Because Dave Grohl and Josh Homme worked together on “Songs For the Deaf,” the breakthrough album by Queens of the Stone Age, they’re a known quantity. Add Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones to the mix and what do you get?

An album that sounds very much like Dave Grohl and Josh Homme on the self-titled debut from their new project, Them Crooked Vultures. It’s a record full of muscular rhythms from Grohl and deceptively sweet stoner-rock crooning from Homme, punctuated by his terse guitar riffs. As he was in Zeppelin, Jones is a subtle presence here, adding understated bass lines and backing vocals and letting the outsized personalities in the band come to the fore.

“Them Crooked Vultures” is a long record for the genre, clocking in at more than an hour — and feeling like it. A few of the tunes stretch past seven minutes, but the more compact songs work best: “Dead End Friends” flashes past on a swift, pounding groove and skinned-knee guitar, while a savage riff helps “Reptiles” sound like a Zeppelin outtake from the “Houses of the Holy” era, with greasier vocals.

As supergroups go, this one is fairly unassuming: Despite the star power involved in a group comprising members of Zep and Nirvana (yes, and Foo Fighters and Queens of the Stone Age, too), these three manage to convey the sense that this project is less an exercise in ego than a pretty good excuse to rock.

— Text by Eric R. Danton, photo by Dustin Rabin

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“Them Crooked Vultures” album stream

If there’s one particular sound associated with Washington D.C., besides go-go, it still has to be the piledriving aggression of hardcore punk — Washington is, after all, where it all started for Minor Threat, Fugazi and Dischord Records leader Ian MacKaye, and for D.C. native Henry Rollins.

Bellflur sounds nothing like them. Although the indie-rock quartet does hail from Washington, the group has more in common with latter-day D.C. acts like Middle Distance Runner. Fronted by Carlos Gonzalez-Fernandez, Bellflur mixes twitchy rhythms with honeyed synthesizers and dreamy vocals on their latest EP, “Last Quarter of the 20th Century Blues,” which is holding it down for the group until its second full-length album, due early next year.

You may be asking yourself: wtf is up with the animal masks? Good question. Gonzalez-Fernandez explains on his publicist’s blog: “There was an old upright piano in the backyard of the farmhouse I lived in. When I would drive away at night, a piano with deer around it would appear out of nowhere. The spooky image of animals in suits using abandoned instruments to make music stuck with me.”

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Grey Sparkle Finnish Pig mp3

(Photo by Eamonn Aiken)

Perhaps by instinct, children of ’80s suburbia will be drawn to the music of Neon Indian.

Armed with vintage synths and arcane samples, group mastermind Alan Palomo writes songs reminiscent of, among other things, Wham hits, Sega soundtracks and Cameo-era funk jams. Listening to Neon Indian’s debut, “Psychic Chasms” (Lefse), is like sleeping over your at best friend’s house in 1987 and staying up all night watching WWF videos, playing Contra and blasting Top-40 radio. Lest this sound hokey, rest assured the music is less about gimmickry than sweet remembrance.

Listen, Dammit, recently chatted with Palomo as he drove through New Mexico, and here are three facts we learned:

1. When buzz comes, it comes fast: Palomo composed the songs that would make up “Psychic Chasms” at his home in Austin, working on the music while on break from his full-time band, Vega. “Here we are a few months later, performing them to drunk kids that are chanting the lyrics,” Palomo says, reacting to the blog hype and critical raves that have followed the album’s release. “It’s been a strange trip, to say the least.” Neon Indian’s touring lineup boasts four musicians, and when Palomo plays venues such as New York City’s Mercury Lounge, which he was thrilled and surprised to sell out, he won’t have to go it alone. “The main challenge has been recontextualizing some of the bedroom elements into a four-piece rock band and making it entertaining and maintaining some kind of accuracy and trying to stay true to the original material,” he says.

2. There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia: While fans and critics agree Neon Indian’s music is nostalgic, everyone has their own idea of what, exactly, Palomo is referencing. “It’s this little audio documentary from various parts of my life,” he says of the album. “I like the fact the music has this strange stream-of-consciousness to it. The instruments are constantly undulating. The samples undergo some kind of transformation by the end of the song. The idea is that it’s based on memories that are buried in experience. You can’t peg down the finite details because you experienced them.” He adds that while he never set out to make video-game music, as some have alleged, it’s entirely possible elements of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 crept into his writing.

3. Synths: always a good idea. Compare parts of “Psychic Chasms” to Paul McCartney’s holiday oddity “Wonderful Christmastime,” and Palomo will act as though you’ve uncovered a key ingredient in Neon Indian’s secret formula. “That would be a perfect example,” he says of Macca’s 1979 hit. “I have this strange infatuation with rock bands that had that one song that was, like, the synth track — the one song where someone brought a Yamaha DX7 to the studio and was like, ‘Let’s fuck with this for a while.’ It doesn’t come from the same school of thought as electronic artists. They’re trying to find ways to incorporate it into this pop band. It always sounds really goofy and sort of flippant, almost. ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ has that vibe, I think.”

— Interview by Kenneth Partridge, photo by Dagny Piasecky

Johnny Whitney and Cody Votolato made an unholy racket as members of the Seattle post-hardcore band Blood Brothers, a tradition they proudly continue in their new project, Jaguar Love.

The duo, having since relocated to Portland, Ore., released its first full-length album, “Take Me to the Sea,” in August 2008.

With a new, as-yet untitled album due early in 2010, Whitney and Votolato (brother of roots-rock singer Rocky Votolato) offer an early listen to the first song, “Up All Night.” It’s a clattering electro-pop number packed with blaring synthesizers and featuring an insidious chorus.

Download the song here for free.

(Photo by Chris Lang)

Building on the buzz of last year’s “Made in the Dark,” British electro-pop band Hot Chip returns Feb. 9 with “One Life Stand” on Astralwerks.

A record-company press release describes the new album, the band’s fourth, as “a full-blooded leap into the unknown, an album that is awash with Hot Chip’s trademark creative bravery and a searing emotional intensity from first track to last.”

Wow, who’s ready for a cigarette?

Pre-orders start this week via Amazon.

When Johnny Marr joined Modest Mouse a few years back, fans of both rightfully scratched their heads.

Whereas the Washington indie band had a reputation for screwing with pop conventions, letting the inherent weirdness of main songwriter Isaac Brock mark strange even the relatively accessible likes of 2004’s “Good News for People Who Like Bad News,” Marr had always been something of a classicist. As the musical mastermind behind the Smiths, the English guitarist crafted some of the most enduring, original and impeccably constructed songs of the ’80s. Sure, he broke new ground, but he was careful to not disturb the bones of any dinosaurs.

It made more sense when Marr announced last year that he’d cast his lot with brothers Gary, Ryan, and Ross Jarman, better known as the Cribs. The trio from Wakefield, England, plays a brand of pop-minded punk rock that’s intricate but never fussy, explosive but at the same time restrained. On their excellent third album, 2007’s “Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever,” the Cribs proved themselves world-class tunesmiths and sharpeners of hooks. Were it not for their brash playing and cynical worldview, they’d probably be superstars on both sides of the Atlantic.

Marr joined up just in time to help write and record the Cribs’ fourth album, “Ignore the Ignorant” (Warner Bros.). More so than “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank,” the Modest Mouse album on which Marr (evidently) appeared, “Ignorant” bears obvious signs of the former Smith’s presence. The placid jangle of “Save Your Secrets” and ever-so-slight rockabilly-style reverb of the title track hark back to the Smiths’ heyday, and even on tracks where Marr’s influence is less apparent, there’s a sense his involvement bolstered the Cribs’ confidence and reinforced what they were already doing plenty well on their own.

As on “Men’s Needs,” singer Ryan Jarman spits cryptic lyrics that seem to detail humanity’s various failings. He’s at his best when he breaks into his raw-throated Cobanian yells, but even when he plays it cool, he’s smart, intense and funny — all adjectives that apply to the band as a whole. Marr or not, the Cribs have yet to receive their stateside due.

— Kenneth Partridge

The project was commissioned by BAM as part of its 2009 Next Wave Festival, and it featured Kim and Kelley Deal (those iconic twins of alt rock fame, who share between them stints in the Pixies, the Amps, the Last Hard Men, and the Breeders), Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond) and Matt Berninger (of The National).  It’s not easy to think of a phrase that succinctly describes what they created: a multi-disciplinary experience?, a gesamtkunstwerk?, a collaborative sound cycle and installation?, a comparative history of twins and ball games presented as a performance?

Ritchie’s large-scale sculptural environment framed a one-hour animated film made from the artist’s intricate drawings. An evocative, complex score and song cycle composed and performed by the Dessners and a 12-member chamber orchestra was accompanied by vocal support from Worden, the Deals and Berninger. It retells the Mayan myth of the hero-twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque through the lens of the 1976 World Series.

While many audience members may not have been familiar with the Popol Vuh (the source text of the Mayan myth), the concept of the hero-twins is common enough across mythologies to be familiar. Tenacious and artful, mythic twins tend to be involved in the creation of civilizations (Romulus and Remus, Liza and Mawu) and have relationships deeply rooted in dualistic power and adventure (Apollo and Artemis, Castor and Pollux, Kusha and Lava, the Navajo twins). In the Popol Vuh the twins wake the gods of the underworld with a loud ball game and are challenged to a game with the gods. What follows is a tale that involves cunning maneuvers, decapitation, demonic macaws and the like. The performance opened with twins Racquel Garcia and Joshua Garcia playing ball on the set to the soundtrack of the 1976 game.  As the performance unfolded the various twins mirrored one another other, as well as the tale of mythic twins.

The project focuses on and is comprised largely of layered multiples — patterns that repeat, reference back and fold in on each other. The Dessners played intertwined motifs opposite one another on the stage. The vocalist in the chamber ensemble mirrored Berninger’s vocals. The Deals echoed and amplified each other. The animation mirrored the music and was projected in such a way (using multiple screens and mirrors) as to create the effect of the images bursting apart and folding back in on themselves. The singers were each doubled visually by the mirrored floor of the stage. The narrative themes of the project were doubly twinned: baseball in 1976 resonates with baseball now (the first performance was held concurrently with the first game of the World Series); the ballgame that started the performance twins the ballgame of the Popol Vuh; and those each twin the other.

The project draws on a remarkable range of sources and operates across several media.  This kind of wide-reaching effort makes me think of the potential for concerts to be re-conceived as immersion experiences.  It combines the world of sports and innovative contemporary music – somewhat surprising bedfellows — as well as drawing on animation, sculpture, alternative/indie rock history, chamber music and dance.

This is a concert that’s more than a concert.  It’s an adaptation of text, it’s a screening and an installation, it’s rock and it’s chamber music, it’s a representation and recontextualization of a sports broadcast — and as such, it commands our attention in ways that a conventional concert would not. Before the performance began, as they were announcing the players from the 1976 game, there were people in the stands — ahem, theater — who were cheering for various players and booing at the Reds. And that’s the kind of ball game in which I’d like to be immersed, demonic macaws, impregnating calabash fruit-heads, decapitation, creation and all.

— Meghan Maguire Dahn

Given that Byethost declined to identify the complainant, we have no way of knowing whether this is true. What is absolutely true is that Byethost refused to renable the account, because “it appears your site content nature appears to be based around copyright content.” Pointing out that the vast majority of media content on Listen, Dammit, was approved for posting by artists and/or labels didn’t help, and the company offered us a refund and a full backup of the site.

The former took place without incident. The latter did not. Not only did Byethost fail to provide a full site backup, they claim, somewhat implausibly, to no longer have the files necessary for Listen, Dammit, to reestablish itself with a different hosting company. A lengthy, byzantine back-and-forth with their monumentally unhelpful support staff proved fruitless.

Unfortunately, we weren’t wise enough to have backed up our own files. Lesson learned. After trolling through cached files on Google, we’ve recovered a significant chunk of what we had published, which will go on the new site, when it’s ready. In the meantime, Listen, Dammit, will publish here, to the extent possible.

The post that seems to have caused all this trouble was a review of Jemina Pearl’s new album, “Break it Up,” which included an mp3 of the song “After Hours.” Because we’re not about to be cowed by some anonymous douchebag with a chip on his shoulder, here is that review again. Because we’re not stupid, we removed the mp3.

Maybe it was inevitable that Be Your Own Pet break up. The Nashville garage-rockers were a volatile group from the start, thanks to the members’ young ages and the full-bore, high-impact music they played with ferocious abandon. It made for terrific, often unforgettable live performances, but how long can that sort of thing endure?

About four years, as it turns out. The group announced its dissolution in August 2008, but the individual members weren’t done making music: other projects include the bands Turbo Fruits and JEFF the Brotherhood, along with a solo career for singer Jemina Pearl.

She was the accelerant fueling the highly flammable mixture that was Be Your Own Pet. On her own, Pearl is akin to a perpetual motion machine on “Break it Up” (Ecstatic Peace/Universal), her solo debut. The record features help throughout from BYOP drummer John Eatherly, who co-wrote all the songs and played most of the instruments.

Pearl barrels through these 13 songs with savage glee, singing with menacing sweetness as she tries to get out of her own head on “After Hours,” celebrates the trashy side of her hometown on “Nashville Shores” (featuring Thurston Moore on guitar) and makes an exception for duet partner Iggy Pop on the vintage garage-pop tune “I Hate People.”

The songs here are packed full of bright buzzsaw guitars and fast, simple punk-rock drum beats with all the manic energy of Be Your Own Pet’s best tunes. The difference here is the greater emphasis on structure. Credit for that goes to producer John Agnello, who helped Pearl and Eatherly shape and tighten the tunes into lean, lacerating rockers that help ensure Jemina Pearl remains a sonic force to be reckoned with.

— Eric R. Danton