Andre Jarema, a Belgian émigré chasing success in London, is an imposing figure in his way— not in appearance, exactly, though he does have a stage presence something like a prematurely awakened wintering bear. His aura of largeness is more the way he looms over the music, insinuating himself on top of it in a way that is not quite smothering, but damn close. It is obvious that he is a slave to his passion. Jarema seeems to dwarf the rest of his band in both spirit and artistic hunger. Indeed, his singing is not unlike a starving man devouring a thing, and not caring about the untidy consequences.

That is not to say the music is somehow lacking, or that the playing is inadequate– on the contrary, it’s often beautiful and surprising. But the music is so crisp that Jarema’s turned-up vocals with that hard-to-identify accent just under the surface that it’s a bit distracting. That being said, the majority of the songs recorded for the DVD Everyone At Home ride comfortably in a well-traveled groove between the subversive, creepy charm of The Smiths and the uneasy pop of early-period Radiohead (specifically the arresting “I Wanted to Be Alone”); there’s even a bit of Catherine Wheel’s Rob Dickinson in Jarema’s amorous, breathy delivery. This puts the band in good company, and overall, the songs are clean, nimble numbers over which Jarema lays out playful non sequiturs and stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Some of the songs possess a certain charm that is almost schizophrenic in nature. It’s hard not to don a wary smile at “Your Mum”, for example— a mischievous, strange pop ballad that floats around precariously like a parade balloon to which the trusses are snapping one at a time: How strange it feels / being sought out like the earth / is no reason to skive I say / you are the one who drew my smile / the earth spins / like the ring your finger has not…your mum is fat / your dad is crap / and you ain’t got no sister / uh huh-uh-huh-uh-huh-uh uh uh.

Divided into several sections, Everyone At Home is easily digestible in one sitting, but it warrants return trips. Jarema’s music is not an easy nut to crack. There is a band session recorded without an audience; a segment filmed during a house party; a freewheeling standalone piano number called “Your Time Has Come” which oozes the kind of ascetic self-assurance that made Jack White a superstar, and an interview. Except for the interview, the production is shot in heavily shadowed black-and-white, which gives all the performances a wintry charm.

It’s an interesting push/pull— the music and songwriting is lush and inviting, yet Jarema’s voice seems at times to lope from flower to flower like a languid bee. The two entities reconcile in the satisfying “Birth Sex Death,” a groove-sick, snarling rocker that evokes, if not “How Soon is Now?”, then “How Soon is Now?” as covered by Everclear. The sound is a little throwback, but the energy is irresistible.

One showcases, among other things, the smallness of the world. The musicians within hail from all over the globe: Australia, Belarus, Ukraine, the UK, Germany, the United States. Beyond that, the album boasts an inspiring ingenuity that reminds us, without having to say it, that music is as vital a force as nature; it will find release. Project Bluebird boasts over twelve writers.The twins comprising Aloe Up— a folk outfit with elements of breakbeat electronica— collaborate across an ocean, one in Denver, one in London. Tom Peel’s backing tracks come out of a reel-to-reel tape recorder strapped to his chest like a bomb. There would be easier ways to come up with a backing track, but none of them would cry “Listen!” quite so loudly.

There is a joyful recklessness to this compilation; these do-it-yourselfers came together on last.fm, and have released this compilation as a free download, available here, under diym netlabel. An interactive net radio station, a hodgepodge of made-it-in-the-bedroom musicians, a DIY label, a free download— does it get anymore grassroots? Industrial soundscapes (“Prelude” by DateMonthYear) sit cozily next to Black Flag-meets-The Cars basement rock (“Good at Night” by Bill Strange); the chaotically cool electronica of deadcat (“C11H16BrNO2”) arrives just a few songs away from the rustic psalm of Project Bluebird’s “Once in the Forest.”

There are too many individual moments to cover comprehensively, but the gross effect of all these styles together under one roof is almost subliminal. Brokenkites’ meditative, pulsing dream track “Silent Sun I” plays like a soundtrack for a nighttime walk in a city with which you’re unfamiliar. Brunk’s track “hank and I were just bored” has a loungy, existential vibe, playing over a looped sample of a man and a woman having a conversation about sex. It’s sort of Portishead, sort of…not. Moya’s “Die Hard” is a psychedelic piano-and-guitar piece that plays out like a desert hallucination, gradually rising in intensity until a snarling guitar coda releases the tension (this track would find itself right at home in a Quentin Tarantino movie). Tom Peel’s “I’m Pretty Sure It’s Something” is a beatific and contemplative song about the ebb and flow of life on Earth, using the moon as its primary metaphor. Awaycaboose’s “Lullaby for Navidson” is appropriately haunting, a couple of ominous notes woven over top of a barely-there growl. But of all the unconventional songs in the collection, it’s Pete Davis’ slightly less adventurous “Fool” that sets itself apart— a brief, banjo-driven squall of layered vocals and taut songwriting, “Fool” absolutely soars. Davis manages to sound like ten people in one body, all of them gifted.

The unifying characteristic of all these songs– some fun, some cerebral, some just strange– is that they exist due to a labor of love; there’s little doubt that “established” acts also love their work, but there is an endearing purity to this collection that elevates it. One is no curiosity; it’s the natural collapse of barriers. These people are unafraid to experiment, and to do it on their own– following their intuition, creating music from a place of feeling and emotion. There’s little chance such a recording would fail to be compelling.

The free download is available here.

Track List:

1. My Life – Matthew That
2. Prelude – DateMonthYear
3. Good at Night – Bill Strange
4. Carry Them – Aloe Up
5. Silent Sun I – Brokenkites
6. Les Absents – Joe Jack Wagner
7. Fool – Pete Davis
8. Demo II – Solarein
9. hank and I were just bored – Brunk
10. Cosmic Interference – Joanofarke
11. shadows on the carpet – EL Heath
12. Once in the Forest – Project Bluebird
13. Die Hard – Moya
14. The Other Side – The Peach Tree
15. Kissing Your Beetle Bloodied Lips – Speculativism
16. I’m Pretty Sure It’s Something – Tom Peel
17. Sh0tSignal – SilverlagE
18. Sympathy – Terry Springford
19. Lost Subway Wind – Wolfframe
20. C11H16BrNO2 – deadcat
21. automat#1 – Elektrolandmusik
22. Bruno the Songdog – Kissing Zebra Jones
23. Lullaby for Navidson – awaycaboose
24. Hope Has Taken Me – Jason Silver
25. 06:06 a.m. – Greate world in g – psyPi!!Z
26. jukebox gemini girl – Fili O (so cool)
27. A Toast – Dan Masquelier

Supergroups are all the rave this decade.  Velvet Revolver.  Audioslave.   The Raconteurs.  Chickenfoot.  Next in line are the Monsters of Folk: Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, super-producer Mike Mogis, Retro-Nuevo troubadour M. Ward, and My Morning Jacket front man Jim James.  If the gold standard is the Traveling Wilburys—and it is—the Traveling Wilburys they are not, despite so many media types deeming them to be the next coming.  Nor are they folk in the most Woody Guthrie sense of the word.  Neither declaration is their fault– somebody inevitably has to label them something– but none of the four are far enough along in their careers to carry the burden of being mentioned in the same breath as eternal heavyweights such as Bob Dylan, George Harrison, or Roy Orbison, nor should they be held accountable (though in truth it is their own fault) for the awfully awful moniker.  But their intent seems serious enough, and the Monsters of Folk set out for a full-on musical movement with their self-titled debut.  Whether they come close to accomplishing that, however, is up for a serious debate.

Monsters Of Folk starts off with “Dear God (Sincerely M.O.F.)” and right away Jim Jones and the boys sound like they’re trying to harness their inner Thom Yorke; the song has such a Radiohead “Nude” remix vibe to it that it proves a difficult pace setter for what’s to follow.  Next up is the Oberst led “Say Please” and it’s a complete about face; high on harmony, Oberst heads towards Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young country with Ward on guitar doing an earnest ode to Neil, and though it’s better than its predecessor,  it too falls a few miles short.  Ward leads the way on “Whole Lotta Losin’” and it’s as close as Monsters Of Folk comes to full-fledged romp; Ward is known for his reverence of yesteryear, and like most of his solo stuff, “Losin” is a all-in win; the first homerun of the album.

Monsters of Folk has its share of them, and they seem to come with higher frequency in the Jones-heavy numbers such as “The Right Place” with its alt-country twang that is perfect for this band of misfits; when Jones sings, “I’m in the right place” he’s spot on.  “Baby Boomer” is perhaps the best compilation; with its Johnny Cash-chug-a-chug/The Statler Brothers “Flowers On The Wall”-esque foundation,  Ward, Oberst, and Jones play off each other as if they were always meant to.  When Oberst is left to his own device Monsters can too easily fall into a pattern of sounding too much like another Bright Eyes record however.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that—he’s rightfully earned his place at this table—but the grey area lies in the fact that if you didn’t know any better, the “other guys” can too easily—and do—sound like other guys.  “Man Named Truth” is an exception; the tune is equal parts of everyone he claims to be influenced by, from Dylan, to Young, to especially Emmylou Harris; the tune is tasty, as easily accessible as it is addicting, and the other guys stand out as much as they fit in.

If there’s one common criticism of Monsters Of Folk as a collective of creative guys at the height of their respective creating primes it’s that at more times than not it feels too shared for the sake of sharing, less organic than it probably should; too many times they trade turns shining in the spotlight than they share in shining in it together.  There’s a lot or promise, more than a few payoffs, but it’s less cohesive, and even less coercive.  That and at the conclusion of the album it loses steam quicker than a freight train out of coal.  Monsters Of Folk concludes with “His Master’s Voice” and regrettably it’s a Rip Van Winkle yawn.  People who want to like this album because they worship the guys behind it probably will see little wrong with it; for all intents and purposes, these guys are as close as their generation’s Traveling Wilburys as they’re going to get, and why not love that.  But a more objective person will take pause, noticing the flaws as much as the promise.

As a whole, Monsters Of Folk, is definitely worth a listen, and it’ll be an entertaining one.  Just don’t go in expecting a grand finale.  There are plenty of bottle rockets here.  Just be happy to take what you can get.

Jónsi & Alex is Jónsi Birgisson, Sigur Rós vocalist/guitar player-with-bow extraordinaire, and Alex Somers, musician and visual artist to, among others, Sigur Rós.  On their debut album, Riceboy Sleeps, they combine for one mother of a meandering glide through the subtleties of sound.  The album started as a side project between Sigur Rós recordings and that’s about the best place to start talking about it.  While Sigur Rós two most recent studio releases, Takk… and Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaus are—dare I say—more accessible/less steam-of-consciousness than their predecessors— Jónsi & Alex with Riceboy Sleeps veer backwards more towards the epic ethereal territory of ( ).  The spacey, outer-worldly journey of Riceboy Sleeps feels like a walk through the valley of imagination; at times it sounds like it could be the lost soundtrack to a film you’ve never seen but know the script by heart, and yet it can just as well be the strange look by a stranger you can’t take your eyes off of.  Spare of almost any vocals, Riceboy Sleeps focuses more on the symmetry of the submissive, each song seamlessly bleeding into the next, free of any real climax, but sustained of something special, always beneath the surface, but never without a face.  With its light sound Riceboy Sleeps isn’t for the light-hearted; if you want the meat and potatoes of Sigur Rós you better point yourself somewhere else.  But if you can walk into Riceboy Sleeps with an open mind, Jónsi & Alex will help open your ears.  Give it a chance and you’ll be amazed what you hear; you don’t have to be a believer to believe.

These days it’s getting harder and harder to find something to smile about. Grin, the second album of Toronto-based blueVenus offers itself for consideration.  Grin is a tale of hurdles; the overcoming of them, the outright avoidance of them, and the tracks of tears and smiles of the miles in between.

The album starts with the title-track and for a few seconds it sounds like you’re about to head down to O Brother, Where Art Thou? country.  But right before you get to the crossroads, blueVenus hits the breaks on Bourbon Street and the dancing ensues.  By the time you hear, “Everyone will say life gave you a lemon/You just got to grin” it’s too late; grief or not, you’re feeling funky and ready to go along for the ride.  On guitar Devrim Eldelekli is a virtuoso of cool, wielding his axe with a dizzying precision, transitioning seamlessly from the bad-ass bluesy riffs of “In Between” to the radiating roar of the Johnny Greenwood-reminiscent rumble of “Lucky Well” and “The Life” to the jazzy jamming on the Fiona Apple-ish “No Time To Waste,” which also showcases the potent pipes of Andrea De Boer.  To say De Boer has a powerful voice is selling her short; she can sound as delicate as fine China—and we’re talking the good stuff that momma only brings out only for holiday dinners—and as powerful as a cabaret crooner from a bygone era of women singers who only needed one name because they were that damn good: Ella, Billie, Janis, you name it, Andrea De Boer can hold her own.

Together, Eldelekli and De Boer are as much sound mates as they are soul mates, and as listeners we’re treated to their sweet intimacies.  Difficult to squeeze into a genrelization, there’s no doubt Grin has a pop sensibility to it; the album is catchy, laden with tunes tailor made for the tapping of toes.  Even when it threatens to get cheesy with a song like “Happy Tune”, the ska/early No Doubt vibe that starts things off gives way to a perfectly happy-go-lucky ditty, summing up everything that’s good and bad about those parts of adolescence that we’re supposed to grow out of, but never do (if ever a song was made for a John Hughes movie it’s this) and by the end you find yourself with a fitting grin.  You could call the album jazz, pop, rock, or any number of other modifiers and they’d all fit, but above everything else Grin is fun.  Take “Ohrwurm”, just when it sounds like you’re getting a long-lost outtake from Sgt. Pepper Eldelekli goes Jay-Z and busts out a German rap.  If you don’t know German what he says is anybody’s guess, but it fits, and it’s fun, and there’s not just something to that; there’s something to be said about that.  Smiling might not be as easy and organic as it used to be.  But there are no sour lemons behind this Grin; in matters of sound, blueVenus is as sweet as they come.   Drink it up.

A strange question occurred to me as Backspacer drew to a close for the first time on my stereo; it was about halfway through what is certainly the band’s most mature song yet, the cinematic and winsome “The End,” a song both about death and the presence of life: what would Kurt Cobain be doing right now, at this very minute?

It isn’t stealing Eddie’s moment. And it isn’t a question that has occurred to me during any other Pearl Jam song to this point. Maybe it was the subject matter that got me thinking. Or maybe it was that this song seems to be a sort of coming of age. This is Eddie Vedder’s song, and he commands it through an elevated sense of craft he probably was not capable of up until these past few years. Many times I’ve felt that Kurt Cobain had a similar future, but the thought had never occurred to me so forcefully, and never inspired directly by a piece of music. These two men shared a moment in music history and, as such, they seem to be inextricable in many ways. If Eddie Vedder remains in the spotlight as long as, say, Mick Jagger has, he will still be dogged by the nineties, and the voices left behind– among them, Cobain’s, and his own. On “The End,” Vedder is virtually alone on the track, backed by a string arrangement you would scarcely believe was possible if you were listening to the band back in the early nineties; back then, Pearl Jam was like a star at critical mass. Who would’ve thought they’d outlive their angst?

They did, but there was a long period of mourning. Even with an above-average number of great songs, their body of work since No Code— the album where most agree they martyred themselves to the radio gods— was clouded with a morbid sense of self-awareness and second-guessing. Even if they found themselves squirming under the limelight in 1995, at least Pearl Jam still had an identity to rail against. Once they ducked out of the party and the door locked shut behind them, that identity was gone and they found themselves staring into a void. Backspacer, at last, sounds a new chapter– turns out a damn good party was just a short walk across town.

The shortest album in their catalog, Backspacer is also their most dynamic, a birthday bash for a band embracing its middle age with all cylinders firing. The album in turn showcases a vulnerability and liveliness we’ve probably not associated with Pearl Jam before: traits like humor emerge. Humor! “Johnny Guitar,” for example: a short, raucous, song written about funk icon Johnny “Guitar” Watson— purportedly inspired by nothing but a picture hanging above a urinal— is nothing if it isn’t fun; a funky, freewheeling word game. Compare it to a song from their previous album that’s similar in spirit, “Life Wasted;” a good song that could have been better, if it only bought what it was selling. “Johnny Guitar” isn’t selling a thing, on the other hand. It doesn’t need to shout its philosophy; you just dig it.

There is a real sense of community on this record, a looseness of style that calls up so many different influences. At times it feels like a festival set; varied, jubilant, and crowd-pleasing to the extreme. Consider: the instant, easy appeal of “Force of Nature”— a gnarly marriage of Neil Young crunch with U2 grandiosity; the lush and beautiful “Just Breathe,” with its road-trippin’ vibe that makes you want to have a cigarette and just look up at the starry night; “Supersonic,” a new wave punk dynamo, taking a page from both The Cars and The Ramones; “Amongst the Waves,” with an epic build that takes its cue from Pearl Jam circa Ten, and comes pretty damn close to recreating the hugeness of past anthems like “Alive” without retreading the material or the mood. All of this under one roof makes for a truly full and satisfying soundscape.

To see the band— who may be swiftly growing into our youngest rock immortals— find comfort in their own skin at last is a welcome development. Angst can only take you so far, and sometimes you can’t come back. This question that occurred to me about Eddie’s lost peer as the album was coming to a close did so because the last song on Backspacer does not play safe. It’s a loaded gun. For all the band’s declarations that love is the answer, there is still a very real restlessness to be dealt with: something that remains, despite how much we kick or how hard we punch. Pearl Jam’s knuckles have been bloody for years, but with Backspacer it’s time for a truce. Will it last? Time will tell. For now, they don’t want a fight; they wanna rock.

Joshua Bartholomew has no problem going where his heart leads him; this is clear on the digital EP that follows up his sprawling double-disc release, And So It Begins. it’s called Heart Headed, and it’s four unabashedly saccharine love songs performed with nary a twinkle of melancholy.

Heart Headed— in its title, brevity, and instant sincerity— strikes me as rather brave. Maybe it’s the concept of a love song in general that seems brave; the idea of being unafraid of vulnerability, of trusting the simple emotions we’ve learned to drown out; it’s walking naked into a rain of arrows. And how to plumb the depths of such an old subject? Tricky.

Despite its naked approach to the subject, when Heart Headed talks about love, it’s got an almost religious appeal to it; it comes with a kind of sweet and assured doggedness; a peaceful zeal– sort of like that of a freshly-infatuated lover. Maybe this lover, he’s got a record of breaking and entering (but that’s all behind me, darling); someone who just wants to walk in front of his love with a basket of rose petals, so that her feet may never be sullied by bare floor. The speaker in these songs has the object of his desire clearly in sight; he is in love, and to him the world is a blissful certainty because of it. He is in a kind of waking dream state, where all things are tender: the heartbeat bass kicks of I Want You (To Want to Be); the aching string arrangements of Wondering When You’ll Come; these songs are righteously smitten, pretty, and pillow-soft. But it’s Strawberry Curl that separates from the pack with a cool, laid-back chorus with a Shins vibe; in this song, the love object is distant. At least she’s got a head start should things get, you know, weird.

I kid. EPs are a tough sell; they’re nice as audience prep-work, a way to share b-sides, and as experiments or stylistic exhibits. Heart Headed is certainly the latter, and another fine example of Bartholomew’s talents— he’s a hell of a vocalist, and a gifted songwriter. He’s not straying from his comfort zone, but that’s okay. If you’re in the mood for a snack-sized helping of modern love songs, Heart Headed definitely fits the occasion.

http://www.joshuabartholomew.com/

Dredg is hard to dig at. Call them what you may—progressive, alternative, art-rock, weird—and it somehow never fits, like trying to squeeze King Kong into a pair of Abercrombie and Fitch jeans. Their fourth studio album, The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion, is heavy, the way things used to be groovy, or bitchin’, or rad. Inspired—at least in part—by Salman Rushdie’s essay, A Letter to the Six Billionth Citizen. The album is like a convention of higher thought; only fun: a new exhibit of paintings; only less pretentious. Rushdie’s essay dealt with the far-reaching and personal impact of religion; it asked the unanswerable question “Why?” in a way that prophesied an answer. The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion, like their previous albums before it, is a concept, it asks plenty of questions and raises any number of points to consider. If you have answers, if listening to it brings on a couple of questions, fine. But that’s never been the point, and it’s not here. It’s all about the journey, the paint-smeared palette as much as the final product.

The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion opens with kids singing. It ends with birds chirping over the distorted whisper of man. In between is a Jackson Pollack-like concoction of sound: brazen and bold, ethereal and esoteric, yet communal in the most gathering sense of the word. Gaven Hayes works a harmony the way smoke works its way into oblivion, Dino Campanella works over the drums the way Rocky Balboa worked over a side of beef, Mark Engles on guitar is a reincarnation of Edge when U2 was less bombastic, and Drew Roulette on bass and synthesizer is the beautifully beating heart of it all. The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion may force you to take a couple steps back; you may find yourself, hand over mouth, really looking into—or listening into, if you want to get literal— the thing, the creation, to really get a grasp on it. You might even be there for a while, especially if you’re a first timer to Dredg, and find that you keep coming back. But the end result is Wow. From top-to-bottom, The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion is one of the best albums, one of the best accomplishments of 2009.

Catch Without Arms, though solid, was more straightforward, more traditional in structure than Leitmotif and El Cielo. The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion, is a return to transitions between songs—movements as they’ve called them in the past—and they are just that, moving; as moving as the songs themselves. The flawless transitions help glue everything together to create a mood, an experience, a cohesive vision, frantic as it may get. “Long Days and Vague Clues” is chaotic, a cacophony of strings and pounding drums that would make Beethoven’s ears perk, and it eases seamlessly into the soothing “Cartoon Showroom,” which then bleeds into “Quotes,” one of the finest songs Dredg has created; it’s the perfect union of what makes Dredg who they are, the sort of song that, instead of trying—and probably failing—to properly explain the band to someone else, you play for them.

I don’t get art; the universally accepted definition of the hows and whys of what the word art entails, anyway. Some say that art is the vision. Andy Warhol, and all of his cows, bananas, and Marilyn Monroes might go for that; add some color to an otherwise overlooked soup can and with one big Emeril Lagasse “BAM!” you have art. To me that seems too easy; everyone colors pictures when they’re four, why’s it all of a sudden a big deal when you’re doing it when you’re forty? Is Britney Spears an artist because she takes some lyrics written by someone else and kind of, sort of, puts her voice—as digitally “enhanced” as it winds up being—over a beat produced by someone else? Who’s to tell? Art should be harder than that: harder to earn, harder to create, harder to “get.” That’s not to say I get Dredg all of the time—what they’re trying to get at—and The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion is no different. But it sure as hell sounds good, and Dredg is sure as hell different than anything else out there. That has to count for something.

Thrice is one of the best bands going. With their latest release Beggars, the band’s seventh studio album, they further establish themselves as a band who doesn’t allow its sound to grow complacent. Fresh off the experimental The Alchemy Index, Thrice has refocused itself on groove. Recorded in their garage studio, Beggars sounds like an album created in a garage. The songs are organic, as full of energy and enthusiasm as the oil stains and the tent-that-hasn’t-been-used-in-years intimacies of the garage they started out in. After The Artist in the Ambulance Thrice could have eased into being the next At The Drive-In and made a solid career of it. But you hear “In Exile” and it sounds more like Coldplay if they had balls. Dustin Kensrue is as deft a songwriter as he is a conveyer of what he’s trying to say; he can still scream with the best of them, as songs like “At The Last” and “Talking Through Glass” prove, yet his voice can just as easily hypnotize you with the stellar “Circles.” As brilliant—and career daring—as The Alchemy Index was to try, the formulaic, element-to-element inspired structure of each EP left the band with little leeway to gain any sustained momentum. There are TAI fingerprints all over Beggars, but it has a momentum, a sustained groove uniformity to it that hasn’t been seen on any other Thrice release. “Doublespeak” isn’t a song they would have—or probably could have—written five years ago. Long since having traded in the soaring Guitar Hero worthy solos of The Illusion of Safety and The Artist in the Ambulance for the more textured rhythms they’ve rocked since Vheissu, Thrice is more accessible band for it, and Beggars is that rare album that diehards will devour, and newbies will be drawn into. The boarlike riff of the album’s first single “All the World is Mad” shows they can still bring it—and shows they still have a little ATDI “Arcarsenal” hardcore action left in them—but the follow-up “The Weight” will appeal to the Radiohead heads everywhere. Thrice isn’t quite recognized in the Radiohead pantheon. But Beggars shows that they probably should be.

She & Him have to be the wet dream of lovers-of-all-things-Indie. Zooey Deschanel, the actress you can’t help but fall in love with, and M. Ward, the troubadour you can’t help but tap your toes to. Together, on their debut album Volume One, they forge full steam ahead on the long trip back to 1970’s radio. Consisting mostly of songs written and sung by Deschanel, Volume One is a musical time warp; you didn’t have to live through Carly Simon or Dusty Springfield to hear that Deschanel and Ward did. They both have a nose for the nostalgic; we get it. Paying homage is one thing; trying to recreate the past is another. In the moments where Deschanel is left to her own device her voice sounds out of place, like an actress trying to play a singer, a category in which she could have scored a Razzie win for worst impersonation if Scarlett Johansson hadn’t already come along and staked her claim. Ward’s masterful at getting the most out of less in terms of the production value, and his guitar work is as stellar as ever, which make the album listenable. But that can’t save it in the memorable department; in that department, Volume One is on the verge of total bankruptcy. The original compositions are perfectly suited for that elevator descent to hell, or if Locke or Desmond were looking for an alternative to Cass Elliot’s “Make Your Own Kind Of Music” down in the Dharma hatch. But I don’t know how much that’s saying. She & Him’s take on the timeless “You Really Got A Hold On Me” is almost criminal, it’s that bad, and let’s not even mention—ok, we’re doing it—the crucifixion of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” Almost as bad is “I Should Have Known Better.” Perhaps that should be their mantra when dealing with the deities of rock; when the urge for bad karaoke strikes them, stay far, far away. If we’re to take Volume One as a natural precursor to Volume Two here’s to hoping they’ve put away their songbook of the standard’s of 1973 and try something of their own.