Album Review: Self-Titled - Wild Flag

I love the new Wild Flag album. I love many things about it: its chops, its messiness, it sense of fun, its immediate timelessness. In fact, I even love this album for what it hasn't done, which is to say become an icon of ghettoized "girls rock".


I love the fact that a group comprised of former members of musically and intellectually uncompromising bands like Sleater-Kinney, Helium and the Minders has been routinely called a "supergroup" by the national media. I love that this hasn't prompted a series of navel-gazing articles about "girls in indie rock." I love that this record has come out the same year as albums by women like Leslie Feist, Annie Clark and Merril Gerbus who were weaned on the kind of punk that SK and Helium made but have now been able to expand that sensibility across genres and audiences to great acclaim. I love that I've been hearing about an album of great music made by women rather than a great girl rock album.

Covering Our Bases - The Velvet Underground

You shoulda seen 'em then...

Certain bands are so influential that they become touchstones in the history of popular music. There are few better ways of measuring a band's influence than the amount of nods it gets via covers. Since nothing gets On Warmer Music going like a good cover, we'll take some time to look at those bands.


The Velvet Underground are perhaps the classic cult band. Formed by Andy Warhol in 1966 around Lou Reed, they released four classic albums that combined lyrics about deviant sex, hard drug use and arty pretensions with a mixture of vicious noise freakouts and poppy gems. It's been hoarily said that "they didn't sell many albums, but everyone who bought one went on to form a band" but by the last decade they were such a hip influence that Eddie Argos from Art Brut complained that he didn't "want to hear the sound of the Velvet Underground a second time around". That notwithstanding, the Velvets are founding fathers (/mothers) of the very idea of "indie rock" and today we've got some proof.

Soundtrack Sampler - Adventureland

Soundtracks are a wonderful thing. There's a bootleg of John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats covering Neutral Milk Hotel's "Two-Headed Boy" where he says "I'm sorry if I screw this up, because I know there's a lot of you out there who are living and dying with this song" and that perfectly sums up what great music has the potential to be. If you truly love certain songs they become the soundtrack to your life - you live and die with them.


The only problem with that is that your life is under-rehearsed, way over budget and full of people who are far less interesting and attractive than those you see on the big screen. Movies are less messy and more satisfying. Good directors know that music is an emotional short-cut, able to short-circuit logic and quickly hack directly into our emotional-response centers. That means that a well-chosen soundtrack can not only open minds to new music but turn a good movie into a great one.