Written by: Dave Cantrell

Commencing a long overdue column here at SEM, we present the inaugural installment of Lightning Strikes, an occasional (and hopefully frequent) column dedicated to covering as many albums as we can as succinctly as possible. Yes, we love covering the relatively unknown and doing it comprehensively, but the drawback there is…SO many records go unreviewed. Lightning Strikes is our attempt at redressing that oversight. With any luck and perseverance, this column will appear bi-weekly to help our dear readers navigate the dizzying array of releases that present themselves with a nearly exhausting regularity. We know how that is, and we empathize. For convenience’s sake, we’ve attached a little “4 strikes and you’re GREAT!” rating to the end of each review which we’re pretty sure needs no further explanation. [feature photo by Trish Tritz]

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HOOTEN TENNIS CLUB – “Highest Point in Cliff Town” (Heavenly Recordings)

Remember the band Garlic? No? Well, that’s OK, few do. At the height of Pavement-mania (yes, there was such a thing, sort of), the band with the vampire-rebuffing name released an album that was unapologetic in its sonic devotion/derivation of the crackerjack Cali slacker geniuses, guaranteeing them a footnote of notoriety (well, this one mention anyway) to the Pavement story. Then there’s the far cagier – and far more talented – Speedy Ortiz, that, while allowing their sound a clear stylistic nod to the Malkmus Stairs brand of skew (among others, Sonic Youth and the Breeders among them), knows enough to synthesize it into their own mix-o-matic stew of influences, some of them even drawn from eras that didn’t include torn flannel and tongue-in-cheek wink-wink irony. Hooten Tennis Club, rather craftily, have chosen the path between, even if it leans a little too uncomfortably close to the former.

Though it perplexes a bit that any young band would act to so consciously cop a sound so well-known to – and rabidly missed by – countless scores of music nerds across the world, this Liverpool outfit seems unperturbed and unabashed. They have good reason: they’re excellent at it. With tracks as full of California twilight as “Always Coming Back 2 You” or rich with jerky/smooth poignancy as “I’m Not Going Roses Again” or lonely/lovely as “…And then Camilla Drew Fourteen Dots on Her Knee,” all with some degree of those chronic, heartbreaking, exceedingly human electric guitar figures winding through and/or hanging over them that you’re sure you’ve heard before but haven’t, we may have the best Pavement album since Wowee Zowee. And if that sounds like a backhanded compliment that’s edging close to a critical slap, well I suppose it is. Whereas the majority of songs on Highest Point in Cliff Town are able to stand on their own – the playful garage funk of first single “P.O.W.E.R.F.U.L P.I.E.R.R.E” even stands a bit taller – until the band can better disguise exactly whose shoulders these tracks are standing on, the obvious talent at work here that is this album’s savingest grace (it’s an excellent listen regardless, the melodies quite fine) we’ll have to wait until future releases to find its feet. Should there be a second record I’ll most certainly lend an ear. But only one more time.√√

J FERNANDEZ – “Many Levels of Laughter” (Joyful Noise)

Philippines-born, Chicago-based artist J (for Justin) Hernandez is a mapmaker by day, which offers an irresistible coordinate of poignance as a jumping-off place for this review, seeing as what he gets up to in his off hours – resulting in this accomplished, quietly startling debut – itself maps out a set of well-trodden, pop-historic territories, from Memphis to Canterbury to Hoboken to the Pacific Northwest and many intersecting points in between (even, wouldn’t ya know it, Chicago).

The songs on Many Levels of Laughter, in other words, issue forth with powerful ghostly innuendos of those delicate-yet-forcefuul voices whose glints of vulnerability, combined with an often playful, innate bent of innovation have left enduring impressions on our hearts and minds. One hears notes and invocations of Wyatt, Ayers, Chilton throughout this record, the latter’s humbly chimed chord here, both the former’s  light-touched, elevated prog-pop soul there. In places – the harmonium-drenched shroud of the creeping but revelatory “Apophis,” the bare and intimate presence that marks out the opening bar of “Read My Mind” before a YLT-styled organ escorts it down the hall – the stark naturalism of Elliott Smith reawakens and hovers between the lines. Were it but pastiche  and carbon-paper tracing, the album would barely merit a mention but the adroit synthesis at work from top to bottom ensures it is, in fact, rather worth shouting about. Our interest never flags, as one deftly scintillating touch gets layered upon another, making even the six and a half minute close “Melting Down,” a revolving paint dream of a track that underscores the fact you probably can’t come of age in the birthplace of post-rock without being influenced by it (ask Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-era Wilco), a riveting, hypnotic, deeply satisfying listen.

A superb first effort and we now have a new fearless singer-songwriter wearing that oddly bedizened crown made up of equal parts lush green ivy and a lush technicolor imagination. Lucky us. √√√

VINYL WILLIAMS – “Into” (Company)

Visit John Williams’ grandson’s website vinylwilliams.com and the visual backdrop – an intensely kaleidoscopic, panoramic rendering of what appears the inside of a Moorish temple, color-enhanced with a near-lysergic glee – is impossible to turn away from, and in fact one cannot help but be mesmerizingly drawn into the screen, even if that screen’s as small as you palm. With the consummate electro-dance artist’s third full-length, the integration between image and music is inseparably complete. Indeed, with Vinyl Williams, what you see is what you hear.

The palette employed on the website (you did click, right?) tends toward the saturative and bright, and so it is with Into. On tracks such as the ECM-goes-IDM “Space Age Utopia” (think a twitchy smooth Stereolab), the alluring “World Soul” that sounds like Curtis Mayfield at zero G’s, and the Avatar-world chillout fantasy “Iguana City,” the touch may be light but the whole is, well, wholly immersive. Though the sonic character of this record is a deeply, densely textured one, an effortlessly effervescent effect pervades throughout. One floats, both over and irresistibly through this album, somehow both slightly disembodied and fully connected. Listening to Into is a bit of a zen experience in that sense, like background music that commandingly occupies the foreground of your consciousness. The aesthetic both drifts and controls, a neat shamanic trick that bewitches and soothes, excites and calms. “Axiomatic Mind” is barely there and yet its airiness has a driving quality that holds you in rapt stasis. The wonderfully titled “Plinth of Uncanny Design” captures with its bass slink and waves of cosmic ambiance, like komische on a brief holiday, while “Zero Wonder” would seem to be the theme song of a bygone television show beamed back from the future Mars, “Eter-Wave-Agreement” the audio journal of an intergalactic day trip taken by Jon Hassell and Popol Vuh. Opus-length closer “Xoi Rumi” is all smoky thrall and chargingly gentle tropicalia, Sergio Mendes tuning in and turning on circa 2015.

Thus it is with Into. The sound-sculpting auteur Vinyl Williams has, for now at least, found his most realized voice yet. The record is continuously present with the listener, the listener present with it. Into is nothing less than a living breathing koan of the modern age. √√√