you won't find a single glitch or bleep in Kansas City-born power piano pop songstress Julia Othmer's stuff, but the digital age has still been good to her.
Her website just snagged a Gold ADDY (the Grammy of Net design), and her track Mission Control was picked as the theme for the PS2 game SpaceStation: SIM.
"I must say, I've really moved up a notch or two with fans of mine who are gamers," she laughs over the phone from her base in Philadelphia.
Though it's hard to picture video game nerds dropping their sweaty controllers to light candles and sink into a bubble bath to Othmer's sensual brand of rhythmic, passionate, soaring rock, maybe the sexiness oozing from her songs fulfills them in ways Halo 2 just can't.
"I'm almost like a hooker; I'm whatever you want me to be," says Othmer of the music she conceived of with the help of Santana bassist/rhythm guitarist Myron Dove. Her style has garnered a range of descriptors, from sophisticated blues-lounge to intimate siren soul-rock to pop loveliness with a jazz-hewn spontaneity.
The folks at the Philly Music Awards just nominated Othmer in three categories: female entertainer, female vocalist and keyboadist. With her drive and talent, and the full-length debut album she just FedEx-ed to her mastering guy, she's planning on continuing to advance.
"If you don't keep growing, it gets kind of boring, doesn't it?"
while it's clear that iron & wine, Magnolia Electric Co and My Morning Jacket like to dwell on the darker end of the alternative twang spectrum, Milton Mapes can make them all sound like cheery sunshine pop groups.
Stone chillers like Waiting For Love To Fail and the Rudyard Kipling- copped When The Earth's Last Picture Is Painted from the Austin doomsayers emotionally charged epic The Blacklight Trap (Undertow) had me reaching for Neil Young's Tonight's The Night to lighten up the mood.
It's telling that when Bloodshot recently asked Milton Mapes to record a song for the label's forthcoming 10th anniversary celebration disc, their idea of an appropriate party jam was the Cowboy Junkies' Now I Know. Apparently, their cover of Ricky Nelson's Lonesome Town was already picked up for use in the new flesh-eating video game Stubbs The Zombie: Rebel Without A Pulse (www.stubbsthezombie.com)
"The darker side of things has always been more interesting to me as a songwriter," allows Mapes's main man Greg Vanderpool from Austin. "I guess you could say that our recent stuff leans toward the blues, even though we're not playing traditional blues music.
"You know, Townes Van Zandt said there's only two kinds of music � the blues and zippity doo-dah. We prefer to err on the blues side."
my phone call to atlanta catches Michael Henry and David Schneider of no-wavers the Press right before they head out to a Memorial Day/thank-God-our-friend-isn't-dead celebration.
A good buddy of theirs was one of the people handcuffed at gunpoint and forced to lie on the ground during the Fulton County Courthouse massacre last March.
But the continuous threat of gun violence is just one of the reasons why the Press boys don't consider ATL the most ideal place in which to operate.
"There are good bands here, but not really an underlying network of support and encouragement," says Schneider, huddled over a speakerphone next to Henry in the band's workspace.
"Yeah, as a band, we've had absolutely no luck in Atlanta," adds Henry. "We've given up on it for the most part and decided to play everywhere except here."
That means the two needn't worry about the "city's one rock zine that shits on every local band." Their up-tempo, unpretentious and fun, fun, fun pop melodies are catchy enough to spark and spread like wildfire beyond the local scene and its crabby writers.
Their chances for success are high given how hot anything post-punk is right now, but the guys dismiss their trendy sound.
"The post-punk thing is inevitably used to describe us, but I'd never heard any of these seminal post-punk bands until recently, so I don't know where that influence comes from.
"We play guitars, drums and bass � we're a rock band, you know?"
who says you can't go home again? There was a time when Potential Bad Boy was running away from his jungle roots, but now he's embracing d 'n' b all over again.
Potential Bad Boy (aka Chris McFarlane) came onto the UK scene just as jungle was starting to emerge out of the early 90s rave scene.
He had a good run as a producer and DJ throughout that decade, but then he dropped drum 'n' bass for the emerging UK garage sound (a combination of house, hiphop, d 'n' b and R&B) and was suddenly remixing major-label artists for the UK market.
"It was a period when I wanted more out of the jungle sound," explains McFarlane. "It had changed, and there didn't seem to be room for the more musical stuff I wanted to do."
But seemingly overnight, the UK garage scene morphed from a raw underground phenomenon into pop music for 14-year-olds. Once again, the sound was getting too defined for McFarlane, and a return to his jungle roots started to look better and better. Fast-forward a few years and he's back with some big d 'n' b anthems and has emerged from the studio to DJ again.
He describes his style as more musical and traditional than that of many of his peers, which means he focuses more on vocals and makes more direct references to the music's roots in reggae. Surveying the scene he's come back to, McFarlane feels the future looks good.
"It seems like we're heading back toward more of a balance of sounds, where you can hear more than one style all night."
