Who They Are: A trio that formed in Los Angeles and moved to Nashville, undoubtedly because the country music capital of the world was a better match for their retro, rockabilly-tinged style. They've been churning out music with admirable regularity over the course of the past few years. Wicked Will is their fifth full-length.

First Impressions: Punchy, smart and good. There are sharp lyrics throughout and a fine driving force to the music. It's the pure definition of a solid rock 'n' roll album, nothing bothering to try and reinvent something that's been dandy as can be since it was invented in the first place.

Who They (She) Are (Is): St. Vincent is the performing name used by Annie Clark. A former member of the Polyphonic Spree, Clark released her first album under the St. Vincent name in 2007. Entitled Marry Me, it was a big success on the cool kid circuit, but not as impressive as her follow-up, 2009's Actor, which was one of those albums that everyone who follows indie music was required to have an opinion on. Actor garnered enough acclaim, that Clark undoubtedly felt a level of pressure she was previously spared of as she worked on the material that would become her third album, Strange Mercy.

First Impressions: This is pretty great. Part of the association undoubtedly comes from Clark's lovely vocals, but the album consistently reminded me of the sort of inside-out pop wonders Kate Bush used to make before her inner kookiness took over completely. If this pop music had followed this route instead of rushing salivating to the canned nonsense that now dominates Top 40 radio, it would have been a better outcome for us all.

Who They Are: A six-person band out of Portland, Oregon (which leads to the obligatory hat-tip to the wondrous and famous jupiterjuniper) that's just released their sixth album overall (can that be right?) and third on Sub Pop (I know that's right).

First Impressions: It sometimes sounds like the kind of album Wilco would have made if they'd kept treading the path they cut with Being There, although it harkens more overtly to nineteen-seventies classic rock radio than Jeff Tweedy and company ever did. It winds up fairly hit or miss, but I think it's best when it fully embraces the temptation to wallow in retro excess. "Street Fighting Sun" is the clearest example of this, but a less willfully wild track like "Astronaut" accomplishes the same satisfying result. It didn't totally grab me right away, but I have a feeling this one might grow on me.

Who They Are: An indie rock quintet that benefited from launching out of the painfully cool locale of Brooklyn. Their first album was one of those insanely buzzy debuts that inspired swarms of admires, followed by, almost inevitably, an equally impassioned legion of detractors. Hysterical is the band's third full-length effort, released about four years after the fairly underwhelming Some Loud Thunder.

First Impressions: The vocals from lead singer Alec Ounsworth kept reminding me of Rufus Wainwright, although mostly in the lower held tones, the portions of Wainwright's songs before the emotive soft growl gives way to falsetto floridness. Overall, it's a nice pop album with little bits of forced grit into the sound, not unlike the Killers if someone had convinced them to back away a bit from adding the Duran Duran candy apple coating to everything they kid. I mean that as a compliment. Honest.

Who They Are: Loney, Dear is the pseudonym of Swedish musician Emil Svanängen. His first album in the States came out in early 2007, and I remember it as one of the albums on the new music shelf at WPRK that I returned to regularly during my last months there. It was just sturdy, one of those excellent radio records that delivers a good song wherever the metaphorical needle was dropped (the laser was directed?). Nothing stood out, but everything was good enough to trip my little mental flag that sent me regularly returning.

First Impressions: My gosh, this record is dull. Svanängen favors lush, orchestral pop on this outing and many of the songs swell into sonic puffballs of languid nothingness. It certainly might grow on me, but it certainly didn't excite me the first time around.

Who They Are: I Break Horses is a Swedish duo: Maria Lindén and Fredrik Balck. Their officially bio states that they met online when they were both patronizing a website targeted at hypochondriacs, but that sounds to me like some of that rock star cheeky misdirection akin to Jack and Meg White's old "sibling" relationship. They put out a couple singles before working their way up to a full-length debut, the title of which I really love (given the band name, of course; by itself, the title is admittedly nothing special).

First Impressions: It's the sweetest darn shoegaze you're ever likely to here, thanks in large part to Lindén's vocals which have some of that airy, spectral quality I usually associate with Cocteau Twins. But the music is gentle, too. I've seen some write-ups that compare it to My Bloody Valentine, but I Break Horses rarely generates the same force. It's floaty instead of pummeling. Sometimes it's a little too flowy for my tastes, leaning on a twinkly sonic prettiness that can become numbing across a whole album. In smaller doses, though, it's pretty nice.

Who They Are: A trio from Miami that gets described as being part of every raunchy rock 'n' roll subset in the Rolling Stone encyclopedia: garage, punk, glam, on and on. Glazin' is their second full-length effort, following a debut in 2009.

First Impressions: It's tough and cool, all right, leaning on "oh oh" and "whoa whoa" in the lyrics in a way that I honestly appreciate. Sometimes rock music is at its best when it's at its most primal, and indulging in those pure nonsense syllables to fill out the song can be the best way to burrow down to that. The guitar sounds is agreeably dirty, but it seems more workmanlike than something that's really trying to pin anyone to the back wall with the sheer force of it. One of the songs includes the line "I've got a feelin' that you're listening to Zeppelin," and the band sounds like the sort of grinding seventies outfit that would have been left behind as most rock fans embraced the bloated pomposity of bands like Led Zeppelin. It's good stuff.

Who They Are: English trio that formed in London in 2008. Lead vocalist and guitarist John Arthur Webb and bassist Kevin Hendrick were in a noise rock band called Pre, and they met drummer Robin Silas Christian while all three of them were working at a record store, which is the sort of origin stories that all bands should really have. They signed to Sub Pop and released their debut full-length in 2010.

First Impressions: While I admittedly tend to default to my little college radio golden age in the late 1980s and early 1990s as my primary starting reference point, I can't shake the sense that Endless Now sounds like any number of solid-enough straight-ahead rock efforts that moved methodically through our rotation, getting plenty of airplay when it was new and then being promptly forgotten about by the staff when it moved into the main library. They have nice hooks, sharp musicianship and leave almost no impression. It'd be decent radio filler, but still only filler.

1996: Madison's Hotel Washington burns down

In February of 1996, I was working weekend overnights at a commercial alternative radio station in Madison, Wisconsin. It was pretty rare, then, that I'd get visitors on a Sunday morning. That's when I was catching up on my sleep, after all. So it was a surprise when a couple of friends showed up, roused me from my bed and announced gravely "We've got to show you something." I was living on East Washington Avenue at the the time, making the trip to our destination markedly easy. We just drove the few blocks up to the capital, looped around it, and headed a short distance down West Washington. We got out of the car and stood along with several other similarly forlorn residents in front of the smoldering remains of the Hotel Washington.

In it's first life, it was a massive hotel, conveniently located near the Milwaukee Road railroad depot. As that became a far less viable business model, the place needed to transform, and it did exactly that. Rodney Scheel was the man who transformed it, buying the building in the mid-seventies. By most accounts, the first business he opened in the reconfigured facility was a gay bar that bore an especially convenient version of his first name. Rod's was a major success and helped spawn the opening of several other bars and clubs within the building, including The Barber's Closet, The New Bar and, the place nearest to my heart, Club de Wash.

I didn't get to go there much, but it still loomed large. When I finally found my way to the radio station that played good music during high school, the concerts they were touting most breathlessly always seemed to take place there, and I was equally envious of those with ready access to the club when I checked tour schedules from my close but still too distance perch at college in Stevens Point. Finally, when I moved to Madison after college, I could go see show there, except for the little problems of not enough time and not enough money. That may explain why the first concert I saw there was the understandably forgotten band Dink. I got free tickets through the radio station. I believe the last show I saw there, just a few weeks before the fire, was Ben Folds Five. In retrospect, I wish I'd been one of those people who was willing to check out anything and everything they had, a patron who practically haunts the place. The couple of times I went there and just sat at the bar for a bit, usually grabbing a beer or two while I purchased tickets for an upcoming event, I plainly liked the vibe of the place. It wasn't trendy or edgy. It was simply a good bar wedged into an odd corner of an old building. Like a lot of places in that part of the country, it felt like people making the best of something, both preserving the past and moving forward in an unfussy way.

Rodney Scheel didn't live to see his building disappear from the landscape. He died at the too-young age of 39 in 1990, a victim of the AIDS epidemic. He didn't go through the hopes and promises of rebuilding that were never realized, and he never got to see his landmark venue reduced to nothing more than a historical marker bolted to an outdoor pay phone at a gas station.

It was a terrific place that truly typified the diversity, openness and community spirit of the marvelous city where I was born. It's not the only landmark that's gone, but it may be the one that means the most to me.

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And with that, one fire just may light another. Tomorrow I depart for a little trip. I'm not going far at all, but I'm deliberately cutting myself off from internet access. With limited ability to pre-schedule posts on Livejournal, I'm going to let this space go dark for the next week. And then...well, we'll see.

I'm hardly the first to note the ghost town feel to Livejournal these days. If anything I'm woefully late in acknowledging it. Nearly everything that's been posted here for the past couple of years has also gone up over at my Coffee for Two blog, which was initially a sort of insurance site, but has increasingly felt more like the place my material belongs at. I've been mulling sticking with that spot exclusively for a while, and this necessary layoff seems like it might be a good time to start. For one thing, if I've done things accurately, I won't miss a day of posting over there, despite my week-long absence.

I still have a lot of nostalgia for this space, which is amusing given my prolonged resistance to inquiet's relentless efforts to get me to sign up. I may very well find something else to do with it, or I may decide that double-posting in two spots is okay after all. For now, consider Jelly-Town! to be on hiatus. I hope you except my invitation to follow my words at Coffee for Two instead.

#42 -- The Fabulous Baker Boys (Steve Kloves, 1989)
Michelle Pfeiffer had been working regularly in television and film for ten years before The Fabulous Baker Boys came around. And she'd certainly been noticed, giving performances of increasing prominence and accomplishment, including a justly Oscar nominated turn in Dangerous Liaisons the year prior. Yet when she first stumbled through the door as Susie Diamond, introducing herself to the piano playing siblings of the film's title by barking out "Goddammit!" as she fell to the ground, it was uncannily like seeing a star flare into life.

A compelling argument for the merits of The Fabulous Baker Boys can be made by doing little more than writing a mash note to Pfeiffer's performance. She completely commands the screen, artfully showing the ways in which Susie's toughness is a actually a manifestation of her vulnerability and uncertainty. Those qualities aren't just intertwined, they're effectively one and the same. She's sexy, smart, brash, hard and lovable in the role. And it may be the first strong example of Pfeiffer developing an arc in which her character changes in a measurable fashion and yet is clearly the same person at the end as she was at the beginning. It's a surprisingly rare achievement--most great performances focus so much on the change that they forget the unifying details--and Pfeiffer does it better than most.

But there's more to The Fabulous Baker Boys. The plentiful accolades piled on Pfieffer at the time--she basically won every Best Actress prize except for the Oscar, because this was still an era when Academy voters were terribly susceptible to sentiment in marking their ballots--obscured just how good Jeff Bridges is as Jack Baker. He's the more talented pianist of the two siblings and the lifelong process of ignoring his artistic instincts to soldier on in the dispiriting lounge act with his brother has hollowed him out. Bridges doesn't stoop to playing him tragically, honing in instead on the corrosive attitude he's developed as a bulwark against his own self-loathing. It gives the relationship that develops between Jack and Susie a stronger grounding than the usual movie motivation of simply pushing the two leads (meaning usually the two prettiest people onscreen) together. As ill-considered as their coupling may be in the context of the film story, it's also wholly understandable. These are two wounded people drawn to one another, holding out some timid hope that being with someone else may finally be something more than a salve for the pain. It may finally provide some actually healing.

The screenplay by Steve Kloves has the depth and insight of a beautifully crafted short story. He masters the art of creating dialogue that is funny, natural and revealing. Nearly every line is telling, carrying a message beyond its face value meaning. He understandably uses his direction to highlight the words, but also shrewdly enhances the mood of the film with the way he captures the environments the characters move through. They're not seedy and rundown, but are instead largely the benignly neglected lounges and hotel ballrooms of a bygone era of glamor. This land of fresh tarnish is somehow even more depressing that places that have been battered beyond recognition. The long, slow fade of cultural classiness suits the dilemma of watching time slip away faced by the characters. The whole film is cast in a lovely, melancholy tone.

But seriously, that Michelle Pfeiffer performance really is sensational.