By Elise Granata
There is a groggy morning light that Make It Easy on Yourself awakes in. The only other presence in the room is a solitary guitar being plucked, conjuring up a companion for itself with its echoing reverberation. Omeed Goodarzi (vox/guitar) barely cracks a word’s shape with his lips while cooing the record’s opening lyric, questioning his expression in itself: “What am I now, when I go to speak?”

Midi and the Modern Dance ached in a similar key before in “Stay Awake,” the opening track on 2009’s Twilight, How Sweet You Are (“I feel numb and painless, my dear/and there are no comforts here”). But where “Stay Awake” leaves traces of a lullaby to reassure (“but the night will come eventually/and there will be better days, you’ll see”), “I’m Sorry” simultaneously opens and closes the record with a despair so thick, Goodarzi can’t see the forest but for the trees. Maybe this is why a track like “Everything I Touch” was chosen to follow—it kicks off its predecessor’s drear with Mikey McGovern’s (keys) ecstatic Rhodes ditty and breaks of upbeat pop frenzy. This was a bit of Midi’s monogram in the days of Twilight, but “Everything I Touch” is a dishonest attempt, the defiantly sunny day which falls on the saddest afternoon of your life.

Dave Groener’s (Suns) poolhouse acoustics cloud the quality of the rest of the record into a lo-fi fog which also disenchants “Almost A Threat” and “I’m Sure,” two songs with kindred insincere half-smiles. These don’t give the record any levity, but sidestep the glaring undertone of loneliness and an element of emotional fatality introduced with “I’m Sorry.” Indulgent though it may have seemed, a thorough eight tracks worth of brooding would have solidified Make it Easy as a whole production. It’s hard to imagine “Everything I Touch,” “Almost A Threat” and “I’m Sure” as anything but outliers, regardless of how strong each track is on its own as substantial pop songs awash in riffy keys and the contagious ebb and flow of short tension and relief.

When the sparse guitar notes pluck back in, easing into “Lucky,” it feels exceedingly more comfortable. It’s just you, Goodarzi, and the smattering of keys and drums (Jack Aldrich) in the background, transparent enough to let the conversation begun in “I’m Sorry” continue on. The record’s reckoning is in “Where Do You Think,” the most powerful Midi track yet written. Goodarzi is tangible, leaning in amongst the tides of autoharp and fuzzed out guitar to trill, “There are better men out there you see/so many boys more good looking than me/where do you think I belong, if I don’t belong to you?” He continues to alternate between self-deprecation and a subdued kind of desperation among harmonies with McGovern and a pining autoharp sigh. In tense Okkervil fashion, feedback squeals once, twice and explodes into a blood-letting so comparatively abrasive and pained that it couldn’t possibly relinquish itself in any other line than a tongue-in-cheek “there’s a place in my head where thoughts of you spread/through the cracks in my bed, how I wish you were dead, how I wish you were dead.”

As of late, Midi’s taken many forms due to their member’s collegiate obligations, though Goodarzi is always a mainstay—sometimes solo, sometimes with Adam Levison (accordion, autoharp) or even Will Rutledge (Suns, drums). As far as that sad, solitary integrity goes, it’s best kept in these intimate performances—but emerge teeming with a full band. Midi aches and rejoices along with any other responsive being, and fall into each emotional step with ease. For us emotional creatures, this dynamism might just mean that this record will endure.

By Christoph Whitbeck
The Motorcycle Industry's The Only Friends Worth Having is the most ambitious EP I've heard in a while. In four songs, the band attempts to craft a solid, cohesive record, running the gamut from crazy summer pop rock jam to love lost yearning, without the jarring feeling of musical non-sequiturs—and they completely nail it.

I suppose the best way to describe this record is paradoxical. In just 14 minutes, we hear four completely different songs. On top of this, the songs themselves contain mini-paradoxes: while the lyrics to the chorus of the opening track "Paul Newman and a Ride Home" are a bit of a downer ("once you're gone you're gone for good, let me ease you back to health") the music makes you reach for both the volume knob and the window roll-down simultaneously. I mean, it just sounds better loud. Then we slow down a bit with "French for Tigers" and its cutesy chorus ("no one sings along to my songs the way you do!"), and end up slowing way down (and roll the windows back up) for the brooding "Electric Education.”

But what is wonderful about these paradoxes is that the band never loses honesty or integrity. They are dynamic, not contradictory; the lyrics are believable, not constructed, and they play their songs like they mean it, because they mean it. This is one band that very clearly loves what they're doing and wants you to enjoy it with them.

On first listen, this music can be easily misinterpreted and labeled as emo. And while it's a little reminiscent of Say Anything or Motion City Soundtrack (what with that synth on "Possessed" played by Mike Weiss), I'd say these kids are too happy for emo (ooh! another paradox!). Yes, John Langan's lyrics are a bit melancholy from time to time. The chorus to "Electric Education:” "It's been a long dark semester, but it's been way better without you" –just a sad chorus to have to repeat. But it's not what they say, it's more how they say it, and The Motorcycle Industry says it all with the joy and feeling that goes with doing what they love.

So grab their new EP, and ask your dad to PRETTY please borrow his Beemer, then grumble off to your shitty little '93 Subaru and turn this shit way up. Cos you're going for a sweet summer roadtrip upstate. And your car gets way better gas mileage than his anyways.

By Elise Granata
Sure, to Nick Corbo and other songwriters like him, spring brings with it a cargo of analogies: hope, warmth, new life, Corbo’s “thawing just in time” (“Every Song I Sing”). It also brought along his newest and longest release through American Buffalo Recordings, Animal Names.

And just as important as the sun is for stirring up the tiny microbes of chlorophyll, the tracks on Animal Names bloom and burst with the instrumentation Corbo and friends gorged them with. In a modest eight tracks, Corbo adapted some old songs and deliberately seasoned new ones with brass, keys, gang vocals and lo-fi samples. The warm bass tones in “Painted Halls,” a lonely flute warble in “The Museum of Natural History,” in “My Home Isn’t Home,” lilting keys and tides of trumpet—the shoe fits on each track, just shy of being overdone while defining a musician beyond another acoustic songwriter. His transition is best viewed in “Every Song I Sing,” a rosy acoustic ditty included on the Bird Watching in America EP. It was a track once limited to the accessory of a gang-vocal sing along, and now flourishes with bursts of trumpet, drum and howls.

Lyrically and stylistically, Conor Oberst has a hand on the shoulder of Animal Names. The fragile harmonies and stumbles of drum in “Roanoke” recall “Contrast and Compare,” the nostalgic sample of a message left by a faceless giddy girl layered with field recordings of a buzzing crowd at the end of “Rosasharn,” even an identical “to love and to be loved” (“Let’s Not Shit Ourselves”) is sung to Corbo in his memory in “The Merritt Parkway pt.2.” Then there’s the constant lyrical harping on the powerful hand of the seasons (“so I’ll dig myself a sweet farewell ‘neath the dirt and the dying leaves/and wait for the spring to come and wrap me up in the roots of her leaning trees”), states, symptomatic skeletons in the closet (“I can’t stand my own mind/America, when will we end the human war?” from a Ginsberg sample). Still, the relationship between the two songwriters isn’t a genetic one. Corbo might have what Oberst’s having at the bar, but won’t stay long enough past closing for his friend to come after work and ask about a yellow bird.


His saving grace is every song’s resolution, its suggestion of hope. No matter how celebratory the trumpet might sound, it’s never ironic. Animal Names walks with a greater levity; Corbo’s voice is less wrecked by sobs and hauntings, less spent on nights with an inch of scotch in his glass. Even in the darkest corners of the tracks like “My Home Isn’t Home,” which empties into pitchy feedback over Ginsberg’s “America,” there is still a pinhole of light from the yard—the sweet and brazen storyline of “The Museum of Natural History” picks up right after Ginsberg’s brooding lines.

It’s because of Corbo’s earnest and use-what-ya-got approach—recording in his Torrington home under the guidance of R.J. Gordon (Purchase based student producer), performing on a couple instruments on most of the tracks himself, collaborating with friends on vocals, horns and keys—that the record is able to get its sea legs and pick up an identity. And its identity is all that’s visible through the record’s transparency: his friends, influences and origins. As he writes in the liner notes, the project never would have been completed without them.


(Photos: Kellyann Petry)