Formed: 2007 in San Francisco

Members: Christopher Owens and Chet “JR” White.

Latest release: Girls’ debut, Album, came out this fall on True Panther records.

Why you care: Girls’ back story is almost too good to be true: Frontman and songwriter Christopher Owens grew up as a member of the Children of God cult in Florida (no, really) and spent much of his childhood as a vagabond, living for stints in Europe and Puerto Rico. It’s rumored his mother was among women followers used by the Children of God to bait potential converts with sex, a method of evangelism called “flirty fishing.” Around the age of 16, he escaped to the states and eventually settled in San Francisco, first joining the band Holy Shit with Ariel Pink and Matt Fishbeck before forming Girls. On Album, Owens spins heartbreaking tales of drugs, girls, and on the incredibly catchy breakthrough “Lust for Life,” a wish list of life’s simple pleasures: “I wish I had a suntan/ I wish I had a pizza and a bottle of wine.” Album is also just a pure joy to listen to, 12 songs of buoyant pop filtered through a hazy lens of old 45s and hungover afternoons.

Sounds like: Brian Wilson and Roy Orbison going on a crazy weekend bender—popping pills, writing love songs, and jamming with Big Star.

For fans of: Jonathan Richman; California pop; anyone who just wants to shake a leg or two.

SEE IT: Girls play Wednesday, Nov. 18, at Doug Fir, with Dominant Legs. 9 pm. $10. 21+.

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IMAGE: Jason Quigley

For a band that’s frequently associated with all things geeky, Jesse and Emily Laney’s North Portland house hardly resembles an ode to Dungeons Dragons. Despite the odd thrift store gnome or tchotchke—and the Darth Vader helmet resting on a keyboard in the front room—it’s relatively tame for a group like World’s Greatest Ghosts, one that sings about evil monsters, magic potions and secret elixirs. Not until you walk down the basement steps to the band’s practice space, lined with concert posters of friends’ bands and K Records staples, does one realize that the house is more of a temple to the synth-rock quintet’s real unabashed obsession: playing live music.

In fact, sitting around a table at NoPo dive the Florida Room, it’s hard to get through a conversation without delving into a discussion of favorite shows and albums. “Have you heard the new Built to Spill yet?” guitarist Casey Laney interrupts. “The first track is one of the best album openers in years.” His brother Jesse quickly jumps in: “I was just going to say the same thing!”

Finishing each others’ sentences is nothing new for World’s Greatest Ghosts. Until recently, the four core members of the band—Casey and his brother Jesse, who sings and plays keyboards, Jesse’s wife and bassist Emily, and guitarist Brandon Anderson—all lived in the same house. It’s that closeness and familial bond that led to frequent arguments, laughs and missteps that inform its debut album, No Magic. Recorded by local producer Skyler Norwood—whose previous credits include work for Blind Pilot, Horse Feathers, and Talkdemonic besides moonlighting in Point Juncture, WA—No Magic is one of the best-sounding and -sequenced local efforts in years. From the opening “Phantastes,” a ringing, anthemic pop song with dual-guitars slithering like a snake trying to make its way out of a labyrinth, to the infectious singalong “On the Shore,” it’s an album that isn’t afraid to shake a leg and have some fun amid the turmoil.

“We don’t always love each other,” Jesse admits. “We’re all family and friends that have gone way back, but we still fight. I think it’s better to be a real band that has problems but still has so much fun than [one] who paints a pretty picture all the time but secretly hates each other.”

The Laneys moved to Portland in 2006 from outside Nashville, Tenn., on recommendation of a few friends and a desire to move away from any scene that emphasizes anything other than the music. Though Jesse jokes it’s actually because of his disdain for the South (“summers there are filled with humidity, ticks and assholes”), the brothers’ upbringing was surrounded by music: Dad Alan Laney is a well-known country and bluegrass songwriter. Still, Nashville and also New Orleans—where Jesse and Emily briefly lived before Hurricane Katrina—lacked anything resembling the Portland underground house show circuit that helped birth the current band.

For most of its first three years in existence, WGG rarely played a show in a traditional venue, instead hitting up almost every basement, living room and arcade in the city. “It was such an incredible experience,” Casey says. “Playing with punk bands and alongside really avant-garde people was rad. I mean, we’re a pop band, and to be submerged in that kind of scene really imparted a lot of good things on us.” Those wide-ranging influences are heard on No Magic, which jumps from synthensizer-led rave-ups (“Magick Words”) to songs like “Loudest Speaker,” the album’s closest thing to a ballad and only moment in its 33-minute run time where things slow down enough for you to catch your breath.

Following the mastering of the record in the spring, World’s Greatest Ghosts also had to pause for a second: Drummer John Damiani decided to move to Oklahoma City for grad school, and label Lucky Madison pushed the release of No Magic back to the fall. New time-keeper Eric Ambrosius was actually in attendance at Damiani’s last show with the band, a Tender Loving Empire showcase in June, and after just two months has already integrated himself into the World’s Greatest Ghosts family.

“We’re excited to record with him and see what happens when we don’t all live together,” Casey says. “It could be a disaster, but at least at the end of the day we’ll still be friends.”

SEE IT: World’s Greatest Ghosts release No Magic on Wednesday, Nov. 4, at Holocene with Swim Swam Swum and Wampire. 8:30 pm. $6. 21+.

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[POWER POP] I used to laugh at John Cougar when he sang, “Ooh yeah, life goes on/ Long after the thrill of living is gone” in “Jack and Diane.” But now that I’ve got some gray hairs and a pot belly, that sentimental piece of clap-along pop seems like a much more vulgar joke.

Boat’s 30-year-old frontman, David Crane, packages his coming-of-age nihilism in just as appealing a pop sheen as Cougar (who was 31 when “Jack and Diane” came out). “You can declaw all of your pets,” Crane sings in his wobbly, cartoon voice to start Boat’s new record, Setting the Paces. “But your new black sofa will still be a mess.” The knee-jerk reaction here is to giggle at the couplet, despite its sly critique of suburban futility. Crane would prefer you don’t laugh. “I’m not joking,” he sings. “I’m feeling real seriously.”

A lot of people have mistaken Seattle’s Boat for a joke-rock band. Perhaps Crane’s plain-spoken lyrical style and hand-drawn album illustrations—not to mention his charmingly incompetent falsetto and Boat’s bouncy stage persona—don’t help combat the notion. But for all its clever, Malkmus-esque one-liners, Setting the Paces is a bit of a heartbreaker. It’s a diatribe against the aging process, a foe that can’t possibly be beaten. “Everyone I know who is my age is not real excited about hitting 30,” Crane writes via email. Not that it’s all bad. “I bought a house, got a new teaching job, moved to a new town [Tacoma]…I guess I am really happy.”

But in his lyrics, it’s clear Crane wants it both ways—­to have the freedom of growing up without all the boring responsibility. It’s a worldview that comes in part from his job as a teacher. “I think that I often view things through the same lens as a middle schooler,” he says. “I am still nervous about who to hang out with at meals [and] break times, I still try to get away with cutting corners on big assignments. I daydream and draw pictures when I should be taking notes.” That escapism is addressed on Boat’s pop-punk opus “Interstate 5.” “Sippin’ diet cola, eating with my family/ Sleeping in pajamas way too small for me/ I didn’t ask for this, man you gotta help me out,” Crane sings, finding himself on the fast track to adulthood. Boat tours come in handy. “Interstate 5, come on, take me out of this mess,” Crane sings. Distortion bubbles up, barely hiding the sound of a soda can popping open.

Whether Boat likes it or not, Setting the Paces showcases an incredible amount of growth on the band’s behalf. Where the band’s previous discs—2006’s Songs That You Might Not Like and 2007’s Let’s Drag Our Feet—felt uneven, Setting the Paces plays beautifully from front to back. It actually manages to be more thoughtful and fun than either of the band’s solid previous releases, with earnest singalong jams like “Lately” and “Reverie” standing out as some of the finest pop tunes to come around this year.

Late in the disc, Crane has made great strides in coping with adulthood’s encroachment, realizing he doesn’t need to return to his childhood, he just needs a break every once in a while, singing, “In the apple tree behind my old house/ Was a little place where I would hide out/ Looking for a new place now that it’s gone/ One that I can go to whenever I want.” Sometimes you find profundity in strange of places—“Jack and Diane,” or even a Boat song called “(Do the) Magic Centipede.”

SEE IT: Boat plays Thursday, Nov. 5, at the Woods with Brothers Young. 9 pm. $7. 21+.

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[BLANK SLATE] David Bazan doesn’t know what to tell you about God. After nine Pedro the Lion releases, a decade as indie rock’s scholastic defender of Christianity, and hosting theological QA sessions at every show—followed by a very public loss of faith, a couple years of blackout binge drinking and an album that buries, mourns and rages at everything he believed—Bazan has run out of answers.

“It’s like losing a lifelong imaginary companion,” the Seattle-based singer-songwriter says, then corrects himself. “That’s not even it. I thought God and I had a pretty cool thing going. It’s a companion that had the added feature of providing safety, and was going to be the one to right worldwide wrongs. I grew up believing that the poor and downtrodden had this cosmic advocate, and I no longer do. So that’s not awesome.”

Curse Your Branches, Bazan’s first LP under his own name, is a record of that disappointment—and the sudden vulnerability of shedding a label and discovering that you are naked. As Pedro the Lion, Bazan was an acoustic defense attorney for God, using song cycles like Winners Never Quit and Control to prosecute pious hypocrites and advocate for prodigal sons. But now he has himself become a prodigal, with no intention of returning. “I swung my tassel to the left side of my cap,” he sings in “Hard to Be,” the new album’s opener, “knowing after graduation there would be no going back.” Curse Your Branches is a breakup album where the songwriter doesn’t know if he’s the dumper or predestined to be dumped—or if the person he loved even existed. It is a uniquely honest document of apostasy, with wild fluctuations between freedom and grief. Also, it’s the loveliest piece of pop Bazan has ever recorded.

“I’ve been trying to not have such a rigid idea of what instruments are appropriate,” Bazan says on a Halloween drive between Lawrence, Kan., and Omaha, Neb. (Curse Your Branches opens with synths, then expands past the traditional Pedro drone to include pedal steel, tambourine and group crooning.) “Whatever needs to be there is going to go on there. It’s more fun not to limit myself.”

The casting off of Christianity was far more painful. Bazan hit the bottle hard—“I wanted to drink until I physically couldn’t drink anymore”—and wrote grooving kiss-offs to his former creator. “The toothpaste isn’t going back inside the tube on this one,” he thought. But even in the album’s final song—where Bazan’s father, a Presbyterian choir director, plays piano—he admits, “The crew has killed the captain, but they still can hear his voice.” Bazan retains that longing for God. “I can’t tell which it is: perceiving that something exists, or missing the conviction that something exists. I just don’t know.”

Admitting what he doesn’t know has become Bazan’s daily answer. “The discipline of reserving judgment, I don’t think it comes as naturally for me, and I don’t think it comes naturally for a lot of people. Just feel each conviction as strongly as it comes, write it down, and then move on to the next conviction. Or to lunch, or whatever.” AARON MESH

SEE IT: David Bazan plays Mississippi Studios Friday, Nov. 6, with Say Hi. 9 pm. $12. 21+.

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[AMERICAN GOTHIC] Derrick Martin and Chelsea Campbell live a classic Portlandian fairy tale. A pretty, small-town girl leaves Washington to become a big-city barista. She meets a music nerd with a caffeine habit. A few years later, the 25-year-old proposes to her man and they walk toward the sunset, guitar and banjo at their sides.

But as the core members of swamp-stomp folk army St. Frankie Lee, the chipper couple offers twangy ballads that evoke Natural Born Killers more often than Cinderella. Set to the steady thud of a stand-up bass and Martin’s sparse banjo plucking, St. Frankie offers up enough cold-blooded violence and kinky sex to make Freud’s cigar explode.

“We’re storytellers, and it’s fun to tap into this darker side,” Campbell says. “My favorite songs are the nasty ones. The skaaaanky ones.”

St. Frankie Lee trudges toward a fiery apocalypse, with Campbell wailing like a possessed June Carter Cash as she trades vocal calls-and-responses with Martin, who comes across like a Southern preacher. With four bandmates tinkering on everything from accordion to theremin, the group’s execution is clean but rugged. Harmonies skewer off-kilter as the pair croons about death and destruction, fucking and fighting, smattering the tunes with the witty wordplay of storytellers raised on Washington Irving.

“Stole from me last week/ You can bury me with everything/ To him it’s all been solved,” Campbell croons on “The River,” a ghostly, kinky song dealing with fetishized theft and kidnapping gone horribly awry. “Hangman in polished boots/ Silver stakes in his hands/You won’t walk away.”

St. Frankie Lee’s 11-song debut, Let’s Get it On, crawls through the jagged underbelly of Americana, and it bears scars. The self-produced gem hammers home an unrefined honesty absent in like-minded groups that try to polish a sound that’s rusty by nature.

The band is a walking contradiction that would give Kris Kristofferson pause: Its two lovebirds lock eyes while harmonizing lines like “I’ll kill you, you bitch.” Then they bust into a folksy rendition of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.” Let’s just hope the glint in their eyes is true love rather than repressed psychosis.

SEE IT: St. Frankie Lee plays Berbati’s on Tuesday, Nov. 3, with Hallelujah the Hills and Love Trucker. 9 pm. $5. 21+.

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When Dirty Projectors appeared on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon a month ago, Roots drummer and Late Night bandleader Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson was smitten. “I will follow y’all to the end of the earth,” Thompson said at the end of a rehearsal video he posted to Twitter.

Judging by the critical response Dirty Projectors has received this year, ?uest isn’t the only one. The Brooklyn-based sextet’s Bitte Orca, released in June but recorded largely in the summer of 2008 at Portland’s Union Hall, is a major leap forward for the band and its one consistent member, Dave Longstreth. It’s a record of intricate, layered arrangements for guitar and voice that takes more cues from Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré than buzz bands like Animal Collective.

“We had toured so much for [2007 album] Rise Above, and when you’re touring like that, New York doesn’t always feel like the most restful kind of home to come back to,” Longstreth says. “I think we were all excited to record it out West.”

Longstreth had lived in Portland in the past, and it was during an early immersion in the local experimental music scene that Longstreth met Adam Forkner (a.k.a. White Rainbow), Adrian Orange and Curtis Knapp (founder of Marriage Records)—figures important to the development of his first material. Dirty Projectors’ earliest records—including 2003’s Morning Better Last!, released on local label States Rights Records, and the Marriage Records EP New Attitude—were off-kilter sketches that jumped from distinct genres (one-man blues, spare acoustic folk, neo-classical pieces) and never found a unified sound. In those days, Longstreth saw Dirty Projectors as an amorphous unit, and it wasn’t until touring on Rise Above—a weird reimagining of Black Flag’s Damaged that gained Dirty Projectors considerable notice—that he brought in a unified group (guitarist-vocalist Amber Coffman, keyboardist-vocalist Angel Deradoorian, vocalist Haley Dekle, drummer Brian Mcomber and bassist Nat Baldwin) and began writing songs that combined all his interests.

“It was never really a priority for me to have a consistent band, because I figured I’d write a batch of songs and they’d all have a specific skeleton,” Longstreth says. “But it’s been super awesome to solidify the band and start to do it the opposite way: Write with everybody in mind, write a part that Brian would sound amazing on or a melody for Amber.”

Indeed, Bitte Orca’s highlights showcase members of Longstreth’s band, especially vocalists Coffman and Deradoorian. “Stillness is the Move” is a groovy RB number: a slinky, rhythm-based platform for Coffman to open up her gorgeous falsetto and coo all over Longstreth’s loping fret work. “Two Doves,” on the other hand, is completely percussionless, with just Longstreth’s spare finger-picking and a string quartet backing Deradoorian as she sings of a love unfulfilled. The women’s voices are similar at first, but it’s the slight contrast between the two—especially set against Longstreth’s unrestrained yelp—that anchors the strong middle section of the record and gives it an experimental edge.

Things only get stranger on “When the World Comes to an End,” a sparse, pretty song where the three female singers showcase an impressive vocal technique called “hocketing.” Known mostly to musicologists as a staple in medieval music, it’s a compositional tool largely foreign to the rock world. But due to the strength of their pipes, it sounds natural when Coffman, Deradoorian and Dekle engage in a vocal game of pingpong.

Longstreth’s deftness with vocal arrangements is one of the things that attracted Icelandic pop icon Björk to collaborate with the band. Talking about Björk leads Longstreth to geek out (“I still can’t believe she was in my apartment!”) and offer up a description of the collaboration that speaks as much to the Projectors’ music as to Björk’s: “It was like watching water find its way down a hillside,” he says. “It’s trickling and then all of a sudden it’s boring through the silt, making these caverns, yet somehow knowing where it’s going the whole time.”

SEE IT: Dirty Projectors play at the Aladdin Theater on Tuesday, Nov. 3. 9 pm. $15. All ages.

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The sons of Godzilla return to Portland, but will 49-year-old frontman David Yow still get naked?

IMAGE: Manfred Rahs

[AMERICAN GLADIATORS] In the ’90s, Chicago’s the Jesus Lizard earned its reputation as “the best live band anywhere.” It also recorded half a dozen noise rock albums full of menace and wild creativity. The band combined the cacophony, sweat and swagger of Nick Cave’s Birthday Party with the black-diamond focus of AC/DC. The Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow spent plenty of concert time offstage, swimming naked in a sea of denim and dirt, always somehow managing to deliver his garbled ravings like a punch-drunk sailor.

“These shows are freaking me out,” says Yow of the band’s reunion after 10 years. “In Turin, Italy, they screamed and yelled for over 35 minutes before we even got onstage. I’ve never had that happen before.” Surprising, considering the Jesus Lizard played something like a thousand shows between 1987 and 1999, landing a deal with Capitol Records in the process. “It was a three-record contract,” Yow explains. “And after so long after the second record, they finally said, ‘You know, you don’t sell any records. You can go.’ It was at that point that I called our manager and said, ‘I quit.’”

The band stayed broken up until Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, etc.) invited the Jesus Lizard to play the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival earlier this year. The opportunity to play with original drummer Mac McNeilly was the clincher for Yow. “I hadn’t seen Mac, ‘the real drummer,’ for probably 12 years,” he says. And in that time a new generation had discovered the band, its stage legend and its classic albums Goat and Liar (both recently reissued with care by Touch Go).

So does Yow believe he can still deliver a show that backs up his reputation? “It probably is more difficult,” he admits. “I’m 49 years old. But I’ve been going to the gym (laughs).” On the subject of recording new material, he is not so glib. “The Scratch Acid [Yow’s first band with the Jesus Lizard bassist David Wm. Sims] reunion taught me to quit saying ‘never.’ But I can’t believe that we’re gonna do that. I have no desire to write new Jesus Lizard songs.” And as for future tours? “I think we’ll finish up in November in Chicago. I’ll bet you a nickel that’s the end of it.”

SEE IT: The Jesus Lizard plays the Crystal Ballroom on Thursday, Oct. 22, with Black Elk. 9 pm. $22 advance, $25 day of show. All ages.

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Through all of the changes Gossip has undergone in the long journey from Arkansas garages to clubs the world over, it’s never been overburdened by recorded material. “Four LPs in 10 years,” guitarist Brace Paine admits. “Yeah, we’re not exactly the Fall.”

The trio’s new album, Music for Men—recorded with Rick Rubin for Sony after three years’ constant touring upon the sizable back of global floor-filler “Standing in the Way of Control”—distills its inimitable post-punk discotheque assault through Rubin’s legendarily platinum filter. “[Rubin’s] like a New Age music guru: hippie-ish, but in the best way—all about creativity and understanding,” Paine says. “He helped us put the puzzle together.”

“Heavy Cross,” the new album’s propulsive single, definitely arrives from the same party as the band’s big hit: chicly persistent percussion from drummer Hannah Blilie and the bristling angularity of Paine’s riffs (think Prince drenched in New Wave classicism) strut around the outsized lungs of frontwoman Beth Ditto. Alongside her band’s increasingly broad musical footprint, La Ditto’s star has exploded across the pond—topping NME’s cool list while penning advice columns and hosting game shows. She’s even disrobed for dual purposes of fat acceptance and gay activism. Which is all present in Gossip’s music: Every inch of every song clings to her roiling vocals as she weightlessly glides from a cooing Stevie Nicks seductive distance to the tuneful caterwaul of a gutterpunk soul diva.

It’s less a theatrical performance than bravura representation of a woman containing multitudes, and the more far-ranging touches of the new release (which hints at electroclash Nashville at points) speaks to the band’s ever-expanding perspective. “Us traveling the world has opened up hearing things you could never find in America. I stay in Berlin and go to techno clubs and then go to the crusty punk shows. In England, everything is DJ culture, and, in Portland, it’s basement shows—so it exposes you to new things, for sure.”

“A lot of people think we’re British, which is weird because I feel like we’re just obviously so not,” Paine continues. But the U.K. media has claimed Gossip nonetheless. “We’ve had an offer for some MTV reality show, but c’mon, give me a break. That would just be ridiculous.” Gossip, standing in the way of control, always.

SEE IT: Gossip plays Wonder Ballroom on Saturday, Oct. 24, with MEN and Boy Joy. 9 pm. $20. All ages.

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by Casey Jarman and Michael Mannheimer

Being a member of a supergroup isn’t easy. First, you’ve gotta share the songwriting credit and acclaim with other dudes. Then comes the inevitable lukewarm review of your first album. The truth is, these starpower-heavy outfits rarely live up to the sum of their parts: too many egos and too many styles often means acts that focus on “getting back to basics.” A good supergroup is always entertaining, but—like sports teams constructed with too many aging stars (ahem, Gary Payton and Karl Malone joining the Lakers in 2004)—rarely championship material.

So, as Monsters of Folk—the quartet of indie luminaries Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes), Jim James (My Morning Jacket), M Ward and Mike Mogis (uh, Bright Eyes)—makes its Portland debut, we look at how the foursome stacks up against three of the most impressive supergroups in history. Sorry Billy Corgan, Zwan just missed the cut.

The Highwaymen

Members: Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson
High point: 1985’s Highwayman, which is a great balance of low-key, friendly fraternizing between country mega-stars and heartfelt balladry. It’s only slightly marred by ugly ’80s production.
Low point: The 1995 bar-blues anthem “It Is What It Is,” a fun but ridiculous latter-day attempt at blues-rock hitmaking. The “Highwayman” video (on YouTube) is real bad, too.
Legacy: The Highwaymen may have helped jump-start Johnny Cash’s then-fading career—it certainly helped give ace songwriter Kris Kristofferson some much-deserved credit. Unfortunately, with Cash and Jennings both passing away in the past decade, there’s not much hope for a reunion tour.

Traveling Wilburys

Members: Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, George Harrison
High point: “Handle With Care,” the Wilburys’ first collaboration originally intended as a B-side to Harrison’s single “This is Love.” Even after 20 years, the song remains one of the finest pure-pop moments of their careers.
Low point: When Dylan, arguably the greatest lyricist ever, sings, “If you let me drive your pickup truck/ And park it where the sun don’t shine” in “Dirty World.” Who does he think he is, Prince?
Legacy: Monsters of Folk wouldn’t exist without the spontaneous, good-times vibe of the Wilburys. And as mediocre as much of its material was, at least it got Dylan away from touring with the Grateful Dead.

Crosby, Stills, Nash Young

Members: David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young
High point: Though CSNY began as a trio, it wasn’t until Neil Young’s arrival in late 1969—just before the group played its second show together at a backwoods festival called Woodstock—that the band became a certifiable hit. Subsequent album Déjà Vu still stands as one of the finest albums of the early ’70s, blending Young’s fiery guitar playing with some of the sweetest harmonies this side of the Beach Boys.
Low point: 1994 album After the Storm, which, besides having one of the most hideous album covers of all time, made even the ’90s output of the Stones sound decent.
Legacy: Indie rock circa 2009 is all about smooth vocal harmonies, and Fleet Foxes owe some credit to these guys. CSN is still touring, raking in the dough with the boomer set and hoping Young will ditch singing about electric cars for another run at the money.

Monsters of Folk

Members: Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis, M. Ward, Jim James
High point: The quartet’s self-titled debut disc opens with a very cool, beat-driven and Sade-esque sexy jam addressed to God. That sense of adventurousness is hugely refreshing, but it only stretches the first few tracks before it’s impeded by too many acoustic guitars.
Low point: Though these dudes sound pretty singing together—and, let’s face it, look pretty good just standing around—the more resigned tracks on the debut run together. Also, Conor Oberst’s beard in “The Right Place” video makes him look creepy. Why would you wanna cover up that cute li’l baby face!?
Legacy: Time will tell. Expectations were very high, and most critics have not been particularly kind to the group thus far. But the foursome has genuine chemistry that may yet win out, should they re-form after the current tour. Our dream is pretty simple: We hope the Monsters inspire Will Oldham, Jason Molina, Bill Callahan and Bon Iver to start a rival group.

SEE IT: Monsters of Folk play the Schnitz on Wednesday, Oct. 14. 8 pm. $42.50-$53.25. All ages.

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[STRING THEORY] Jeremy Faulkner is fascinated by guitars. That might not come as much of a surprise—guitars are what guitar-playing frontmen are usually obsessed with—until you hear Ah Holly Fam’ly’s layered, intricate arrangements. The group makes a point of emphasizing everything but the guitar.

“Until I was in my early 20s, guitar was the only instrument I cared about,” 28-year-old Faulkner says. “I listened to music and if there was a string arrangement or something I didn’t really hear it.”

Faulkner has clearly come a long way since his younger days. The first thing one hears on Ah Holly Fam’ly’s debut full-length, Reservoir, is the sound of a violin and flute softly overtaking a gently strummed acoustic guitar, and it only gets less guitar-centric from there. The band’s sound—a mix of Appalachian folk, backwoods innocence, Leonard Cohen-esque poetry and gorgeous male-female harmonies—make the most of the band’s unconventional eight-piece lineup: Ah Holly Fam’ly is a chamber-pop juggernaut.

“We just kept on adding members,” says singer and flutist Becky Dawson of the band’s transition from its roots as a trio to its current behemoth status. “Before we knew it, it was like, ‘Why not bring in another friend?’”

Reservoir’s finest moments, including the delicate opener “Young Veins”—which begins in a séance of plucked string instruments before changing time signatures and morphing into a jaunty pop song—and the stunning vocal interplay of “Loneliest City,” showcase the work of an incredibly tight octet, one that built slowly from a trio after moving to Portland from Moscow, Idaho, in June 2006.

Though Moscow isn’t a huge hub for touring bands, it was a college town, and Faulkner fondly recalls both Animal Collective and Devendra Banhart playing shows in the basement of the grungy house he lived in at the time. It was those experiences, along with both his and Dawson’s separate stints as music directors at college station KUOI, that persuaded the duo to pursue music full-time.

As the band—which is pared down to a four-piece for out-of-town trips—prepares to head out on its first cross-country tour, Faulkner is quick to point out that he’s totally serious about that sentiment. After returning from the East Coast, he and Dawson plan to move to a cabin in rural New Mexico for a few months to work on new material that focuses on vocals and, you guessed it, the guitar. “Songwriting is the only thing I can do,” he says. “I get sick of everything else real fast.”

SEE IT: Ah Holly Fam’ly plays Holocene on Thursday, Oct. 15, with A Weather and Aan. 8:30 pm. $6. 21+.

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