This looks awesome. Altamont Now is having its world premiere tomorrow, March 22nd, at the Boston Underground Film Festival. From the director: ‘it’s the story of a mysteriously square journalist who happens upon a cult of rock and roll revolutionaries living inside an abandoned nuclear missile silo with little idea of what they are “revolutionizing” against.’ Shot inside an actual underground silo, it’s an absurdist, satirical look at how youth rebellion borrows from its past.
Well, I totally failed to post anything about either of the Mountain Goats shows I went to last week, so here’s a taste of what John Darnielle is like in concert – this is their cover of Ace of Base’s 1993 hit, “The Sign“. A quick YouTube search reveals that The Mountain Goats have played this song live many times. The MP3 below is from yet another version, in which Darnielle alternately threatens and encourages the audience, and it still makes me laugh, even after scores of hearings.
Destroyer‘s eighth album, Trouble in Dreams, could be the perfect album from the 70s that you never heard. Like John Darnielle‘s, Dan Bejar’s distinctive voice polarizes listeners; if you didn’t enjoy his previous album, Destroyer’s Rubies, you probably won’t like this one either, although the vocal acrobatics are less in evidence. But Bejar writes songs that are both listenable and interesting, both lyrically (inventive phrasing about time-honoured topics, like women) and musically, foregoing the traditional verse-chorus-verse structure, but still remaining – well, catchy is probably too strong a word – but certainly you’ll hear his songs in your head. This characteristic of his songwriting came home to me when I realized that, despite my devotion to the three-minute pop song, my favourite song on the album was the eight-minute long epic “Shooting Rockets (From the Desk of Night’s Ape). Bejar is widely compared to David Bowie, although I have to say that this album sounds more like early Roxy Music to me – in a good way, not in a boringly derivative way – especially “The State.” Trouble in Dreams definitely holds up to repeated listening and is worth checking out.
I’m a little late blogging this, but Seth Godin, a marketing guy, posted a transcript of a talk that he gave to a roomful of music company executives. This is the stuff I wave my hands about and try to explain to everyone I know, when I talk about why I have a music blog and how the music industry is changing. Godin starts by summarizing the factors that made the traditional music industry so sweet (the ubiquity of Top 40 songs, music as a physical artifact that was coveted and which wore out, free promotion via radio and TV, an oligopoly of record companies, and so on) and then makes the case that they are all gone:
Music is not in trouble. I believe more people are listening to more music now than any time in the history of the world. Probably five times more than twenty years ago…that much! But, the music business is in trouble. And the reason the music business is in trouble is because remember all those pieces of good news?…every single one of them is not true anymore….
Having explained how all these factors have disappeared, he goes on to discuss how record companies now have to change the way they do business:
There is a lot of music I like. There is not so much music I love. They didn’t call the show, “I Like Lucy”, they called it “I Love Lucy”. And the reason is you only talk about stuff you love, you only spread stuff you love. You find a band you really love, you’re forcing the CD on other people, “you gotta hear this!”. We gotta stop making music people like. There is an infinite amount of music people like. No one will ever go out of the way to hear, to pay for, music they like.
The final point that Godin makes is that music creates tribes of people, who want to interact with each other and the musicians, who want to go to concerts – nobody who really loves a band wants to be a passive consumer. Godin persuasively argues that the music industry has to start thinking about ‘tribal management.’
I’m not convinced that record label industry execs are the people who are going to make the transition (Nettwerk aside) but hey, at least they invited the clue train to visit.
What This is Spinal Tap is to heavy metal, Hard Core Logo is to punk – both of them are mockumentaries following a band on tour. As befits its different genre, however, Hard Core Logo foregoes the silly jokes of Spinal Tap and instead walks an edgy line between humour and bitterness. Based on the book by Michael Turner, and brought to the screen by Bruce McDonald, the movie is widely seen as an allegory of the death of punk (although that makes it sound very boring, while it is in fact funny and sad, and has great music). The cast is stellar, with Hugh Dillon (the lead singer of The Headstones) and Callum Keith Rennie (now probably best known as a Cylon) playing the leads, and guest appearances by Vancouver punk legends DOA and by Joey Ramone. This is just a terrific movie for anyone interested in music, bands or punk.
Stars, who sing perfect Smiths/Belle and Sebastian-style pop songs, performed a live set on NPR‘s Studio 360. The show aired yesterday, and the segment is available for streaming or download. They also did a live bonus version of “Personal”, which is archived below.
I should add to my previous post that The Main Drag endeared themselves to me forever when they chose to cover LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” for Coke Machine Glow (I kind of like that song). Their version loses the staccato piano and swaps out James Murphy’s world-weary but assertive voice for the straight-up emotion of Matt Boch and Adam Arrigo.
Boston-area’s The Main Drag played last night with Freezepop and The Information and they were phenomenal (actually, all the bands were terrific). They first impinged on my consciousness in late 2006, when they won the Salon Song Search with “A Jagged Gorgeous Winter.” (Boston was well represented, with another local band, Hallelujah the Hills, taking third place). The Main Drag’s second album, Yours As Fast As Mine, came out last year – I can only presume that they spent their $5000 in contest money wisely. ‘Jagged’ and ‘gorgeous’ are both excellent descriptors of their string-laden songs.
Well, I had a terrific time guest-DJ’ing on WMBR this morning. Emphasis on the ‘guest’ – I got to do all the fun parts, like choosing all the songs and talking. Keith handled the control panel with gracious professionalism, and made me feel very welcome and less like the total newbie I am. I decided to focus on Canadian indie music, just because I know it pretty well and I needed a theme to narrow down the universe of possibilities. You can listen to the stream (.m3u file) for the next two weeks (until the morning of Thursday, March 20th). Note that I don’t come in until about the half-hour mark; Breakfast of Champions, WMBR’s morning show, runs from 8 to 10 and I was officially in from 8:30 to 9:30 am.
EDIT [March 20, 2008]: If you missed the streaming, but still want to hear it, feel free to contact me at debcha at gmail dot com and I can hook you up.
Here’s a copy of my notes from this morning; you can guess what I thought was the most important thing to remember (click on image to see a PDF).
I’ll be guest DJing on WMBR tomorrow, Thursday, March 6th, from 8:30 am to 9:30 am EST, sitting in on their weekday morning show, Breakfast of Champions. My playlist is focused on Canadian indie music, probably including songs from the new Destroyer and Ladyhawk albums, which haven’t yet been officially released (man, I’m enjoying having access to WMBR’s library!).
Three ways to listen:
Over the airwaves: If you are in the Boston area, tune into 88.1 on your FM dial.
Live streaming: Go to WMBR and click on one of the links in the top right corner to listen live.
Archives: If 8:30 am Eastern doesn’t work for you, but you’d still like to listen, the show will be archived for two weeks, starting pretty much immediately after it airs. Click here and select March 6, 2008.
Stay tuned for a follow-up post, with the complete playlist.
So obey my fortune cookie and turn way to the left of your dial as you head in to work tomorrow morning!
[Middle East Upstairs, Cambridge MA; February 29, 2008]
Toronto-based trio Born Ruffians played at the Middle East Upstairs on Friday night. They were astonishingly tight, especially considering that it was only the second night of their tour. Luke LaLonde’s jagged, warbling vocals were ably backed by both bassist Mitch DeRosier and Steve Hamelin, the drummer, leading to an almost 50s vibe, with barbershop-quartet-style harmonies. The cheerful-sounding music belies dismal lyrics, however, like these from “Badonkadonkey”: The disappearing kindness/that I show for you, I know/the loving that you gave to me/was wasted too. Their new album, Red, Yellow and Blue, is slated for release on on Tuesday, March 4th (I nabbed a physical CD – complete with lyrics sheet – at their concert).
One of the recurring themes in Daniel J. Levitin’s book, This Is Your Brain on Music, is the the centrality of expectations, both fulfilled and violated, in our experience of music. We have expectations at the level of individual phrases (whether chords are resolved or not, say), at the level of the song structure, the genre, and the overall sound (why Western music sounds different from say, traditional Chinese music). This probably goes a long way towards explaining why most of us need to hear a song a few times for it to ‘register.’ But it occurred to me, reading this book, that there is another important area of violated or fulfilled expectations, and that’s the existence of cover versions of songs. Cover songs – good ones, anyway – combine pleasing familiarity and pleasing novelty in a neat little package.
At a more intellectual level, Rosie Swash, of the Guardian Unlimited’s Music Weekly podcast, talked about the three factors that make for a good cover version: the element of surprise; history or meaning; and the cover artist making the song their own.
So welcome to Coverage, an intermittent feature on this blog, in which I post some of my favourite covers. Enjoy!
This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
Daniel J. Levitin
When I was in graduate school, I mentioned within earshot of a professor that I probably know more about alternative and independent music from 1980 onwards than I know about anything else. The professor insisted that I must know more about my doctoral thesis, but I couldn’t agree – when I think about the thousands of songs I can recognize within a few bars or can sing or hum along to, to say nothing of the masses of ancillary information like band names, albums, song titles and who dated whom, the sheer number of terabytes in my head dedicated to music is staggering. But the really astonishing part is that I’m not unusual. Everyone is great at remembering music. This is the book that explains why.
Written by a platinum-selling music producer who went to graduate school to study cognitive neuropsychology, This is Your Brain on Music addresses the cognitive underpinnings of the remarkable human facility with music. Daniel J. Levitin starts with a brief, lucid introduction to the fundamentals of music theory, and then goes on to discuss how we discern rhythm and harmony, how the brain processes music, and how we remember songs, ending with a discussion of the evolution of ‘the music instinct.’ Levitin shows how these processes are complex and highly distributed, involving regions of the brain ranging from the most primitive (the cerebellum) to the prefrontal cortex, the seat of higher reasoning. Throughout the book, Levitin is clear but doesn’t oversimplify, and he alerts you to the many, many open questions that remain in the field. This is a great book for anyone who’s given any thought to how we think about music.
WMBR, MIT’s community radio station, has one of the coolest member premiums ever – you can come in and DJ part of your favourite radio show. I made a donation to them in their fall fundraising drive, and I’ll be heading in to the studio to be a guest DJ on their morning show, Breakfast of Champions, on Thursday, March 6th, 2008, from 8:30 to 9:30 am EST. Keith, the Thursday BoC host, was kind enough to orient me to the station and let me spend a couple of hours perusing CDs in the stacks (pant, pant) yesterday afternoon, in preparation for my on-air turn.
WMBR homepage (link to streaming audio at upper right of page)
[Massachusetts College of Art and Design; January 31st, 2008]
Dan Deacon brought his Ultimate Reality Tour to MassArt on Thursday night, for a pretty low-key show, as this signage on a nearby bus shelter sugests. The video art was fun, especially for aficionados of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies (we clocked all three Terminators, Predator, Total Recall, Junior, and Kindergarten Cop). Unfortunately, Deacon’s headlining gig was a bit of a disappointment; the sound wasn’t amazing, and it was cut short by a Silly String-confiscating campus cop. The fun surprise of the night were openers Big Digits, whose dance-oriented electro filled the Pozen Auditorium with a pulsating mass of sweaty art-school kids.
Incidentally, Dan Deacon’s favouriteblueconcertshirt is starting to look pretty threadbare; if anyone knows where to get another teal shirt with a psychedelic colourburst of tropical birds on the front, maybe he’d be willing to trade in the original.
NPR‘s Weekend America invited The Mountain Goats to write and perform a song for Super Tuesday. In true John Darnielle style, it’s a bitterly humorous meditation on politicians as vampires, with a dash of Revelations thrown in. As he says, “Things tend to be more interesting if you take them to extremes….You could be a really good political satirist…[but] I write little emotional psychodramas… I will vote for the person who comes closest to what I think is right, but I don’t like and trust any of them.”
However, in my (admittedly feeble) defense, I’d like to point out that Cambridge, MA, probably has the world’s highest concentration of literate, geeky bands with overeducated lead singers. So instead of talking about bands whose lyrics are in the ‘yeah yeah yeah baby’ school, I get to enthuse about bands like The Franklin Kite, whose lyrics include words like ‘disambiguate,’ ‘conducive,’ and ‘malignant.’ Lead singer Ryan Hickox just got his PhD in astrophysics from MIT (and to celebrate his successful thesis defence, they held a concert). He’s still local though, having joined the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a postdoc. If you are in the neighbourhood, go check them out at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square on Friday, February 1st, 2008 (I think it’s some kind of Harvard-oriented concert, but don’t let that put you off).
I have built my life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I’m always racing to catch up on my new favorite song. But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with—nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.
While Sheffield does reach back to his childhood, most of the book centres around his relationship with his wife Renée, her untimely death, and the reality of living as a young widower. Sheffield’s personal narrative is poignant and well-told, and he paints a touching portrait of his deceased wife. I occasionally found the prose to be (in the words of Julien Temple and David Bowie) a little clever-clever, but it was nevertheless an enjoyable and touching read.
Update[January 27, 2008]: By strange coincidence, Rob Sheffield is about to visit the Boston area. He’ll be reading from this book at Brookline Booksmith on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008.
zed equals zee 
