County Tracks

Near-Death Experience Gives Street Busker New Purpose on Debut EP

Mar 282017

Though he’s only 22 years-old, Vermont songwriter Erin Cassels-Brown has packed in a lot of living since he nearly died.

When he was in college, a burst appendix sent his body into septic shock, landing him in the hospital for an extended stay – he says he left “12 pounds lighter and a million life thoughts heavier.” His brush with death made him reevaluate his purpose, dropping out of college and leaving work at his father’s solar company to pursue music full time.

“I decided to get on a bus and try to be a street performer for a while,” he says. “I went to Asheville, North Carolina and Charlottesville, Virginia. I didn’t make much money, but I made some amazing friends and it gave me a new lease on life, both physically and emotionally.”

Cassels-Brown traveling around busking on the street, trying to scrape together a life from tips tossed into his guitar case. On his debut EP Northern Lights, Vol. 1, the song “Virginia, Bring Me Light” traces his Kerouac-ian journey. “That might be the saddest song on the album,” he says. “It certainly doesn’t include the happy ending of the real life adventure, but I was trying to write from the place I was in right before I got on the southbound bus.” Continue reading »

Concrete Jumpers Doesn’t Mind If You Call Him Emo

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Mar 242017

In the early 2000s, “emo” was a label that few musicians wanted stuck to them. Even Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carraba – as much the poster boy for the genre as anyone – disavowed it. “I didn’t think it was an appropriate name for grouping us together, but it stuck,” he said a few years back. “It’s like the term ‘hipster’ that was very cool but is now meant as an insult. That’s what happened with ’emo.'”

Carrabba prefers the less charged “singer-songwriter,” which would also apply to Vermont musician Sam Wiehe – but he doesn’t mind if you call him emo. “I know it has a certain stigma and can be attached to ‘sad boys’, but to me, emo music just means music that is emotional,” Wiehe says. “And that really is all I wanna make.”

The 20-year old Wiehe records as Concrete Jumpers – or, rather, recorded. His new album Dear Madison is his last under that name. It’s a breakup album filled with heart-on-sleeve emotion and sometimes devastatingly personal lyrics. So…emo. Continue reading »

How Levon Helm Battled an Ice Storm to Drum for Bow Thayer

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Mar 172017

Classic Vermont Albums digs up great records from Vermont’s musical past.

Bow Thayer’s Wikipedia page reads like a who’s-who of New England’s rock and roots scene over the past 25 years. His first Boston-based band Seven League Boots shared bills with Fugazi and Beck. When that band broke up, his new trio Still Home toured with Pearl Jam, who opened for them! “We didn’t even know who they were – nobody knew who they were,” Thayer told Mountain Times last month.

As the 1990s progressed, Thayer moved away from grunge (as did the rest of the country) and towards Americana and bluegrass, swapping cargo shorts and headbanging for slide guitar and banjo. He cycled through a few bands in that mold – Elbow, Jethro, The Benders, all popular in the New England area – before finally releasing the first album under his own name in 2004. A tight alt-country songwriter had by this point fully replaced the grunge guitarist, complete with mandolin flourishes and references to rivers and conifer trees (literal roots music, in that case). His musical touchstones moved from Nirvana to The Band – though, frankly, he loved the Band even when he was touring with Pearl Jam.

“I was a big fan of the Band,” Thayer says today. “During the eighties I was uninspired by the plastic and over-processed music coming through the airwaves. The Band was accessible and still playing around the area where I grew up. I think I used the lyric to ‘Life Is a Carnival’ as a senior quote in my high school yearbook.” Continue reading »

Gillian Welch Meets Annie Wilkes in a Folk Song About a Milkman Obsession

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Mar 162017

Roots music fans know that when you’re listening to an album by “Gillian Welch,” you’re really listening to the musical partnership of Welch and her longtime collaborator David Rawlings. Ditto for an album released under the name “Dave Rawlings Machine.” Rawlings and Welch share one of the strongest and most enduring musical partnerships in Americana music. Their albums arrive infrequently though, so Welch and Rawlings fans impatient for more would do well to discover Vermont-based duo Cricket Blue.

Last year we named Cricket Blue’s “Angela Carter” one of the Best Vermont Songs of 2016 and they’re already back with a best-of-2017 contender. Though they haven’t released a studio version yet, “The Milkman” is available via a beautiful live video (below). Continue reading »

How Craigslist and a Merle Haggard Wallet Inspired One of the Year’s Best Indie-Rock EPs

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Mar 142017

Clever Girls’ debut EP Loose Tooth is only 14 minutes long, but there’s a whole lot of living packed into those 14 minutes.

Frontwoman Diane Jean first met bassist Winfield Holt and drummer Rob Slater in 2015 via a Craigslist ad (she was conscripted to sing harmonies for Slater’s other band 1881, who we also love). Jean had just left Boston for the tiny town of Waitsfield, Vermont, wanting to get away from stressful city life. As she sings in “We Tried,” “I tried the city it swallowed me up / And my friends up and die when they take too much / I tried the city but I had enough.” Continue reading »

Hear an Epic Post-Rock Song About ‘Game of Thrones’ Fandom

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Mar 072017

In the era of so-called “peak TV,” no show has been peek-ier than Game of Thrones. So it’s no surprise that the show has inspired its own musical tributes, from zany covers of the theme song to YouTube to artists like Sigur Rós and Mastodon cameoing in the show itself.

Now, a Vermont rock band called The Mountain Says No has recorded their own Game of Thrones song titled, appropriately enough, “Game of Thrones.” But to make it even more meta, it’s really a tribute to the fandom surrounding shows like Game of Thrones and how a share love of a show can bring people together in real life (Breaking Bad gets a shoutout too). Continue reading »

Four New Doom Metal EPs to Get You Through the Winter

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Mar 012017

Our favorite album of 2016 was a one-track doom metal record, from a Vermont band that sadly broke up right after releasing it. Maybe bleak winter weather inspires heavy and somber music though, because a glut of fellow doom merchants up north have already stepped in to fill the void. We’ve picked the four best, strong stoner and Sabbath vibes to help blast away the gloom. Continue reading »

Ambient Producer Foamek Channels Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada on Two Haunting New Tracks

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Feb 272017

Last month, Pitchfork posted a massive list of “The 50 Best IDM Albums of All Time.” That stands for “Intelligence Dance Music” for those not in the loop, and it’s one of those genres like “emo” where few of the category’s musicians think much of the label. But many of the greatest electronic artists – Boards of Canada, Autechre, Aphex Twin – fall under IDM’s amorphous umbrella, blending ambient music with (sometimes subtle) dance beats.

Vermont producer Foamek aka. Jake Davis also works in the IDM wheelhouse. On a pair of new singles, he sounds like a synthesis of all 50 of that list’s albums and some other influences besides besides (he loves Scottish post-punk band Cocteau Twins). Like the best IDM music, his new songs “Someone Has Died” and “Growing Up in the Woods” are thoughtful headphones records that might just make you move. Continue reading »

Unearthing the Legacy of Mike and the Ravens, the Northeast’s Greatest Lost ’60s Rock Band

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Feb 242017

The only surviving photo of early Mike and the Ravens. L-R: Peter Young, Mike Brassard,
Steve Blodgett, Northfield town chairman Earl Rinker, Bo Blodgett, Eddie Jones

Late one Saturday night in 1962, the window of the Community Church in Stowe, Vermont creaked open. Three teenagers clamored through, dragging a box behind them. They climbed up to the church steeple, which contained the building’s sound system. Every day at noon it blanketed the town with a recording of tolling bells (despite a bell tower, the church did not have any real bells).

The teenagers opened their box and slipped a different recording out of its sleeve, a vinyl set of covers of the latest frat-rock hits: “Get a Job” by The Silhouettes, “The Stroll” by the Diamonds, and a handful more. They removed the tolling-bells record, put in their rock album, and pressed play.

They say the rock and roll woke up people as far as six miles away. The boys scurried home in the darkness as Bill Justis’s twangy “Raunchy” filled the streets.

Stowe being a small town, this prank did not prove to be the unsolved crime of the century. When the ringleader’s mother heard about it the next morning, she immediately pegged her son as the culprit. He was promptly arrested and forced to go back to school, breaking up his band. Continue reading »

This Music Video Hauntingly Depicts Depression Taking Over

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Feb 222017

Tyler Daniel Bean describes his first music video’s concept succinctly: “When you try to make a video about what happens when depression takes over the house and you decide the best way to show it is by dancing around in your underwear for 9 hours and then cutting it down to the length of a song.”

Like certain David Lynch films, the video for “Willow II” gives a series of everyday scenes – a man making coffee, eating breakfast, aforementioned underwear dancing – an ominous tone once you notice the protagonist’s empty stare. He appears to be living in a picturesque forest-cabin setting without noticing or engaging. As the images progressively get less mundane – his bandmates begin rocking out around him, most notably – his blank gaze remains the same.

Like the record it comes from, On Days Soon To Pass (one of our favorite albums of 2016), the “Willow II” video explores Bean’s struggles with depression. In this case, the video concept came from a metaphor he learned in therapy: Continue reading »