Born and raised in Bergen, Norway, Lerche was inspired by the music he heard emanating from his older sibling’s bedrooms – be it A-ha, Elvis Costello or classic rock. Inspired, he picked up the guitar at the age of 8, and as a teenager performed at open mics at the club where his sister worked. Before his 16th birthday, he was signed to Virgin/EMI. “I had to start singing to get all these songs out there,” he says. “No one else was going to! Lerche’s triumphs and travails of the last few years certainly left a mark; he moved to the U.S. and dealt with various practical matters (including some green card issues), forcing some delays. But he also recorded the soundtrack to the hit movie Dan in Real Life (”The director wanted a musician to work with and he convinced both me and the Disney Corporation that I was the only one who could do it.”) And, most importantly, Lerche left his major label home and struck out on his own. Heartbeat Radio, his most current offering, is certainly Lerche’s boldest and most challenging record. While it maintains the studio polish of his groundbreaking debut, Faces Down, there’s also a sense of musical adventure that stems from his later work. The songs mix acoustic guitars with grand gestures of orchestral pop, with elements of anything from 50s Jazz, via 60s and 70s Brazillian psych-folk to state-of-the-art 80s pop masters such as Prefab Sprout, Scritti Politti and Fleetwood Mac. Although Radio presents a variety of moods and sounds, ...[more]

Bowerbirds' debut album, Hymns for a Dark Horse, was nearly one hundred percent focused on the thesis that the earth is a sacred place with merit beyond us, and that humans are just visitors here. Its contrapuntal harmonies documented a moment in the life of the songwriter and the life of the band - Beth Tacular and Phil Moore living in an airstream in rural North Carolina, building a cabin of reclaimed boards by hand in the woods - but did so without, as far as we could tell, delving into their lives at all. While these weren't protest songs, per se, they had the wry anger of a 'Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.' The songs were interconnected, both musically and thematically, a musical whitepaper of the very best, most listenable kind. So it was a big surprise when we heard the songs collected on Upper Air. Bowerbirds were revealing more, writing from a personal voice, exploring love and human emotions in ways that have never been fully fleshed-out in their songwriting before. They have not abandoned their worldview from Hymns, but the lyrics are no longer just observational. These are songs written from a personal place, examining the contradictions inherent to a conscious life, and this emotional depth makes for an undeniably powerful collection of songs. Upper Air is the product of months spent away from nature and away from home, touring endlessly with the likes of Bon Iver, Phosphorescent and John Vanderslice and on their own, on both sides of the Atlantic. The...[more]

Athens Georgia’s multifarious psychedelic roadwarriors DARK MEAT have geared up for another get-go of pillage-and-freakout in the name of their newest offering, TRUCE OPIUM. A long period of lineup changes, label complications and heavy touring across North America and Europe has focused the band into a diamond-hard and transformative experience: they’ve trimmed their lineup to a highly-effective and barely-anemic 9-piece, and, in the process, have organically developed an intense and diverse instrumental chemistry. Truly, TRUCE OPIUM retains all the insane eccentricity, rawness and sonic bombast of their infamous live show, and evinces a sharpened essence and unified vision burnished by the last three years spent spraying themselves across the cosmos in their cramped tour-van. In terms of heightened vision and sonic-execution, TRUCE OPIUM is a huge step forward for the band -- as it augments their celebrated Albert Ayler, Stooges and Neil Young obsessions with more a abstract, cosmic tack: pronounced Eastern influences abide via the use of acoustic drone instruments like tanpura, bulbul tarang and sitar, prayer-like group chants and the study and reverent application of polyharmonic Sygyt and Kargira Tuvan throat-singing. Last year, bandmembers workshopped, rehearsed and performed at The University of Georgia with a carnatic classical troupe from South India. This amazing and humbling opportunity, along with their involvement in several local improv, free-jazz and noi...[more]

The E.A.R.L.'s dunch shows are hangover friendly live music that occur somewhere between one and four p.m[more]

The great majority of artists spend their formative years (if not their entire careers) working to shake off the gravitational pull of their predecessors, and the many masters and masterpieces that came before them—what the literary critic Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence.” For musicians, in particular, this tendency is especially pronounced, for reasons having to do with the nature of their craft and materials. Unlike the contemporary novelist or filmmaker, say, there is presumably a finite number of choices remaining to the artist making music in the 21st century that have not yet been exhaustively mined after 500 years of popular and semi-popular song. It is for this reason that, when we are asked to describe what a piece of music sounds like, we inevitably talk not about the thing itself, but resort to the trope of metaphor or analogy—“a little Brian Wilson, a little Pink Floyd, a little bit of Kraftwerk.” Rare indeed is the artist who outgrows their early influences, and instead become one of the markers by which other groups are measured. Almost alone among bands of the last two decades, Tortoise is a group that resists easy metaphors and analogies, who can be described as sounding like only themselves and no one else. Twenty years after its founding, the band’s signature and singularly inimitable sound—a fluid intersection of dub, dance, jazz, techno, rock, and classical minimalism, with no part overwhelming or dominating the whole—remains an America...[more]