[embedded YouTube video; if you can’t see it, click here]
Indie-rock auteur Vincent Moon worked with The National to make a one-hour documentary about the creative process behind their brilliant 2007 release, Boxer. Judging by the trailer above, it’s shot in a gorgeously moody style that complements that of the album. The official site also has short vignettes for each track on Boxer. The release is set for May 20, and will include an EP, The Virginia, of demos, covers, live versions and B-sides. Needless to say, I’ve already pre-ordered my copy.
[Middle East Downstairs, Cambridge, MA; April 16, 2008]
Ezra Furman and his band, the Harpoons, tie together down-home style tunes with angst-y, sarcastic Midwesterner lyrics. They performed an energetic 45-minute set at the Middle East on Wednesday night, opening for Cloud Cult. Give them a few more months and the concerts will be singalongs, I think – I’m sure I’m not the only person who bought the CD and has started learning the witty lyrics. I also suspect that twenty-year-old Furman – possessed as he is of a shy charisma – will be the target of many smitten fourteen-year-old girls (and boys) in the near future. (It’s not captured very well in my photo, I admit, but try this promo photo). And besides, how could you not like a band that passes out York peppermint patties to all their loyal fans?
[mouseover text, which WordPress doesn’t seem to want me to use: “I don’t know what’s worse — that there exists broken-hard-drive-sound techno, or that it’s not half-bad”]
Besides, everyone knows you buy techno on Beatport.
While barely old enough to drink (and the photo above seems designed to suggest that they are making the most of their new privileges), The Box Social nevertheless have a tight, appealing indie-rock sound – think Sloan, or maybe a hybrid of their fellow Midwesterners The Hold Steady and Green Day (especially the opening of “Pay Attention,” which certainly seems like a homage to “Brain Stew”). The Box Social honed their songwriting and performing skills in the Milwaukee basement scene before migrating an hour west to Madison, for school. Their first full-length album, Get Going!, was released in 2007; in true Millennial fashion, they documented the process of making it and put it on YouTube: part 1, part 2.
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I’ve been on something of a Mountain Goats kick recently, partly because of the recent concerts and partly because listening to John Darnielle’s songs can make anyone feel better about their personal life. I ended up putting together a ‘best of’ CD for myself, and then proffering it to assorted friends. In lieu of accosting you personally, grabbing your lapels, and shouting, ‘John Darnielle is a brilliant songwriter and lyricist!’, I instead humbly offer this small sampling of his work. All links are to YouTube.
I was prepared to hate the movie 21, partly because the trailer suggests that the movie is entirely unlike the book, but mostly because they shut down the People’s Republik and Harvard Bridge for several nights for filming (I really hope there is a kick-ass car chase on the bridge, not just a touching love scene between improbably hot ‘MIT students’). However, I do have to salute the producers’ excellent taste in bringing LCD Soundsystem in on the soundtrack (my love of James Murphy is well–documented). His contribution, “Big Ideas,” begins with a driving beat, underlaid with syncopated drums. The rising tension and accelerating pace have turned out to be the ideal music for last-minute pre-workout details, like putting on a sports watch and finding my keys, as I’m getting ready to head out the door. The horns come in at about 1:40, and by the time the vocals come in at 2:10, I’m ready to sprint.
Of course, “Big Ideas” is also an excellent accompaniment to a strenuous session of couch-surfing. Or, you know, winning big at Vegas.
My friend Scott, who is an aficionado of cover songs, was kind enough to make me a mix CD, including a set of amusing and insightful annotations. I prevailed upon him to be a de facto z=z guest blogger and he graciously agreed; I’ll be posting some of the songs, together with his notes, over the next few weeks.
Here’s what he says about The National’s cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Mansion on the Hill”:
Further proof that indie rock stars can occasionally be just as pretentious and minutia-obsessed as some of their fans. God forbid you’d cover a Bruce Springsteen song that somebody had heard of, or even a lesser-known track from one of his hit albums. No, “Mansion on the Hill” is a track that never charted from one of Springsteen’s least-popular albums, Nebraska. If it didn’t sound so good, I’d ask for my money back.
As you can probably gather from this blog, I have a deep and abiding love of pop songs. However, in the last year or two, I’ve gotten more into techno music, especially minimal techno. Techno is a pretty maligned genre, and minimal definitely has a reputation as one of its least accessible forms – it’s widely considered to be all bleeps and glitches, of interest mostly to geeky boys who are high-functioning Asperger’s cases. It’s also somewhat overwhelming to get into – there is a massive amount of music available and not a lot of guidance.
But I’m going to argue that it’s worth persevering, or at least not dismissing minimal techno out of hand. Traditional pop songs are like Western gardens – a showcase of colour and form, easily accessible and understandable, and rewarding to our senses. But minimal techno is like a zen garden. At first glance, it seems impossibly austere, even barren. However, sustained attention reveals that its severity hides just as much complexity as greenery does. I listened to the song below half a dozen times in a row, and heard new details with every iteration. Give it a try.
Remember all those times you heard that a band you like played in your town only after the concert? Tourfilter is what you use to make sure this doesn’t happen.
All you do is register, and then enter a list of artists you want to see. Tourfilter scrapes online concert listings for your city and, when it finds a match to a band on your list, sends you an e-mail with the information. The website is reminiscent of Craigslist, with a minimalist aesthetic and a simple, user-friendly interface. That’s pretty much it. It’s brilliant.
For a slightly less minimalist experience, check out the Tourfilter night at River Gods, in Cambridge, MA. Chris and his guest DJs play songs from artists that are going to be performing in the area soon. While you are listening to the songs (and snarfing River Gods’ wonderful fries with aioli), you can text for details on the artist, date and venue, and sometimes other fun info too.
Last week I had a conversation with my friend Paul, about how venerablenewspapers bend over backwards to make you hear the word ‘fuck’ in your head, without actually writing it. I ran into this phenomenon in the audio realm a few weeks ago, as I was choosing songs to play on WMBR. I listened to all my choices carefully, so that I wouldn’t be responsible for an FCC violation (some albums were more of an issue than others). I knew that Mother Mother used the line ‘to help me get me fucked’ in their song “Touch Up,” so Keith fired up the audio editing software. But we had to listen to the song a couple of times to realize that the station already had the radio edit; the context and the initial ‘fuh’ sound were enough to trick our brains into hearing the whole word if we weren’t playing close attention.
Furthermore, this video is the definitive evidence that sometimes the bowdlerized version can be way, way dirtier than the original.
Mission of Burma are arguably Boston’s most significant contribution to rock music, and living proof that the ability to create and perform music that is edgy, progressive and, um, loud, doesn’t have to diminish with time. The band formed in 1979 and broke up in 1982, and produced exactly three releases: an EP, a full-length album, and a post-breakup live album (all of which were recently remastered and re-released by Matador). Despite this paucity of material, Mission of Burma were, and remain, hugely influential – everyone from REM to Nirvana to Moby cites them as an inspiration. That should have been the end of the story. But after a two-decade hiatus, the band started playing together again. Since then, they’ve recorded two more albums, ONoffON (2004) and The Obliterati (2006), to massive critical acclaim. I was lucky enough to see them twice in 2006, including at that summer’s Pitchfork Music Festival, where they made most of their successors look like snot-nosed poser-punk kids. I’m stoked that they’ve been invited back to Pitchfork for 2008.
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Matador Records remastered the first three Mission of Burma releases: Signals, Calls and Marches; Vs.; and The Horrible Truth About Burma, to create the ‘definitive’ versions that came out on March 18, 2008. They documented the remastering process, and put four videos up on YouTube. Music production geeks and MoB fans rejoice!
eMusic is soliciting questions for Dan Bejar (aka Destroyer), whose album Trouble in Dreams came out this month and who is currently on tour. Send your questions to asktheartist@emusic.com before this Tuesday, April 1st, and keep an eye out for the interview, scheduled to be on the eMusic homepage during the week of April 21st. Bejar’s lyrics are notoriously obscure – now’s your chance for some enlightenment. What I really want to ask about the New Pornographers’ concert in Boston last fall: “Dude, was that really an orange in your hand when you wandered onstage to sing?”
Freezepop is the band that dragged synthpop out of the 80s and into the 21st century. Their third full-length release, Futurefuturefutureperfect, is as perfect a piece of danceable electronic songwriting as you’ve ever heard. But they are really at their best live; I saw them a few weeks ago, in front of a full house at the Middle East, and it was the most fun I’ve had at a concert in ages. The show featured duelling keytars, a shark-encased microphone, and generally playful behaviour from the band, especially the aptly-pseudonymed Liz Enthusiasm. They did a brilliant live version of “Melon Ball Bounce,” a jingle that Raymond Scott wrote for Sprite (which they recorded as a bonus track on Fashion Impression Function). One of the highlights was the Duke of Pannekoeken‘s virtuosic theremin performance on ‘Frontload.’ Sadly, the Duke (Kasson Crooker) has severely curtailed his touring with the band; his day job is keeping him pretty busy.
As if Rachael Ray liking Holy Fuck wasn’t bad enough, Entertainment Weekly decided to take a kick at the indie-rock can with their special supplement on The Indie Rock 25. The format – exactly one release from each year since 1984 – is pretty much tailor-made to invite disputatious responses. It’s worth checking out, if only to contrast the picture of REM in 1986 (the picture in the dead-tree version is dorkier still) to their rock’s-elder-statesmen cover photo on April’s Spin.
Dan Kennedy is clearly a man who knows how to make the best of a bad situation. He realizes a lifelong dream of working in the music business, only to discover that he’s just gotten himself a deckchair on the Titanic. The year is 2002, the company is Warner, and the record industry is imploding. Warner itself is about to be bought by ‘the billionaire grandson of a man who made the family a fortune in booze and chemical dealings,’ resulting in hundreds of layoffs, including Kennedy’s. Fortunately for us, he turned his experiences into a acidly funny memoir, Rock On: An Office Power Ballad. This book certainly made me laugh, and it also made want to loudly cheer the ongoing demise of the traditional record industry. However, my favourite part of the book was a lengthy, loving account of an Iggy Pop concert, possibly because Kennedy was writing about something he loved, not about something he had to be self-protectively cynical about:
…Iggy is everywhere at once. He flies like a computer-animated god-beast deity in an unhinged and hijacked Lucas film. You suddenly realize every punk band you thought was blowing your mind back when you were sixteen was simply a cute little messenger delivering a wadded note to you from this man, wherever he might have been that night.
You can see a promo video for the book here, and Michael Azerrad wrote a review for the New York Times, here. You can also download audio of Kennedy telling a story from the book at a Moth gig in Seattle.
[Middle East Upstairs, Cambridge, MA; March 22, 2008]
Montreal-based Miracle Fortress played a sold-out show at the Middle East Upstairs, opening for fellow Canadian scenesters The Most Serene Republic. Based on their single ‘Hold Your Secrets to Your Heart,’ I expected them to be quite a bit more ethereal than they were, especially given their fairly dreamy start – frontman Graham Van Pelt began with a solo piece. Instead, driven by Jordan Robson-Cramer’s propulsive drumming, they turned out to rock quite a bit. Their set was mostly drawn from their first full-length release, Five Roses (which, if you grew up in Canada, doesn’t evoke music so much as it does baking), as well as some new material.
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[Middle East Upstairs, Cambridge, MA; March 21, 2008]
I wrote about Holy Fuck the last time I saw them – they are utterly phenomenal live. You can look at the clips on YouTube, but they don’t really capture the experience (that’s why that’s a video above, not a live clip). Unfortunately, they are wrapping up their North American tour – but if you happen to live in the UK or Ireland, you should definitely try to catch one of their shows.
And I’ve decided that Rachael Ray can’t be all bad if she’s a fan.
zed equals zee 
