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      A Crash Course in the Elephant 6 Recording Co.

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      A new documentary explores the lo-fi psychedelic music made by bands including Apples in Stereo, the Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel.The Apples in Stereo, one of the anchors of the Elephant 6 scene that’s the focus of a new documentary.Tim BarnesDear listeners,Today’s Amplifier is a celebration of the Elephant 6 Recording Co., a humble but hugely influential music scene that grew in the 1990s out of two small Southern cities — Ruston, La. and later Athens, Ga. — and serves as the subject of “The Elephant 6 Recording Co.,” a spirited new documentary directed by C.B. Stockfleth that tells the stories of some of its most enduring bands, like Neutral Milk Hotel, the Apples in Stereo and the Olivia Tremor Control.If none of those names means anything to you, fear not: You’re only 25 minutes and eight songs away from knowing exactly what I’m talking about.The Elephant 6 story begins in Ruston, a sleepy college town where there was little to do but dream, hang out with friends and, when you got bored enough to try to figure out how, make music. One of my favorite things about the film is the way it captures the necessity of creativity and a do-it-yourself ethos in places where there isn’t a lot of pre-existing art or culture. “I feel like kids in places like that tend to get deeper into the things that they love — tend to go further into them, tend to lose themselves more in them because they need to,” Julian Koster of Neutral Milk Hotel says in the doc. “They have to escape into something.”Eventually, those kids cobbled together enough money to buy instruments, microphones and most crucially, four-track tape machines. In the film, Kevin Sweeney of the band the Sunshine Fix gives perhaps the most succinct summary of the Elephant 6 sound that I’ve ever heard: “Those guys were just trying to record ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ or ‘Pet Sounds’ on their cassette machines,” he says. After some consideration, he adds, in disbelief, “And they did!”A whole group of them relocated from Ruston to Athens, where the independent-minded bands who had come before — like R.E.M. and Pylon — had created an infrastructure where artful music could thrive and find its local audience. “It just seemed like a beacon for weirdos,” says the Elephant 6 musician Heather McIntosh.Sometimes called the Brian Wilson of the scene, Robert Schneider, the helium-voiced lead singer of the Apples and the producer of many of the early Elephant 6 albums, set up his own low-budget recording space that he called Pet Sounds Studios. (Although, as someone points out in the documentary, it acquired the nickname “Pet Smells,” because of all the cats that lived there.)“The Elephant 6 Recording Co.” is a vivid time capsule of musical community before the internet, before tape trading became a thing of the past and before indie rock became such a marketable commodity. Neutral Milk Hotel emerged as the scene’s breakout star when it released the critically adored 1998 album “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” but the group’s frontman, Jeff Mangum, fled the public eye and stopped releasing new music. (Still publicity shy, he’s the only major member of the collective who isn’t featured in the film.)Inspired by the movie, today’s playlist is a crash course in the Elephant 6 sound, which would go on to inspire the next generation of indie musicians and beyond. Though many other artists would be associated with the collective in later years, I’ve stuck to four of the original and most recognizable bands from that scene — the Olivia Tremor Control, the Apples in Stereo, Elf Power and Neutral Milk Hotel — selecting an earlier and later song from each.Get ready to lose yourself in a utopia of psychedelic pop-rock, layered and collagelike production, and the intoxicating ambition of a bunch of musicians trying to craft their own “Pet Sounds” with whatever they had on hand. (The film, which premieres this weekend, will be available on video on demand starting Sept. 1.)Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. The Olivia Tremor Control: “Jumping Fences”The Olivia Tremor Control melded psychedelic experimentation and pure pop melody, fronted by longtime friends Will Hart and Bill Doss, who died in 2012. The band’s 1996 debut album, “Music From the Unrealized Film Script: Dusk at Cubist Castle,” is one of the high-water marks of the Elephant 6 scene, and the jangly, tuneful “Jumping Fences” demonstrates why. Like many 19-year-olds who came before me and, hopefully, many who will follow, it blew my mind when I first heard it in college. (Listen on YouTube)2. The Apples in Stereo: “Glowworm”Fronted by Schneider and formed when he was temporarily living in Denver, the Apples in Stereo are the most sugary sweet of the Elephant 6 bands; their infectious tunes recall the sunshine pop of the ’60s coated with layers of tape hiss. After a run of singles and EPs, “Fun Trick Noisemaker,” the Apples’ 1995 debut that features the bouncy fan favorite “Glowworm,” was the first full-length LP to bear the Elephant 6 stamp. (Listen on YouTube)3. Elf Power: “Jane”Though the dream-pop group Elf Power recorded this 1999 song in New York with the accomplished producer Dave Fridmann, its introverted titular character still captures that imaginative, small-town spirit out of which so many Elephant 6 bands sprung: “Jane was the one who would always have her fun when she’s lying on her bed, making visions in her head,” the frontman Andrew Rieger sings. Sounds like Jane’s about to start a band. (Listen on YouTube)4. Neutral Milk Hotel: “Song Against Sex”Neutral Milk Hotel’s first album, “On Avery Island” from 1996, overflows with ideas, lo-fi resourcefulness and ramshackle energy. On its lead track, “Song Against Sex,” Mangum creates one of his soon-to-be-signature surrealist musical frescoes, while regal blasts of horns and crashing percussion give the song an antic maximalism. (Listen on YouTube)5. The Olivia Tremor Control: “A Peculiar Noise Called ‘Train Director’”The Olivia Tremor Control pushed even further into the realm of psychedelia on its great second album, “Black Foliage: Animation Music Volume One,” from 1999. On this track, hooky melodies and moments of pop lucidity suddenly burst forth from textured cacophony. (Listen on YouTube)6. The Apples in Stereo: “Please”Here’s an effervescent fuzz-pop gem from the Apples in Stereo’s 2002 album, “Velocity of Sound.” One of the longest running Elephant 6 bands, the Apples have also had some of the most high-profile cultural crossovers: cameos on “The Powerpuff Girls” and, later, “The Colbert Report.” Just as unexpectedly, Schneider is now a mathematician who teaches at Michigan Technological University — and, to the surprise of his students, moonlights as an influential indie musician. (Listen on YouTube)7. Elf Power: “All the World Is Waiting”Elf Power is perhaps the most prolific of the major Elephant 6 bands; last year, the group put out its 14th album, “Artificial Countrysides.” I love this warped, stomping tune from Elf Power’s 2006 release, “Back to the Web”; its music video, filmed in Athens, captures the communal zaniness of the Elephant 6 scene. (Listen on YouTube)8. Neutral Milk Hotel: “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”Mangum’s fervently beloved 1998 album brought more attention to the Elephant 6 scene than anything had before — maybe more attention than it could handle. Something changed after “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” a visionary, heart-on-its-sleeve album that continues to find new listeners in new generations; this was clear enough when the band finally reunited in 2013 for an extensive world tour. The album’s title track, which on the record features little more than four frantically strummed guitar chords and Mangum’s keening wail, has since become the unofficial anthem of Elephant 6 and all it represented. When “The Elephant 6 Recording Co.” premiered last week in Los Angeles, an accompanying tribute concert ended with a group singalong of this tune. (Listen on YouTube)How strange it is to be anything at all,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“8 Songs That Explain the Elephant 6 Recording Co.” track listTrack 1: The Olivia Tremor Control, “Jumping Fences”Track 2: The Apples in Stereo, “Glowworm”Track 3: Elf Power, “Jane”Track 4: Neutral Milk Hotel, “Song Against Sex”Track 5: The Olivia Tremor Control, “A Peculiar Noise Called ‘Train Director’”Track 6: The Apples in Stereo, “Please”Track 7: Elf Power, “All the World Is Waiting”Track 8: Neutral Milk Hotel, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”Bonus tracksWant to feel old? Friday is the 10-year anniversary of Miley Cyrus’s most infamous Video Music Awards performance, which sent waves of moral panic throughout the nation in 2013. Exactly a decade later, she’s released a more wizened and reflective ballad, “Used to Be Young,” which I wrote about in the Playlist. This week’s roundup of new music also features new tracks from L’Rain, Zach Bryan featuring Kacey Musgraves and Al Green’s gorgeous cover of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” More

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      ‘Blue Box’ Review: Grappling With an Ancestor’s Impact

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      In this documentary, Michal Weits tries to process her ideas about her great-grandfather Joseph Weits, who was regarded as the father of Israeli forests.In “Blue Box,” the director Michal Weits challenges a national narrative about Israel that, for her, also happens to be a family narrative. One of her great-grandfathers was Joseph Weits (sometimes spelled “Weitz” or with variants of “Yosef”), who had a reputation as the father of Israel’s forests. That was how Michal thought of him growing up.Joseph Weits oversaw land and forestry initiatives for the Jewish National Fund, but that job description leaves out important context. In the 1930s, before the founding of Israel and in preparation for a possible Jewish state, he was instrumental in purchasing land that Palestinians lived on. During the 1948 war that followed the declaration of Israel as an independent nation, he assembled a committee that sought, among other things, to prevent Arabs from returning. The film makes the case that transforming the landscape, including planting trees, became a way of ensuring that.Joseph left behind voluminous diaries that Michal pores over in the film (Dror Keren reads his words in voice-over) as she tries to reconcile her ideas about her ancestor. In his writings, Joseph expresses conflicted feelings about his actions, which — “Blue Box” emphasizes more than once — occurred against a backdrop of antisemitism throughout Europe and the Holocaust. Michal interviews members of her extended family, who have a range of attitudes about Joseph’s legacy and in some cases are reluctant to engage with it.“I don’t want to be a part of this,” Michal’s father tells her late in the movie, after suggesting that, had she been around in 1948 or 1949, she would have been standing proudly with her great-grandfather’s cause. Part of the power of “Blue Box” is that it can’t say for sure if she would. And the familial and personal tensions give it something extra, elevating it beyond the standard historical documentary.Blue BoxNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘BS High’ Review: Greed and Football

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      A saga of high school football players taken advantage of by a dubious start-up is played for entertainment in this flawed documentary.In August 2021, the high school football powerhouse IMG Academy played a lesser-known team, Bishop Sycamore, in a game broadcast on ESPN. IMG won. The score was 58-0. That lopsided match precipitated a shocking revelation: Bishop Sycamore wasn’t a true high school. The tale is one of greed and grift. But “BS High,” a documentary about the saga, is too taken by the audacity of Roy Johnson, the founder of Bishop Sycamore, to critique his actions.The directors Martin Desmond Roe and Travon Free have gained unfettered access to Johnson to retrace the coach’s founding of a football academy ostensibly intended to help Black athletes succeed. At first, Johnson is depicted as an amusing, comically inept figure dodging unpaid hotel bills, buying groceries at bottom-market prices and concocting cons so egregious there are no laws against them. It’s all done with the goal of turning Bishop Sycamore into a recruitment hub for top-tier colleges.The questions Roe and Free volley at Johnson aren’t used to investigate his misdeeds, but rather played, through sharp cuts, as setups for punch lines. That method wears thin as these young players, in their own interviews, share the broken promises, shattered dreams and physical perils they endured. Ultimately, the film shifts full blame to what Johnson took advantage of: a larger system that exploits young athletes for big money and television ratings. But by repurposing the story in a way that seems geared for pure entertainment, “BS High” can come off as similarly exploitative.BS HighNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      How ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ Topped the Charts

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      A song by the previously unknown Oliver Anthony Music struck a chord with conservative pundits. Its quick trip to No. 1 relied on tactics that help pop stars go viral.The unadorned video suddenly appeared on social media earlier this month: a young man with a bushy red beard and a guitar in a backwoods locale, dogs at his feet and bugs buzzing in the background. In an impassioned drawl, he sings a country-folk anthem about selling his soul “working all day,” and being kept in his place by inflation, high taxes and the elites he holds responsible: “Rich Men North of Richmond.”Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      ‘Bella!’ Review: Taking the Fight to the Streets and the House

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      The jam-packed documentary “Bella!” hustles to chronicle the pioneering political career of the New York congresswoman Bella Abzug.Jeff L. Lieberman’s biographical documentary “Bella!” churns along at a hectic pace as if hustling to keep up with its subject. Bella Abzug fought ferociously for equal rights and against the Vietnam War in the U.S. Congress, bringing a New Yorker’s tenacity and a plain-spoken dedication to democratic ideals, akin to fellow pioneer Shirley Chisholm.The child of Russian Jewish immigrants, Abzug began her political path with pamphleteering in childhood, and later drew on organizer-style moxie and a Columbia legal education (defending Willie McGee in a notorious case in Jim Crow Mississippi). But it wasn’t until 1970 that she ran for a congressional seat, beating a longtime incumbent in Manhattan in the primary and kicking off a busy decade of legislative battling.Lieberman’s starry interviews — from Hillary Clinton to Gloria Steinem to Representative Maxine Waters to the avid Abzug fund-raiser Barbra Streisand — speak to the liberal, feminist revolution of which Abzug was a vital part. Abzug’s own words — drawing on audio diaries — provide the background to her political worldview: as a reaction to the “cocoon approach to living” of the 1950s, as a manifestation of Judaic notions of justice, and as a dedication to equal rights for all, leading to her sponsoring the Equality Act of 1974, intended to “prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, marital status, and sexual orientation.”Aides and others recall that the tireless Abzug could be both a charmer and a screamer. After losing a 1976 Senate race to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, she tried and failed to attain other offices before shifting to international activism; she died in 1998. Her never-say-die advocacy still inspires, but the film also illustrates the merciless challenges of electoral endurance even for the fiercest fighter.Bella!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Billion Dollar Heist’ Review: How to Rob a Bank, Digitally

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      This documentary chronicles a 2016 digital bank heist by pairing commentary from cybersecurity experts with a toolbox of visualization techniques.In 2016, a team of cyberthieves stole $81 million from a central bank in Bangladesh. The theft was meticulously executed: The hackers gained access to the bank’s financial transfer system through contaminated email attachments that allowed them to plant custom malware, which they used to worm through the office’s computer network until they reached the single server responsible for dispatching encrypted orders.If this sounds convoluted in writing, just imagine trying to spin its esoteric details into a true-crime yarn fit for neophytes. “Billion Dollar Heist,” directed by Daniel Gordon, attempts the task by leaning on a stable of cybersecurity experts to walk viewers through the operation. To further explain, Gordon whips out a toolbox of visualization techniques. When, for example, the subjects describe how the hackers navigated Bangladesh’s internal network, Gordon depicts the mission as a Super Mario-like video game.With so much action transpiring in the digital realm, the documentary is careful to milk its handful of terrestrial story beats: a critical typo in a transfer request, a multiday gambling spree at a Philippine casino, the wily scheduling of the attack on a national holiday to ensure that bank employees would be offline. These details ground the narrative, but their prominence contributes to the film feeling like predigested news — particularly when the more arcane aspects of the story remain undefined.“Billion Dollar Heist” is not totally bankrupt, but in mining its central cybercrime for tidbits while smoothing over its complexities, the film erodes its power both as seminar and spectacle.Billion Dollar HeistNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Reinventing Elvis: The ’68 Comeback’ Review: Fully in the Building

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      Elvis Presley’s 1968 TV special showcased the king of rock ‘n’ roll in his unadulterated glory. A new documentary shows how it happened.“I heard the news/There’s good rockin’ tonight.” That’s what Elvis Presley sang in 1954, on his second single, a cover of a jump blues tune originated by Roy Brown. The lyrics come to mind while watching the new documentary, “Reinventing Elvis: The ’68 Comeback,” directed by John Scheinfeld, because the movie seems explicitly formulated to reach people who have not, so to speak, heard the news about Presley: his impact on pop culture and his preternatural performing charisma.Both of those realities were inarguably blunted by Presley’s manager, the slippery Col. Tom Parker. Baz Luhrmann’s fictionalized biopic of Presley from last year managed to both villainize and at least slightly humanize the guy who turned Presley from an alluring danger to youth morals into a cheesy family entertainment attraction. This movie outright brands him the villain and brings on a shot of a smoking cigar every time he’s reintroduced.The hero of the story is the television producer-director Steve Binder, who put together the 1968 television special that briefly made Elvis electric and provocative again. (Binder is also an executive producer of the movie.)In addition, the movie is a celebration and defense of Presley. While not overtly mentioning the accusation that Presley was guilty of cultural appropriation, the film counters it from several directions, including the critic Kelefa Sanneh’s assertion that what Presley accomplished was a fusion of modes, not theft. And contemporary musicians here sing Presley’s praises, including the Black country singer Darius Rucker and the Dominican recording artist Maffio.The clips from the special itself are irresistible, as when Elvis, chatting with old bandmates, mocks his signature lip curl, saying, “I got news for you, baby, I did 29 pictures like that.” He also sings up a storm. If today Presley really needs a sales pitch, this movie is a good one.Reinventing Elvis: The ’68 ComebackNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      ‘Untold: Hall of Shame’ Review: Cheaters Never Prosper

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      An infamous sports-world doping scandal is related with insight in this compelling, albeit slight, Netflix documentary.Why would an athlete use performance-enhancing drugs? “Untold: Hall of Shame,” a documentary about a high-profile doping scandal in the early 2000s that shocked the world of competitive sports, offers a persuasive reason: because every other athlete is taking them.Victor Conte Jr., a self-taught sports nutritionist and trainer who provided several sports stars and Olympians with steroids through his Bay Area firm Balco, insists in “Hall of Shame” that performance-enhancing drug use in pro sports is “rampant,” to the extent that using them is all but necessary to win. He frames the decision to dope as one between unethical victory or noble failure. “Show me an athlete not on steroids,” he says, “and I’ll show you a loser.”With compelling verve, “Hall of Shame,” from the director Bryan Storkel, tells the story of Conte’s ignominious rise and fall. It draws you into the addictive thrill that his athletes felt as they were winning medals and breaking records, and although it’s somewhat slight on the whole, the film makes clear why elite competitors such as Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery and Barry Bonds were willing to compromise themselves for a taste of elite glory.Both Jones and Bonds declined to appear in the film — and both have denied ever knowingly taking performance-enhancing drugs — but Montgomery, candid and vulnerable, opens up about his reasons, to dramatic effect. “I don’t care if I die,” he describes having told Conte, in dope-boosted pursuit of the world record for 100-meter dash. “I want to see what it feels like to be the greatest.” He broke the record in 2002; it was invalidated two years later. As “Hall of Shame” makes clear, if you win by cheating, greatness is not what you achieve.Untold: Hall of ShameNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More