Buy, Buy Love

In this season of greater-than-usual need, attending benefit shows remains a plausible way to enjoy great music while helping a charitable cause. (In particular, The Get Up Kids‘ Red Cross-supporting gig with The Anniversary and The Appleseed Cast on December 7 should be satisfying on many levels.) But as our fearless leaders would no doubt have you know, concert attendance alone won’t yank the nation out of its funk. Yes, this year more than ever, it’s time to buy, buy, buy, and a number of considerate area artists have recently released stocking-ready CDs with which you can help jump-start the economy while crossing a few hard-to-shop-for friends off the presents list:

For the hype-conscious scenester who frets that The Strokes have become passé: Like the New York-based quintet that inspired Beatlemania-like (or, more accurately, early-Stones mania) reactions during its sold-out gig at The Granada earlier this month, The Hearers benefit from a huge word-of-mouth campaign anchored by the slogan “You’ve got to see them live.” And like The Strokes, The Hearers garner Velvet Underground comparisons, though the local band recalls that group’s slow-shimmering, moody work rather than its upbeat rock-out flourishes. But The Hearers’ history is lengthier than that Lou-come-lately outfit’s. The band’s self-titled debut disc, released this year on Seattle’s Big Lie Records, compiles songs recorded (“in a variety of seedy locations,” according to the liner notes) between 1995-2000. With titles such as “Kill the Other Guy” and “Wither and Die,” The Hearers seldom venture far from bleak terrain but stray to every border of that territory. At times, The Hearers are a forlorn country crew, pairing lost-love laments with tearjerking pedal steel and melancholy finger-picked progressions. Later, the group’s members are surly absurdists, pairing stark acoustic riffs with a silly spring-loaded sound effect and titling a spooky, seemingly soulless instrumental “Cloning Is a Hick Process.” Finally, the group is eerily experimental, letting the last track drone on past the twenty-minute mark with layers of fuzzy noise, abstract input from unorthodox instruments and distorted screams. With some high-profile gigs ahead, including a coveted opening slot for ex-Swan Michael Gira‘s Angels of Light at Double Dragon on December 13, people will be hearing a lot more about The Hearers soon. Grab a copy for the with-it music connoisseurs on your list now so they can wave it about smugly once word reaches the masses and the trio’s appeal is no longer esoteric.

For adventurous listeners who prefer their albums to be a little “off”: The Hearers’ songs aren’t exactly standard pop nuggets, but they are colored within the lines for the most part, offering discernible melodies and accessible vocals. But for the iron-eared contingent who can appreciate the art of noise (the people who would skip directly to The Hearers’ cacophonous hidden track), there’s The Aesthetics‘ aptly titled Off, a paint-chipping concoction that wraps all its tracks in crackling feedback, untraceable static and low-end buzz. On the opening song, “Store Card 60,” the group can’t quite obscure the catchiness of its free-weaving guitar line, try as it might to smother the hook. As an instrumental, the tune also escapes the clouds of distortion the group uses to make its singer sound as if he were shouting his vocals into a phone that had been left off the hook two hallways removed from the recording room. But the next song eventually succumbs completely to anarchic din, and the group never really tosses traditional song-structure advocates another bone. Particularly notable are the album’s two live tracks, on which the band actually manages to lower its fidelity, a neat trick for a group that makes Beck‘s early work sound like Pet Sounds.

For grammar-cognizant metalheads: Musicians probably won’t go platinum by catering specifically to the proud few who use their red pens to correct misused pronouns as well as to scribble “Reign in Blood” in dripping scarlet letters wherever possible. But for those to whom this description applies, Synesthetic‘s album cover should provide as much amusement as the music on the disc. It depicts a letter from an anonymous neighborhood activist (the group is based in McLouth, Kansas, so the Old Hyde Park gang probably isn’t to blame) that takes the parents of one of the band members to task for letting Synesthetic practice in the back yard. “You can’t imagine the fights that were going on from the drinking, and the sex that was going on in the grass,” tattles the writer. (Hmm, where’s McLouth located again?) “Drugs, booze, sex and vulgarity,” the outraged citizen summarizes. “Nouns and conjunctions do not a sentence make,” the group retorts in one of the amusing corrections it’s made in the margins. After listening to “Say to Me,” the first track on this EP, it’s difficult to see what the letter-writing killjoy found so offensive about the band. Rather than being “loud and vulgar,” this tune is low-key and introspective, with its singer bemoaning the pain corroding my brain over a brooding guitar blanket that brings to mind Staind without the breakout choruses. That missing feature appears on the next selection, which still couldn’t be considered obnoxiously loud. The depravity to which the unnamed critic refers doesn’t surface until the last number, a scream-studded, heavy-breathing, Disturbed-aping affair so far removed from the other tunes that it makes the entire record seem like a various artists compilation. And it’s good to see that the accuracy-minded group has that kind of aggressive energy at its disposal, because it will need it to rearrange all the fliers and marquees that will doubtlessly misidentify it as “Synthetic.”

For night-movers who love both new and old-time rock and roll: Metallica‘s “Turn the Page” might have been the be-all, end-all as far as mainstream Bob Seger covers go, but there are still plenty of closeted Fox listeners eager to prove that rock and roll will never forget the burly-voiced, scraggly-bearded head of the Silver Bullet Band. On Sweet 16s Turned 31, the now-defunct Hillary Step tries its hand at “Against the Wind,” moving from a breezy acoustic intro to a climactic chorus to an intriguing instrumental tangent that bears little resemblance to the original composition. But while the Step shakes down the Detroit-born Seger’s work, [Daryl], named after an ’80s sci-fi flick that predated Like a Rock by just a year, delivers a straight-faced reading of “Mainstreet” that includes both an unironic echo of that ballad’s overdrawn guitar solo and a classic-rock-radio-segue-ready fade-out ending. Sweep the Leg Johnny recreates Seger as a painfully earnest coffee-house singer/songwriter with its acoustic rendering of “Night Moves,” while Saraswati converts “Feel Like a Number” to indie language, inserting skittering drums, meandering guitar riffs and an inside-joke in-song skit. All of this tampering with time-honored barn burners might seem like risky business, but this is a wink-free disc — the heartlands-raised groups involved in this project seem to be paying honest homage to the quintessential Midwest rocker.