CMJ » Brandon Specktor

Iggy And The Stooges – Ready To Die

Brandon Specktor — Thu, 02 May 2013 15:20:04 +0000

Is Iggy Pop OK? Is he dying? Is he broke? We ask because we care, and apparently we’re not alone, because this page called “Dead or Alive? Iggy Pop” was just updated three days ago. He’s not dead. But Iggy Pop is 66 years old now, and he just made an album called Ready To Die. It’s expectedly loaded with feelings that are far flung from his Lust For Life heyday, and even though this marks the first Stooges album with Raw Power lick master James Williamson on guitar in almost 30 years, this new album of old ideas hits hardest at its softest, most melancholy moments.

That’s not to say the rock isn’t rockin’. Opener “Burn” starts with a startling, explosively heavy drum-and-guitar thunderclap just to remind us all that, yes—this is a fuckin’ Stooges record, and we’re seriously doing this right now. The following 34 minutes is a satisfying, if sometimes disingenuous, jolt of regret and reminiscence, whose least interesting moments are those power-chord-fueled, everyman rock cuts with titles like “Sex and Money,” “Job,” and “DD’s” (pronounced “Double D’s,” if that legendary abs-out Iggy Pop subtlety had you fooled). These songs are quick and catchy like the best of the Stooges, but where old tracks were soaked in coked-up fear, lust and anger, these don’t do much more than communicate the basest classic rock party lines—”Working for The Man sucks! Staring at boobs is terrific!”—in as few chord changes as possible.

One notable exception is the song “Gun,” which describes a country freaked out on violence with the happily-manic cadence of an Alice Cooper song (and gets stuck in your head just as fast). In this song Iggy basically writes off World War Three as a drunken bar brawl we’ll just have to deal with some day, singing “Now it’s time to duke it out, nuke it out, and black it out.” Against all this album’s mortality, there’s something comforting about the way Iggy knocks the apocalypse down.

Iggy Pop doesn’t have time for Armageddon. He’s seen friends die and almost been there himself, and Ready To Die hits hardest when Iggy parks his chest-gazing to acknowledge that. On “The Departed,” a dark country ballad steeped in crisp slide guitar, Iggy opens up on the death of original Stooges guitarist and longtime friend Ron Asheton, channeling some late-game Johnny Cash gravitas. On “Unfriendly World,” another acoustic ballad, Iggy takes an emotional inventory of his life while staring at empty picture frames, old Christmas toys, and other collected junk that proves, despite the hazier moments, he has existed on this planet. Both tracks are honest, reflective, and powerful. Even though they disrupt the album’s predominantly punky rhythm, they also elevate it above rock cliches.

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Buke And Gase @ Bowery Ballroom: January 30, 2013

Brandon Specktor — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 18:24:05 +0000

In case you were worried, Buke And Gase are still astonishing endeavors in multitasking. Aron Sanchez, sitting stage left during the Wednesday night release party for his band’s second LP, General Dome, is playing the ninth or tenth prototype of his guitar-bass hybrid baby, kicking on who-knows-what version of his bass drum/tambourine percussion cannon, and now pitching in a few duet verses here and there for good measure. Arone Dyer, stage right, has ostensibly mastered the third iteration of her six-string baritone ukulele, which belies its sideshow-prize appearance with sizzling power and extraterrestrial effects-pedal augmentation. Both Aron(e)s are engaging their eight collective appendages in some kind of strumming or stomping or fretting action, pretty much nonstop for 60 minutes.

Barring a pair of those Dick Van Dyke one-chimbley-sweep-orchestra harnesses, this means B&G’ve got to be seated for the whole show. The dynamic makes for an intimate stage presence, more rewarding in intimate venues like Mercury Lounge or Le Poisson Rouge (still standing after a B&G/Death Grips/Flying Lotus triple-header during last year’s CMJ Marathon) where their impressive footwork doesn’t go so unnoticed behind rows of bobbing human heads.

But the upshot to B&G playing a larger venue like Bowery, as the crowd of several hundred fans and friends observed Wednesday night, was an enormous upgrade in power and volume. Sanchez’s kick drumming and low-end gase beats sounded mammoth through the club’s speakers on their set/General Dome openers “Houdini Crush” and “Hiccup,” and Dyer’s strong vocal melodies were amplified perfectly above the instrumental surge. B&G protested one writer labeling their sound “fiery, metal-infused indie rock,” but at the Bowery they got the most back from their audience during bouts of what anyone there can agree was some goddamn awesome fiery metal infusion. That stoned-heavy bridge about a minute into “Your Face Left Before You” (echoed later in new track “Contortion In Training”) inspired the first of several communal head-banging sessions around the floor and balcony, and got a few front-row joes swaying in half-mosh. “Sleep Gets Your Ghost” proved another big pleaser and spiked the set’s first singalong into swing.

Not surprisingly, songs from 2010′s Riposte and beyond got the biggest rises out of the crowd, which dwindled toward the end of B&G’s hour. The Aron(e)s ended their set the same way they ended at Mercury Lounge a few months ago, leading an ecstatic clap-along to the natural show-stopping swagger of “Revel In Contempt.” Only a day old, the stuff of General Dome might still need some time to percolate with fans before it earns show-stopping power of its own.

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Life Or Death: Slug Guts, Mac DeMarco @ 92Y Tribeca

Brandon Specktor — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 18:45:45 +0000

Slug Guts – Photo by Donald Lee

It must be significant that the first mosh pit of Saturday night’s Life Or Death showcase at 92Y Tribeca broke out during the shiny sleaze-blues of Mac DeMarco but not the thunder-pissing outback metal of Slug Guts. To be fair, the front-row scrum of rangy dance-bros wasn’t so much a proper mosh pit as a communal exaggeration of drunken swaying (and even that was enough to stoke the 92Y bouncer on “scolding flashlight detail” into action), but where was that energy half an hour earlier during the Aussie metal show?

The crowd’s lack of thrashing didn’t halt the five be-mustached bruisers of Slug Guts from throwing their slippery, leather-clad bodies full force into a dark and angry landscape of their new album. Front-screamer Jimi Kritzler, all faux-hawked and jean-vested and aviator-ed and slithery, has kind of a scummier Jesse Hughes vibe, and Slug Guts’ doomy desert head-bangers sound similarly influenced by a life of listening to way too much Josh Holme. The tunes were loud, heavy and riff-driven, but mostly just loud. A dude named Nick was up there playing sax, but you’d have no idea from listening. Even Kritzler’s crackly vocals were engulfed by the tsunami of guitar and drum fuzz.

The room-ringing rock was a gift that kept on giving, well into the crisp surf chords of Mac DeMarco’s following set. 22-year-old DeMarco can barely breach the doors at most of the venues he’s played this CMJ, but that same youthful DGAF vivacity made his indie-blues ditties a festival must-see for many young attendants.

Saturday’s Life Or Death showcase was no exception; the room swelled with well-dressed 20-somethings before his set and was greeted with the greatest fan enthusiasm before DIIV came out three hours later. Coming from sturdier Williamsburg venues like MHOW and Public Assembly, the comparatively posh lounge vibe of 92Y somewhat limited Mac’s stage antics (no surfing or diving here) but never his humor. Mocking Slug Guts with fake deathmetal throat growls, introducing his band as “cock rock” (his Facebook bio opts for the alliterative “jizz jazz” instead) and just generally dropping an off-script “cock” whenever the urge struck, Mac’s banter was just as entertaining as his band’s perverted pop-abilly.

The show ended with Mac and drummer Joe McMurray trading places, giving Joe a chance to play his “first guitar solo ever” and DeMarco one more chance to show off his polymath rock chops, securing his seat among smiling festival winners before the MUSE-y synth pop of Sky Ferreira stole the room back to a darker place.

Photos by Donald Lee

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CMJ 2012 Artist Q&A: Talk Normal

Brandon Specktor — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:00:24 +0000

Sarah Register moved from Oklahoma to Manhattan in 1997 looking for her voice. Instead she found a haunting partnership. Alongside friend/drummer/co-croaker Andrya Ambro, Register supplies the dark guitar muscle to Brooklyn’s Talk Normal, a noise-brood coven of two whose 2009 debut, Sugarland, was a strange contest of black and white magics, wringing fallen-angel harmonies through a swamp of dissonant fuzz and relentless kick-drum thunder.

Talk Normal’s self-produced sophomore LP, Sunshine, is a project three years in the making that will finally see release via Joyful Noise on October 23—a few days after the duo plays the Knitting Factory tonight during CMJ 2012. And if leading singles “Bad Date” and “Cover” prove portentous, the band’s hypnotic spell has only grown stronger. I chatted with Register on a cloudy afternoon in Brooklyn from her Williamsburg troll pad (“pretty much right next to the bridge”) about the ups and downs of her last three years, why she doesn’t groove on improv comedy anymore and what we can expect from Sunshine.

What brought you to NYC 15 years ago?
I just always thought music was magical, and I thought that New York was the center of the world music-wise. So I went to college at NYU in the audio engineering program. I figured I could get into helping other people make music that way while I figured out what to do for myself.

And has Talk Normal proven a satisfying way of finding your own musical magic?
It’s been going on for a while now, long enough to have had ups and downs for sure. Andrya and I have devoted a lot of our time, money and lives to it. So it’s definitely been all over the board in terms of what it’s taken from us and given back. Talk Normal is a living, breathing thing that talks and has needs and demands, and we’ve tried to give of ourselves as much as possible to that. I think we’re in a healthier place right now than in the past. It was pretty challenging getting our first record together financially, mentally, in a lot of different ways. But that’s standard.

You’ve been working on Sunshine for three years. What took you so long?
This was an important album for us—Andrya and I have been working together and individually toward being more open, being more free and also having more fun. We put some of these songs together very slowly and tried to make the sound as close as possible as to what was in our heads. There was at least one month where I stepped away and didn’t listen to any of these songs all month. But we’ve been done with this album since the beginning of the year, so it’s thrilling that it’s finally gonna be out, 10 months after we finished!

Are you happy with the results?
I think we grew a lot making this record. Andrya just has such a tremendous amount of personality in her voice, and it’s been shining more and more, and that’s just a wonderful thing to experience. It was a long process…figuring out where we were and what our dynamic was between us. Figuring out what could be great about us and what already was and how that could be even more, how we could be better to each other while traveling. We’re definitely trying to focus on what’s gonna be next. We’ve got a couple new songs that are coming out pretty great, actually. It’s a good testament to some of the hard times growing and moving forward during this last record.

Where does the title Sunshine come from?
You know I’ve read a lot of things that talk about “their tongue-in-cheek album title, Sunshine,” which is fine, but it actually is an album about joy. The word comes up in four of the nine songs. It’s just got a good feel to it. Oh yeah also, that movie Rockers? That’s a favorite of Andrya’s and mine, and there’s a character named Sunshine in it. It’s a movie that gets quoted a lot in and around me [laughs]. So of the many things that Sunshine was, it was also part of Rockers.

Did you work to be more honest and open lyrically on this album, too?
There’s a couple of cases that were direct reactions to things I experienced. One of them I keep pretty close to my heart…but another one, which would totally not even be translatable when you look at the lyrics, is “Baby Your Heart’s Too Big.” A big part of that song is about sickness and the potential death of someone who was very important to me, but lyrically it sounds like something you’d say to your girlfriend.

How do you and Andrya split up songwriting?
Usually I’ll write down a bunch of words and hand them over to Andrya, whether or not she knows what the song’s actually about. She takes that and puts it in a different place—adds some new thoughts, takes out some rhymes and throws it back to me, where I’ll be like, “Oh! Fascinating! Look what you did with this!” [laughs]. Andrya often writes about perspective and new things and experiences. I’m more buried in the past. A lot of different things come out of that. We’re always either writing together or it’s all Andrya, which is great, because otherwise it might just be me waxing poetic about my teenage years. Which would not be great.

Do you write poetry?
I suppose that I do, yeah.

Does it rhyme?
Most of the time [laughs]. But, it’s completely unfair because there’s other times when I’m not on my stupid rhyming kick…like, for a while I was taking improv comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade, and in class there’s more than one game that has to do with rhyming off the top of your head and sort of spitting words out, and all of those cases I completely failed! Apparently I’m not cut out for public improvised rhyming.

You’ve been performing for a while, though. Do you feel comfortable with yourself on and off stage?
I definitely don’t feel like a fully realized performer yet. I’m very aware of everything when we’re performing, and you compare that to when you see other people on stage and they’re all rolling their eyes back in their heads and they’re just in wherever, whatever other world. But as a listener, when I listen to some of the things that Andrya and I have done, I’m really proud. I feel humbled that there are moments in songs that kind of give me that magical feeling that means something to me completely separate from creating it. That’s cool. We’re definitely not done yet.

Talk Normal plays at the Knitting Factory on Friday, October 19, as part of CMJ 2012.

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Oh My Rockness: Roomrunner, METZ, Chrome Canyon @ Cameo

Brandon Specktor — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 20:30:59 +0000

METZ – Photo by Violeta Alvarez

If you missed the sibling feedback nukes of METZ and Roomrunner that detonated for two hours through the narrow back room of Williamsburg’s Cameo Gallery last night, congratulations: You still have your hearing and can enjoy the rest of this festival. If you were one of the brave people there without earplugs, well, good game, y’all. Look forward to reading about the rest of the Marathon buzz online while Googling to see if “New York Ear Bank” is a real thing (just checked—it’s not).

But it was totally worth it, right? Wedged between the comparatively chill garage pop ditty-bop of Toronto’s Moon King (who just put out a new EP and are playing loads more shows this week) and the comparatively shushed synth cruise of local nostalgia-nauts Chrome Canyon,
Roomrunner and METZ’s dual drillbit-to-the-brain assault was the loud rock event of CMJ night one.

The Baltimore basement vets of Roomrunner got the feedback loop started with some thrusting grunge cuts from their Super Vague EP along with last year’s self-titled debut, manhandling perverted surf riffs into tsunamis of violent fuzz. Denny Bowen—who’s moved from the drum kit to main axe after his old Double Dagger outfit broke up last year—had no delusions about the strength of his crew’s primal missives. “Go ahead and turn the vocals down to a medium man cave,” he said to the sound guy before his voice was forever lost (probably for the better) to the unyielding tides of fuzz.

Toronto trio METZ soon followed, who hastily fracked that man cave and desecrated its ruins. In its 40-or-so minutes on stage, METZ played close to its entire (gnarly) new album, only foregoing some of the buzz-barf filler for one final, extended trip into the noise void. And that’s where they really killed it. Screamer/guitarist Alex Edkins hopped flamingo-style onto Hayden Menzies’s kick drum, heathen screamed into mic and amp alike and, in a spot exorcism with the ghost of Kurt Cobain, slashed guitar-first across the stage and almost clashed with bassist Chris Slorach in the midst of his own bunnyhopping, head-banging vigil. METZ must’ve shooed the spirit away—and with it the nearest third of the Cameo Gallery crowd, now too deaf, too wrecked or just too satisfied to stick around for Chrome Canyon’s midnight cruise.

Photos by Violeta Alvarez

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Buke And Gase @ Mercury Lounge: October 12, 2012

Brandon Specktor — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 19:20:30 +0000

Buke (n.): a baritone ukulele-turned 6-string guitar that looks like something you’d win at a county fair, sounds like a sproinging synth organ warped through a war of tape feedback in the deepest level of your Ambien dreams. Played by Brooklyn musician Arone Dyer to ameliorate her carpel tunnel.

Gase (n.): a glorious electric rhythm love child, 1/3 bass, 2/3 guitar, 100% badass. Played, invented and incessantly re-invented by Brooklyn musician Aron Sanchez, ’cause the dude used to outfit the Blue Man Group with bonkers instruments and that itch apparently doesn’t go away.

Some other vocab lessons—see “toe-bourine”—were thrown around at Manhattan’s Mercury Lounge on Friday as the crowd crammed close for a midnight set from Brooklyn guitarchitect duo Buke And Gase (formerly Buke And Gass), but the most important noises of the evening came without words. Following opening sets from improvisational gloom-jazzers Blast Off! and gauzey, dreamgaze-y syth choir Glass Ghost, Aron Sanchez and Arone Dyer bobbed, boot-stomped and buked through a unique sonic palette that sounds even more flannel-blastingly massive in person.

The dual Aron(e)s dropped a hefty sampling of their fantastic new Function Falls EP (still streaming here) tempered with Riposte favorites and their parade-through-the-swampland single, “Hiccup.” Adam Schatz, sax man for awesome opener Blast Off!, joined them for a wonked-out rip through “Misshaping Introduction,” but wasn’t quite enough manpower to facilitate the lush cover of New Order’s “Blue Monday” that inspired the Function Falls jam sessions. “For that song we’d need a play button,” Dyer laughed.

“Copyright be damned! You’re probably the best band in the universe!” a fan answered.

The Mercury crowd didn’t get “Blue Monday,” but they did get an exuberant hour of weird-rock assault capped with “Revel In Contempt” that got most of the crowd clapping ecstatically along to Sanchez’s attack against a modified kick drum. Drop as many cliches as you want about DIY Brooklyn hipsters or whatever (granted, everything from the Aron(e)s’ amp casings to their screen-printed tees are self-engineered), but Gase is a multi-purpose rock weapon that could be co-opted just as easily by Rush or Rage Against The Machine. Matched with Dyer’s squelching Buke rhythms and the lilting, Karen-O-but-way-less-scary electricity of her voice, behold one of the oddest, most cliche-obliterating bands working out of a Brooklyn basement right now.

Buke & Gass are playing a showcase at the CMJ Music Marathon this week along with Death Grips and Flying Lotus. Weird, weird lineup. But on Friday night, B&G proved with a smile that they’re ready to bring not just the experimental bent to match the belching synths and cobra-puke flow of their future stage-mates, but the spine-shaking musical muscle to boot.

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Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, K-Holes @ The Well: September 22

Brandon Specktor — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 21:28:37 +0000

Ty Segall

“This song’s dedicated to the medic,” Ty Segall said toward the end of his outdoor set at the Well on Saturday while one front-row fan bled from the ears.

Elsewhere in the sold-out Bushwick industrial space, a girl who hobbled into the yard on crutches now twirled them in triumphant loops about her head. The rain was down to a drizzle after alternating between spits and buckets for the past half hour. One Twitter pessimist likened the scene to “all the bad parts of being at a music festival.” Well…that depends on what side of the mosh pit you were standing on.

In the past few years Ty Segall and current tour-mates Thee Oh Sees have built a rep for themselves as the reigning warrior kings of California garage rock. Ty is just about to put out his third LP of 2012 while Thee Oh Sees just dropped their excellent 14th album in half as many years. Both rock troupes are lauded for their high-energy live sets and near-endless road trips (Ty was just out here in May, and Thee Oh Sees played ATP the next day). Judging from Saturday’s sold-out co-headliner along with local lo-fi psychonauts K-Holes (whose frontman Cameron Michel also plays guitar in Golden Triangle, and makes some pretty psychedelic art), the buzz is paying off for Ty and TOS, and especially for their fans—bloody brains or no.

Ty Segall

Building off of the latent energy and drunkenness of Thee Oh Sees’s set, Segall and his band—which includes eternal conspirator Mikal Cronin as well as the newer friends who helped forge this summer’s rampaging Slaughterhouse from the black core of Mt. Doom, CA—played quick and heavy, opening the ceremonies with a squealing introduction to Ty’s favorite toy (an effects pedal named “Fuzz War”) before coming down hard on album openers “Death” and “I Bought My Eyes.” At first the open-air venue seemed a disadvantage to noises designed for the angry ricochet between garage and basement walls. But when the rain came, the audience members that didn’t retreat to beer tent awnings condensed into one writhing molecule, and first blood was shed in Ty Segall’s ad-hoc Bushwick slaughterhouse.

The band tore through most of its new album, giving extra attention to the Black-Sabbath-via-Jack-White descent into power-chord artillery “Wave Goodbye,” but it was older favorites like “Finger” and “My Sunshine” that warranted medical attention. Toward the set’s end, the band eschewed recent covers of Willie Dixon and Fred Neil for some surprise renderings of “Sweet Home Alabama” and the first verse of “The End.” Besides the rain, it was the most welcome surprise of the night; from my view in the mosh pit, the clutch of soggy Ty-chopaths seemed like they would’ve been just as satisfied with a cover of “Call Me Maybe.”

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Thee Oh Sees – Putrifiers II

Brandon Specktor — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:13:23 +0000

John Dwyer and friends set to tape some 200-plus songs throughout the last five years, and Putrifiers II holds a few of the best.

We’ve got “Flood’s New Light,” an uncharacteristically crisp and upbeat ditty of jangling tambourine, hooks of elated “ba, ba-ba-ba-ba” gibberish and the clearest stream of biking-through-Golden-Gate-Park-naked-on-solstice endorphins since their rainbow-melting cover art for Help. It’s about as campy as Thee Oh Sees are capable of getting—but don’t stress. There’s still a doobie chilling between Counselor Dwyer’s teeth.

Moving on a bit, we get the flip side of those good vibes with the seething guitar menace of leading single “Lupine Dominus.” It’s the weirdest, crunchiest, most visceral slice of psychedelia by Thee Oh Sees on this or any album and one of the best rock singles in a year that contains some actually pretty great rock singles (recession’s ending, guys—USA!).

There are other winners here, for sure, plus some cool experiments with Jethro Tull-tooting flute parts, a droning cello here, an itchy fiddle there, but otherwise the wolf’s share of Putrifiers II remains couched pretty comfortably in the time-honored Oh Sees conventions that made this sandcastle as big as it is. There’s falsetto, there’s funereal note-for-note vocal duets from horror twins Dwyer and Brigid Dawson, and there are plenty of fuzzy forays down the alleys of psych-rock-past with special emphasis on Byrds-y guitar (“Goodnight Baby,”) post-India Beatles spirit wankery (“So Nice”) and a dram of shuffling zombie Doo-wop (“Will We Be Scared?”).

All these songs are good (well, except maybe “Cloud #1,” which isn’t so much a song as a 90-second continuation of the synth fart that concludes “So Nice.”). Putrifiers II is a perfectly A.D.D. arc of garage psych we’ve come to expect from Dwyer and co. lo these five years. But that’s the album’s biggest fault, too. Beyond the welcome shine of TOS’ cleanest production to date, so many of the songs here fall too comfortably into the realm of expectation, and after 14 solid albums in five short years we’re still, greedily, waiting for our minds to get full-blown. But then, maybe that’s what happens when you’re putting out an average of 2.8 albums a year; you don’t have time to let your songs marinate and develop for long.

Lupine Dominus, by the way, is Latin for “Master Wolf.” That’s what you’ve got to be today if you want to, as Dwyer puts it, “make art for a living.” Tour longer than other bands, play harder than other bands, record faster and release more than other bands. The strategy has paid off for the band, establishing it as California garage-rock royalty (TOS has friend and conspirator Ty Segall beat on Facebook likes nearly 2:1). Putrifiers II is not the masterpiece TOS fans may have been hoping for. But it is another piece that let’s Thee Oh Sees maintain the role of reigning masters.

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Divine Fits @ Music Hall Of Williamsburg: September 9, 2012

Brandon Specktor — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 21:02:50 +0000

It’s easy to discount Divine Fits. With the groovy specter of Spoon lingering just beyond bassist/guitarist/gravel-voiced front-moaner Britt Daniel’s eternal bedhead, dude didn’t have to wait too long before A Thing Called Divine Fits, his debut album with ex-Wolf Parade/Handsome Furs dynamo Dan Boeckner, was earning respectable NPR airplay or pop-rocking Fallon‘s studio audience into a frenzied cheergasm. Life, fresh as it is for these indie vets’ new venture, has been pretty easy so far—so that’s why when Daniel says stuff like, “It’s a real record. It’s a real band,” well, it’s easy to pull a McKayla. But then they go and put on a show like last night’s at Music Hall Of Williamsburg, and suddenly a silver medal seems pretty damn impressive, after all.

Completed by the muscular rhythms of New Bomb Turks drummer Sam Brown and “barely legal” multi-purpose keys/backup guitar man Alex Fleschel, Divine Fits tore through the 11 tracks on their debut album, plus two covers, in an hour that fleshed out, beefed up and totally validated the crew’s already solid dance rock cocktail. Many among the Spoon and Wolf Parade zealots who comprised the sold-out, Sunday night crowd may have anticipated from past gig experiences what rock would come, but Daniel and Boeckner, befuddled into smiling repetitions of “Thank you…thank you…thank you” and “Seriously, you guys are SO nice,” proved themselves more surprised than anyone by the energy exploding from Divine Fits’ first NYC set.

Some cred should definitely be given to show opener Sean Bones, a breezy Brooklyn foursome captained by its eponymous frontman, who whisked the growing crowd away on a brief but convincing digression to some fire-lit Long Island beach. The band’s Facebook page tags its style as a “Tropical Disease,” which turned out at least half-applicable on stage last night. Singer/guitarist Bones’ floating, vaguely-nasal delivery channeled an MGMT with the caps lock turned off, maybe sipping a Corona with lime on Atlantic shores in lieu of mainlining Amazon psychotropics, while the mammoth grooves of bassist/filmmaker/way-cooler-than-you snowboarder Saara Untracht-Oakner set a Rastaman’s eterna-chill pulse. The overall effect was an undeniably danceable breeze that blew the crowd into swaying cliques, if never into full-blown head-banging tribes.

The rockness came soon enough though, when half an hour later Daniel grabbed a bass, Boeckner slung his guitar around his shoulders and this thing called Divine Fits hopscotched right into the Daniel-driven declaration of (b)romance, “Flaggin a Ride.” On record, the song is a slow-building, Spoon-y march of tickling guitar trills, and a great teaser of things to come.

But live, Daniel’s mannered, neck-bulging dedication to note-by-note perfection was neatly opposed by Boeckner’s guitar-thrashing rock’n'roll energy. The playful buddy cop chemistry that characterizes the Fits’ debut is pushed to even cartoonier extremes on stage—Daniel tall and tousled in a white tee, Boeckner clad in a black, sleeveless getup that showed off his snarling cat tatt; Daniel rigorously hunched, tweaking his pedals into the perfect pitch for each of his patient rock strolls, Boeckner delivering his synth-pop pick-me-ups in head-bangs and serpentine writhes on the stage floor; Daniel all divine, Boeckner providing the fits.

For all the excitement stirred up by this tension, the set’s most satisfying moments came when all four Fits were unified in the challenge of playing someone else’s material. The cover of Tom Petty’s “You Got Lucky” was pitch-perfect synth pop worship, elevated to Indie Prom levels of audience participation thanks to Fischel’s lush keys and Boeckner’s moody blues bellow. When the band ecstatically emerged for their encore performance of “Shivers,” Daniel delivered a visceral impression of Nick Cave melancholy (“I’ve been contemplating suicide/ but it really doesn’t suit my style”) that creeped fluidly into a Brown/Boeckner drum’n'guitar freakout. The show ended with a coordinated stage hop from the band’s co-pilots, driving home in a unified power chord what Daniel’s been trying to convince us all along: This thing called Divine Fits? It’s the real deal, man.

Divine Fits Setlist:
Flaggin A Ride
Baby Get Worse
Salton Sea
What Gets You Alone
Would That Not Be Nice
Civilian Stripes
My Love Is Real
Doom Town (Wipers cover)
Like ice Cream
Neopolitans
You Got Lucky (Tom Petty Cover)
For Your Heart

Encore:
Shivers (Boys Next Door cover)

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Best Of The Fest: Lollapalooza 2012

Brandon Specktor — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:35:28 +0000

This year’s Lollapalooza was, in a word, loud. Dance jockeys Justice and Avicii headlined the same stage where stoner rock legends Black Sabbath reunited on Friday night, and the ubiquitous bass explosions emanating from the EDM-specific stage/eventual mud playground, Perry’s, was loud enough to defibrillate an unconscious raver. Every band, whether wielding guitars or MacBooks, had to jack up the volume as a result, leading to the loudest, smokiest, bro-iest bro-down in the Chicago alt rock festival’s history.

Here’s the most interesting things we saw over the weekend:

Least Annoying Nationalism: Random Canadian Dudes At The Sheepdogs
It’s surprisingly easy to get a clutch of boozey bros to chant their American pride—sporadic choruses of “USA! USA!” and, more bizarrely, “MICHAEL PHELPS!” could be heard at any given moment somewhere in or around Grant Park this weekend—but it’s remarkably less simple to get a crowd of boozey bros to rep the Maple Leaf. Three long-haired Canucks tried to get a “SASKATOON!” chant going during the Sheepdogs’ Sunday afternoon set (a lite hits version of the set they played at Mercury Lounge not long ago), currying camaraderie with the good-natured Canadian Southern rockers. Nobody else joined in. But nobody wanted to sock them with a wadded up flag, either.

Best Guitar Faces: Gary Clark Jr.
Neo-bluesman Gary Clark Jr.‘s latest of nine festival performances this summer may have been his ballsiest. The first blast of bass on “When My Train Pulls In,” an eight-minute acoustic solo on Clark’s Bright Lights EP, was startling. Likely competing with the software-augmented fusillade of sound drifting in from Perry’s across the park, Clark’s hour-long, improv-heavy set choogled by through muddy sheets of reverb that rendered the shredding climaxes of “I Don’t Owe You A Thing” and city-swag closer “Bright Lights” nigh indistinguishable. But when Clark and his backing band (picture three understated badasses in sunglasses) dropped the tempo and the feedback in the middle of the set to make room for some crisper solo showmanship, the resulting stomach-pain crinkles of concentration and revelation-through-rock jaw drops that unfolded on Gary’s face proved just as fun to watch as the music itself.

Best Stage Banter: At The Drive-In
“Literature. I fucks with books,” Cedric Bixler-Zavala admitted toward the end of his newly reunited band’s scorching Sunday set. The At the Drive-In front-serpent had just finished a tangent about proper sandal attire while the band dealt with audio difficulties, and is an apparent champ at filling awkward silences with random opinions. He’s probably a hit at after-parties.

Most Likely To Inspire Some Quixotic Wandering: Black Sabbath
Content having seen the solid first hour of Black Sabbath’s behemoth two-hour reunion show (they played “Black Sabbath” and “War Pigs,” crunching into the heaviest Iommi-driven nuggets early on), I followed the crowd on Friday night.

Please Chill Award: Wale
The smallest crowd of Friday night’s headliners was at Wale, whose set on the tree-enclosed Google Play stage had the misfortune of falling right between the skeleton-disintegrating chomp of Sabbath and the nonstop bass fart gunfire drifting downwind from Perry’s. Some devoted watchers pumped their fists in anticipation of the Maybach musician’s arrival, which came 15 minutes behind schedule, and would show Wale love up through his “Rack City” finale. Others left as soon as Wale took the stage to start an episodic tirade about the shitty sound engineers controlling his mic. It wasn’t a good look, especially on a dude trying to rap “fuck fame / fuck money” with a straight face.

Hardest Band To Actually See: Black Keys
Most of the Lolla collective was watching the Black Keys. Halfway into their set, the Keys’ crowd was near impenetrable and extended to the concrete steps a couple hundred yards from the stage. The main stage’s twin video screens were scarcely visible, providing a nice shot of Dan Auerbach’s hands during one of his El Camino solos.

Weirdest Crowd: Bassnectar
Meanwhile, at Perry’s, Bassnectar was commanding a pulsing wub-and-light show whose brain-obliterating bass drew the most eclectic crowd I’d see all weekend. Beyond the predictable hydra of flailing EDM fanatics crowding the front of the stage, there were several families with small children laying out blankets between the cylindrical speaker turrets halfway between the stage and the exit. The weirdest/best thing I saw at Lolla this year was a kid—who couldn’t have been more than six years old—watching Bassnectar on his dad’s shoulders, putting him on a level plane with the girl dancing topless a few feet ahead of him.

Best Cover of “We Are Young”: Drunk Dudes Hiding From A Flash Flood In Kasey’s Tavern
On Saturday afternoon Chicago was hit with so much rain that Lollapalooza’s 60-or-so thousand attendants were forced to evacuate Grant Park and seek shelter downtown. Many of the day’s predominantly teenaged, distressingly shirtless EDM fans took refuge in the likes of the Chicago Public Library, Starbucks and Target stores, while other stranded evacuees were bussed to nearby garages for safety. The festival’s 21+ refugees, meanwhile, crowded into bars and neon-lit liquor stores throughout the financial district. My friends and I Jenga’d into Kasey’s, a narrow tavern in Printer’s Row made even narrower by the 75 other wet and thirsty savages queuing Chili Peppers on the jukebox, applauding Olympic volleyballers and their own weather-slighted brethren on local news reports, and eventually uniting in an atonal chorus of Fun.’s “We Are Young.” On the patio, a group of older wristband-wearers sat in the rain smoking pot from a wooden pipe. The Chicago police had their hands full. Mad props to them, and to the fleet of bartenders who remained pleasant and professional through the afternoon despite a belligerent scrum of vikings taking their city’s fire safety codes to task.

Best Concert-Turned-Muddy-Tribal-Ritual: Santigold
After the storm, each of the night’s four headliners pushed their sets back by about an hour. Though the augmented schedule slighted bands like Alabama Shakes and Paper Diamond whose sets got rain-nixed entirely, the storm is pretty much the best thing that could’ve happened for festival attendants. The air was cooler, the turf was softer, and the resulting attitude of elation pouring in sweaty chants from thousands of returning party-starters fostered some of the most uninhibited audience experiences of the weekend, especially at Santigold. The baseball diamonds ringing Perry’s stage were reduced to flip-flop-eating rivers of mud, and for every attendant hesitant to vacate their islands of solid ground there was another fan crumping shirtless in the ankle deep muck. The booming, tribal drums of stripped club beats like “Creator” and set closer “Big Mouth” proved indispensable soundtracks to the crowd’s mud stomping mania. For a few minutes, those in the front rows who were invited to storm the stage during “Creator” enveloped Santi and her lock-step backup dance badasses entirely.

Best Performance Adjusted for 100,000 Stoners: Jack White
As a panting, sweat-drenched Ozzy Osbourne reminded everyone on Friday night, being a headlining musician at a sold-out festival ain’t easy work. Sunday headliner Jack White came prepared with his two backing bands—the all-male Los Buzzardos and the all-female Peacocks—but ultimately the success of the two-hour set rested on his own madcap leadership. After zipping up a tight rendition of “Sixteen Saltines” from his new album, Jack gave Los Buzzardos an almost imperceptible cue to drop the tempo of “Black Math” down to a stoner slug’s pace, more in line with the languorous vibe emanating from the drugged, fatigued loyalists who made it to Lolla’s final show. Jack cut like a buffalo through 20 fiery White Stripes, Raconteurs and solo singles, eschewing his whip-crack garage tradition for sludgier noodling. Ever a fan of threes, Jack dressed the stage and all its inhabitants in somber shades of black, white and blue, giving their haunted blues an almost funereal feel, especially when the Peacocks swayed with flowing hair and dresses through softer, clearer cuts of “Love Interruption” and “The Hardest Button to Button.” Both bands came out for the curtain call, Jack bowing tall, pale and tired in the center. After an encore of “Seven Nation Army” satisfied the wordless hook that festival attendees had been chanting all weekend, they all earned it.

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Dick Dale, Manitoba, Detroit Cobras @ Rocks Off Cruise

Brandon Specktor — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 21:28:56 +0000

In July 1961, a 24-year-old Dick Dale had to move his regular Balboa concerts out of the ice cream parlor and into the 3000-capacity Rendezvous Ballroom. These alcohol-free ballroom “stomps” enlightened schools of energetic surfers and teenage beach louts to the growing phenomenon of surf rock, and sold out rapidly.

At the time, Dale’s music was a revelation; his guitar was slick, wet, and gargling with reverb; his style was so conducive to amplification that it required the construction of the first-ever 100-watt amplifier. According to some stories, Dale was the first dude to turn the volume up to ten, earning him the title “Father of Heavy Metal” along with the obvious “King of Surf Rock.”

Now Dick Dale is 75, and rock music is ever more becoming an object of nostalgia rather than a force of cultural change. But that doesn’t stop either one from selling out. Wavestomp—a concert cruise presented by Rocks Off concert promotions and tagged as “low brow on the high seas”—was a nominal tribute to Dale’s ballroom ragers of yore, bringing together Dale, the garage-shaking Detroit Cobras, metal survivors Manitoba and hundreds of seafaring fans for a party cruise around the Hudson Bay on Sunday.

The Princess, a well stocked and impeccably crewed party yacht commissioned for this three-hour voyage of exploratory rock debauchery, started boarding at 6pm in Manhattan’s Pier 81. Lolling in the waves of the Hudson, the boat would play home to more than one type of rocking. While Dick Dale chilled in the wheelhouse with the ship’s captains and his platinum-haired wife, other guests took time before the show to amass food and drink tickets, get their sea legs (alcohol helps) and wander the party vessel’s scenic outer decks. At anchor, the Princess offered clear views of Hoboken to the West, the Empire State Building to the East, and the nearby Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum immediately North. The Intrepid’s topmost deck is currently capped with a silver dome that houses the recently acquired Space Shuttle Enterprise, a majestic artifact of the ’70s and ’80s, now retired to sea. Would the same fate befall the icons of classic rock’n'roll tonight?

No time to think about it as a voice over the ship’s speakers officially welcomed passengers to Rocks Off and offered the night’s first and only safety precaution: “Prepare to get your mind rearranged by the Detroit Cobras!” Below deck the Cobras’ four-piece instrumental section, including eternal guitarist Mary Ramirez, began calibrating their equipment to fuzzy jangle mode. Ramirez and vocalist Rachel Nagy signed the Cobras to Sympathy for the Record Industry during the garage boom of the ’90s, and have been playing reverb-blasted party covers of R&R&B rarities since; Nagey alternately describes the Cobras as “a live band who occasionally make records,” and purveyors of “old-fashioned Friday-night-go-out-and-find-a-pretty-girl-and-dance-with-her-because-it-WILL-get-you-LAID music.” They’d put this latter claim to the test during a painfully brief set that focused on the speediest, twist-friendly cuts in their repertoire, jumping right into the “Cha Cha Twist” while the Princess set out Southbound, leaving the brooding blues stuff for the mainland.

The Cobras tore through five or six snake-slick covers in the brief opening window they were afforded, and dealt with recurring sound problems throughout. Nagey seemed a little peeved, flashing viper fangs behind genial requests to kick up the lead guitar in her monitor, but the crowd didn’t care. If anything, Nagey’s venom just worked toward fiercer, more engaging performances of “Right Around The Corner”‘s tribal gibberish, and “Shout Bama Lama”‘s exuberant Southern gristle. Any dismay at the set’s early finish was couched in resounding applause throughout the cabin. “Dick Dale is coming up,” Nagey said at the end. She added in a husky Elvis ooze, “Oh, I’m sorry—we are Dick Dale.” In spirit, she wasn’t far off.

Next up was Manitoba, a brawny collective of Dictators refugees, CBGB stooges and hair metal contemporaries who’ve built a reputation around frontman “Handsome Dick” Manitoba’s all-stomp, no-pomp attitude. Notably (and proudly,) the Dictators roadie-turned-frontman once got his band kicked off a KISS tour for mocking the rockers’ schlocky banter and other grease-paint pretensions between music and audience. But appearances aside, the songs of KISS and Manitoba both inhabit the same American Gomorrah where sex, booze and sex/booze ragers trickle down from the lips of the gods of rock all day, everyday.

The dominant narrative of Manitoba’s music, but especially the Dictators icon-o-hit “Who Will Save Rock And Roll?” places the band at the vanguard of a deteriorating music culture. They answer self-imposed sulkery like, “I can’t take living 9 to 5/ I can’t find a reason to come alive,” with easily memorized choral chants, chugging rhythm-section muscle and flights of screedily-deedily-dee solo shredding fancy. Handsome Dick sells his rock remarkably well, too. Throughout Sunday’s set Dick trashed the L.A. Guns for leaving Manitoba stranded with no audio equipment at a recent gig in Jersey; Dick trashed an upstairs heckler for mocking his “nice pants” (Dick eschewed his usual Bronx beanie for a fedora, shades, cabana button-up and crisp white Levis); and when he made a crass, boo-inducing joke about how the drunken fanboy who slithered onstage to mumble Manitoba’s praise was probably “from Colorado,” he quickly pushed on to more rock, rock, rock.

Given a set of songs with names like “The Party Starts Now!!,” “Fired Up,” and the aforementioned “Who Will Save Rock and Roll,” you can pretty much gauge exactly what the 45-minute set looked, sounded and—to Handsome Dick’s satisfaction—smelled like. Burlier, beardier and belly-full-of-boozier than earlier predecessors, the Manitoba crowd was a triumphant headbang to the Cobras’ salacious twist. It was a welcome escape for all aboard—rivaled only by the vision of Manhattan drifting slowly and brilliantly away outside.

“Can’t beat that view,” Manitoba guitarist Ross The Boss said aloud to nobody in particular on the aft of the Princess immediately after his set. “This is what you get for selling out a cruise. If you don’t sell it out they just cut the engine and strand you here.”

To be stranded for the next set may have been a welcome calamity. The cabin was claustrophobic for The King of Surf Rock’s performance, fans stretching from the dance floor up the staircase and off to either side of the upper gallery (“It looks like a big crucifix coming at me!” Dale would later joke.) His two-piece backing band—featuring son Jimmy Dale on drums and Sam Bolle on bass—opened with a teaser “Misirlou” riff, summoning Dale from behind the black backstage curtain, himself a vision of black, ambling in ponytail and white-swirled Western shirt like an old gunslinger back for one more job.

He slung his weapon just as well, wielding his signature righty-Stratocaster-played-left-handed, attacking with high-necked tremolo pick explosions, and eventually rattling on Bolle’s bass with spare drumsticks and never losing that wave-gliding tempo. “If you see me muttering to the boys every now and then it’s so they know where we’re going next,” Dale said after an incendiary “Pipeline” medley. “I’ve never used a setlist in my life. They don’t know what I’m doing because I don’t know either.”

Dale’s modesty is charming, but masks the truth: Dick Dale can do whatever he wants, because Dick Dale is rock. He thus spent most of his set as a surf-rock karaoke machine, blasting through reverb-soaked covers of “House of The Rising Sun,” “Smoke on The Water,” Link Wray’s “Rumble” and Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues.” Late in the set he asked the sound guy to drop the treble in his mic so he could play a guttural impression of Johnny Cash before cutting through a “Ring of Fire”/”Folsom Prison Blues” medley. The Princess had been docked again next to the quiet Intrepid for 15 minutes before Dale was informed his time was up, funneling an extended Bo Diddley improv into the pure cut of “Misirlou” everyone was waiting for.

Camera phones flashed incessantly around the cabin, 20- and 60-something onlookers petrified alike in hooting reverence for 75 minutes. It wasn’t a California ballroom stomp. The most vehement dancer aboard the Princess was no teenager, and he spent most of the night working off his high under the gaze of event security. But Wavestomp was a loud and memorable three-hour vacation from real life that reminded us pro-temp mariners rock’n'roll doesn’t need saving. Rock is as cathartic and powerful as it ever was; it’s just us who’ve changed.

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Q&A: Rubblebucket’s Alex Toth

Brandon Specktor — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 16:00:42 +0000

Somewhere in South Vermont—not far from the university where Rubblebucket songwriting couple Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth first met about a decade ago—there is talk of foam vaginas.

“We talked about building this ‘Love Tunnel’ that came out of the stage—basically a large, papier-mâché/foam vagina—and we’d run out of it at the start of the show,” Toth says over the phone on a rare day off at Traver’s parents’ house. Meanwhile, upstairs, Traver is working on tunes that will inevitably become Rubblebucket’s next EP, coming out September 11. “We’ve also been talking about mummifying me onstage, and before an appropriate lyric or trumpet line I’d break out of the toilet paper sarcophagus or whatever and triumphantly play the part.

“Basically, the more wild, ridiculous the idea is, the closer we are to achieving the vision of Rubblebucket.”

The popsteady Brooklyn nine-piece’s recent Live In Chicago CD/DVD catalogs a single energetic night of last year’s second nationwide Omega La La tour. But in the neon-and-LCD-strewn footage you’ll see none of the robot puppets or flapping rainbow parachutes that have since come to characterize Rubblebucket’s dynamically wonky live show. As Rubblebucket gears up for a string of summer festival gigs and another live show transformation, CMJ asked Toth about how the band’s wild ideas evolve (TP entombment included), which family members showed up boozy to a recent Manhattan gig and whether or not we can expect to see any foam vaginas and papier-mâché robots share the stage in harmony at upcoming Rubblebucket performances.

When I saw you at Bowery Ballroom your parents were there. Your mom danced right past me with beer! Is that normal?
[Laughs] I’m from New Jersey, and my mom works there but is also in the city all the time. She brought a whole crew out for that Bowery show. She got like a bus to come from my hometown, and like, my old art teacher was there and my Uncle Peter, who’s basically the last vestige of the hundred-year-old Flynn family flower-selling business. I was really happy that my mom did that. But it’s kind of weird; we’re playing music right now that’s totally inspired by the function and dysfunction of my family, and to have them be there is trippy. Like, we’ve been debuting songs that they don’t even know are about them [laughs].

How has your family’s dysfunction inspired your lyrics?
Last fall when we got off our second of two national tours for Omega La La I felt really, really out of it physically, but I was in this writing zone, and I knew it was time to top what we’d already done. I’m at my Aunt Eileen’s house, and she’s got a piano there, and as I’m writing she keeps coming in with Post-it Notes, and she starts popping around and being like, “OK, what’s this song about?” And I was like, “Oh my god. She’s in total manic mode.” My aunt’s like totally going crazy and impeding on my writing process, but I ended up getting some valuable lines out of it. So she’s there at the Bowery show while I’m basically singing about how, “Eileen has lost her head again.” [Laughs] She was thrilled to make it into a song, even though it was about her being crazy. Earlier in that same song there’s a line that goes, “My Aunt Gracie has dementia/Never met her and stood me up,” which actually happened.

Please explain how a dementia-afflicted aunt stood you up.
I’m named after my grandfather Al Toth, who died when I was like two or three months old. His father came from Hungary. My dad is really terrible at staying in touch with that side of the family, so a few months ago I tried reaching out to Al’s sister Gracie—my great-aunt. And apparently she has dementia, but she and her daughter wanted to meet us in Edison, NJ. There’s a Flynn flower shop out there, so I went with my sister and my dad’s sister and got some family flowers and went out to Edison, and they totally stood me up! We’re waiting there, and we called, texted—nothing. Aunt Gracie stood us up.

At that same Bowery show you said you couldn’t bring out the “Love Tunnel” because the last night’s crowd tore it up. What happened there?
Neil Fridd of the Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt who made the robot puppets for us talked about building this “Love Tunnel” that came out of the stage—basically a large, papier-mâché/foam vagina—and we’d run out of it at the start of the show. I think the Flaming Lips had a vagina that people would run out of?

They sure did.
Anyway, we had this idea of a “Love Tunnel” where it would kind of accordion out. You’d set it up, and it’d fold out, and people would run around it. But the problem is you need four people to operate it, and when we’re in a club room where you have a tight sold-out show there’s just no room to have that heart-pump circulation without really good coordinating. So the first night we tried to use it, the “Love Tunnel” was literally a third of the size of the whole dance floor. Then in Burlington, VT, we busted it out, and the audience proceeded to basically turn it into a large parachute. The poles got torn out, and it just lifted above the whole audience’s head and started pumping. I took a video from stage—it was actually pretty great. But since then we haven’t really used it that much. It takes us long enough to set up the LEDs, build the robots, and then we have to find volunteers to operate them.

So the robots are always played by audience members?
Yep. It’s hit or miss, whether people are drunk or they know what’s going on in robot land. Sometimes before we go on I’ll try to find a couple of people who look bright-eyed and seem to be dancing to whatever music is happening, so I know they’ll give the puppets some energy. You’d be surprised by how many people don’t want to be the robot puppet. But every night I kind of recruit a couple of people and give a five-minute orientation about how to put them on and all that.

What live elements are you working on for bigger summer shows like Camp Bisco?
We’re thinking about a whale raft. It’s this large raft that [trombonist] Adam [Dotson] and I would literally surf on the crowd with these papier-mâché whales on either side of it like we’re literally in this ocean. We’re also talking about a pillow jumpsuit as a safe alternative to crowd-surfing. When we played at Brooklyn Bowl in August 2011 I was dropped on my back and had to go to the emergency room, so now I meditate every time I crowd-surf to telepathically tell the crowd, “Do not fucking drop me.” It’s not exactly rockstar [laughs], but if I’m gonna go ride the wave then I’m gonna be careful. But with a pillow jumpsuit that wouldn’t be a problem! We’ve also been talking about mummifying me onstage, and before an appropriate lyric or trumpet line I’d break out of the toilet paper sarcophagus or whatever and triumphantly play the part. We’ve also talked about cardboard cutouts of the band starting the show with our new live album playing through an iPod, then we attack the cutouts and take over the parts.

If you had an unlimited budget for Rubblebucket shows, what would you do with it?
Pay all nine members of our band enough so that they are totally making a living and comfortable and not below the poverty line [laughs]. But after that I would probably commission visual artists and physicists to do something really innovative with light and sound. It would probably involve dressing up the whole room so that the entire space is immersed and connected to the vibe we’re trying to put out. Maybe there’s sound-sensitive panels that change color with the music or something. It would involve commissioning some genius physicist. A really good high school friend went to MIT, and I was hanging out with some of those kids, and they’re fucking crazy! They’re molecular biologists and physicists, and they were having these long talks about the nature of light versus the nature of sound and human perception. It was just mind-blowing. I’d like to surround myself with people like that as well as visual artists and just come up with something brilliant to tour on. And now that I’m talking about it, thank you for that question, because that’s what I’m gonna do.

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Ty Segall Band – Slaughterhouse

Brandon Specktor — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 15:45:34 +0000

Ty Segall, bandleader, runs things a little differently than Ty Segall, solo artist. Give soloist Segall a guitar and the dude refuses to sit still—we know this from his staggering anthology of 20-something EP, LP, 45 and compilation releases since he took his own name in 2008. But give Ty Segall a whole band, as the universe graciously did for his recent national tour and Slaughterhouse, the second of three albums planned for 2012, and, well, you’d better hope the roof is reinforced.

Bolstered by studio production muscle and help from drummer Emily Rose Epstein, bassist-slash-longtime-Ty-ally Mikal Cronin and guitarist Charlie Moothart, Slaughterhouse is a riff-happy head-trip that spins in more cohesively sludgy circles than anything we’ve heard from Segall yet. The jangly chords and Lennon-frail vocals that characterized last year’s Goodbye Bread as well as Ty’s excellent collaboration with White Fence are buried here, trampled to mush by a stoney, thunderous groove rampaging out of the primordial sludge of album opener “Death” like a pale horseman late for his Judas Priest farewell tailgate, then charging drunkenly forward on its own slick momentum for another 35 minutes or so. This is the heaviest collection Ty’s ever dropped, and that’s saying something.

Seriously, though. Track two sledgehammer “I Bought My Eyes” is almost stereotypically heavy; it’s the vaguely articulate offense of noise that greets ’90s detectives whenever they trace a dubious lead into that one Seedy Youth Basement Club they always seem to wind up in. “Slaughterhouse,” our minute-and-a-half-long title track, is the album’s heart of mud, violently defibrillated. A snarling cover of Bo Diddley and Willie Dixon’s “Diddy Wah Diddy” is the album’s fuzzed-out battle cry, abruptly silenced by Ty’s own howl of “Fuck this fucking song!” Nice to see that bandleader Segall is as impatient and frantic as ever.

For most of the album, Epstein, Cronin and Moothart are felt as a thick, wet presence behind Ty’s various guitar and vocal exorcisms. But the metronomic bass-and-drum combo into Fred Neil‘s “That’s The Bag I’m In” sheds a full 14-second spotlight on the support staff before our hero enters with his wheeziest Howlin’ Wolf impression. There are plenty of other love letters to garage-trashing kin spray painted on Ty’s Slaughterhouse walls: The slow descent into reverb murk on “Wave Goodbye” takes a similar trajectory as “Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground,” and even Ty’s own “Oh Mary” gets a heavy makeover.

But, more than anything else, these 11 tracks pay homage to the electric guitar, and none more so than the textural shiver of the 10-minute album closer, “Fuzz War.” This self-explanatory assault is the perfect conclusion to a master’s thesis of reverb, crafted by an electric orator who, more and more, finds the pithiest ways to worship the guitar as instrument, drug and weapon.

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Q&A: Crocodiles’ Charles Rowell Gets Naked In Germany

Brandon Specktor — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 20:36:13 +0000

Photo by Marco Rapisarda

While writing their third studio album, Endless Flowers, the globetrotting garage punks of Crocodiles went a bit bohemian. Principle songwriters Brandon Welchez and Charles Rowell wrote and recorded most of the record in Berlin, sharing a “shoddy chateau” together on the outskirts of town, hitting up sordid dive bars at night and bringing the various vagrants they encountered home with them.

“Somehow we eventually came up with an album,” says guitarist Rowell above the electric squall of the band’s pre-release rehearsal in Berlin.

The resulting record, Endless Flowers (out June 5 on Frenchkiss), is Crocodiles’ poppiest offering yet, blooming with slick guitar hooks and sexually charged rhythms that capture the combination of honesty and depravity gleaned from the group’s musical study abroad. We caught up with Rowell to get the skinny on the new record, memorable episodes of debauchery and a peculiar production practice called “The Naked Dictator.”

Crocodiles – Endless Flowers by Frenchkiss

It sounds like rehearsal is going pretty… loud. Are you playing in the same space where you first rehearsed your album?
No, but ironically enough we’re playing our record release show basically in the same space where we rehearsed the album. It’s literally cavernous: It looks like a cave, and it’s under a train station. Brandon [Welchez] and I taught the band the songs there, and just after we finished rehearsing they turned the caves into a venue. So now it’s like, a 1,000-capacity club underneath the train station, which is pretty nuts.

How have you guys been spending your time in Berlin?
Brandon and I lived together in a little chateau on the edge of town—a cheap chateau, a shoddy chateau. Brandon and I have been working together and making music together and making love together for about 12 years now, so we’re thick as thieves, and we know exactly what the other person is thinking just by the blink of an eye. We cooked breakfast for each other and did all kinds of domestic things, finishing writing the record, taking in all the crazy local characters. So that’s how we wrote it. Then we flew the band out and took them to this cavernous rehearsal space and recorded it. The whole thing has kind of set a precedent for what we’ll do in future albums: Move to a city, immerse ourselves in the sordid underground that revolves around dive bars and gay bars and stuff, invite all these crazy characters back to our house, and hopefully we’ll eventually come up with something that’s worth releasing.

Do you already have your next city picked out?
We’re thinking Mexico City next. All the same feelings we get off of Berlin we get there. It’s cheap, it’s nefarious, it’s artistic, it’s beautiful—really inspiring. We actually wrote quite a bit of this album when we were there last.

What sorts of nefarious dives do you frequent in Berlin?
There’s a bar that basically translates to “The Rotten Rose” that we went to a lot. It’s completely covered in mirrors–the whole thing, even the tables. They’re located in Kreuzberg, which is a grittier part of the city on the south side of the river. Same thing with the Witch Club, which has like all these random stuffed witches on broomsticks all around the place. It definitely says a lot about the clientele. Witch Club had a really good dance floor though, and they put on really good garage-rock nights. There’s also a club called Ficken 3000, which translates to “Fuck Club 3000.” That had like a blackout room where you can go if you’re expecting to hook up. They also have an ice cream machine in there, so you have to go to the blackout room if you want to eat ice cream. Which sends a really odd message.

And what kind of nefarious characters have you been bringing home with you?
[laughs] Like male burlesque dancers…some of the actual club owners. We got in really well with the owner of Ficken 3000, actually. All kinds of interesting people. Coming back here now for our album release is like a reunion! We didn’t really bring it up that we were in a band or anything when we met these strangers, but they’re fans now. They’ll be there at the release show under the train station. I can’t even imagine what backstage will be like…probably like a zoo, literally. Animals. People who act like animals. Bushels of hay. Urine on the walls. Or maybe they’ll just bring canvases and an easel and paint us.

Crocodiles – Sunday (Psychic Conversation #9) by Souterrain Transmissions

Did you play any shows in Berlin before this one?
We played here once before, and that was at a house party. It was insane. We had to keep starting and stopping because people were falling all over us. It was also a dress-up party where everyone was in crazy costumes. I had like a military outfit on, but I cut the shorts really, really obscenely short, and I cut the sleeves off my military jacket, and I had a helmet on and lipstick.

You’re playing a record release show on a boat on the Thames. How did that come about?
The record label that released our “I Wanna Kill” single in the U.K. are having a party, but it happens to fall on the same day that the Sex Pistols had their famous boat gig. It also coincides with the week of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and our record release. So it’s all kinds of stuff. We kind of work off spontaneity 100 percent of the time, so something crazy may happen. I hope so. I hope the boat sinks.

Flowers show up on the album cover and in several songs throughout the record. What attracted you to that image?
In a way it just came together. A lot of the inspiration on this record is poetic and literary figures. At the time we were reading a lot of Charles Baudelaire and like Flowers Of Evil, so maybe that’s in there. But flowers can mean anything, really. It can mean happiness, sadness, a first date, a funeral—anything. It’s a poetic thing and an image that’s been used a lot because it’s really effective, especially if you want to straddle that line between dark and light.

When was the last time you gave someone flowers?
I gave them to my wife—or my wife to be—Hollie [Cook] after she played a gig. She was going to be on a television show, so I brought her flowers at the television show.

What led you to the naked photo you used for the album cover?
There are people out there who probably like our music and probably listen to it pretty carefully, and here we’re exposing ourselves a little more and getting a little more naked emotionally. Thematically, it just fits. It’s deviant but it’s also very emotional and honest and kind of romantic in a way. Jesus, the model…people all have different opinions about what he’s doing and what it means, which is really cool. But mostly it’s the cover we wanted because it just fits our songs, you know. There’s some dirtiness, some nastiness but also some real honest moments. And Jesus is beautiful as well.

Is that Jesus on the cover of the “Sunday” 7-inch as well?
Yep, that’s Big J.

As a band you seem pretty comfortable with nudity. Can you tell me about the Naked Dictator?
[laughs] Yeah, it’s just fun to mess with everyone who’s involved in the recording session. So we did that by going into what we called the Naked Dictator persona, by getting naked and whipping each other with hot mops dipped in water and stuff. Like, while we were recording someone would go into their Naked Dictator outfit, which is nothing at all, and smack someone with a mop or something, so it’s recorded.

So the Naked Dictator is actually on the album?
Yeah. [laughs] In several forms.

The post Q&A: Crocodiles’ Charles Rowell Gets Naked In Germany appeared first on CMJ.

Sheepdogs @ Mercury Lounge: May 31, 2012

Brandon Specktor — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 20:50:20 +0000

Despite being born a generation too late and a nation too far North, Saskatchewan’s Sheepdogs have its Southern Rock schtick down to the mustache. The band’s five-man touring lineup covers all the appropriate burnout iconography: bandanas, bell bottoms, torn denim jeans and jackets, fuzzy guitar straps, facial hair in varying stages of bushiness and one-length-fits-all manes of sweaty locks that would probably end up writing the same bayou bopping songs if they managed to shear themselves free and form a band of their own.

But then, there’s the songs themselves: three-guitar-thrumming, 12-bar-chugging, solo noodling jams about “Feeling Good,” getting “Laid Back” and making time for some down-home “Southern Dreaming.” It’s a convincing vibe—one that, in August 2011, inspired 1.5 million voters to elect the Sheepdogs the first unsigned band to ever fill the cover of Rolling Stone magazine (teaser copy: “a very hairy rock & roll fairy tale”). Last night at Manhattan’s Mercury Lounge the same heady vibes filled the ‘Dogs sold out 11 pm show with equal numbers of balding, beer-swilling boomers and sundress-swirling Bonnaroo bait seriously pushing the venue’s 21+ mandate. One drunk 40-something went around high-fiving his younger neighbors, throwing up the horns and congratulating people on their t-shirts.

The inherent stomping glee of Juno-winning ditties like “I Don’t Know” got the room writhing, but even more compelling than the solo-laden tunes was the band’s onstage energy. Frontlumberer Ewan Currie frequently mounted the small speaker-supporting table in front of the stage to toss back his frizzy ponytail and solo skyward. Lead axeman Leot Hanson spiced his shreds with behind-the-head noodling and punctuated power chords with Pete Townshend high jumps. At one point drummer Sam Corbett hopped atop his stool to rain down on a cymbal.

During an epic encore jam all five members got a brief solo of their own and earned the giddy whoops and cheers that met them. Throughout the hourlong set nobody in attendance questioned the band’s dadrock authenticity; only one chatty front row bro ribbed Currie for his choice to guzzle Tecate (“You skipped a country!”), but let the Canadian $5 bill affixed ceremoniously to the frontman’s mic stand slide. The crisp turquoise note was just another prop in the Sheepdogs’ rockstar moment, and they earned it.

Setlist for Sheepdogs:
Who?
I Need Help
Southern Dreaming
Feeling Good
The Way It Is
Laid Back
The One You Belong To
Hang Onto Yourself
I Don’t Get By
Learn & Burn
I Don’t Know
How Late, How Long

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