Noise Archives — Page 92 of 108 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Fingered? Jimmy Page apologies for reunion resked

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November 5, 2007

jimmy page.jpg
Jimmy Page back in the day. Photo courtesy of Alex
Reisner’s Led Zeppelin site.

A little message from Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, issued by Warner Bros. today:

As you all know by now I was regrettably put in a situation where I had to postpone my performance at the Ahmet Ertegun Benefit show, on Nov. 26, due to a fractured finger. We have now rescheduled this show to take place, at the same venue, on Dec. 10.

In doing so I was very conscious of the fact that many people are traveling great distances to attend. I do want to let everyone know that this decision was unavoidable. My apologies to anyone who has been inconvenienced by this change.

I would also like to thank everyone else involved for their help with making this change. Harvey Goldsmith, the trustees of the Ahmet Ertegun Foundation, and of course, the other artists who so willingly agreed to join us on the show.

I look forward to the 10th December!

Jimmy Page

Hannah Montana and me

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November 2, 2007

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By Tim Redmond
I suppose Child Protective Services will come and arrest me now that I’m about to admit that I took my kindergarten-age daughter to see a rock concert in Oakland, on a school night, and kept her up until well past 10 pm without a proper dinner … But what can I say: Vivian loves Hannah Montana. She has all the CDs. She watches the TV show. She puts on her best rock-star outfits and sings the songs, over and over, and dances and tells me that she’s going to be a rock star. She was Hannah Montana for Halloween. So when I learned at 4:45 pm Thursday that there were two review tickets available, I grabbed Viv, fed her half a cheese sandwich and loaded her on BART.

For those of you who don’t follow tween-age popular culture, Hannah Montana is a phenomenon. The Chron kind of blasted her a couple of days ago — and for good reason: The hype is out of control. So are the ticket prices.

And yes, we live in a culture where parents will do anything to please the little brats, including shelling out a fortune for a performance that lasted an hour and 15 minutes (almost to the minute; Disney runs a tight ship, and unlike any rock show I’ve ever been to, this one started and ended exactly on schedule).

So I should probably feel bad that I’ve not only allowed my daughter to be exposed to this, but actively encouraged it. I should feel terrible about the materialistic messages in the songs and the over-sexualized image of a 14-year-old girl prancing around onstage with male and female dancers who were all at least five years her senior.

I should feel rotten. I should go seek counseling from some proper-parenting group. I should be ashamed of myself.

And here’s what happened:

The moment Hannah Montana came onstage, after an utterly predictable 30-warm-up by a boy band called the Jonas Brothers, Vivian was transfixed. Her eyes opened like saucers, and she got this smile on her face that I will never forget as long as I live.

And frankly, the kid (the one on the stage, that is) knows how to perform. I’m not a big fan of the Work, as it were, but you have to admit, for a 14-year-old, Ms. Montana has astonishing presence. She sang (I think actually sang, not lip synched) her songs with plenty of energy and managed to dominate and control the stage even when she was surrounded by as many as a dozen other seasoned professional singers and dancers, most of whom looked to be in the early 20s.

At least, when she was Hannah Montana, she did.

Halfway through the show, she went backstage, ditched the wig and the TV persona, and came back out as herself, Miley Cyrus. Somehow, the energy wasn’t the same; I think Cyrus has got the Hannah Montana thing down, but hasn’t quite figured out how to be who she actually is. The last few songs reminded me that the person up on stage was too young to drive a car and barely old enough for high school. For her sake, I hope the Disney thing passes pretty soon and she can stop being a pre-packaged icon and start trying to learn to be Miley Cyrus; she might even turn out to be good at it.

But overall, I have to say, Viv and me had a blast. By a few minutes into the first set, my girl was standing on her chair, dancing madly and singing along. The earplugs I’d carefully installed to protect her young ear drums were ripped out and thrown on the floor (“I’ll put them back in when I WANT to, daddy!”). She’d kicked her cup of soda water into the people behind her, soaking the jacket on the back of her chair. When the rather uptight mom behind me warned that the chairs were tippy and my daughter was in danger and had already spilled her drink, I smiled and said, “it’s all rock and roll;” the woman looked at me in horror.

The place was packed with parents and daughters; our seats were pretty near the bar, so I was able to grab a bud light or two. The tweenage shrieking was almost unbearable, but Vivian didn’t care, and as a veteran of many, many Grateful Dead shows, I have to say it was no more obnoxious than the spaced-out dudes swaying and mumbling “Jerry, man.”

I mean, it was a rock show. In every way that’s right and wrong, for all the best and worst reasons …. And I knew that my daughter would be tired and crabby the next day and her ears will be ringing and she didn’t finish her homework, but fuck it: She danced all the way home.

Who’s Uz? Czech avantists Uz Jsme Doma return

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November 1, 2007

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It’s not exactly a Prague Spring, but hope springs eternal that there will be intriguing sounds in the house when venerable Czech underground avant-proggists Uz Jsme Doma come to SF. Cod Liver Oil (Skoda) is the name of the Teplice-based combo’s new CD game – get a dose when they stop here, after what looks to be a moody tour of Praguetowns across America. It happens at the Hemlock Tavern Saturday, Nov. 3.

For the love of Hannah Montana

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November 1, 2007

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By Ben Richardson

I don’t really kick it with many “tweens,” so I was pretty slow on the uptake when it comes to the whole “Hannah Montana” thing. In fact, I had to be informed of her existence by a colleague of mine here at the Guardian: Duncan Davidson.

“What!” he exclaimed one day, sending six-odd high-gauge earrings aquiver and clenching exclamatory muscles beneath his elaborately tattooed forearms. “You’ve never heard of Hannah Montana!?”

Davidson has a daughter situated at the hot-pink epicenter of Hannah Montana’s target demographic, which explains his familiarity with Disney’s newest pop princess. As her legend grows, however, it will be the people in my situation who will have the explaining to do. With the force of Disney’s PR and multimedia machine arrayed behind her, Hannah Montana is gradually turning into a kind of cultural juggernaut, proving once again that if you reach a certain threshold of 12-year-old approval, nothing can stand in your way.

Venezuelan youth explosion!

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October 31, 2007

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An incredible argument against America’s tragic downsizing of school music programs? Why sure! What do you get when you create a national system of youth musical education that reaches 250,000 kids, spawns 120 orchestras, and offers even the poorest kids in the country an opportunity to express themselves and plug into global culture? Well, El Sistema, as the huge and tuneful operation in Venezuela is known, is one. Complete and utter musical bliss in the form of the globe-trotting Simon Bolivar National Youth Orchestra, under the direction of world hotshot 26-year-old conductor Gustavo Dudamel, is another. Check it:

(and before all you neo-cons jump all over the whole national program thing with your musty Soviet-socialist rhetoric, that’s the delightfully heretical Shostakovich they’re playing to cleverly diffuse you, dudes). The Youth Orchestra, which will be playing ol’ Shosty’s 10th Symphony, Bernstein’s West Side Story and some fiesty Latin American selections at Davies Symphony Hall this Sunday Nov 4, get pretty festive too:

Of course, there’s a temptation to romanticize these talented kids as geniuses of the barrios – but in many cases that’s indeed what they are. Come out this Sunday and see where a little inspiration and support can lead ….

Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra
Sunday, Nov 4, 7pm, $25-$81
Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Avenue, SF
(415) 864-6000
www.sfsymphony.org

Bearrifying! Paws for rap horror

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October 31, 2007

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OMFG — you knew it would happen. Girly bear rap-rock AT LAST hits the viral mainstream. And yes, it’s pretty terrifying. Even more terrifying — why is SFBG becoming a clearinghouse for bear musical releases? Because I loves me some scary, furry goodness, that’s why.

JFYI — if you wanna check out some serious bear hip hop — ON THE FUR REALS — check out my sexy homie Bigg Nugg below

Spooked sounds 2: more lost albums and forgotten performances for Halloween

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October 31, 2007

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Pussy Galore – and scares galore.

By Erik Morse

Let’s pick up where the first installment of “Spooked sounds” left off: here are a few more notorious sonic “events,” which constitute a spectral and alternative history in recorded music’s century long canon. The more cryptic, the more incredible and the more emphatic the anecdote, the scarier the sounds. Try playing some of these at your next Halloween party and see just how spooked your guests will get.

PART TWO: THE LATER YEARS (1967-PRESENT)

Unit Delta Plus and the Beatles – Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, London, 1967

Founded as a cooperative of sorts by electronic musicians Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson, and Peter Zinovieff as early as 1965, Unit Delta Plus was an experimental adjunct to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the height of “swinging” London’s musical and multimedia explorations.

Using their knowledge and gear from the BBC days and marrying it to a more edgy, psychedelic sensibility, Unit Delta Plus hoped to accomplish an aesthetic saturation of sight and sound not unlike that being similarly developed at New York’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable or San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium. With Zinovieff’s Putney townhouse as their headquarters, the members of UDP began experimenting with complex tape music and primitive EMS synthesizers. By ’66 they held a music festival in Berkshire, reputedly the first ever dedicated solely to electronic music. Although the crowd was composed mainly of academics and musicologists, the festival was a major success and catapulted Unit Delta Plus into the center of the London underground.

Nels Cline at du Nord: so much firepower, so little venue

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October 31, 2007

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By Benedict Sinclair

It’s always nice to get a warm feeling from a show, regardless of the sonic or literal violence you might undergo during it. The bartender at Café Du Nord on Thursday, Oct. 25, was kind enough to hand me my drink with an unusually welcoming smile. Suddenly I overheard a discussion about how beautiful a certain country highway was – the one I’d just happened to grow up on. Ah, home. I’m never sure why, but I get the same feeling from listening to albums that include guitarists Nels Cline (of the Geraldine Fibbers, the Nels Cline Singers, and nowadays Wilco) and Jeff Parker (Tortoise and Isotope 217).

The narrative arc of a Nels Cline solo once seemed to me a bit like a rollercoaster, but considering the sudden, indescribable variations on delay and distortion he tosses around, the amount of 13th chords he employs, and, really, just a plain old spooky control over chaos, I’m more inclined to recall the image of a flickering candle. I’m thinking specifically of the one placed in the center of my table at Café Du Nord, where the Nels Cline Singers played two sets: one as a trio and the other with Parker. I sat, I stared, I heard.

I mean, bassist Devin Hoff and drummer Scott Amendola certainly held their shit down, punctuating Cline’s soaring presence with equal vigor. But I can’t get away from that flame metaphor, the way a practically invisible center produces that glow, refracting in all directions through a bubble glass lamp. It was as if Nels and his sparking fingers lighted the café themselves, that red hue cast over everything perhaps strictly a product of the heat scattering out as this guy poured his soul into unpredictable jazz shredding. Yet the band also fostered many moments where the flickering meant a slight cooling. They’d play pretty, sweet melodies together and still burn it up. The second set was the less out there of the two.

Pip, pip for the Pipettes

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October 31, 2007

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By Chris DeMento

The Pipettes are a UK trio with a Supremes-meets-indie-rock popgirl sexgimmick on a North American tour come two years too late. They wear polka-dot skirts. They are hot. They dance about. They are very sexy. They sing about boys in school uniforms and dance about. They are female vocalists. Let us coordinate our dance in the old-new popstyles and dance the old-new popstyles about very much: www.thepipettes.co.uk, read the “about” page.

On paper, Bimbo’s 365 Club and the Pipettes (Oct. 29) are a decent match. One would think the girls’ bubbly, decadent act should awaken the joint’s muffy ballroom character, bring it out in (retro)fits. Dances with schizoid eyes and dated names, long cigarettes, alcoholism – I saw none of this stuff. What I did see was a priced-to-move vortex of !Fun Brand! unfun that looked like a lot of hard work and sounded mediocre at best, an embarrassing pratfall of a noisewelter. All they wanted to do between numbers was bitch at the soundperson, which only served to draw attention to the unfortunate thin of their overproduced sound. If you want to be heard, just sing louder, ladies.

There is room for escapism in popular music. People need to be moved, taken for the proverbial ride out and away from themselves, given over to suspension of disbelief, even. But at a certain point one needs to separate meaningful escapist art from driveling, crackerjack ridicule and shameless branding, especially when the latter start taking themselves too seriously. “We are the Pipettes” was one of the songs they did – it’s also an album title. The Monkeys, hey, hey, people said they monkeyed around. People also said they sucked ass. People don’t want to be goofy surf-movie extras. Not the smart ones, anyway, not anymore. Sorry to be a killjoy.

Spooked sounds: 12 lost albums and forgotten performances

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October 30, 2007

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Johnny Ace: a blues icon turns into one of rock’s first casualties.

By Erik Morse

With Halloween soon approaching, all the party mixtapes and Goth soundtracks will inevitably be programmed with the scary and spectral. It only seems appropriate, then, to take a look at a history of some of these ghostly recordings, albeit of a slightly different kind.

Twentieth century music must have been possessed from the moment it became electrified, a seemingly endless séance of dead voices stripped of a bodily source and projected into the ether, replayed endlessly through phonographs, radios, tape-players, and iPods. And like other technologized art forms, popular music created a simultaneous narrative stream of folk tales and urban legends that emanated from fan to fan and fed back into the collective experience of “hearing” like the vibrations of an E string squealing against a Vox amplifier. More than a 100 years since Edison recorded the sounds of a nursery rhyme (extra credit if you know which one) in his Menlo Park laboratory, the most famous moments in popular “sound” have played loudly alongside a haunted loop of forgotten breakthroughs and discarded reels remanded to the archives of the preening critic and obsessive fanatic. These ghostly recordings and events may have been buried for ages so there’s no better time than Halloween to go digging them up again.

Never mind Brian Wilson’s infamous Smile, Bob Dylan’s electric turn at Newport ‘65 or Prince’s Black Album, these 12 notorious sonic “events” constitute a spectral and alternative history in recorded music’s century long canon. The more cryptic, the more incredible, and the more emphatic the anecdote, the scarier the sounds. Try playing some of these at your next Halloween party and see just how spooked your guests will get.

Haunting Two Gallants

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October 30, 2007

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By Chris DeMento

Saturday night, Oct. 27, and I’m at the Independent to see Two Gallants. Opening acts Songs for Moms and Blitzen Trapper did well to set the stage for odes. Soft white lights blanched soft white faces, making ghosts of East Coast transplants dressed like goons dressed like Double Dare buffoons. Meanwhile young city-bankers in serial-killer costumes put on cats’ ears for listening. Still a half week shy of Halloween, and it seemed the lot of us, near and far, came quite prepared to be forgetting who we are.

I love rock ‘n’ roll when it smashes lullabies, even as it oozes sap. Two Gallants has me stalking my neighbor a day after the show so he can retell to me events I missed because I was sort of given over, maybe half transfixed.

The duo must have been tired when they hit the stage, road weary, but they hid it well, used it even. It’s not easy to play with lots of energy after a whirlwind two-and-half weeks across the country, unless it’s for a homecoming, which this was, and unless you know how to make it work for you, which they do. I wondered at their transitions – a reggae skeeze, a waltz, then back to indie peristalsis – felt them in my head and in my loins. I don’t know their songs so well but I got lost in them for a while at least.

Good music. Bad name.

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October 29, 2007

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Though undeniably accurate, “The Bridge School Benefit” is the worst name for a rock concert ever. The only sexy thing about it (besides giving publicity to the school, which deserves it), is that it sounds a lot better to skip out on helping a friend move or having dinner with your S.O.’s parents to attend a “benefit” than it does to admit you’re going to smoke doobies and listen to the devil’s music.

But for all its bad name-iness, and the fact that I hate the Shoreline Ampitheater (Am I too old to appreciate massive venues? Or have I been spoiled by intimate shows in good-music towns?), the 21st Annual Bridge School Benefit last Saturday was actually quite good.

It may seem like no surprise, given that Tom Waits was on the bill. But with great expectations comes the possibility for great disappointment, and I’m happy to report that Mr. Waits did not disappoint.

Good old Tom when he was, well, less old.

Seconds for Orange Juice’s Edwyn Collins

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October 29, 2007

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By Todd Lavoie

Comeback of the year? Edwyn Collins, definitely. Back in February 2005, Collins – the former leader of jaunty Scottish post-punk charmers Orange Juice and a solo artist best known for the 1994 vibraphone-peppered finger-snapper “A Girl Like You” – suffered two cerebral hemorrhages that left him hospitalized for months. After undergoing extensive operations, he was unable to speak, and with the workings of the brain remaining a bit of mystery despite all of our progress in medicine, doctors were uncertain as to when he would regain his voice, if at all. Mercifully, Collins’s rigorous neurological rehabilitation program was enormously successful, and the whip-smart crooner got his velvet-and-stinging-nettles baritone back. A gradual process, obviously, but his recovery was coming along at such a steady clip that earlier this year he decided to work on the material he’d recorded prior to his near-fatal attacks. Apparently the road to wellness has been rather smooth for Collins. Here we are, only a few months later, and Home Again (Heavenly/EMI) is already out. And it’s fantastic.

From what I’ve gathered from recent interviews, nearly all of the music on Home Again was recorded before the hemorrhages, which meant the only work that remained to be done was the mixing. However, that’s a mighty big “only” when you consider that Collins’s recovery was a two-step process: first he had to re-acquire the faculties to make words and sentences, and then he had to re-familiarize himself with the sound of his own voice. For a singer – whose sense of identity is so deeply, fundamentally tied to having an intuitive understanding of the voice – such a setback must be daunting beyond belief.

In one interview, Collins revealed that when he was first recovering in the hospital, all he wanted was silence. Gradually, that position changed and all he wanted was his guitar, but it would take months before he was able to indulge that desire. Re-acquiring his voice meant much more than being to able to produce sound with his lips and tongue. It also meant a great deal of (self-)exploration, learning how to use the voice more effectively for conveying emotion. Listening to the tapes in his home studio initially was much like getting to know a stranger, he described in another interview. Chalk it up to a crack team of physical rehabbers and some seriously scrappy fortitude, I suppose, because Home Again is a clear sign that Collins possesses total control of his instrument. If the pre-illness Collins was indeed a stranger upon re-introduction, it mustn’t have taken long before the barriers were broken down and a deeper understanding was achieved.

Darling Nikki

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October 26, 2007

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Don’t try to front like you never liked Motley Crue. You know you shouted at the devil. You know you tapped out the poignant opening bars of “Home Sweet Home” on your big sister’s Casio keyboard. And you know you turn up the iPod when shuffle kicks you into “Dr. Feelgood.”

Girl, don’t go away mad.

Ok, maybe all of the above — that’s just me (I also own Motley Crue: Behind the Music on DVD, and have routinely claimed band auto-bio The Dirt to be my favorite book of all time). But if you don’t like the Crue, what’s wrong with … uh .. yue?

Founding Motley member Nikki Sixx don’t need no Rock of Love, sex-tape scandal, nor Surreal Life stint to retain his coolness. And I say this because, well, he was always my favorite. (Love you too, Mick Mars.) Now the Sixx-pack’s got a new side-project band (Sixx: AM — get it??), who’ve just put out a soundtrack of sorts to Sixx’s new memoir, The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star (Pocket Books, 2007).

Learn it. Love it.

Head over to Barnes and Noble in San Mateo to pick up a copy and get it signed by Sixx hisself — in person this weekend. Partial proceeds from book sales go to Sixx’s Running Wild in the Night, a fundraising initiative that helps runaway, abandoned, and abused youth via Covenant House California. Here’s the deets:

Sun/28, 2 p.m.
Barnes and Noble
11 West Hillsdale Blvd., Hillsdale Shopping Center
San Mateo, CA
(650) 341-5560

The book, which is designed to look like a diary and is packed with ghoulish, red-white-and-black illustrations, contains some pretty amazing rock ‘n’ roll nightmare-isms:

“April 4, 1987
Van Nuys, 2:30 a.m.

I think things are looking up. Pete and me have now got porn stars doing our drug runs for us.”

“August 28, 1987
Capital Center, Landover, MD
Backstage, 11:55 p.m.

I just got a blow job from a girl who started crying and thanked me after. What the fuck?”

“November 21, 1987
Backstage, Chattanooga, 6:40 p.m.

Fuck, I feel like dog shit.”

(Author’s note: this was my Halloween costume costume more than once.)

Go, metal monsters Gojira, Go

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October 26, 2007

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By Ben Richardson

Esteemed Guardian staffer Cheryl Eddy was kind enough to sacrifice a sentence of her Behemoth preview this Wednesday, Oct. 24, on the altar of French metal masterminds Gojira. Though the adjective she picked to describe them – “brutal” – is certainly apt, I wanted to delve a little deeper into the band’s Gallic brutality.

Gojira is the brainchild of two brothers from Bayonne: Joe and Mario Duplantier, a guitarist and a drummer who honed their formidable instrumental skills as children before recruiting a bassist and second guitarist to round out their band. Initially calling themselves Godzilla, they soon paid the inevitable price of, well, not coming up with a better band name, and switched over to the Japanese translation.

Describing Gojira’s music is tricky. The music definitely draws on the bludgeoning power of down-tuned death metal riffs, and it harnesses the speed of thrash metal picking, but it’s nigh impossible to call it “death” or “thrash” in good conscience. There’s also the complication of the band’s heavy prog influence, which manifests itself in Gojira’s off-kilter, abruptly curtailed riffs, strange time signatures, and majestic, epic interludes.

From Norway to our Bay: A Q&A with Sorcerer

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October 25, 2007

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Daniel Judd of Sorcerer likes racquet sports, so I found it hard to talk about music when I interviewed him. But I like Sorcerer’s White Magic so much — in fact, as I post this interview, I’m listening to it — that for once I was able to shut up about tennis. It was even US Open season, and yet, I was able to exercise restraint when it came to my Dolores Park backhand battles, my friends’ favorite obscure places to play in San Francisco, and my fandom for current players like Rafael Nadal and obscure new players like Agnes Szavay. (See? I can’t shut up.) One insightful aspect of the interview below that I wasn’t able to fit into this week’s cover story is Judd’s discussion of DVDs and the craft of making music and movies. Dive a little deeper, to the bottom of this Q&A’s oceanic floor, and you’ll find some funny banter about fish in tanks and fish on plates.

Guardian: I just read an interview with your where you mentioned ping-pong. Are you going to see Balls of Fury?
Daniel Judd: I saw a preview for that the other day. There’s this Japanese movie I’ve been trying to hunt down called Ping Pong. It came out a few years ago and I don’t know if it even came out on DVD, but it’s been compared to Rushmore and Wes Anderson.

G: I noticed you’ve listed tennis as one of your interests. You know that really I just want to interview you about racquet sports.
DJ: Some friends and I had a tennis group of various levels that we called the Tennis Jihad.

G: I’ll start out by asking about some of my favorite tracks on White Magic: “Divers Do it Deeper,” “Blind Yachtsman” and “Airbrush Dragon.” Can you tell me about those?
DJ: On “Divers Do it Deeper” I was trying to do underwater, aquatic disco. I was looking at pictures of deep sea diving and I found this funny old bumper sticker that said ‘Divers Do it Deeper.’

From Norway to Our Bay: A Q&A with Dominique Leone

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October 25, 2007

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Yeah, this week’s cover story on Oslo-San Francisco beyond-disco connections is pretty damn long. But there wasn’t enough room to note all of Dominique Leone’s activities. In addition to his November EP on Lindstrom’s Feedelity label, Leone is also readying an LP for release next year. He has another project, Paul and Diane, which pairs him with MaryClare Brzytwa. He’s also working with Katie Vida – the Local Artist featured in this week’s issue – on a dream world installation for Maybeck House in Berkeley.

Guardian: How did you and Lindstrom get in contact with one another?
Dominique Leone: We first communicated around a year and a half ago. I wanted him to a remix of one of my tunes, so I just wrote [to] him. He asked me to send some music, so I sent him a few songs. When he came back to me he was really positive. He’d sent one email that I never got, and then wrote me again weeks later to ask if I’d received what he’d written.

Killer queens and Hallo-weiners

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October 25, 2007

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Sorry, the above should say Hallo-winners, not Hallo-weiners — but I’m hella-halla hungover, and that’s why this posting is, well, late. BUT! There so much devilishly great stuff happening this Halloweekend and beyond that I’m running out of annoying puns — a thankful first! I want to go to every party, and I probably will, but below are some that I’ve highlighted because if I don’t, the drag queens involved in several of them will poke a stiletto through my third eye. And isn’t that what drag queens are for, to kill you? They’re like Gattaca. But with robots. I think.

SATURDAY

Surya Dub Halloween Mashdown

For some reason Halloween always reminds me of Indian food. You too? Weird! Get down to the devilish dubstep and Southeast Asian sounds (no drag queens involved — but maybe) at Surya Dub’s Halloween mashdown, with DJ Maneesh the Twista and a freakin’ pumpkinload of international guests — this is the place to be on Saturday latenight, right dem?
Club Six
60 Sixth St., SF; 863-122.
10pm-3am. $10.
Tons more info: www.suryadub.com

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Dial “X” For Murder

The best annual lesbian costume party ever. DJs Campbell and Roccoh add to the devil may care atmosphere. (One of my friends just phoned to tell me she was going to cut eye holes out of a flannel shirt and go as a lesbian ghost! Awesome!)
Lexington Club
3464 19th St., SF
863-2052, www.lexingtonclub.com. 8pm, Free.

Giddy, yup! New Young Pony Club makes us frisky

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October 25, 2007

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By Todd Lavoie

“New Who What Huh?!” All right, maybe the name doesn’t exactly flow from the tongue in gently rolling syllables on the first go-round, but try it with me now, slowly, steadily: New Young Pony Club. Ah, there you are. Very nice. Again. New Young Pony Club. Great. Quick – now three times fast. Now you’re in fine shape for this coming Monday. Why, you ask? That’s when London indie disco-new wave revivalists New Young Pony Club storm the Mezzanine stage, silly.

The five-piece of hip young things and fashion-forward synth lovers insist on their Web site that New Young Pony Club isn’t just a mere dance band, but that they have a mission, a manifesto, even. A subtle manifesto, they add, but a manifesto nonetheless. Since they seem to keep their MO shrouded in mystery – unless, of course, my days of staying two steps ahead are sadly behind me and I just straight up missed the deeper gist of the sloganeering, a serious possibility I must grant as I catch another wisp of gray in my sideburns – I’m going to hazard some crazy-ass guesswork here and offer a theory to NYPC’s driving force. Ready?

Party hard. Oh, and look great doing it.

Hot Swiss Beethoven

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October 23, 2007

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You may not love to listen to Beethoven like Annie Lennox’s fabulously unravelling housewife ….

But would you listen to him if the conductor looked like this?

Does sex sell classical? Sure!

I know I would. And I will, as young Swiss conductor Philippe Jourdan leads the San Francisco Symphony (and renowned French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard) in Beethoven’s lovely, sweeping, and somewhat hot-blooded Piano Concerto #3 — as well as Ludwig van’s Egmont Overture and Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony, October 26-27 at Davies Symphony Hall (and Thursday the 25th in Cupertino). Come for the cutie, stay for the music — that’s what I always slur ….

This Friday and Saturday evening. Click here for more dishy info.

From Norway to our Bay: A Q&A with Lindstrøm

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October 23, 2007

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Over the course of the next week I’ll be posting Q&As with all of the music-makers featured in this week’s “From Norway to our Bay” cover story. What better person to kick things off with than Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, the Oslo maestro behind many great tracks and the man behind Feedelity Recordings? This interview actually dates back to earlier this year, and thus provides an introduction of sorts for other conversations – with Lindstrom’s cohort Prins Thomas, and with SF’s Sorcerer, Hatchback, Arp, and Dominique Leone – soon to come.

Guardian: What are you up to today?
Hans-Peter Lindstrøm: I’ve been working on a remix. I’ve got a deadline tomorrow.

G: One of my favorite remixes of yours is of “Call Me Mr. Telephone,” by Answering Service [for the comp Confuzed Disco]. I love how dramatic the buildup is before the vocal — the keyboards remind me a bit of John Carpenter.
L: I did that one with [Prins] Thomas, but I have an unfinished version that I did alone that sounded very disco. I was banging my head against the wall, so I asked Thomas if he wanted to jam. We went to the studio and usually he picks up the bass and drums and I play the keyboards.
We decided to change the chords and the structure of the song, starting it without vocals. I’m really happy with that mix because it’s not the traditional way of doing a remix.

And the dreidl will rock

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October 23, 2007

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I have a new obsession: www.jewsrock.org. I found the site while researching an old obsession, NOFX’s “The Brews” (I was trying to prove to a friend that it wasn’t a cover of another song, and that, in fact, the song she thought was the original was actually Manic Hispanic’s cover of “The Brews,” called “Cruise”), and nearly fell off my chair. The only thing I love more than punning and pro-Jewish jokes is rock music. And combining all three? Holy chutzpah, I’m a happy little semi-Semite. Check out the site to find for a guide to who’s who in Jewish rock (The Challah Fame), Q&As with famous Heebs (The Four Questions), features on musical icons like David Lee Roth (“And the Dreidl will Rock”), and essays on music and Jewishness (“Heavy Shtetl”). Even more perfect? Cruise the site while listening to Oakland’s parody of racist punk band Screwdriver, called (of course) Jewdriver. Just make sure you visit before Friday at sundown, because we sure as shit don’t rock on Shomer fucking Shabbos.

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Photo courtesy of Roberta Bayley.
Who knew? Joey Ramone (a.k.a. Jeffrey Hyman) is one of the Chosen. But I wish the goyim could keep Kenny G.

CMJ 2007: Deerhunter, Japanther, Islands, Santogold, and more cake for all

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October 23, 2007

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Mighty Reatard-ed. All photos by Michael Harkin.

By Michael Harkin

There had been murmurs all week among college radio music-director types that this year’s CMJ line-up wasn’t as cool as in years past, and this seems correct to a certain degree. For one thing, there should have been more hip-hop and electronic showcases than there were, even if only to break up the obvious indie-rock bent of the overall conference. That said, the showcases that did go down often felt pretty representative of the best in the various represented genres: this week saw Mariee Sioux, Erol Alkan, Mika Miko, Earthless, and the Dirtbombs pass through the city limits and give it a go amid the abundant crowds of music industry hawks.

It was a week of late nights, little sleep, and perhaps one Belgian fry too many, but there was a lot of music to be taken in each day from 1 p.m. onward, one had to arise by 11 a.m. if he/she wanted a chance at sighting the next big thing. Here are some highlights from the last three days of the NYC festival:

THURSDAY

Memphis’s Jay Reatard is still pretty young, but he’s already got a certain mythological status among garage-punk mavens: as a former member of the Lost Sounds and the Reatards, and now with his solo career, he’s had a King Midas touch of tunefulness that’s ramped up lately. The dude’s on a roll in the studio, having cranked out the spotless Blood Visions LP last year, as well as some brilliant slabs of vinyl on the side, like the glorious “I Know a Place” single, whose B-side is a stunning acoustic cover of the Go-Betweens’ “Don’t Let Him Come Back.” Tonight at a crowded Cake Shop, he greeted the crowd with “Hey douchebags!” and proceeded to play most of Blood Visions at triple speed, finishing his set in less than 20 minutes. Every song was introduced with the song title and a “LET’S GO” – superb punk from a fiery, poofy-haired, tough-looking group of dudes. Jay will be rolling through the Bay Area in November (12 Galaxies and the Stork Club), and he remarked in a conversation after the show that there are a series of singles coming next year, so look out for that!

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Double Dagger take a stab.

Following Mr. Reatard, Double Dagger brought punk of a different flavor: a more sinister, Fugazi-like intensity characterized their set, as vocalist Nolen Strals hap’ly danced about the stage in his blue, black, and white
camo tee. They didn’t face quite as thick a crowd as the preceding set did, but those that stayed paid witness to a spastic stomp-along series of howls and tight bass grooves. These guys channel the nerdy anger of Shellac and the slanted guitar riffs of Swell Maps in a convincing way, and form yet another piece of evidence that the Baltimore music scene is blooming.

Dethklok! Dethklok! Dethklok!

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October 23, 2007

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By Duncan Scott Davidson

Dethklok, “the most brutal band in the world” and stars of Adult Swim’s juggernaut of animated murder, Metalocalypse, are on a nationwide tour in support of their recently released Dethalbum (Williams Street), which peaked at number three on the Billboard Hard Rock Album charts and reached number 21 on the Billboard 200, making it the best-selling death metal album of all time. The fact that a cartoon band bested Slayer’s Reign In Blood (Def Jam, 1986) might bum out old tyme metalists, but facts have to be faced here: not even Slayer are more brutal than the almighty ‘Klok.

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Fear them. No, seriously.

Even when tackling stand-up comedy or band therapy, Dethklok are unquestionably dark and unrelenting (and hilarious). As stated by an anonymous fan on metalsucks.com: “I’d pay money to see Dethklok. I’d leave after they were done. Lyrically and musically, they are better than any death metal or metal core band out.” Unfortunately, the band is slated to open for indie rock icons …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, who, despite their metal-sounding name, are destined to be decapitated by Dethklok, only to have their headless corpses eaten by ravenous hell bats.

Recently, I called Metalocalypse creator Brendon Small to discuss the carnage.