The Crocodile

It can be easy, sometimes, to forget where you started. When the goal that you set out to create no longer carries any resemblance to the original plan, and the finished product is as much of a surprise as it is a completion. In a lot of ways that was how Keep in Mind Frankenstein came to be.

Singer-guitarist Mat Brooke had big plans for Grand Archives' sophomore album. The band had written a slew of new songs, and honed them during sound checks around the world. They were good to go. And when they entered the studio and the tapes started rolling?

"It sounded kind of... Like guys who don't really play rock music trying to rock out," confesses Mat.

Their record, it seems, had very different plans for how it wanted to sound. Except for "Dig That Crazy Grave," a buoyant ditty redolent of Southern California and summer afternoons, all the material originally slated for the album wound up on the cutting room floor. Yet as the earlier songs fell away, new ones were composed to take their place. "And the record took on a new identity," says Mat, "a little darker than the first album."

Sometimes the group had barely scanned the lyrics before they stepped into the vocal booth to record harmonies. "As opposed to singing like you've practiced the song for a year, we were singing each one like it was the first time... because it really was," says Mat. Not that he's complaining. "This sounds a lot more alive."

The album's finest moments include several happy accidents; little ideas nurtured with help from producer Ben Kersten (who also recorded The Grand Archives, the band's 2008 debut...

"For the past year or so, the word on the street was this: D.Black has the skill and ambition to go supernova. Though Seattle has his heart, the national stage has all of his dreams. His debut CD, The Cause & Effect, was finally dropped last year by Sportin' Life Records and critical judgment has called it an artistic success on both levels—rap and production.

D.Black is part of the gangster school of rap, and so The Cause & Effect is packed with guns, street realism, and crass materialism. He is not about being nice, polite, or cheerful—D.Black is aggressive, individualistic, and fatalistic. But why should we bother listening to music by a disagreeable person? Because, like Eminem, the man has the gift of gab. His hero, Jay-Z, claimed in "A Moment of Clarity" to have the rapping strength "to carry Biggie Smalls on [his] back"; D.Black has the strength to carry both Jay and Biggie on his. The Cause & Effect also features production from The Three (BeanOne, Vitamin D, and Jake One)." CHARLES MUDEDE

Seattle-based GABRIEL MINTZ has a need to write songs. Lots of them. It's like blood or breathing. From his West Village days on Bleeker Street to his Greyhound Bus desert individuations, Mintz has written more than a hundred songs that tell of characters and sketched out scenes. Vocals are a gangly call. Dirtied, but on. Closer to the mic, his lower register becomes unashamed of its beauty. He's roots type Americana-leaning with a warm spatial drone.

Capturing this sublime aridness, Mintz released Volume One this spring. It documents his first full-length foray and it's an adventurous one. The expansive beauty of tracks like "Western Days,' "Atom Bomb" and "Firefly" amble along the mental throughway like brush across a barren Texas highway.

These contemplative capsules were destined to accompany the open plains as seen from an auto on cruise control or the dew-tinted window of a passing train. The moods that reverberate on Volume One are many; from the gritty thump of "Safeway" to the 60's pop harmonies of "Sofa Bed" to the majestic "Desert Sky" whose stream-of-consciousness vocal sounds like a channeling of Jim Morrison from his epic ode "The End".

Anchoring Gabriel's visceral ruminations are Trent Moorman (Head Like A Kite) on drums and producer Geoff Stanfield (Sun Kil Moon) on bass who both recently joined him for a four-song live session at Seattle's world-famous KEXP studios. The radio station's Morning Show host/producer John Richards quipped "This new Gabriel Mintz is pretty stunning stuff, emotional & beautiful music."

This tastemaker endorsement joined lofty accolades from the cities' leading publications including Seattle Weekly, SOUND Magazine and the Stranger. Also on board is GIVE Seattle (http://giveseattle.org) a thirty-plus business and non-profit collective initiated by Seattle coffee roaster Caffe Vita whom hand-selected the song "Safeway" for their 2009 "Best-of" compilation benefitting Arts Corps, Seattle's largest nonprofit arts educator and a pipeline to local area foodbanks. Alongside Mintz, the GIVE Seattle compilation features artists such as Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie, Fleet Foxes and Visqueen.