Music Blogger Archives — Page 27 of 39 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Teddy Thompson: Americana by way of England

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November 6, 2007

By Anna Mantzaris

Teddy Thompson (that’s Thompson as in spawn of Richard and Linda) may be an English boy by birth, but the 31-year-old’s rock-folk-country sound will make you think he’s spent years fine-tuning his sound deep in the land of the American south.

Taking on the greats – Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, George Jones – Thompson’s latest CD, Up Front and Down Low(Verve Forecast), is a thoughtful collection of interpretations of C&W classics and not-so-well-known gems, with dad Richard and pal Rufus Wainwright lending their talents. A New Yorker by residence, Thompson takes his show on the road opening for Suzanne Vega; he appears Monday, Nov. 12, at the Fillmore.

Bay Guardian: How did Up Front and Down Low come about? Why an album of covers?

Teddy Thompson: I came home after touring after the last record for a year. I didn’t have a lot to do. I started just recording some songs for fun, but I liked the way it came out and I thought maybe it would make a good side-project album.

Thanks for the metal! Even if it does sound like other metal…

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November 5, 2007

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By Ben Richardson

Have you ever listened to a song and thought, wow, I’ve definitely heard that part before, in a different song? Vanilla Ice’s oft-derided thievery of the bass part from Queen’s “Under Pressure” is probably the best-known example, but – surprise – it turns out that riff-plagiarism has been rampant for years, especially in the dogmatic world of heavy metal and hard rock. Thanks to the keen ear of YouTube user BaknBlack, we provide you with a nine-volume compendium pilfered, ripped-off, and thinly disguised rock: Metal That Sounds Like Other Metal.

Fingered? Jimmy Page apologies for reunion resked

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November 5, 2007

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Survival of the fitty: Siouxsie Sioux shows no sign of slowing

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October 23, 2007

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Siouxsie Sioux, right, accepting a Peta
humanitarian award at a 2006 ceremony.
Courtesy of www.peta.org.uk.

By Todd Lavoie

Oh, 50 – it ain’t no thing. Just ask Siouxsie Sioux, the reigning queen of ice-water stares and sublimely detached vamping just hit the half-century mark this May, though you’d never guess it. Fifty, schmifty! I just read a recent interview with the punk/goth/you-name-it icon, and the former Susan Dallion listed off three biggies for keeping the ole middle-age uglies at bay: plenty of water, lots of fresh produce, and a pure blistering hatred of air-conditioning.

She’s lived in the South of France for years and years now – universes apart from the suburban drab-drab of her Bromley, England, upbringing – and she attributes the change of locale to her apparent eternal youthfulness. Proof? Ah, well, peep away at the artwork for Siouxsie’s first-name-only-darling solo debut, Mantaray (Universal), and tell me that’s not one of the most stunning fifth-decade women you’ve ever seen! So what if she’s beddin’ down with beetles, bees, and butterflies? I’m dazzled!

And do I spot the cracks of a smile on that face, eyes peering upwards and outwards into some warm light beaming down upon her? “Nah, can’t be,” you say? Go on, look again. Call me crazy, but that looks like optimism to me – oh, the Goths will be so disappointed.

Going after the Go! Team

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October 22, 2007

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By Chris DeMento

If I had been liquored up, like good and wedding-reception drunk, the Go! Team, who appeared Oct. 19 at Mezzanine, would have doubtless been an even more enjoyable show. They crammed their set full of frenetic, fizzpop, indie-hop dance numbers, deviating only twice to play something softer, slower, more coquettish. The better part of it was all getaway cars, poprocks, and coke.

The old stuff – like “Panther Dash” and “Lady Flash” – is written with a recipe that calls for one part rock ‘n’ roll posturing, one part disco synthfunk, and one part hip-hop brio. Mix in a simplistic glockenspiel, substitute semi-inspired harmonica lines, tinker about on toy instruments – and smile pretty and laugh and keep it genki! And throw your hands up in the air and jump and yell, “Yay!” and “Go!” and “Whoo!” a whole bunch of times. The stuff they played off the new album bears a listening, if only for the sake of close comparison to the old. The crazydancy rock-hop formula still works.

The Go! Team should be noted for doing what so many UK bands before them have also succeeded in accomplishing – that is, for putting fundamentally American tropes to colorful, original use. Not to call them Lennons
– far from it. But it’s undeniable that the warm reception they received from their 35-and-younger Mezzanine audience had much to do with their manipulation of popular American forms, specifically hip-hop. Their approach presents itself just clearly enough, without overpowering the other ideas in the music – a convenient influence that remains almost topical so as not to scare off the alt-indie-dance-pop rockers. For the Go! Team, hip-hop works best as a component, a third of their sum polyphony, and in this way, lead vocalist Ninja provides a more rhetorical, rhythmically additive element than any real semantic purpose or tonal value – perfect for white folks who don’t own any Nas records but fondly recall the Rob Bass days. (And this is all right crafty on the part of the band, if you ask me.)

Go, Go! Team, go: More from cheer leader Ian Parton

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October 19, 2007

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The Go! Team are all about the highly intense positivity. so it’s a little strange to find producer-songwriter-mastermind Ian Parton, 33, so somber and sober, speaking from the UK on the brink of their SF show tonight, Oct 19, at Mezzanine. Oh well, the fun is all over the new record, Proof of Youth (Sub Pop) – and that’s what counts. Here’s a bit more from our talk.

Bay Guardian: Did you have anything that you really wanted to accomplish with this new album?

Ian Parton: I wanted it to be noisier, more kind of ballsier, just a bit more wangy, a bit more kick ass, and a bit more live sounding. I always loved weird tunings and white noise and feedback and more aggressiveness. A bit more Public Enemy and more sing-along.

BG: Speaking of Public Enemy, how did you get Chuck D to perform on the album?

IP: Oh yeah, I never really thought it would happen. I still never believed it up till that very moment. It was six months in the making after the first e-mail was shot off – to nowhere, not knowing if we had the right address and wondering if it was really Chuck that replied or someone fucking around with us.

Tacos, “Widow”‘s peak, Gold beats: make it Fiery Furnaces, Chuck Prophet, and Fool’s Gold

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October 19, 2007

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Whoa, there’s a lot going this weekend, as usual in the fairest of ‘Friscos. Let’s take a tip from our sponsor and take it a one day at a time this weekend.

First, the Fiery Furnaces are up tonight, Oct. 19, with Pit er Pat at Independent – and dang, their new album, Widow City (Thrill Jockey), rocks it old-school. As in feathered hair, air-brushed vans, and double gatefold vinyl, which by chance, Widow City is available on. Hey, it’s a great time to be a widow! (Cue video “Ex-Guru.”)

Next up on Saturday, Oct. 20, you got a hoedown to throw down: the Fool’s Gold Showcase at Mezzanine with A-Trak and DJ Mehdi, Kid Sister, Kavinsky, Nick Catchdubs, and Trackademicks. Let’s hope Kavinsky actually does something (check Michael Harkin’s CMJ blog) – but whatev, Chicago’s Kid Sister will make it all happen – here at SXSW.

Meanwhile on Sunday, Oct. 21, SF singer-songwriter extradordinaire Chuck Prophet is going to be toasting his new acclaimed CD, Soap and Water (Yep Roc) – with tacos, natch.

Dude has hired a truck to treat the fans on Sunday at the Make-Out Room. Of the aforementioned grinds, Prophet said, “Yes, you heard right. Free tacos for all my friends! The taco truck will be courtesy of El Tonayense. I’m a carne asada man myself, but I hear they do a killer al pastor.” (Dig it – after paying the $10 cover.) Prophet also performs free at Amoeba on Oct. 21, 2 p.m. – so now you’ve no excuse to miss him! (You can also hear the album online here.)

CMJ 2007: If it’s Wednesday, it must be Celebration, Fool’s Gold, the Cool Kids, and Birthday Suits

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October 19, 2007

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Passing out lane: Birthday Suits at Cake Shop. All photos by Michael Harkin.

By Michael Harkin

It’s been in the high 60s and low 70s out here in New York City, and while that is set to change pretty soon – the rain was set to start Thursday, the day I write this – the indie-rock sun shan’t set till early Sunday morning! A lot of shows went off Wednesday, Oct. 17 (Tuesday was a bit more low-key) – here are a few that I checked out and enjoyed:

Celebration – good times.

CELEBRATION AT PIANO’S (BROOKLYNVEGAN SHOWCASE)

I was lucky enough to catch a set by Celebration, a Baltimore band whose organ-heavy psychedelic shoegaze-beat was a real treat to take in. Vocalist Katrina Ford explained that, because they were playing in New York, the group was larger than usual, boasting an additional fellow on the congas and a stellar saxophonist who added an element of voodoo jazz freakout to the occasion. Their material had a real infectious, danceable pulse and channeled the space-rock catharsis of Spiritualized on more than one occasion. I’d advise checking them out when they play at the Independent in San Francisco on Nov. 11.

Cool Kids go bump in the night.

FOOL’S GOLD SHOWCASE AT HIRO BALLROOM

A-Trak, Montreal DJ and head of the new Fool’s Gold label, spun a closing with DJ Mehdi of the Paris’s Ed Banger Records, bringing about clever collisions between electro, old-school booty rap and French filter disco. Kavinsky, also associated with Ed Banger, was slated to “perform,” but primarily appeared to be standing around looking cool alongside the aforementioned DJs as they played a few of his 12-inch singles. He couldn’t do it himself?!

The Cool Kids were the flat-out business, man: old-school, oft-808-based breaks and rhymes about gold, pagers, cell phones, and being off the wall like the logo on Vans – you know, the skater kicks? Visuals scrolled behind them of BMX jumping, breakdancing footage, and lotsa Michael Jordan dunks. It was 1993 all over again! Their DJ was called DJ V.I.P.J. – pretty cool. The Fool’s Gold Showcase comes to the Mezzanine Saturday, Oct. 20.

Steamy Birthday Suits.

BIRTHDAY SUITS AT CAKE SHOP

This Minneapolis two-piece was super-thrashy and catchy, pushing miniature, manic bits of punk spazzcore into the basement space of the Cake Shop on the Lower East Side. Guitarist Hideo rolled about on the floor for a bit, while Matthew – who drummed and sang with Hideo – was a whirring thunder behind the kit. Pretty neat-o stuff, and a blinding reminder that rock really ought to be a lot noisier than it often is.

A.J. Roach, why d’ya gotta look so young and sound so wise?

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October 19, 2007

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By Todd Lavoie

I suppose it all stems from my childhood fascination with Yoda, but older-than-the-hills voices seem to sucker me in without fail. It’s especially intriguing when those sounds come from folks whose faces look far too young to creak out such ancient wisdom, such heaving doses of world-weariness.

Sure, I’ve tended to hang on every word during listens of late-period releases from elder statesmen like Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen, but I love the head-scratching incongruity of silver-haired croaks and warbles drifting forth from the pipes of youngish guys and gals. Singers like Will Oldham, Vic Chesnutt, David Eugene Edwards (16 Horsepower/Woven Hand) – how do they do it? Here I am, knee-deep and beyond into my 30s, and yet I still seem to carry as much bass in my register as a 16-year-old girl. Sagely advice, from these lips? Don’t count on it, love. This little voice of mine carries about as much gravitas as it did in high school. Needless to say, I stay clear of any serious oratory action.

And yet there goes Oldham, a.k.a., Bonnie Prince Bill, carrying the weight of the world atop that stiff upper lip, sounding old enough to regale us with tales of what it was like in the days before dirt. Oh, did I mention he was born in 1970?! Wow, what a fossil. Chesnutt and Edwards – same deal. Both are only around 40 years of age, but their voices have always inhabited the earth, if their records are any indication.

Looking for another name to add to the list? Then a trek down to Amnesia this coming Monday, Oct. 22, is in order, friends: local singer-songwriter A.J. Roach will be throwing a record-release party to celebrate the arrival of his latest collection of mountain music missives, Revelation (Waterbug). Trust me, the disc’s a stunner – I’ve nearly memorized the damn thing already, I’ve played it so much! If you too find yourself giddily a-fluster at the thought of bourbon-soaked backwoods folk with the jagged edges left firmly in place, then Monday’s hootenanny ain’t one to be missed. Oh, and did I mention that admission is free?

Come as you are Kurt Cobain biographer Michael Azerrad: On “Kurt Cobain: About a Son”

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October 17, 2007

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By Sean McCourt

As singer, songwriter, and frontperson for Nirvana, Kurt Cobain helped lead a musical revolution in the early 1990s whose effects on popular music and culture are still felt today. Yet after his death in 1994 at the age of 27, he continues to remain a figure somewhat shrouded in mystery. The new film Kurt Cobain: About a Son aims to show a more personal side of the gifted musician, told in his own words.

Director A.J. Schnack has taken interview tapes of Cobain done with music journalist Michael Azerrad for his 1993 book, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana – considered by many to be the definitive biography of the band – and filmed scenes of the places that played an important role in Cobain’s life, including his hometown of Aberdeen, Wash., along with Seattle and Olympia, to accompany the introspective and revealing words of the late musical icon.

Michael Azerrad.

The project came to fruition when Schnack was working on a documentary about They Might Be Giants, Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns, and he included an appearance from Azerrad, who in addition to the Come As You Are has written hundreds of articles about music, along with the excellent tome Our Band Could Be Your Life, a look at some of the most influential underground music artists of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Thirty years of sister lovers: Big Star returns

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October 16, 2007

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By Erik Morse

With the 30th anniversary of punk rock’s safety-pin Gotterdammerung now in full swing, the eponymous social reject-turned-successful-milquetoast might be goaded to drop a small fortune on all the era’s memorabilia and accoutrements in a moment of DIY nostalgia. Merchandise is teeming on record store shelves and label Web sites like the fungus and crabs that once multiplied in the putrid Chelsea Hotel. There’s the umpteenth Rough Trade reissue of the Fall, the “fully re-expanded” four disc set of London Calling with the unreleased “kazoo sessions,” those Johnny Rotten commemorative plates, some “organic” matter lifted from the rotting corpse of Johnny Thunders that’s currently reaching three figures on eBay.

In retrospect, though the truth may be as hard to swallow as a knuckle sandwich at the Manchester Trade Hall, punk was, in its 1977 genesis, a completely corporate invention – from its entrepreneurs to its major label financing to its rather swift absorption into the more consumer-friendly genre, new-wave. Yes, the corrective prologue from Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again will not be soon forgotten by punk scribes or post-rock revisionists. Such a realization makes it all the more shameful that, as 2007 rapidly comes to a close, there has been little mention of another insurgent masterpiece that appeared on the shelves of Rough Trade Records, Chiswick, and Forced Exposure at nearly the same time as Never Mind the Bollocks but without all the slack-jawed fanfare. Unfortunately, the band in question did not hail from Brixton or the Bowery, and the LP did not sound like scorched-earth punk rock in the least. In fact, the album was over four years old before it ever found a label, and the band had since dispersed to the four corners of Memphis to do solo recordings. Of course, the group was Big Star – and the recording, simply called Third or Sister Lovers or Beale St. Green or all three in any order.

It’s Rick James’s memoir, bitch

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October 15, 2007

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By Todd Lavoie

“A lot of cats knew how to funk – that part was easy. But very few knew how to put that special vibe on their music. That’s what I knew best.”

Oh, I think I smell a Pulitzer! Rick James gives it to us straight – and beamed down from that great big coke-and-bondage romp in the sky, apparently, considering that ole Kinks himself passed away three years ago – in his recently released tell-all The Confessions of Rick James: Memoirs of a Super Freak (Colossus), and I’ll be damned if it’s not the juiciest pile of pages I’ve seen in a while.

But let’s be frank, people: a literary triumph it ain’t. So, when I say that he’s “giving it to us straight,” what I really mean is: “scribbling down the memories as soon as they wobble out of the freebase fog, without a moment’s thought to word choice or sentence structure.” Trust me, there’s not a thesaurus or an editor in sight. We’re talking direct brain-to-page transmission here, which sometimes makes for wincingly fascinating results. But hey, I guess we can’t always put a “special vibe” on everything we do?

Plug in, turn on, and feel the noise at the Headphone Fest

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October 12, 2007

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Yep, it’s that time of year again – time to break out the old headphones and plug into some experimento sounds at [:]PLUG3[:], San Francisco’s third annual Global Headphone Festival. Expect the transmission of 48 live local performances, in conjunction with the tenth annual International Headphone Festival, Le Placard X, a self-organized, nonstop streaming, migrating “interaural” experiment.

Organizers advise you to BYOH or bring your own headphones to the event running Sat., Oct. 13, to Sun., Oct. 14, 1 p.m.-1 a.m. both days., at the Lab, 2948 16th St., SF. $5 sliding scale. (415) 864-8855.

Performers include:
100S OF DISMEMBERED HANDBAGS
666GANGSTAZ
ANTHONY MARIN
BEATLE
BEYTAH
BLUE VITRIOL
BLOODY SNOWMAN
CATSYNTH
CONRAD LEWBEL
CYPOD
DELETIST
DOUBLE VISION
DUD
FILTHMILK
FORMS OF THINGS UNKNOWN
GATHER THE BONES (trance viola drone)
HALCYON HIGH
HEADBOGGLE
HEARTWORM
HORAFLORA
JUSTINO
LANCE GRABMILLER
LES TROIS FEUILLES / 3 LEAFS
LNA
LX RUDIS
MAGNANIMOUS
MATT DAVIGNON
MNEMOTH (black noise)
MOISTURE
MY HELICAL ELK
NOMMO OGO
NO NO SPOT
OZMADAWN (sci-fi noise drone)
PAGAN/PRESLEY (electronic improvisation)
PATRICE SCANLON
PISTOLS WILL AIR
PU22L3
RASTER ROOBIT (strings & pedals)
RESPECTABLE CITIZEN
SAKANA
SLITHER SYNDICATE
SOUNDTRACK FOR A MOVIE ABOUT A DREAM ABOUT NOTHING
TROY BYKER (ambient/experimental)
TELEPATHIK FRIEND
TULLAN VELTE
WELDSCHMERTZ (dual cello drones by members of FILTHMILK + DELETIST)
WESTERN ADDITION
ZENTROPIA