Album: The Pinkerton Raid - The Pinkerton Raid

The Pinkerton Raid's new self-titled album is a fused offering of modern soft pop indie and the gritty blues rock that was pop circa 1970 on the British underground scene. With hands in pockets and eyes sullenly fixed on the ground to its feet, The Pinkerton Raid is guided along its path by the echoes of electric guitar, rhythms of a delightful piano, and a chorus of harmonies wisping through the tree tops above. Leaving from the darkened urgency of opener "Santa Rosa", feeling its way through the psychedelic space of the midland tracks, and arriving at the heart felt sensitivity of the last song, "Lullaby, Butterfly"...The Pinkerton Raid knows when to walk and when to run. Exercising the arrangements of a music store's worth of instrumentation, these songs make their way with a lope and a trot, then a stop and a charge.

Most of the album is notably solemn and range from pure ballad (e.g. "Could You Wait") to the downright Floyd-ish "Piano Queen"...but one is an escape artist. "Life of the Party" unbinds itself from the album's somber reflective tone to reveal depth in the form of a magically fun pop tune. "Life of the Party" recounts why we love the weekend with a dancey story of a dinner party crowded with those joyously half inebriated and delightfully drinking the rest of the way there. As it was also my personal favorite of the collection, I was inspired to nearly having the next such party of my own planned and anticipated by the song's 4:00 mark. On an album with so much variety it was refreshing yet not surprising that the stand-out track was molecularly different than the rest, but take not my word for it...stream the album and see which takes you the furthest; stream it here

The Pinkerton Raid releases The Pinkerton Raid this Saturday May 26th with a performance at The Casgah in Durham with sweet folky pop sweet Birds and Arrows, and softly seductive Ashville pop act Stephaniesid. --Carrboro Ninja

Show Review: Skylar Gudasz and the Ugly Girls

Nightlight, Chapel Hill
June 9, 2011

Summer in Chapel Hill's Alt Country music culture is announced by sun dresses and cowboy boots, trumpeting along the edge of a warm Thursday evening last week rode two dozen such cherubs who winged down the ally way and into the warm red glow of Nightlight. Attracted by the smooth witness of folk rock music and the cheer of a gathering they alighted with song on their lips and sparkle in their eyes. As I arrived at their heels, the wonderfully descript in form and name Skylar Gudasz and the Ugly Girls were rallying in mid set. I joined in and found my stand within the half circle of couches and bodies which had formed about the stage filling the room with clam cool demeanor. Not a chance encounter by any stretch, Skylar has of late been on my too-see list for a couple of good whyfor. Their debut album Two Headed Monster was recorded at Arbor Ridge Studios by Jeff Crawford and given the album's penchant for hazy retro vintage touch and feel I'll hedge that Crawford as well lent tutelage in production. Arbor Ridge has carved itself into that extra generational Alt Country vibe with which Carborro and Chapel Hill flows and their brand is worth seeking anytime you are on the street. Upon two streams of the album now, I've come to the same end of drifting into a film grain daydream of 1970's mellow drama cinema. Perhaps Gudasz' powerful yet delicate rasp is akin to the vanguard divas of the classic rock era, or maybe the story book lyrics and complex vintage arrangements call upon the past...something there is triggering nostalgia. And with that album shimmering on the merch stand behind the crowd and the stage, their live performance ranged like an untamed yearling, loose from the halter and passing both modish rockers and heartfelt ballads alike toward a galloping escape. Folk rock is at its best when it carries you away to experience something you wouldn't have without it. Skylar Gudasz and the Ugly Girls have demonstrated this quality on stage and in their recordings. --Carrboro Ninja

post script
Skylar Gudasz and the Ugly Girls perform next at Open Eye Cafe in Carrboro, NC on June 25th 2011. Jeff Crawford and Liz Janes share the billing. 8 pm.

Andrea Connolly lead voice for local darling folk trio Birds and Arrows shared the stage with Skyler for a couple songs

adorable left to right; Jess Streeteam, Stacy Thomas, Kala Wolfe, Anna Rose Beck

Album Review: Birds and Arrows - We're Gonna Run

Since the curtains were drawn and the stage lights illuminated on Chapel Hill trio Birds and Arrows, their audience has been stalked with dramatic moments within subtle deliveries. With a scaled down drum kit steadily strummed with brushes and thumping a soft beat behind a single yet brightly shining acoustic guitar and a low slung cello, Birds and Arrows' instrumentation is as minimalist in design as is the three piece arrangement of musicians whom take to them. Their trade-mark move has been the entrancing rhythm of this soft play jarred and pushed by the excitable drive of singer Andrea Connolly's powerful vocal and in their latest body of work We're Gonna Run, these elements harmony together once again for delicate yet defensible performances.

At full swing, this work is an articulated ballet of keen-edged acoustic strings lifting acute piano key taps in and around heart broken falsettos. Exploring their penchant for describing the longing side of love, We're Gonna Run finds Birds and Arrows explaining away the pains of falling in and falling out with softly whispered remedies mixed into their simple, catchy versus and soothing harmonies. The album's falling out tales are best characterized as Connolly chokes up and cries through the unlucky-in-love "Time Alone" ...a track haunted with hurting emotions and recaptured with brilliant rhythm. Pretty pop gems "Arrows in the Air" and "Another Life" are more steps in the albums intricate dance of folk confession and round the performance with a sense of satisfaction, for Birds and Arrows that they produced a beautiful album and for audience...that we got their best. --Carrboro Ninja

We're Gonna Run is out May 7th on 307 Knox with a release party at The Local 506 in Chapel Hill, but you can see them this weekend Saturday April 23rd on the patio at Sadlack's Heroes for a highly recommended show with the highly regarded Where the Buffalo Roamed.

Birds and Josh Starmer and Arrows: or, How Andrea and Pete Learned to Stop Worrying and Drink Barleywine

Carolina Brewery - Pittsboro
May 22, 2010

It's been two weeks since this show, but my memory's not completely shot just yet. Give me a few more weeks guzzling peroxide and eating raw catfish and it may be a different story. Out with it...

The rains hadn't been gone long... but long enough. Pete and Andrea brought their friend, cellist-about-town Josh Starmer, to join them at the first of the Brewery's summer music series concerts. In Pittsboro, as in Chapel Hill, when you say "the Brewery," it means a place that brews its own beer and serves unimaginably tasty burgers. Their hot dogs are no joke either. Their homemade potato chips, if you can get them fresh from the frier, are about as close to religion as I care to tread. Don't get me started on what "the Brewery" means in Raleigh. That lousy place has as much to do with craft beer as a... hold it... I can come up with an analogy here... as a day care? Yeah, we'll go with the day care analogy. That one fits Raleigh's Brewery pretty well.

Close to 7:30 on a 7:00 start time, and it looked like the rain would hold back. Biblical torrents had hit Pittsboro, making loose clay of the red soil that is surprisingly good for cultivation, but the sun was now shining through fitful mountains of cloud as they marched frantically with the wind. Andrea, Pete, and Josh had held back, watching the skies for signs of anger, but none came and they got started. I was interested to see how a band I was accustomed to seeing play regular rock shows - 40-45 minute sets, natch - would do with 2 1/2 hours to kill. Quite the challenge, as the Brewery's time slots had more in common with cover band set times than original bands. But they did it, only pausing briefly to cover a Genesis song before rolling back into their own material.

I had no idea how much of their own stuff they had under their belt, but it makes sense that Andrea and Pete would be so prolific. They're married, Chrissakes. They have all kinds of time to make music together. Plus, their other project (Graveyard Fields).

I didn't think to take notes, so I don't know which songs were played in what set, but I do know that they broke out some new jams - and they're in a sweet new direction. The crowd wasn't what I was used to, a lot more people eating supper and treating the music as their background, but they knew how to work with it. And a drunken philosopher, not far from me, was trying to talk people into boycotting BP. The people weren't arguing with him, but he was to that point of idiotic inebriation where he figured everything was cause for argument. "No, maaaan... just do this one ffffthing for me, kay? No, 'm ser-ee-yusss...." and he babbled briefly and distractedly about how the new generation "doesn't know how to make music, maaaaan..." even as one of Chapel Hill's finest pop duos was kicking ass, taking names, and ruling the monkey bars on every playground within a twenty mile radius. But he can be forgiven for his blather, career alcoholics need an ear every now and then.

This was a fantastic show, especially for people with a love for Birds and Arrows (guilty!) as they played most of their record, as well as most of the Woodgrain Heart EP, if not all of it. And this is a band perfectly at home on an outdoor stage. In fact, they may inhabit an outdoor space better than an indoor one - as their music blends so well into the natural world. Much like all human endeavor, what they do must answer to the forces of time and nature - so they write and play accordingly. Because, even as they were finishing, there were warning flashes in the great distance as lightning asserted itself, illuminating the billowing caverns of faraway stormclouds. And though no more storms came that night, the presence of these big, dark clouds on our evening's periphery were almost directly opposite to Birds and Arrows music: which is a small corner of hope and civilization planted in the overgrown weeds of a graveyard. And just because the cops say you can't play there doesn't mean you shouldn't. Seriously. That's what the dead would have wanted, right? For people to come and spend quality time with them without weeping or getting histrionic or reflective (boring! useless!). The spirits of the departed probably want to see people acting like they're having fun, so it makes much more sense to play hide and seek or to make out among the tombstones than to bring some lousy bouquet of flowers and look sad.

So when, on a rare warm day in Winter, Pete and Andrea got kicked out of the Carrboro cemetery for picnicking there, they wrote a song about it. But this wasn't their life inspiring their music - this was their music being their life. And if that's not genuine, I don't know what is. -Wild Bill Heroic