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Against Me!, Dropkick Murphys @ Roseland: March 10, 2011

Michael Tedder — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 22:08:37 +0000

Five Thoughts About Against Me! and Dropkick Murphys at Roseland Ballroom

-In light of recent events, getting to hear Against Me!‘s “White Crosses,” one of the greatest pro-choice anthems ever and a salve for anyone who finds the Religious Right infuriating, is a fine way to spend an evening.

-For this tour Against Me! has left behind its touring keyboard player and some of the more elaborate songs from its recent album. The band is also breaking in its new drummer, Jay Weinberg, son of Max. He’s almost a decade younger than the rest of the band and clearly psyched to be there. He could often be spotted mouthing lyrics during Against Me!’s performance in between his vigorous head-bopping. The result of all this mixing around was a band thrashing with renewed vigor, able to hit its pop sweet-spots and burn with righteous fury in equal measure.

-For parts of its set, Boston band of rabble-rousers the Dropkick Murphys was joined by a four-string section. Though it’s nice to see these knuckleheads getting ambitious, such embellishments really weren’t necessary. Their shout-a-long soccer anthems don’t need any extra fuss, and the strings tended to get lost in the Roseland din anyway.

-The Murphys capped off its set by inviting all of the women in the crowd onstage to dance during “Kiss Me, I’m Shitfaced.” I have to say, I wouldn’t have expected such a dude-centric band to have so many female fans. Good for the Murphys!

-Opening the night was Minneapolis’ Off With Their Heads, which is apparently one of those bands that’s been famous in its hometown forever but is just now starting to make noise beyond city limits. The group played a likable, if a bit indistinct, blend of anthem-ready choruses and high-speed hooks. Here’s hoping it gets the chance to develop more of an identity by capably opening big-ticket punk shows for the rest of the year.

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Dismemberment Plan @ Webster Hall: Jan. 30, 2011

Michael Tedder — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 22:38:12 +0000

The Dismemberment Plan played two nights at Webster Hall last weekend, as part of its first tour since disbanding in 2003. Last night, it was refreshing for long-time fans to see how little things had changed. Frontman Travis Morrison was still a charming host (he had light fun with guitarist Jason Caddell’s hoarse, flu-ridden voice, claiming that they had recruited Lemmy from Motorhead for the reunion tour), he still danced like a spazz and he still inserts bits of other people’s songs during the encore. (This time around it was Far East Movement’s “Like A G6” and The National’s “Afraid Of Everyone,” which got a full verse and chorus. The last time I saw them they riffed on Hot Hot Heat’s “Bandages,” which should give you a sense of how long they’ve been gone.)

The band is touring behind a vinyl reissue of the 1999 touchstone Emergency & I, which was performed almost in its entirety last night, and demonstrated that not much has changed with the group’s MVP rhythm section either. Bassist Eric Axelson and drummer Joe Easley have only played together for a one-off reunion in 2008, but they seemingly haven’t missed a beat. Which is impressive, because there’s a lot of beats with these two. They can still replicate the complicated, precisely chopped-up tracks created by the likes of Timbaland and Roni Size, which is an impressive feat. But even more impressively, unlike the handful of math rock and jam band types that can perform similar techniques, Axelson (who still does his circular gyrations while he plays, in case you were wondering) and Easley (who still plays in gym shorts), leave plenty of space for the song to breathe, and never overwhelm the Dismemberment Plan’s tricky compositions. It’s no wonder that after watching the band’s recent performance on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, Questlove called “these mofos tight.” They’re probably the only pair who could challenge the Roots at this point.

It was a joyous night of fans singing and yelling for songs they loved, which reached its apex with a word-for-word sing-a-long of “You Are Invited” that reached Dashboard Confessional levels of audience participation. (This writer will admit that there was a time when that defiantly vulnerable song was something he desperately needed to hear, and can tell that he was far from along in that regards.) But despite all the joy, it was also depressing to think of other ways in which things were still the same. When the Dismemberment Plan started catching people’s ears a decade ago, what stood out was the band’s willingness to venture into genres like dance music and R&B with open minds and sincere hearts during a time when indie rock was strictly a cordoned-off zone, and to their immense credit they never once played these influences for ironic value or shtick. (Even the occasional hip-hopisms that crept into Morrison’s lyrics felt sincere and earned.) Instead, the group blended these ideas with the knotty-post punk of their native D.C. (think Jawbox or Fugazi), and Morrison’s Elvis Costello-worthy storytelling. At their best, this band was the perfect blend of joy and anxiety, both in the lyrics and the song-structure.

In the years since they’ve been gone indie rock has become much more open to outside influence, but watching them last night was a reminder of how far the genre has to go to catch-up with the ease with which they merged forms that seemingly didn’t belong together. At the same time, few people can still touch Morrison’s ability to merge an eye for details that capture the exact shade of despair with a humane “hey, we’ve all been there” tone and a palpable joy to just be allowed to get onstage and sing (and though his solo career gets maligned to an absurdly unfair degree, it’s worth noting that Morrison can’t reach his band’s heights on his own either.) All the members of the Dismemberment Plan have moved on and grown up since calling it quits, but let’s hope that this is one of the Mission Of Burma reunions that sticks. The world still needs these guys, and it’s hard to imagine that a band this inventive couldn’t find some new tricks.

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Les Savy Fav – Root For Ruin

Michael Tedder — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 08:00:27 +0000

“Workman-like” might be a strange thing to call the music of a group of Brooklyn art-punks, but the long-running Les Savy Fav have its sound down to a spazzy-but-precise science. High-energy rhythms, a touch of time-signature tom-foolery and splatters of shardy, dissonant riffs abound, and frontman Tim Harrington is one of the best ranters in the business. But the group never forgets to sneak some solid hooks into the frenzy, and it doesn’t mind occasionally offering up a massive shoutalong chorus every couple of tracks. (The “I want to hear those church bells sound” slow build is, no doubt, going to kill live.) Root For Ruin is the best synthesis of its pop and oddball sides yet, with flailing, manic surges serving as comfortable bedrocks for solid melodic hooks. But what’s truly surprising about this album is the emotional vulnerability displayed by Harrington, a troublemaker in the Iggy Pop mold known for audience-beguiling live shows. (Dude likes his tight spandex.) “Lips ‘N’ Stuff” and “Dear Crutches” are prime love-sucks-but-deal-with-it rants, and “Sleepless In Silverlake” is a surprisingly nuanced piss-take on fabulous ennui. It’s not all downers though, as “Clear Spirits” salutes a life spent in the pursuit of awesomeness.

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Of Montreal – False Priest

Michael Tedder — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 08:00:29 +0000

Kevin Barnes is not afraid to think big. His group, Of Montreal, explores musical styles that range from club-ready R&B to Broadway-ready musicals. His lyrics go deep into explorations of identity and depression. And his live show is a circus of dancers and musicians and day-glo costumes. Now working with Fiona Apple/Kanye West producer Jon Brion, he has a huge sound to match his huge ambitions. Barnes has largely self-produced Of Montreal’s albums (often playing all the instruments too), but on False Priest, Brion drastically widens the canvas, giving the music a newfound clarity, symphonic sweep and thick low-end. Mid-’80s-era Prince seems to be the model here; stacks of swooshing synths, hot-shit guitar solos and cameo turns by art&B divas Solange and Janelle Monáe bring to mind a time when funk freaks, rock kids and art school weirdos all danced at the same night club. And it’s a credit to Barnes’ genius that, as freaky as the music gets, it never overwhelms his lyrics, which regularly achieve avant-garde levels of baffling. (“Unicorns eating baby meat/we got dragon rape if you want it,” for example.)

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On The Verge: Big Freedia

Michael Tedder — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:41:36 +0000

Photo by Brady Fontenot

Since the late ’90s, New Orleans rapper Big Freedia has been perfecting the art of New Orleans bounce, a sub-genre of hip-hop built around call-and-response chants, no-pause-for-breath tempos and gleeful blue talk (Freedia’s biggest regional hit is called “Azz Everywhere,” and it’s as glorious as you’d hope). She’s now bringing bounce to the rest of us. Freedia has recently been touring nationally and is working on plans to get national distribution for her next album, a double-disc affair that she hopes will include collaborations with Spank Rock and Ninjasonik. And she doesn’t even mind that it’s taken the rest of us a while to catch on.

“Everything has its time. If it was ready then, it would have came out then,” she says. “At one point I remember people saying, ‘Everybody else is stealing our stuff, but they’re from Atlanta and Texas. When are you guys gonna make it big with the bounce?’ I felt one day it was going to blow up. It’s just all about the timing.”

Patience and party-starting are just two of Freedia’s many virtues. Genetically a man but self-identifying as a fashionable, powerful woman, Freedia’s outspoken personality and music have helped make bounce a more accepting genre.

“I think people are starting to look at things differently,” she says. “Enjoy life, party, don’t judge a book by its cover ’cause you never know what’s inside. I’ve been preaching that mainly at my shows, thanking people for accepting me as who I am, for not being afraid or being homophobic. You can come up and say anything to me—boys, females, males, whatever. Don’t be afraid to express yourself or be yourself. Now it’s my chance to work it with the world.”

www.bigfreedia.com

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Two Door Cinema Club: Location Scouting

Michael Tedder — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:35:00 +0000

Ireland’s Two Door Cinema Club Won’t Let Defecting Drummers Or Parents Get In Its Way

Photo by Jamie William

The men of Two Door Cinema Club grew up in a small Irish seaside town called Bangor that was something of a modest tourist destination. “There was a beach there, and a fun park, so people would have their holiday there,” says singer, guitarist and keyboardist Alex Trimble. The constant influx of visitors made enough of an impact on the lads that they titled their band’s debut, Tourist History. “It made sense to us. We grew up in this tourist town and left that to become tourists ourselves.”

Two Door Cinema Club released the optimistic, toe-tapping Tourist History via the respected European dance label Kitsune with help from Glassnote in the US. The band worked on the debut all through 2009, recording with producer Eliot James (Bloc Party, Noah And The Whale) on the weekdays and gigging on the weekends. The album was finished with a mixing assist from Philippe Zdar, who recently helmed Phoenix’s smash Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. (There’s quite a bond with the two bands: Glassnote previously helped break Phoenix with Amadeus, which probably explains why Two Door opened some shows for them recently.) And the band has been on the road nearly constantly since its release earlier this year. But Two Door Cinema Club haven’t really done much sightseeing.

Earlier this year they dropped by New York for two shows, and were especially jazzed about playing the Bowery Ballroom. “We were there for five days, but we had no time whatsoever to hang out and explore,” Trimble says. “We were just there the whole time doing interviews, photo shoots, videos and then [playing] the two shows.”

It went on that way for the rest of the tour. The Club’s deep failure as proper, homeland-honoring, sight-seeing tourists was recently confirmed during the summer when one of the festivals it was set to play was abruptly cancelled. Faced with a rare spot of time off, did the band finally live up to their album name and score as many postcards and souvenir shotglasses as its heart desired?

“We decided to be productive and went to a random studio on wheels, of all places,” says guitarist Sam Halliday of their time off. “And we have a new song to play live, which is nice.”

Film School

Two Door Cinema Club, which also includes bassist Kevin Baird, has not let much—not even the deep human need to do a little sightseeing while wearing a fannypack—slow it down ever since its members decided to quit covering other bands and get serious about its own music. Trimble (who is hesitant, but polite on the phone) and Halliday (who still has plenty of “holy cow we’re really doing this” awe in his voice) met at summer camp when they were 14. Acoustic guitars and Damien Rice covers were involved. Baird came on the scene when school recommenced, at first attracted by some girls that the other two knew. They formed an At The Drive-In copycat band, but called it off when they realized they sounded terrible. But Trimble says that they couldn’t stay apart for long. “Once we were 17, we formed this one,” he says.

By the time they were ready to start again, for real this time, the members of Two Door Cinema Club had focused their songwriting and broadened their listening patterns to include indie rock, dance music, folk and more. (“Sam is really big into Beyonce at the minute. Whatever is good, you know?” says Trimble.)

They had become so open-minded about looking at rock music from different angles that when its drummer left, the band took it not as an early stumbling block, but as an opportunity to explore. Trimble had already been “messing around” with laptop programs like Logic and Garageband to record demos. So the group just started making its own beats and loops and went back to work without missing a, well, you know.

“At the time we didn’t know anyone and we just wanted to keep writing songs, so it was just a way of putting a beat behind our music,” says Trimble. “Then we started to get a bit more inventive with it. We started experimenting and doing more complicated stuff, using different noises. That kind of gave us our more sort of dance and electronic elements.”

The result of all that experimenting is a sprightly, ambling sound that combines stuttering beats, Death Cab For Cutie-ish riffs, some pleasing electronic washes of sound and Trimble’s fighting-back-the-nerves coo. It is dance music by (and possibly for) people who would like to cut a rug, but need to work up the nerve first.

Roll It

After lots of experimenting and songwriting, Two Door Cinema Club began posting demos to its MySpace and releasing homemade singles. It was written up in the Irish magazine Alternative Ulster, which also runs an influential club night. The band then started getting tour offers and was approached by Kitsune to release a proper single.

Things were beginning to pick up steam for the trio, but the problem was that all this steam picking-up happened at the same time the members were supposed to be getting ready to go to university. The choice between continuing the band or heading off to school would seem to be a difficult one, especially for Trimble, whose parents are both teachers. But not really.

“[My parents] were pretty dead set on me going to university, but I just felt like, once I left school, that was the right time to do it,” Trimble says. “I mean, we all applied when we were at school, but… I don’t think that would have ever been an option. This was all we ever wanted to do, so we were just going to work as hard as we could, for as long as we could, until something happened.”

After all, the students had planned on majoring in different fields, so if they all went to different universities it was clear that they couldn’t keep the band up at the same time. “Even when we were 15 and in a rubbish band, that was always in the back of our minds as what we wanted to do,” Halliday concurs. “But I guess having some good press [and] a tour under your belt and some stuff lined up was good enough that, when we took the idea to our parents to ask them if it would be alright if we lived in their houses for a year without having a job or going to school anymore, they were cool with it.”

The trio spent that year practicing and writing songs and saving money to go on small tours “in this shit little van [that] the three of us would sit in front of,” Trimble remembers. “We were living off tortilla chips and water.” To buck themselves up during this malnurished time, they wrote “Undercover Martyn,” an early single and the band’s best song. Over a decathlon disco beat and chase-scene guitars, Trimble urges listeners “into the basement, people/many surprises await you,” and makes that notion somehow feel galvanizing.

“It’s about Martyn, an undercover agent who is too scared to go and do something, but he knows he has to. It’s reflected back to what we were doing as a band,” Trimble says, “People aren’t sure if it’s the right thing you should be doing, it’s kind of scary, but you’ve got to do it.” Further validation would come from tours with actual crew members, records made with chic producers and fan acclaim. But before all of that, Two Door Cinema Club had to take some advice from “Martyn.”

“We were going through a time when people were very skeptical and we needed to keep believing in ourselves,” Trimble says. “So we were writing these songs to keep us going.”

www.twodoorcinemaclub.com

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Marnie Stern: Guitar Hero

Michael Tedder — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:26:59 +0000

Photo by David Torch

There’s a song on New York singer-songwriter/axe-monster Marnie Stern’s new album called “Female Guitar Players Are The New Black,” which she readily admits was inspired by journalists asking her questions in situations like the one she found herself in a warm late summer’s day at an Upper East Side Irish pub. “When people ask what’s it like to be a female guitar player, um, I don’t know what it’s like to be a male guitar player!” she says.

Counterintuitively, Stern’s objection to such lines of questioning have less to do with their condescending, “you sure play good for a girl” nature and more to do with their underlying thesis that she is a great guitar player. For you see, Marnie Stern is not a very good guitar player. According to Marnie Stern anyway.

“I don’t really think I am,” she says. “I would like to think that what I do sounds a little bit different. Or sounds personal, or original, but in terms of skill, no, I’m not [good]. I have so many friends that get on the guitar, and I am blown away.”

This is all wildly inaccurate, but part of her charm. Stern readily admits to repeatedly watching any feel-good Rudy-esque sports movie made in the past 30 years (including Miracle, which even your dad didn’t get around to) because she has “always felt underdogish.”

At least part of this is because she started playing music later than most. Her mother gave her an acoustic guitar when she was 15, which resulted in what she calls some Say Anything/“Joe Lies When He Cries”-like strumming, but she didn’t really begin practicing until she graduated college and took her first job.

“I wasn’t good at it. And I wasn’t good at music either, but I enjoyed it more,” she says. “So that’s how I was able to go in with it. And I’m very compulsive, so, you know, when I decide to go on a reading binge I read 15 books. I go really crazy with stuff.” She began balancing near constant practices with a series of New York City area temp jobs that took her from an advertising company to waitressing to Columbia House Records to “all kinds of magazines,” including Playboy and Vogue. (Regarding her work at the later: “I would move the clothes from one rack to another, and I got the grossest arm muscles in the world.”)

After ten years of practicing, holding sparsely attended solo gigs, understudying at various experimental noise rock shows (the friends that she claims can outplay her are in California weirdo bands Deerhoof and Hella, which are pretty great but not prone to the Guitar Hero-worthy theatrics that Stern regularly pulls off) and sending out several rejected demos, Stern drew a line in the sand. When she hit 30, she quit her job to focus on one last-ditch effort at getting a record deal. “It was looking bleak,” she admits. But finally, her dream label, Kill Rock Stars, called.

The label hooked her up with her dream drummer/producer, Hella’s spastically bombastic Zach Hill. Critical acclaim, dropped jaws and three albums, including a new, self-titled effort, followed. “I’m trying to grow as much as possible as a songwriter. I don’t want to make the same record over and over again, so this was my attempt at trying a different side,” she says. “I felt like the first record was very experimental and noisy and gritty. And the second one was more of a fun rock album. And this [new one] was more of a softer side.”

“Softer” is a relative term, but her manic attack has been toned down just enough to allow enough breathing room for Stern’s tough-talking vocals. Most notably, “Nothing Left” indulges in the nautical nature of Stern’s name with the mantra “that man told me not to walk that plank.”

“I honestly don’t remember where that line came from,” she says. “I think that was just talking about going in the opposite direction of the norm. And walking into the craziness of a crazy world, as opposed to staying on the straight and narrow.”

www.myspace.com/marniestern1

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Phoenix And More @ MSG: October 20, 2010

Michael Tedder — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 22:00:48 +0000

For a young band that’s gone from basements to the opening slot at Madison Square Garden, Wavves couldn’t seem less interested in singing well. Which, I guess, is what their fans want? People say the ’90s are back, but it seems like Wavves went ahead and did the Vines comeback no one wanted.

The Dirty Projectors are hit or miss live. Their songs are so intricate that a missed note throws the entire sound off, in a bad, disjointed way. The Dirty Projectors cannot do sloppy, but last night they stepped it up. Every part of their r&b funk, geometric time signatures, and Legend Of Zelda sound-effects mixture hit the pocket. While there wasn’t a Bjork cameo (guess they didn’t want to overshadow Phoenix’s other secret guest, huh?) or any Black Flag covers, which would be conceptually amazing if performed at Madison Square Garden, they still got the crowd on their feet for “Stillness Is The Move,” which is no small feat for a band who, just a few years ago, nobody would expect to play anywhere but an art gallery.

Speaking of band’s that no one would’ve pegged to play MSG a few years ago, Phoenix.Though not as showy about genre fusions as Dirty Projectors, the four-piece (plus a poor drummer and keyboardist who don’t make the photos) play arena rock, indie-pop, house-infused disco, psych-rock woosh and lovely Franco-phile longing all like different counter-melodies in the same song. Clearly overjoyed to have finally broken wide after years of hard work, the group started with “Lisztomania,” but it was the one-two punch of romantic confusion and of “Lasso” and “Girlfriend” which solidified thier success, not a car advertisement fluke.

Does Thomas Mars own anything other than that blue shirt? I’ve seen Phoenix multiple times since the release of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, and it’s always the same with him. Kind of a nondescript uniform.

In a moment that set of a million tweets of “wtf” and plenty of Youtube videos filled with “ohmygods,” Daft Punk played a brief set during Phoenix’s encore. The old friends (Phoenix backed Daft Punk during the mid-90s) jammed arena-heavy runs through “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” and “Around The World.” At this time the crowd went from “excited” to “lost their damn mind.” The show evolved into a remixed, synth-slathered run through of “1901,” including an extended Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, riff, during which Mars ran to the lower bowl of the arena, down to the floor and crowd surfed his way back onstage for a final round of “fold it! Fold it! Fold it!” Still no idea what that means, or why the meteor tower is overrated, but at this point Pheonix had earned the right to tell America whatever cryptic nonsense it wanted.

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