes of this remarkable debut, there’s an electric chemistry between Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss, Helium’s Mary Timony and Rebecca Cole of The Minders. Their music crackles with angular guitar riffs, propulsive rhythms and inventively gauzy textures. Wild Flag draws liberally from ’60s garage rock and psychedelia to create short, sharp and catchy tunes shot through with a genuine emotional intensity. Imagine the B-52s performing with a mouthful of blood and you’re halfway there. Sleater-Kinney fans disappointed by Corin Tucker’s recent singer-songwriter effort should adore Wild Flag, but you don’t need to be a fan of any of the member’s previous efforts to find this music simply thrilling. —Jeff Jackson
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Odonis Odonis
Hollandaze
(Fat Cat)
To make hollandaise sauce, one must balance the amounts of butter, egg yolk and lemon juice. To make his DIY LP Hollandaze, Dean Tzenos, formerly one of Ten Kens and now the driving force behind Odonis Odonis, balances the amounts of Jesus & Mary Chain, The Cure and The Pixies to create one of the most satisfying lo-fi surf punk albums I’ve heard in a long time. And the results are truly savory: pleasantly grimy, yet dreamily daze-inducing. “Seedgazer” clocks in at just over six minutes, close to double the length of any other track, and alone occupies about a fifth of the album, but still leaves listeners yearning for more. The same could be said about the rest of Hollandaze. Fortunately, Odonis Odonis already has plans to release Soft Boiled Hard Boiled next spring, so the gastro-auditory pleasures are sure to continue. —Pete Redington
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Tim Eriksen
Star in the East
(timeriksenmusic)
Though Tim Eriksen’s typical approach has more of a Celtic-meets-Appalachian flavor, some of the arrangements on Star in the East, his CD of acoustically rendered traditional Christmas tunes, wind up somewhere closer to Indian music. Admittedly, some of these old songs like “The First Noel” and “Angels We Have Heard on High” only need a subtly inserted tabla (courtesy of Cordelia’s Dad bandmate Peter Irvine) to push them over the line between West and East, and Eriksen’ shape note-trained vocal vibratos only serve to further propel the melodies into realms of semi-tonal trance rarely breached in modern Western music. Nothing groundbreaking, but definitely worth adding to a chilled-out holiday party mix, it wins a twinkly-eyed smile for its jaw harp rendition of “Join the Chorus” (Fa la la la la…). —Tom Sturm
