Love and Mercy and Sharks- An Interview with Jimmy Whispers

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Love and mercy and forgiveness and "all that good stuff." That's how Chicago "bedroom popper" Jimmy Whispers pegs his particular brand of lo-fi music which has been compared to Daniel Johnston "hanging out by himself at a beach party." A quick listen to his sparse but spry 2015 debut Summer in Pain reveals this love and mercy in full. There's of course "I Love You" where he essentially repeats the title as a mantra over his humming Thomas organ, which he's had for seven years, and the slight thwacking of drums. Efforts such as "Michael Don't Cry" manage somehow manage to find the good stuff too. The track stumbles along with faint percussion and has Whispers offering up a pick-me up to someone even as own his head seems to be down. "Summer in Pain," where Whispers croons into his iPhone and plays gentle chords, wades through "beer and piss" and an "Apocalypse" but is still resilient enough to not drown in all of that bullshit. To even continue you'd have to at least have a smidgen of faith in those concepts up above, a compulsion toward the light even when darkness is more prevalent.

In conversation with Whispers this bright affability comes through. He giggles between answers, in part to keep himself entertained on the solo drive to the night's gig in Bloomington, Illinois but also out of sheer amusement with how's his music's been compared to Frank Sinatra by “someone’s mom.” “No fedora though,” he prefers a ball cap with “Chicago” written in a 70s font. The Sinatra comparison is one that has him genuinely stoked. And that excitement bleeds into everything. He insists that "What a Wonderful World" by Louie Armstrong, a song he occasionally plays at his live shows, is "the best." At a handful of those same shows Whispers crams into a red dress and preens around on stage as the “song and dance man” he dubs himself. It originally started as more of an entertaining provocation, but Whispers admits "Now I just like wearing dresses" I leave a couple of dresses at my house all the time."

Two years ago Whispers didn't have the same kind of time to enjoy a luxuriant red dress. He was driving around "drunken idiots" in his white Honda Civic for Uber, working 12 hours shifts on occasion. He was recording songs, nearly 500 of them from his recollection, into an iPhone and promoting them with street art and zines without any idea when they might come out. In the past year he opened for heroes such as R.Stevie Moore and Ariel Pink. "It took me a minute not to be starstruck talking to R. Stevie" he fondly remembers. Over the summer at Pitchfork Music Festival in his native Chicago, he crowd surfed, danced and mock-executed his way to one of the standout sets of the weekend. He recently traveled to Europe for the first time and played in Holland, France, England, Sweden and Denmark. Now he's rocking the heartland, having a drink or two backstage and doing pushups to prep for the shows. In between there’s the long stretches of road that make up this “Midwest driving shit.” At most he can hope to see a twister while he's out on the highway. "Maybe I'll catch one," he gleefully imagines. Even if bad weather hits, Whispers places it as part of the good stuff. 

Those giggles and laughs sometimes paper over a certain seriousness though. “Everyday something creeps into my mind and tries to mess me up,” he responds to when he’s felt distanced from his musical dreams. "It’s constant revaluation and affirmation." "I wanna change the way I feel tonight," is how he puts it in "Pain in My Love," a highlight of his debut record as recorded by a guilt-plagued calliope player. When he's not on wax he enacts that change by "Thinking where I was a couple of months before and every day's getting better, things get better all of the time." 

(The "Greatest Bedroom Popper" is performing Saturday at Cafe Berlin in Columbia, Mo. The show starts at 8pm with DJ Moose and Chives opening.)

In Revue- 'Depression Cherry' (Beach House)

The last time, or maybe the time before (it's hard to say with certainty), that I was driving the two-hour stretch of I-70 from Columbia, Mo to Kansas City I had a cheaper than cheap pair of knockoff Raybans on. "POLYVINYL," a record label home to bands I love such as American Football was imprinted in white lettering on the black sides. I had just turned off the podcast Hollywood Prospectus featuring some witty repartee about the failings of True Detective Season 2 when I switched over to Beach House’s fifth LP Depression Cherry. Given that I was gazing intently through the small "slit" in the glasses, just above the bridge of these faux-Bans, the timing could not have been better.

Such an innocuous thing was so cosmically perfect because that sort of staring, peering through minutiae with the intensity to cause blindness, is the kind of focus it would take for someone to notice the movement in Beach House's sound over those aforementioned five albums. Beach House, the band’s 2006 debut, might sound like its guitar is on loan and its rickety drum machines from a flooded Guitar Center, but I’m still reminded of the halo effect around light poles on an empty street of a mid-sized city (pop. 100,000) at 2 a.m. on a Sunday night; Bloom from 2012 also does this. It’s like this dulled warmth, perhaps being hugged by someone with snow gloves on, that’s been in Beach House’s blood since the beginning. The gloves have gotten bigger and a little more expensive perhaps, but you can still feel this warmth. A writer for Stereogum, whose name I am genuinely forgetting, compared its subtle expansion of sound to shifting plate tectonics and I think that’s as good a metaphor as will ever be developed to describe its “change” in sound.

The new "accouterments" to Victoria LeGrand and Alex Scally's summer home are first single "Sparks"'s shoegaze, the Perrey-esque synth fade ups on "Space Song," an insistent ticking in "Wildflower" that takes me back to Drive, a propulsive quality in the first five seconds of "Bluebird" that brings to mind Dan Deacon. All of it is fairly new, but none of it feels that way. At no point do the extra wrinkles in the pages make the text unreadable. Shoegaze has so often been concerned with sonic textures that the peeling guitars and vocal shards of "Sparks" make sense. It’s evident that Jean-Jacques Perry's defining ambient piece "Prelude au Sommeil" has its soft hand pushing up the synth fader in "Space Song" because both efforts leave you breathless. Not in the sense that you're choking. No no. That you literally have exhaled your entire body in response to how tranquil the sound is. You have to push the air out just to make room for comprehending the moment. I think of Drive when I hear the ticking of "Wildflower" because it has similar noirish uneasiness. What you once knew to be true and could hold in your hands is slowly slipping out. Which is an awful, terrifying feeling.

If all of this makes Depression Cherry sound obtuse or fey, it isn't. For as airy and ethereal as LeGrand's voice is, she's incredibly grounded. Before she even gets to "Beyond Love"'s chorus she sings "I'm gonna tear off all the petals from the rose that's in your mouth," a detail so lived in and specific you take it for truth. A married couple in "PPP" (Piss Poor Planning) is looking into each other’s eyes and struggling to see anything worth loving anymore, "It won't last forever, or maybe it will" is the figure-8 elliptic she deflatedly croons. The avian of "Bluebird" can't seem to take flight before the penultimate song's trickling keys evaporate into the night air. 

Only on closer "Days of Candy" does the album shuffle off its lyrical mortal coil. And then, it does so by including a 24-part harmony from the Pearl River Community College singers and stating "the universe is riding off with you." Its part hymn, part nursery song, part dirge and one of the most hypnotically ornate things the band has done. Drum machines crackle on a sort of delay and LeGrand's voice echoes like she's the last person on Earth trapped at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. When Beach House goes big, it goes big in a way that would be frightening if for not how lovely it sounds.

And yes love is a common topic, but the love of these characters is just as likely to wither inward as it is to expand outward. What is a warm love song one minute can become a cold elegy the next. Alex Scally's gently flitting guitar can grow loud enough to drown out the hum of an entire city. With Beach House you can see all of these mammoth changes coming from a mile away; you just have to look closely.

"Musical Schizophrenic"- A conversation with London indie pop artist Oscar

Oscar Scheller's a self-described "musical schizophrenic." If the London native's not recording bright, love-struck indie pop under the mononym Oscar, he's staying up in his flat until 5 in the morning recording "crusty acid house" with his friend Guy as Claude Money or dabbling in shifting garage music. He's a classically trained art school grad who wrote a dissertation on "The Emotional Economy of the Sampled Sound" and enjoys the head knocking NYC-rap of Lord Finesse, the careful R&B structuring of Destiny's Child, Ride's intimate shoegaze and infinitely fun baroque pop courtesy of the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society. Scheller will go nearly a month without working and then have a deluge where he writes multiple songs in a weekend. 

When's he wrapped on one of those new tracks, he'll play it for his mom Rebecca, who he inherited part of his musical "disorder" from. Rebecca would make mixes of current U.K. pop hits for Oscar when he rode to school as a child, and splice in New Order, Blondie and the Slits, because she was "a bit of a punk." And if that weren't enough, Oscar's father Martin was a "Bohemian with a joint in his mouth," who made some of the earliest acid house as Funtopia for Arista. The deal never quite materialized, but Oscar still has stacks of the records from Martin's broke artist days. Music is permanently hardwired into Oscar's DNA and you can hear it in his baritone voice.

Who's at the top of the list of bands you'd like to see?
Modern bands...I wanna see Slowdive, I know they’re an old band, but I wanna see them. They would be top of my list, 100%. 

So you're a shoegaze guy then, have you seen My Bloody Valentine?
I’ve seen My Bloody Valentine, which was, I thought it was pretty amazing. It was so loud that people were kind of throwing up afterwards. It was intense. After a while all the feedback and frequencies made this incredible singing noise. It was beautiful, but deafening.

When did you start listening to bands like that?
I was quite late with guitar music. When I was a teenager, I was into R&B and hip hop. My sister was into drum & bass and U.K. garage and all that kind of stuff, so I kind of took CDs from her room and was involved with that, but I think when I first started listening to shoegaze I was about 17 or 18.
 
What about it appealed to you?
I suppose like the delicacy of it and the intimacy as well.

Shoegaze isn't unlike R&B in that way.
Oh God yeah. Some of the best R&B is really minimal.


I can hear shoegaze and hip hop elements in a song like "Be Good" but how does R&B fit in? With the R&B the influence of that is vocally, there are lots of indie singers that could have these crossover soulful voices because they actually sing it's not yelping into a microphone. Julian Casablancas for instance has a great voice. I guess Morrissey as well has got a good voice.

Morrissey is a comparison that comes up a lot for you in the press, why do you think that is?
I don’t think we sound anything a like. I think the reason that people say that is because I sing with my own accent. And as soon as you’re an English band that doesn’t sing in an American accent, you are someone else.

And they seem to suggest you're also gloomy? I just find it funny because I’m really not a miserable person, I’m really silly.

Where does a mistake like that come from? I think people can’t really work out what it is. I think because my voice is so low, people assume I’m kind of deadpan. And I try to sing higher, but I write songs for where my voice is.

But the whole sad thing is kind of a character and even when I do try to write happy songs, they do come out a bit bittersweet.



When did you first start writing?
I was 13 or 14 and started writing on the piano and it was straight up pop ballad kinds of things. I was listening to a lot of Alicia Keys. It was cheesy and really teenage. 

And then I picked up the guitar when I was 15. My friend showed me a few chords and my mom showed me a few chords too, she could play Buddy Holly.
I was in lots of bands that weren’t mine where I was asked to be the singer. Like from the age of 15 I was in bands and learning how to do that.

Was there any frustration with playing in a band versus solo because there was more to worry about? I think when you’re young, it was a lot easier because we all went to the same school, we all finished school at 4 o’clock, and none of us had girlfriends or real lives, so it was like 'yeah lets go practice and do that gig.' So in a way it was kind of easy, but it didn’t feel like that at the time.

And I started to realize that I really knew what I wanted and I had to sing other people’s lyrics which frankly I didn’t like and it wasn’t the best.

So was performing the plan then or did you want to go to school?
I did the whole art school route; I thought it was the promised land. You read about art school and you read about punk and all the great bands that went there and you think 'God that must be such an exciting place, you can dress how you want and you can just express yourself and do what you want.'

Of course that wasn’t the reality. Capitalism has kind of taken such a stranglehold on any kind of individual education system. It’s no longer a school of art, it’s actually a university which the semantics of are completely different. It's incredibly prescriptive and academic and in a way you can’t really call it art school anymore.

I definitely had a hard time there and that was definitely when I started doing the Oscar stuff. I was so pissed off with art school; I was just spending all my time at home writing and coming in occasionally and showing some work and sort of bullsh***ing.

Was the early music you were doing as Oscar for school at all or just an escape from all the bulls***? It was to get away from all the bulls***... I was kind of going through this conflict with everybody around me saying 'why the f*** can’t I come in and play my album or play my songs?' Because it’s as much art as whatever the painting is or whatever the installation is. So it was definitely the kind of escape from that.


How much of that was a conscious decision?
I was tired of straight indie music going to see boys with guitars. The whole thing was boring and tired. It was all either super electronic or complete rip offs. I wanted to exaggerate the fact that I’m an avid record collector. In a way the art school was helpful in that it makes you quite cynical and does strengthen all your references and makes you look at things in or out of context.

The music came about because I wanted to write pop songs, but I’m real, I’m in a bedroom. I’m not a manufactured artist, so I just kind of did it the way I knew best. I played around with lots of old school drum loops because I didn’t have a drumkit and couldn’t make a noise in my bedroom because I live in a flat. So it was the easiest way to do it. All late at night; just drum loops and singing really quietly into a microphone.

Lo-fi approach intentional or because you don’t have the equipment for it?
It’s not intentional. I think if I had a proper drumkit and I knew how to record it and I had studio time, of course I would love to have the songs fully realized. And in a way the songwriting has been improving. Now the songs I’m writing are kind of like album tracks and they do need a kind of high-fidelity.

I think the next thing is to release a new single or EP. Just keep building it.

Oscar's debut EP 146b is out now on Smalltown Supersound imprint Brown Rice.

"Come Down Softly"- Lemonade

Occasionally with song titles I'm stuck in a loop wondering which came first, the title or the song itself? I know usually the title will come last, the Beatles' "Yesterday" was famously demoed as "Scrambled Eggs," but in some cases the music seems tailored to the title. I'm convinced Built to Spill's Doug Martsch figured out how to get the bands guitars to echo into infinity after scrawling the title "Randy Described Eternity" on a piece of paper. The most likely reason for "Anarchy in the U.K."'s sound is that the mangy Sex Pistols wanted to match the calamity suggested in the rebellious title.

Brooklyn electronic pop outfit Lemonade's new song "Come Down Softly" belongs in this category. "Come Down Softly" suggests a slow, feathery fall onto a mattress and that's the mood Callan Clendenin and company fashion here. Clendenin's voice hardly rises above a whisper. Alex Pasternak's drums alternate between thump and unobtrusive ticking. The group's tropical flavored synthesizers wash over everything like waves from a lagoon. At a critical juncture Clendenin soulfully murmurs "a place that I know, this time I'm not alone, the hair bangs on your shoulder breaks my fall." There's no gigantic drop-off, just a gentle ride into the sunset.



Lemonade's third LP Minus Tide is out on Cascine September 9.

"Be Good"- Oscar

In a soon to be published interview I did with London indie pop artist Oscar, the subject of 90s NY rap came up in conversation. To be honest the discussion took me aback because I couldn't see how 90s NY rap fit into his tranquil pop approach. It was a scene with a prominent group that once threatened "Hit you in the face so hard that your nose bone goes into your brain," which is light years away from "I was talking to you last night and I thought that you were quite nice." Rap's "Mecca" was a cold, desolate place then while Oscar's work now, even at its weariest, is still inviting. 

His latest effort "Be Good" manages to work in the muscular drums of 90s NY rap and not frighten anyone. If DJ Premier had smoked a bit of weed before recording the drums for "Kick in the Door" he might've come up with what Oscar has here. After a "Funky Drummer" style intro, they settle into a lazy hopscotch rhythm that wonderfully matches Oscar's deep quivering voice. He's not being pressed and can unspool lines like "whatever it is that you want to say to me, well say it to my face, today," on his own time. Such a leisurely pace allows him to think more, to open up and be honest. "I want you to be good to me, if you could, we could be so sweet," he croons over the chorus' jangly background guitar and blooping keys. It's one of the boldest declarations the burgeoning artist has made yet. One that might not have happened if the confidence of 90s NY rap didn’t creep into his world.



Oscar's debut EP 146b is now out on Smalltown Supersound imprint Brown Rice.