The City Sonic video project is a series of short films that focus on the relationship between a band and a venue. They premiered a half-dozen or so of the films at NXNE last week, and there’s several up on YouTube. One is an interview with Barenaked Ladies drummer Tyler Stewart about the now-defunct Ultrasound on Queen Street W and their residency there.* And z=z fave director Bruce McDonald did one on punk band Cancer Bats at the Adrift Clubhouse. Check their YouTube channel for more videos.
If you happen to be an aspiring filmmaker (or know one), I would love, love, love to see something like this for all the great bands and venues in Boston or Seattle.
*Outing myself as a total dork: When I was a young, geeky, music-loving engineering student (as opposed an old, geeky, music-loving prof), I saw BNL many times at the Ultrasound, frequently bringing my calculus problem sets with me to work on before or between sets. Incidentally, if you think of them as just a novelty band, check out this early and emotionally powerful track.
Musician and illustrator Jeffrey Lewis, who did the great cartoon, “My 2008 in a Nutshell,” has a new video project, Jeffrey Lewis and the News (if you are under 25, the allusion is to this). The first segment of each video is a short, illustrated recap of the news, and the second is a musical performance with Jeffrey Lewis and musical guests. Of the three episodes up so far, my favourite is the second episode, which features what I can only describe as an acoustic mashup of “Louie, Louie” and Pavement’s “Cut Your Hair.” You can check out all the videos so far, and subscribe to them as a podcast, here.
The dark and disturbing video for Depeche Mode‘s new single, “Wrong,” for the album Sounds of the Universe, scheduled for release on April 21 in North America. I’m not much of a video person, but this one grabbed me through to the end and then I watched it again – it hits the right balance between narrative and obliquity.
Depeche Mode’s label, EMI, seems to be aggressively policing people posting the MP3—Hype Machine leads you to a trail of dead links and deleted Blogger posts—so I decided against joining their ranks. You can purchase the single at iTunes.
$99 Music Videos hopes to occupy the space between fan-createdvideos and traditional music videos. The brainchild of Next New Networks, the rules are simple: the video has to be made for less than $99, it has to be shot in one day, it has to be edited in one day and—this is where it’s really differentiated from fan videos—it has to be made with the collaboration of the band. The idea is to bring together emerging bands with enthusiastic filmmakers: the band gets a video, the filmmaker gets exposure, and Next New Networks gets its cut via the (occasionally intrusive) advertising. Every video has a companion making-of video, in which the creators get to document how they worked within the constraints (here’s the one for La Strada’s “The Sun Song” video, above); for someone who’s interested in how things tick, they might be more interesting than the videos themselves.
Want to make your own? Go find a band you like, or a fan who’s up for shooting a video, get five twenties out of an ATM, and submit your own video here.
Wired has a longer interview with the site creators here.
[embedded video; if you can’t watch it, click here]
Speaking of Freezepop, the above is a short interview they did for WePC.com (it’s an Asus/Intel vaguely astroturf-y ‘community-building’ site). The video is pretty much worth watching just for the Duke’s barely-restrained sarcastic understatement as he explains the relationship between the band and music videogames and what being a musician was like in the bad old days.
For a different facet of Freezepop, check out this webcomic.
[embedded YouTube video; if you can’t see it, click here]
While the life of this blog has been fairly brief, it has not escaped my attention that both my love of pop music and my fundamental geekiness shine through. Here, therefore, is the new KT Tunstall video, which brilliantly combines them both (together with anorak-clad obsessive fandom, which, um, I’m not going to admit to, okay?)
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.
[embedded YouTube video; if you can’t see it, click here]
[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.
It’s Thanksgiving in the US, which means I can start thinking about the year 2007 in music. Without question, “All My Friends,” by LCD Soundsystem (off the brilliant album, Sound of Silver) was my defining song for this year. Using an evening out as a framing device, James Murphy incisively considers growing older while finding (and losing) one’s place in the world. You might have to be old enough that you can relate to self-descriptions of ‘with a face like a dad’ and to thoughts like, ‘when you’re drunk and the kids look impossibly tan,’ but I find this song and video deeply poignant. Lest that sounds boring, I should point out that the melancholy lyrics and dry delivery are backed with driving, anthemic musical lines.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his lyrics in this song and in songs like “North American Scum” and “Losing My Edge,” James Murphy is engaging and funny; the Guardian Unlimited music podcast posted a Music Extra interview (MP3s at bottom of page) with him that gives some backstory.
zed equals zee 