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Beach Casual Food & Attitude
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ALL YOU GAN EAT GRAB LEGS
EVERY TUESDAY s 19.95
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THURSDAY
Oysters/Half Shell, Steamed
(by the dozen or half)
Peel N Eat Shrimp (by the lb.)
Pried Catfish
Bluegrass music 5pm-9pm
Every Thursday!
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LIVE MUSIC
Saturday, July 25
TONGUE & GROOVE
Free Wi-Fi Since 1994
- Catering & Private Parties
Mon-Sun 11:30am-Until • Plenty of Parking
1080 Baxter St. • 706-850-5858
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MUSIC GO ROUNDS
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BfiiMANDBLL
Artificial Fire
Zedtone
Starting out more than a decade
ago slinging heavily noirish rock and
roll torch songs, Los Angeles song
writer Eleni Mandell came across as the
saucy, flirtatious lovechild of PJ Harvey
and Tom Waits. Her writing and perfor
mance evolved, and she later cogjured
classic Nashville sounds on 2003’s
Country for True Lovers, sauntered
through jazz on the following year's EP
Maybe, Yes, and sang conventional
songs-for-guitar on 2007‘s Miracle of
Five. These stylistic departures have
been experiments for Mandell, who
explores different emotions, ideas
and sides of her personality through
her music; through it all, Mandell has
rarely fallen flat—her past two releases
have found her treading water —and
her vintage leanings have avoided the
sticky easiness of kitsch.
The terrific Artificial Fire, Mandeb's
seventh full-length album, synthesizes
a number of her disparate interests
without seeming scattershot. While
a tune like “The Right Side’ offers
summery, AM radio rock and roll, that
mood expands into the more energetic
“Bigger Burn" and nuzzles up to the
fiery "Cracked," a wry kiss-off of a
song. "I Love Planet Earth" is a haunt-
ingly cinematic rocker full of atmo
sphere and mood. Backed by bassist
Ryan Feves, drummer Kevin Fitzgerald
and guitarist Jeremy Drake, Mandell
sounds more confident and eager than
she has in years.
Artificial Fire is a return to the
pep and eccentricity of Mandeb's
earlier albums; perhaps some of her
time spent in pop-rock side projects
The Grabs and The Living Sisters
has re-energized her songwriting
much as Nick Cave's lusty side band
Grinderman put a strong gust at the
back of his Bad Seeds. Seductive,
dynamic, classy and clever, Mandell
and her tunes are back in top form..
Chris Hassiotis
Eleni Mandell is playing at the Star
Bar in Atlanta on Saturday, July 25.
JUNGOL
Places
Independent Release
Many reviewers criticize prog-rock
bands for being "self-indulgent’ and
"undisciplined" groups that require
reigning in, especially when guitars,
keyboards and drums windln a line
that one has to chase to the tail end of
a “song" that seems endless. While
Jungol’s Places may hop all over the
map stylistically, all of the stops on
its six-track EP are lean. Each accent
and transition seems in its right place,
and the instruments interlock without
awkward gaps. . :
Places is the Atlanta band’s first
release since changing its name from
Liquid Jungle, and it packs a melange
of influences, moods and textures
together in under 30 minutes. The
album begins with Josh Yoder’s Thom
Yorke-ian falsetto soaring above a syn
thesizer and rapid drumming, and the
electronic noodling recalls post- The
Bends Radiohead until the song moves
into stoner sludge and a saxophone
coda. The soothing and poppy "Shock"
features glockenspiel; “Digital Heart"
alternates between the acoustic guitar
picking and attic vocal harmonies of
Grizzly Bear's Yellow House and a foot-
stomping dose of gypsy folk; “Pulling
Teeth" sounds like it comes from a
fuller George W. Bush Cover Band;
and traces of a more straightforward
The Mars Volta pervade the album.
Jungol’s educated restlessness and
Places shifting ground do not nauseate
the listener because no member seems
interested in competing with his band-
mates to showcase his individual talent
on the album. Places is a solid whole
that deserves attention and encourage
ment, not calls for restraint, because
it knows exactly where it is and what
it is doing.
Alex Dimitropoulos
Jungol is playing Rye Bar on
Friday. July 24 and Slopfest at Little
Kings on Saturday, July 25.
MOKE SNOW
Self-titled
Downtown
Though correctly pronounced
like one guy (“Mike"). Miike Snow is
actually three—specifically, New York
musician/producer Andrew Wyatt and
Swedish production duo Christian
Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg.
Though Karlsson and Winnberg (AKA
Bloodshy & Avant) sport award
winning credits with heavy-hitters like
Britney Spears, Madonna and Kylie
Minogue, the full-band work here is far
more progressive.
Despite its synthetic constitution,
their music vibrates with a human •
warmth that electronic pop music
hasn't seen since Erasure. Incidentally,
Wyatt’s gorgeously pliable voice
often sounds like Andy Bell stretched
into the future-soul inflections of TV
on the Radio. Moreover, with three
studio heads in the mix, this record
is a triumph of atmosphere, scale and
arrangement. Its melodies are pregnant
with a heady, dramatic beauty thaft
neither cloying nor twee. Together, it
makes for an alive, concentrated sound
that’s all essence, no fat.
Highlights include the sweet
exuberance of "Animal," the bedtime
transcendence of “Burial" and the
electro-soul of “Black & Blue." But the
clear star is "Song for No One," which
lays atmospheric indie romance atop
a vintage soul jump that Sharon Jones
would get down with. Even in its most
lighthearted, danceable moments,
Miike Snow embodies a dynamic
vision of pop music that radiates with
legitimate depth of emotion, soul and
expression.
Bao Le-Huu
JEFFREY BUTTER
The Garden of Scissors
Lona
Multi-instrumentalist Jeffrey
Butzer, joined here by Sanni
Baumgartner (Dancer vs. Politician),
creates a world that musically exists
in reality, but, you won't find it in your
day-to-day hustle. You’ll find it in the
quiet moments of half-sleep and day
dreams. The Garden of Scissors fea
tures a variation of sprightly, pensive,
melancholy and softly resolute compo
sitions that seem to exist somewhere
between twilight and the first rays of
morning. Ostensibly the soundtrack to
an existing, but not yet photographed,
film script of Butzer’s, there is a certain
cinematic quality to the arrangement
of the pieces. They form a narrative,
although of what I'm not entirely
sure, and are broken into three acts.
Baumgartner's lyrics, which she also
wrote, are handled with steadiness and
care. It’s as if one is being cradled by
her rather than simply being sung to.
Importantly, Butzer plays almost
every scrap of music on the record.
Utilizing piano, accordion and glock
enspiel, to name a very few, he also
handles all percussion. His singularity
of vision is all over The Garden Of
Scissors and. after several listens, you
realize that what he sees is all right
there in front of us and we'd see it, too,
if we ever bothered to pay attention.
Gordon Lamb
THE SOUNDS
Crossing the Rubicon
Original Signal
The previous album, Dying to
Say This to You, may have signaled
the maturation of The Sounds’ pop
confection as more than just straight
new wave revivalism, but this latest one
trumpets their arrival as an upstanding
indie-rock band. Energy and absolute
accessibility have always been the bed
rock of tlje Swedish band’s infectious
music, and they're as vital as ever here
in the seductive dance-rock of “No One
Sleeps When I'm Awake," the romantic
magnificence of "Dorchester Hotel" and
the sparkling irrepressibility of “Home
Is Where Your Heart Is." Though their
songs remain unapologetically catchy,
the arrangements are more sophisti
cated and the instrumentation contin
ues to get less cute. The shining result
is the most honed manifestation of their
well-defined sound to date. Movement
is essential to The Sounds' dance-floor
sensibilities, and this immaculately
crafted record is their most elegant
capture of it yet.
Though they certainly burned
bright when they first arrived earlier
this decade, ultimate endurance was
always in doubt. But smart and steady
evolution like this resoundingly
answers any looming questions. With
action so hot that even CSS is trying to
cop if, The Sounds are some of today's
tightest popsmiths.
Bao Le-Huu
THE MARS VOLTA
Octahedron
Warner Brothers
Octahedron marks the fifth studio
album from West Coast progsters
The Mars Volta. Octahedron could be
considered the band's first “acoustic"
album, but don't be fooled—there's
still plenty of the synth, reverb, frenetic
percussion and time-warped time
signatures that we’ve come to know
and love/hate from the duo. The sound
is definitely more low-key; gone are
Cedric's falsetto screams and Omar's
guitar-wankery. Instead, they've been
replaced to showcase fairly new drum
mer Thomas Pridgen's outrageous
skills and John Frusciante's sonic
guitar playing. Ihe Latin flavor that
saturates the band's other works is
still there in full swing, but the group's
redirection places this prog-rock/metal
sound in the 1970s rather than today.
“With Twilight as My Guide" is one
of the best songs on the album; a dark,
haunting minimal piece that dances
and dissipates like cigarette smoke
hanging in the air. The chorus alone
(Cedric's usual indecipherable jargon)
affects a quiet desperation that’s hard to
shake even after the song is over. The
song “Desperate Graves' sounds more
like something from Amputechture *
or Bedlam in Goliath, guitars start off
at a cantor and race up to a gallop.
The drums come thundering in while
Cedric hollers “In your landfill days,
these are desperate graves," chimes
come in and fade the song out as
Cedric's vocals dim down. This is the
band's most accessible album to date,
and while many fans may not like this
new direction, the “muted" version
of the band will surely draw in some
newcomers. While Octahedron is less
a departure for The Mars Volta and
more of a variation, it’s still interesting
to hear the band “unplugged," and it
will be compelling to see how the band
challenges itself next time around.
Char'ey Lee
14 -llAGPOLt.COM-JULY22,2009