The group’s new album, “Whiskey Farmer,” is a beautifully downbeat collection of songs about a character who’s always done the right things and is disillusioned by how little he has to show for it. They’re rootsy, country-inflected songs, some of which had been knocking around for a while when Low realized that there was a narrative arc to songs he never quite knew what to do with.

“I feel like I’ve been writing about this character for a long time, and maybe that’s because the character is influenced by me,” singer James Low tells Listen, Dammit. “But I realized that all these songs I’ve written over the years have never quite fit in other projects.”

To accompany the album, Low plans to shoot videos for each song, including the already-released clip for “Thinkin’ California,” a song mostly of resignation that can’t quite let go of that last sliver of hope.

Here are three more facts we learned about the James Low Western Front.

1. His was a dream deferred. Years ago, Low was playing with what he describes as “the best band I had had to date in life, and I had really high hopes,” which were dashed when the entire band was hired away to become Eels. With the rug having been definitively pulled out from under him, Low retreated for a while into a day job. “It was actually kind of good for me to distance myself from the industry for a little bit and re-focus, but I feel like I’m ready to get back fully into the battle.”

2. Country music was an early influence. Though he counts Neil Young, John Prine and Leonard Cohen among his favorite acts, they weren’t the first musicians he heard. Low grew up in tiny John Day, Ore., the biggest town in a county with “about 3,000 people and 45,000 head of cattle.” he says. The only radio station that came in was an AM station that played country. “I professed to hate it, because my parents didn’t much like it,” Low says. “But I ended up listening to Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline, and it just sort of became ingrained in me.”

Later, when he lived in New York, hanging out in a bar with a country jukebox in Alphabet City was like a low-key revelation. “Listening to those songs again made me feel at home, and my writing just kind of shifted in that direction,” he says.

3. The video project was accidental. What started as a clip to accompany the Kickstarter campaign Low mounted to fund the album snowballed into plans to make a video for every song on “Whiskey Farmer.” He’ll be releasing the videos over the course of 2012. “It will give me opportunities to remind the world about the album as we go,” Low says. “But I can see submitting it to small film festivals as a 30-minute film. I don’t know what category it would fit in. It would be almost like a silent movie with music behind it. I don’t know what they would make of it, but it feels like a really interesting project.”

She has the material: The Hudson, N.Y., singer and songwriter recently released “Passenger,” a debut full of engaging, sweetly wistful songs that draw on the straightforward simplicity of folk, topped with a sly, tuneful pop sensibility. You’d never know it from “Passenger,” but serious songwriting is a relatively recent pursuit for rock, who has nonetheless been writing for a while: after a youthful dalliance, she veered back into music while earning a degree in the dramatic writing program at SUNY Purchase.

“With my music, I get more self-gratification, faster gratification out of writing a song and doing it all myself, than writing a piece and waiting for people to act it out and for people to understand it the way I understand it,” she says. Here are three more facts about kayln rock:

1. Capitalizing her name makes her uncomfortable. “Capitalized letters, for me, I see them as being somewhat confrontational, in a sense,” rock says. “I want everything to be lowercase because I don’t want to bring extra attention to my name.” Also, she says, she loves fonts, and the shapes of letters, citing Bookman Antique as a particular favorite.

2. She’s inspired by interactions. Not her own, necessarily, and not even romantic interactions, but rock finds something dramatically satisfying about parsing the ways that people act toward each other. “I really like describing things in terms of relationships with people, like the inner monologue people have,” she says. “A lot of the ideas I would have about stories, whether they’re plays or a bigger film, is just two people having an interaction with each other and the subtext.” That’s not to say she doesn’t draw on her own interactions: The oldest rule of writing is, “write what you know,” and rock does that, to a degree. ”I write from an experience and then I make that decision in my mind to go completely fictional and have it be inspired by something or to go out there and make it about the thoughts in your own head,” she says. “A lot of times I put it all out there. I would never reveal the name of the person, because it’s about everyone having their own experiences.”

3. “Passenger” is a pretty apt title. She didn’t realize it until after the album was essentially finished, but there’s an air of dislocation to many of the songs. “A lot of them are about traveling and looking for someone and thinking you found them and being confused and feeling let down that you didn’t, and letting life take you where you need to be, and feeling like you’re in control and then feeling like you’re out of control,” she says, laughing. “All these little self-revelations that go in and out.”

Text by Eric R. Danton, photo by Reid Elem

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Valentine mp3
Alex the Great mp3

“It’s kind of a composite of an imaginary character that exists in my head,” Wentz tells us the other day by phone. “It’s meant to be deliberately vague in the way that Hootie and the Blowfish was intentionally vague.”

Chew on that a while, while you consider three additional facts about Argyle Johnasen and/or Wentz. The band releases a new EP, “Argyle Johansen and His Inner Demo(n)s,” Sept. 6.

1. Argyle Johansen’s songs come from Wentz’s personal experiences. “I’m about as egocentric as you can be, it’s pretty much all about me,” he says, laughing. “I have a hard time making up fictitious stuff. I don’t have trouble embellishing things, but it’s hard to make up situations.” He cites as an example Argyle Johansen’s self-titled 2009 debut: “My whole first album is about being rejected by different women and hating my job waiting tables.”

2. He plays tuba. Not in Argyle Johansen, where he’s a guitar-and-vocals kind of guy, drawing on the influence of Cake, Tom Waits and, believe it or not, Wu-Tang Clan. But Wentz holds down the low end in a gypsy cabaret band called This Way to the Egress. In turn, This Way to the Egress leader Taylor Galassi contributes to Argyle Johansen. “The first instrument I had any proficiency on was the tuba,” says Wentz. “I never had much of a music education, other than tuba lessons. I never had guitar lessons, I’ve never studied music theory, I’m terrible with that stuff.”

3. Wentz doesn’t find songs so much as they find him. “A lot of the songs that I’ve written, the ideas that I’ve had that have turned into songs, they’ve popped into my head either while I’m in the shower or while I’m riding my bike to work,” says Wentz, who works in a restaurant in Manhattan. Once he has the idea, the rest of the song just sort of happens. “I take credit for these songs, because ultimate they were written down by my hand, but in a sense they were given to me,” he says. “They come from some part of me I don’t have full control over.”

— Text by Eric R. Danton, photo by Gabi Porter

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Percocet Blues mp3

“We change the story every time,” guitarist Josh Benoit admits to Listen, Dammit, after spinning a tale involving a book he supposedly read about a post-apocalyptic world in which a man befriends a puma. Lies! All lies!

No matter: the origin of the name is less important than the music, which is catchy, oft-understated indie-pop anchored by singer Rosie Blais’ surprisingly assured vocals — surprising in that she sings with the confidence of someone who’s been doing it much longer than she has.

Blais and Benoit started Enjoy Your Pumas in Winnipeg, Manitoba, as an acoustic bedroom project, and it soon grew into a full-fledged band that just self-released its full-length debut, “Commonality.”

“We had maybe three songs when it was just him and I playing, and it was very folky,” Blais says. “Josh actually sang, and now he doesn’t sing on our music anymore.”

Here are three more things we learned:

1. They write the songs, you interpret them. There is a theme running through the lyrics on “Commonality,” but the band isn’t keen to spell it out. Blais does allow that she writes lyrics based on her own experience and relationships (not necessarily romantic) with the people around her. “If you knew the order that the songs that were written in, you could follow a sort of dark place I went through for a while, but I’m pretty reserved about telling people my own interpretation of the song, because I want people to find their own,” Blais says.

2. Influences only take you so far. Although Enjoy Your Pumas have drawn comparisons go Metric, Radiohead and even Bjork, the band is mostly interested in sounding like itself. “I’m not really going for a sound myself when I write, I’m looking to write something that I’d want to listen to,” Benoit says. Drummer Luke Janzen says the band develops songs collectively. “The thing that contributes to the unique sound of Enjoy Your Pumas is that we take a very democratic approach to the songwriting,” he says.

3. Fitting in is overrated. The Weakerthans aside, Winnipeg doesn’t have a booming indie-rock scene, so Enjoy Your Pumas has had to find its own way. There’s a bigger punk and metal scene, but as far as we go, I don’t know where we fit,” Benoit says. “We’ve played on lots of different bills with lots of different bands.” Janzen thinks that’s to the group’s advantage. “I think we’re almost stronger in terms of a national scene,” Janzen says. “We get compared to bands from out of town as often as we would get compared to bands in our own city.”

Text by Eric R. Danton photo by Andrew Workman

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Weight of the Circles mp3

Although it’s Gang of Four’s first release in 16 years (and first, for some reason, without original bassist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham), “Content” is just as acerbic and pointed as anything the band has done — maybe even more so, given the deluxe edition that comes with a vial of blood taken from singer Jon King and guitarist Andy Gill.

“The way we go about communicating what we think now is very similar to the way we were doing things in ’78 or ’79,” Gill tells us. “We’ve never at any point been interested in proselytizing, pushing a party line or banging the drum for socialism. I suppose there’s a place for it, but I’ve always felt that it was slightly pointless. What we are about is looking about and observing things, noting certain things, looking at art and what’s around us and what’s inside us, how we consume culture and stuff.”

Here are three things we learned about Gang of Four’s new album:

1. The title is sarcastic. “The Internet and everything out there is basically advertising, and culture has become something that you put in the advertising sandwich,” Gill says. “So you’ve got the Internet providers, you’ve got the websites and all this stuff that needs to generate footfall, hits, so you need something called ‘content,’ so it’s kind of recognition of the slightly demeaning way in which the industry thinks of the stuff that they use as content: the creative stuff, the music, the writing.”

2. Blood is the ultimate content. The deluxe edition comes in a canister with the CD, lyrics, a scratch-and-sniff book of “human activity,” a book of rotoscoped photos of people depicting various human emotions and a small vial of blood. Why blood? “It’s kind of commenting on the state of play in the music industry, which is that things have become a little devalued,” Gill says. “Everything is file-shared. Although people apparently want and need music all the time, it doesn’t seem to have a kind of financial value anymore because it’s all Internet downloadable. So the blood is kind of a joke about that: try and file-share this, mate. It’d be like a novelist writing a book and then sticking a phial of blood in the cover, because you can’t share that on a Kindle.”

3. Jokes aside, the record business is in trouble. “We’re super-aware of the difficulties that are in the music industry today,” Gill says. “Lots of things about the music industry 10, 20 years ago were really old-fashioned. When we look back on it now, people were doing things in a strange and wasteful and bloated kind of way. Things have sort of changed quite a lot.”

Protecting copyright and ensuring artists are remunerated for their work are serious issues, and Gill feels fortunate to play in an established band. “Gang of Four is lucky enough to be in a position where there are lots of labels who are instantly interested in working with you, and we can go out and play live gigs and people will turn up,” he says. “But for young bands, I don’t know how they do it. It’s incredibly difficult.”

— Text by Eric R. Danton, photo by Mike Gullic

1. Touring’s Better With Two: Rice and Lewis have been traveling together since 2006, when he joined the band that toured behind her solo debut, “Rabbit Fur Coat,” but this time, the collaborative nature of the songs is making for a more enjoyable experience. “I think we kind of know the drill to touring for my records or for Johnathan’s, but this is really exciting, because not only are we putting together a four-piece band, but we’re playing different instruments on this tour,” Lewis says. “We’re switching off between bass and guitar and keyboards, and because it’s a really collaborative record, we’re singing together a lot live, in harmony, which is not something we’ve done in the past. So it’s really satisfying when you’re not just hearing your own voice coming back at you. It’s this new character that we’ve both been able to create when we’re singing together.”

2. Two Heads, Like Two Hearts, Are Better than One: When two wordsmiths get together, there’s always the possibility of tension. Not so with Jenny and Johnny, who sometimes finish each other’s tunes. “It varies from song to song,” Rice says. “On some, the lyrics are completely collaborative, and some, the lyrics belong to either one of us.” “‘My Pet Snake’ started out as my song, and Johnathan wrote the chorus, and he wrote the verse,” Lewis adds, describing one of the disc’s standout tracks. “It was very open. I’m not usually that open when it comes to my songs. I can get a little protecting, which I think is important. If you’re a writer, you have to protect your perspective, but with this I was completely open to whatever suggestions Jonathan had, which I think was really liberating for me. If I couldn’t finish a song, which happens all the time — you’ve got a pile of songs that are half done — I was open to having him come in and write a part.”

3. Not Every Song is as Happy as it Sounds: Although Jenny and Johnny write songs that evoke the warmth of Los Angeles, where they make their home, they don’t shy away from tackling the big issues: war, religion, the financial collapse, Michael Jackson’s pet primates, etc. “We often say we’ve been having a five-year conversation with each other, and I think a lot of the songs reflect the things we talk about,” Lewis says. “Politics are part of that conversation, and at this particular moment, I think when you go through a heavy period, it’s harder to write about it seriously. The only way to deal with it is to make light of it in some way. So with a lot of these songs, I think it was easier to kind of just touch on it but inevitably you write about the things that are on your mind. Certainly with [the song] “Big Wave,” the economic collapse of California, we’re thinking about it all the time.”

— Kenneth Partridge

Bridges and Powerlines got to thinking about the late ’90s after finishing “Ghost Types,” the New York foursome’s 2007 debut, and those years became the theme around which they built the follow-up, “Eve.” Due Jan. 18 on Stunning Models on Display Records, it’s a collection of smart, wistful indie-pop songs that perch hazy vocals atop layers of synthesizers, bright guitars and punchy rhythms.

“The late ’90s were really important for all of us,” bassist and primary lyricist Keith Sigel tells Listen, Dammit. “There was this amazing American optimism, the economy was booming, it was sort of like the last happy American time. The last decade has been a real mess, I think. So I wanted to focus on that.”

With a pair of CMJ shows this week, Sigel told us three facts about “Eve.”

1. Bridges and Powerlines spent a solid year writing the album. “The guy who produced our last record,Chris Zane, he told us, ‘Look, I think the key to success is, the second you finish recording a record, you start writing the next record,’” Sigel says. “So right after we finished our last record, we started writing again, and we always like to have a theme or a central focus.”

2. In a way, the focus is nostalgia. In another way, it’s hindsight. “Things were booming, and it was completely unsustainable and I don’t think we realized it at the time,” says Sigel, who describes himself as “painfully nostalgic.” “I think we all thought we were going to be rich and start our own dot.com and all that stuff. There certainly was a lesson in all of that. Historically, there doesn’t get to be any more perfect of a lesson. We were blinded by success and totally got the rug pulled out from under us.”

3. The band loved making “Eve.” The foursome worked with producer Kieran Kelley at his studio in Queens, where Sufjan Stevens recorded “Illinois.” “This is the cool thing about his space: it’s dirt cheap, and he produces everything, he engineers it,” Sigel says. “We pretty much camped out there for a couple of months, but we did do some of it at home, too, for time and efficiency purposes. There are lots and lots of backing vocals and things like that, and we did a lot of that at home. And then there was so much editing — it’s amazing what you can do these days.”

Part of the reason Bridges and Powerlines enjoyed making the new record, Sigel says, stemmed from increased comfort with the recording process. “The whole process was incredible, and making records hasn’t always been incredible for us,” he says. “It always amazes me when a band comes right out of the gate and does something really amazing in the studio. Usually it’s because someone in the band has been doing it for years at home, or they have a producer who’s willing to take chances.”

Bridges and Powerlines performs Friday at 3 p.m. at Arlene’s Grocery in Manhattan and at 11 p.m. at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn.

— Eric R. Danton

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Mirabell mp3
I Remember a Blue Sky mp3

Now the suits have essentially become a permanent fixture for Amaker and his four-piece band, the Rodeo. The Seattle group wears nothing else while on tour, which is the perfect complement to Amaker’s sound: foreboding, twang-soaked western (not country, dammit) music that showcases the singer’s resonant baritone voice.

Amaker and the Rodeo this week release their third album, “Please Stand By” (Spark & Shine Records), a collection of western songs brimming with punk-rock attitude. It’s part calculation, part primer for badass living.

“I look at bands like the Ramones and Devo and they had a very clear identity,” Amaker tells Listen, Dammit. “They knew what they were doing, and there wasn’t any question about it.”

Here are three more facts we learned from Amaker:

1. Packing for a tour is easy. Cowboy outfits are mandatory. In fact, the only other items of clothing the musicians are allowed bring are socks, underwear and t-shirts. “That has really contributed to the evolution of the band. It started out as this shtick, and it’s become this reality for us as we’ve lived it,” Amaker says. “You put the cowboy outfit on and everything becomes extreme, everything becomes exaggerated. We literally become caricatures of ourselves out on the road.”

Not just on the road, either: “I’ve got my hat on right now,” Amaker says, while not on tour. “I do two different things: I do the full-on cowboy outfit that you see on the record cover, and then I do what I call cowboy business-casual, with polyester Wranglers and a coat.”

2. Amaker didn’t always live the cowboy life. “There was a time in my life where I took a break,” says Amaker, 46. “I did the thing where I got married and got a job and recorded multi-track songs in my closet and kind of disappeared into a miserable existence. There was a dark period.”

Emerging from that period is part of what accounts for Amaker’s take-charge badass attitude. “The badass part comes from my personal belief that in life, a man should have a set of balls and make decisions and not be a pussy,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s badass or not, but I think that failure to do so leads to failure.”

3. Speaking of caricatures … “Please Stand By” comes in a deluxe vinyl edition featuring “Mescal de la Muerte,” a graphic novel (emphasis on graphic — “not suitable for children and most of America,” says his label) inspired by the band’s hard-touring, whiskey-belting ways, and written by horror filmmaker Jay Cynik and illustrated by Simon Young. “Through touring for a number of years, we’d find ourselves in all kinds of crazy situations and we used to talk about how we need a comic book. We could be comic book characters,” Amaker says with a dusty chuckle. So how much of the action portrayed is real? “We’re not killing demonic Mexican wrestlers on a daily basis, so there’s some exaggeration there,” Amaker says. “But the characters are loosely based on the personalities of everybody in the band.”

— Text by Eric R. Danton, photo by Johnny Podhradsky

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Man in Charge mp3
Pocket Calculator (Kraftwerk cover) mp3

Starting when she was 17, Radle fronted the San Antonio punk-pop band Lucy Loves Schroeder and put out a handful of solo records. She was working on songs for a fourth solo album in 2005 when she got a call from Rentals founder Matt Sharp, who wanted to re-form the power-pop band with Radle on vocals.

“I was at this point where I was trying to figure out what to do with them, and I met him and I thought it would be a fun detour,” she tells Listen, Dammit.

So she moved to L.A. and spent three years with the Rentals before branching off to play with Walking Sleep and finish that solo record. “Four,” a collection of lush, rootsy pop songs, came out earlier this month. On a recent morning, Radle told us three facts about the record and her career before going back to bed.

1. There are benefits to making solo albums. “As I’ve gotten older I’ve been able to accept that I can be a bit of a control freak, so it’s nice to have that freedom to go into the studio and do whatever I want and experiment and brings in friends to play and have fun with it and not feel restricted by certain instrumentation or laid-out expectations of what the band is supposed to sound like,” she says. “But at the same time, I do really like the collaborative aspect of a bunch of people getting into a room together and creating something that nobody could have created on their own.”

2. Joining the Rentals meant revisiting an old friend: the piano. “I hadn’t played piano since 8th grade, and when I started playing in that band, I had to brush up on some of that theory again. Through that, I started writing songs on piano again,” she says. “I’d kind of fiddled around with it here and there, but as far as sitting down and saying, ‘OK, I’m going to contribute to this song on this instrument,’ that was kind of daunting. The piano is the only instrument I’d ever taken lessons on, so it was a little like riding a bicycle.”

3. Making “Four” was a deliberative process. “In the past, I’d be like, ‘OK, I have 12 or 15 songs, I’m going to go into the studio and record them,’ and just hammer out the arrangements in the studio,” Radle says. “This time, I started recording myself at home and doing demos.” Listening back to the demos gave her a chance to think more deeply about the arrangements. “I have a tendency to go a little overboard and throw a bunch of stuff on there,” she says with a laugh. “At first, it was a struggle with myself to just accept that this song sounds fine. I don’t need to layer a bunch of shit on top of it.”

— Eric R. Danton

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Song for Adam mp3

Taking inspiration from Joy Division and Gang of Four, defunct British acts no one had thought about 20 years, a new generation of bands set somber lyrics to sexless punk-funk beats, creating a sound that would rival garage as the decade’s defining retro-rock trend.

Of all the groups to emerge from that scene, few have had the staying power of Interpol. The dark, dapper New York City outfit has released three albums, the most recent of which, 2007’s “Our Love to Admire,” came out on Capitol and reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. Having since left that label, Interpol is getting ready to drop its self-titled fourth album via Matador, the indie whence it came.

With a fondness in our hearts for Interpol, Listen, Dammit, caught up with drummer Sam Fogarino on the eve of a U.S. tour, and here are three things we learned:

1. The split with Capitol was amicable. When Interpol’s original Matador contract expired, the band was drawn to Capitol by its staff — creative, supportive folks that actually liked and wanted to promote the band’s music. This being the record business, and a major label to boot, all of those people were later fired, leaving Interpol with few backers. At that point, the group and the label decided it made sense to part ways. “There was a lot of goodwill,” Fogarino says. “I have nothing bad to say. They didn’t shelve us. I was really pleased and surprised. It was really smooth. And we had a record in the can. We owned this record. We ended up not resigning to Matador but licensing the record to Matador. We own the master.”

2. The last record wasn’t a Capitol’s offense. While some hear in “Our Love to Admire” the kind of slick pop album bands are forced to make after going mainstream, Fogarino says Capitol asserted no influence over the music. He and his band mates like the album, particularly for what it represents. “I think we all felt the best thing about ‘Our Love to Admire’ was it was kind of a crossroads,” he says. “It was in the way we’d been writing and producing our material about as far as we could go. Nobody dislikes the record, but it was kind of a touchstone to then use as a springboard.”

3. That “post-punk” label? The band is post-caring. Interpol will forever be linked with the ’00s post-punk revival, and while Fogarino sees that movement as a media creation, he doesn’t much mind the classification. Explaining why, he paraphrases a quote from Bruce Springsteen: “There’s no songwriter that can be fascist enough to dictate perception,” Fogarino says. “Coming from such a storyteller, too, that’s very giving of him. I don’t impose what I think the song is about on anybody that’s listening to it. You kind of have to take that attitude as well, be it with press or the listeners. It’s up to them. A lot of the comparisons, I think, were kind of trying to show us in a positive light, and it wasn’t always like we’re ripping off a sound or a band out of the midlands of England. Sometimes people like that aspect, and that’s why they like the band, because it reminds them of something.”

— Text by Kenneth Partridge, photo by Jelle Wagenaar