Wild Combination: A Portrait Of Arthur Russell is as apt a film title as you’ll find. Russell—an avant-garde composer, singer/songwriter, cellist and disco producer—was a gay, flannel-wearing converted Buddhist from Oskaloosa, Iowa. He collaborated with Allen Ginsberg, David Byrne and Phillip Glass, among many others, in a thriving New York City art scene in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Wild combination, indeed.
Russell died from AIDS in 1992 at age 40. His vast music catalog—he left behind thousands of tapes of partially finished songs—was largely overlooked until recently, when a series of reissues, compilations and tributes were welcomed by a new generation. After learning about Russell from a friend, New York-based filmmaker Matt Wolf felt an instant, visceral connection to his music before even hearing it. The seemingly contradictory character—the Iowa farm boy who becomes a Buddhist and downtown scenester—was fascinating.
Read More »
For a moment, sandwiched between soliloquies on art and artists, David Berman pauses. He looks around his Manhattan hotel room. He looks up, down and at Cassie, his wife and bandmate. And then, as you wait for his words just as you would in song, he begins again: “I always say things I don’t believe.”
It’s a cryptic-enough statement from a songwriter whose lyrical abracadabra and syntax have kept fans hungering for more since he first started putting them to tape on 1994 debut Starlite Walker. Under the Silver Jews moniker, Berman’s development as an artist—and as a human being—has taken turns too numerous to count. It was here in New York City that it all began, Berman having started the group in 1990 with college buddies and Pavement upstarts Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich.
Read More »
In the 1980s, the Go-Betweens were every bit as brilliant as R.E.M. or the Smiths, making smart, jangly pop music that never found as wide an audience as it deserved. Led by singers/songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, the Australian band broke up at the end of the decade, only to stage a vibrant comeback in 1999. But just as the duo began writing its 10th album in May 2006, McLennan died of a heart attack. Forster recalls the serendipity that put the Go-Betweens together again.
In early 1999, the Go-Betweens’ record company decided to put out a best-of album called Bellavista Terrace. Before the record’s release, my manager phoned me at my home in Germany and asked what we could do to help publicize it. I suggested a whistle-stop world tour by myself and Grant. The idea was to hit small clubs in major cities around the world, doing interviews by day and playing acoustic shows by night. My other suggestion was that Grant and I do it under our own names—no “Go-Betweens” on the marquee. This was to take pressure off us and allow Grant and I to play what we wanted, even if that meant playing Go-Betweens songs all night. Also, with our solo careers still going, we weren’t thinking about the Go-Betweens. We approached this tour as solo artists and friends.
Read More »
There’s no reasonable explanation why Flipper can make what appears to be an ordinary group of shoppers pogo in public. Rest assured, the band can still do it. A crowd of more than 400 jammed the aisles of San Francisco’s Amoeba Records in February, as the revered punk-rock survivors—now old enough to play on golf’s senior tour—lit into a throbbing, 40-minute set that included chromosome-damaged, post-punk faves “Ha, Ha, Ha” and “Way Of The World” to celebrate the release of Flipper Live (Target-video77), a DVD of performances from 1980-81. At the set’s conclusion, guitarist Ted Falconi, his cascading silver hair tied behind his back, was so locked into his instrument he remained onstage long after his bandmates departed.
Read More »
Kinks leader Ray Davies has been banned from America, bored of the 20th century and, at times, bigger than the Beatles. Davies may not be like anybody else—his songbook is one of rock’s greatest treasures—but he’s finally figuring out who he is. Interview by Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan
At one point during MAGNET’s interview with Ray Davies, the great songwriter stopped mid-sentence to peer out the window of the Dream Hotel overlooking 55th Street in Manhattan at dusk. Something had caught his eye.
“Isn’t that light out there like Edward Hopper lighting? Is that Edward Hopper time or not?”
Observing light, life and human nature with superhuman focus is Davies’ stock-in-trade. His best songs feel photorealistic and sound suspended in time. They are sometimes nostalgic and beautiful, and other times they are cynical and brutal. Davies himself is just as contradictory: combative and sensitive, a shy, self-examining middle-class hero from north London who’s had no problem indulging in rock ’n’ roll excess and showmanship. He’s often called a creative genius and a control freak, which are both compatible and necessary traits for the life he’s led.
Read More »
As if he was meant to fulfill some biblical prophesy, Raymond Douglas Davies was born in 1944 to Frederick and Annie Davies in north London’s Fortis Green neighborhood. He was the seventh child (and first son) of a seventh child. Then, in 1947, along came little David Russell Gordon Davies. Relations between the two brothers have run hot and cold ever since.
Read More »
The golden age of Ray Davies and Co. may have ended with 1971’s Muswell Hillbillies, but there are essential tracks scattered among the hit-and-miss LPs that followed:
“Sitting In My Hotel” from Everybody’s In Show-Biz (1972)
“(A) Face In The Crowd” from Soap Opera (1975)
“I’m In Disgrace” from Schoolboys In Disgrace (1975)
“Full Moon” from Sleepwalker (1977)
“Misfits” from Misfits (1978)
“In A Space” from Low Budget (1979)
“Art Lover” from Give The People What They Want (1981)
“Heart Of Gold” from State Of Confusion (1983)
“Summer’s Gone” from Word Of Mouth (1984)
“Scattered” from Phobia (1993)
With big guitars and hard-hitting drums, the Southern-bred road warriors in the Whigs are on a mission to restore the rock trio to ragged glory. By Steve Klinge
“The phone was actually on my body and I didn’t hear it. That’s how asleep I was. It’s rather embarrassing.” Parker Gispert, the 25-year-old songwriter, vocalist and guitarist of Athens, Ga., trio the Whigs, is apologizing for missing several calls for a scheduled interview. Drummer Julian Dorio finally had to wake him in the back of the tour van.
Although it’s early afternoon, Gispert can be forgiven for his exhaustion. He’s somewhere between Cleveland and Chicago, in the middle of a tour that has the Whigs criss-crossing the Midwest. The buzz for the band’s second album, Mission Control (ATO), is growing quickly, adding to the whirlwind. A few weeks ago, they played Letterman; the following week, they’ll do Conan. The New York Times gave Mission Control a glowing review, and last year Esquire named Dorio “best drummer” in its annual Esky Music Awards.
Read More »
Twenty years ago, Mudhoney made Superfuzz Bigmuff, the landmark recording that launched grunge and put Seattle on the musical map. Here’s what really happened.
Who’s Who In the Mudhoney Story: Jeff Ament (Mother Love Bone bassist); Mark Arm (Mudhoney singer/guitarist); Nils Bernstein (journalist, record store owner); Jennie Boddy (Sub Pop publicist); Ed Fotheringham (illustrator, Thrown Ups singer); Stone Gossard (Mother Love Bone Guitarist); Jay Hinman (journalist, fan); Steve Manning (fan); Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth singer/guitarist); Bruce Pavitt (Sub Pop co-owner); Dan Peters (Mudhoney drummer); Charles Peterson (photographer); Jonathan Poneman (Sub Pop co-owner); Bettina Richards (Atlantic Records A&R person); Steve Turner (Mudhoney guitarist)
Before everybody loved them and everybody loved their town, the guys in Mudhoney were just another group of Seattle music-scene misfits and castoffs. At the beginning of 1988, the phrase “Seattle music scene” didn’t have quite the same meaning as it does now. Singer/guitarist Mark Arm, guitarist Steve Turner, drummer Dan Peters and bassist Matt Lukin ushered in the grunge era with the August ’88 release of “Touch Me I’m Sick,” Mudhoney’s debut single. The snotty, motorized garage-rock blast wasn’t exactly a shot heard ’round the world, but it was heard by the right people, and the subsequent Superfuzz Bigmuff EP, issued two months later, cemented the gloriously sloppy sound and beer-goggled vision that would make some other people in Seattle (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam) very famous.
Read More »
For Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart—the new-primitive art-punk duo known as The Kills—life in the information age can be a fate worse than death. By Tom Lanham
Jamie Hince has a theory. He knows it sounds crazy and maybe even a little misanthropic, but just hear him out. Our egotistical, tabloid-obsessed, knuckleheaded MySpace society—perfectly depicted in Mike Judge’s wicked 2006 send-up Idiocracy—has become nothing but a huge spectacle.
“I’ve not lost touch with myself enough to think that I’m actually part of it,” says Hince, the cynical guitarist/vocalist/drummer for blues/punk duo the Kills. “I’m not a celebrity, I’m not famous. I’m just a musician, doing my thing. But the problem now is that everyone’s fought so long for the rights of the individual that it’s finally gotten through to the other side, and individualism got mutated and went all out of control. And now it’s just out-and-out selfish shit, where the rights of the individual have blended with capitalism and made for a really ugly society. Punk rock was part of it.” He sighs dejectedly. “Individualism sounded like the most amazing thing, but now everyone’s just out for themselves.”
Read More »
For a brief spell in the early ’90s, Jellyfish was more than happy to play grunge spoiler. That much was obvious from the campy, funereal organ that kicks off Bellybutton, the San Francisco band’s effusively melodic 1990 debut.
“We went to a church in L.A. that had a massive cathedral organ and recorded it right there,” says Jellyfish keyboardist and cofounder Roger Joseph Manning Jr. “Jellyfish was actually the most punk-rock statement I ever made. We were always outsiders, musically. But unlike the sort of music geeks who would’ve gotten into jazz, we really loved classic pop.”
1993’s Spilt Milk, the band’s second and final album, is a blustery, meticulous tribute to the hook-crazed nostalgia of ’70s fandom, mining inspiration from the Beatles, the Beach Boys and Queen with a theatrical flamboyance that bordered on parody at times. While Spilt Milk confirmed Jellyfish’s immortality in the eyes of power-pop fetishists, it failed to capitalize on Bellybutton’s modest commercial success. That was enough to send band members scrambling for the exits.
Read More »
Five years after being typecast as a retro-rock buzz band, Danish duo the Raveonettes have brought their cinematic, hooked-on-classics sound into sharp focus. By Chris Barton
2003, America was heading into an election year full of hope and promise, with the prospect of real change in the air. Although a war had just started in Iraq, the government offered comforting promises that it would be over quickly, culminating with the unfurling of a “Mission Accomplished” banner on a battleship’s deck. And in the world of music, the White Stripes, the Strokes and vintage-sounding, feedback-embracing Danish duo the Raveonettes made fans and critics swoon. It was “the return of rock,” an apparent revival of the raw energy and integrity of garage rock that would bring the genre back to its roots and, it was hoped, dominance.
Read More »
The Duke Spirit creates the kind of record-collector rock that’s usually explained with mash-up descriptors that sound like they were written for a music-industry version of Robert Altman’s The Player.
“We’ve had some weird comparisons, like ‘Björk fronting Meat Is Murder-era Smiths,’” laughs guitarist Luke Ford, who grew up outside of London reading hype-afflicted U.K. music magazines. “One of our favorites was, ‘A crack whore fronting an Oasis tribute band.’ It wasn’t very positive, obviously, but we thought it was pretty funny. We almost put that on a sticker on the front of the album.”
But on an album like Neptune (Shangri-La Music), which was recorded in the California desert with Queens Of The Stone Age producer Chris Goss, it’s difficult not to point out obvious touchstones. Over the course of a dozen tracks, there are easily identifiable elements of Sonic Youth’s poppier moments, the neo-girl-group harmonies of the Raveonettes, shades of the shoegazers and cinematic ballads that would’ve made Lee Hazlewood proud. If those reference points weren’t obvious enough, the Duke Spirit’s website features photos of the band holding up albums by the Modern Lovers, Black Sabbath, Ronnie Spector and Sly And The Family Stone.
Read More »
When you think about Martha’s Vineyard, you probably picture scalloped frills trimming the wraparound porch, endless summers and gentle salt breezes from the Atlantic. The Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism has seen to that. But for the members of the Billionaires (all year-round Vineyard residents at some point in their lives), the associations are a bit different.
“We mowed those lawns and reshingled those roofs all through high school,” says singer/guitarist Tim Laursen.
Read More »
On first inspection, there’s nothing that unusual about Meric Long when he sloshes in from a rainstorm to take shelter in his neighborhood taqueria in San Francisco’s Mission District. Look closely, however, and you’ll spy huge, pointy talons jutting out from his fingerless gloves.
“They’re my dragon nails—fake but really strong,” explains Long, who employs them in plucking a tinny old National guitar in his anachronistic folk/punk duo the Dodos. “I used my real nails for a while, then we left on tour; after two shows, they just broke. So now I even have a manicurist, but I poke through everything.” He claws the air for emphasis. “I can’t help it! I’m dangerous, I tell ya!”
Look even closer, beneath the ash-pale 27-year-old’s shaggy black bangs, and some subtly exotic features become evident. “My mom is from Tahiti, but she’s Chinese,” says Long. “And my dad’s from Oakland, but he’s white as snow.” For an entire summer, Long relocated to Tahiti, worked at his uncle’s bread shop and soaked up as much culture as he coud, which could account for the far-off, tribal feel of Visiter (Frenchkiss), the Dodos’ second album.
Read More »
Juno brought worldwide attention to his former band, the Moldy Peaches, but Adam Green isn’t in a cute, folk-pop mood anymore. By Kory Grow
“I was walking down 14th Street the other day and just realized that I was full of shit and that I’ve never done anything close to what I wanted to do in my life,” says New York City resident Adam Green. “Time to take some more acid, I guess.”
Green, who turned 27 in May, has had a lot to consider over the past few years. Since the age of 18, he’s been a professional musician constantly on the verge of mainstream success. Having cofounded quirky, anti-folk ensemble the Moldy Peaches with singer/songwriter Kimya Dawson in 2000, Green launched a concurrent solo career two years later. While the Moldy Peaches enjoyed critics’-darling status, Green’s solo albums, which have traversed folk, country and indie rock, have received mixed reviews at best. Whereas the Moldy Peaches played endearing, if sickeningly cute, tongue-in-cheek ditties like “Who’s Got The Crack,” Green’s solo songs were more mature, aiming for grandiosity. (Not to mention his Tourette-like river of expletive-laced lyrics: “There’s no wrong way to fuck a bitch with no face,” Green sang on his second album, 2003’s Friends Of Mine.) Though Green is accustomed to putting out an album a year, his label, Rough Trade, applied the brakes after 2006’s Jacket Full Of Danger, barring him from releasing an album last year. This is when things began to go awry.
Read More »
Glasgow wasn’t always bursting with great bands. Before Belle And Sebastian and Franz Ferdinand, it had been some time since the Scottish city put anything noteworthy on the musical map. Yet when Adele Bethel and Scott Paterson were growing up, Glasgow still had some credibility.
“Teenage Fanclub, Jesus And Mary Chain and Aztec Camera are the bands I really loved when I was younger,” says Bethel. “And Glasgow is so small, they were all from down the street.”
But when singers/guitarists Bethel and Paterson teamed with bassist Ailidh Lennon and drummer David Gow to form Sons & Daughters in 2000, they didn’t take cues from their indie-pop neighbors. Instead, Paterson found inspiration in rockabilly, early R&B and rootsy, greasy garage; Bethel’s lyrics were born out of similar stews: murder ballads, blues laments and noir narratives. While a current wave of American bands revels in the exoticism of Brit folk’s intricate fingerpicking and magickal mythologies, Sons & Daughters turn their gaze back across the Atlantic.
Read More »
Canadians have a reputation for affability, and first-generation singer/songwriter Basia Bulat, the daughter of a Polish music teacher, is no exception. But that doesn’t mean roiling angst and quiet desperation don’t lick at the edges of Bulat’s debut album, Oh, My Darling (Rough Trade), in spite of its lighthearted feel and the sunny undulations of her golden vocals. According to Bulat, Darling emerges from the quiet hurts suffered when native sweetness brushes up against harsh reality. She recalls a moment when her childhood love of oldies radio was ridiculed by classmates.
“All the kids were into the song ‘Good Vibrations,’ and I thought they were talking about the Beach Boys,” says Bulat on a patio outside the San Francisco venue where she’s performing. “But they were talking about Marky Mark And The Funky Bunch, and I was ostracized. The girl who came to my birthday party and gave me the tape told me I was a big loser for not knowing who they were … There’s darkness on this record! Darkness!”
Read More »
Tempted to split and tested by hard times, the Helio Sequence holds steady as the constantly reinventing center of Portland, Ore.’s indie-rock scene. By Matthew Fritch
In 2004, Benjamin Weikel walked away from the biggest alt-rock band in America. Weikel, a gifted drummer from Portland, Ore., had been recruited by Isaac Brock to play on Modest Mouse’s platinum-selling Good News For People Who Love Bad News. Over the course of four subsequent tours as a member of Modest Mouse, Weikel experienced the golden moments of success: the late-night-TV performances, the swelling crowds and bigger venues, the feeling of driving into Los Angeles in a tour van and hearing the DJ on KROQ trumpet the arrival of sure-shot hit single “Float On.”
But Weikel had already made plans to swim upstream. “[Modest Mouse] wanted me to be in the band at the end (of the last tour),” he says. “They asked me fairly often, even after I’d officially left. I was supposed to do Jimmy Kimmel with Modest Mouse and had to say, ‘Well, I have a Helio Sequence gig booked on that day.’ Then that was it.”
“[Weikel] gave up on the number-one band in America,” says Trevor Solomon, a friend and Portland-based booking agent. “It’s fascinating, because he stuck to his guns. Most people would have sold out for the money.”
Read More »
Making high art that seems to imitate the down and druggy neighborhoods of their native Vancouver, the members of Black Mountain are not your typical stoners. By Michael Barclay
When Stephen McBean looks In The Future—the title of the second album by his band, Black Mountain—he sees a world ruled by tyrants and bastards, spilling blood and conjuring devils and demons. Yet McBean insists he’s an upbeat guy.
“Everyone wants to have a good life and happiness despite all the depressing elements of the world and the stuff that weighs you down,” muses the Black Mountain singer/guitarist. “There’s a lot of great things to celebrate: friends, your community.”
This makes sense coming from someone whose band’s 2005 self-titled debut boasted an anthem with the refrain, “Don’t run our hearts around.” But In The Future (Jagjaguwar) features the hounds of hell and Lucifer himself joining in the blood orgy. McBean denies browsing John Milton or the Book of Revelation. He did, however, read something about Mayan culture that inspired the song “Wucan.”
Read More »
As immortalized by Guided By Voices on “Dayton, Ohio 19-Something And 5,” the Buckeye State has inspired some of the greatest lo-fi and bedroom rock of the past two decades. But the members of Columbus’ Times New Viking—vocalist/drummer Adam Elliot, vocalist/keyboardist Beth Murphy and guitarist Jared Phillips—are getting a little bored with all the GBV comparisons. Despite the fact that his brother Kevin played in 84 Nash (a band on Robert Pollard’s Rockathon label in the ’90s), Elliot doesn’t cite GBV as an influence.
“Guided By Voices is definitely a reference, but musically I don’t think we’re influenced by them,” he says. “The way we create songs is similar to the way they create songs, just spending Saturday night sitting in your house, making songs with your friends. A lot of people mistake it as we’re trying to sound bad on purpose, but it’s more about recording the song three times after you learned it, so there’s still that freshness to it.”
Read More »
With the great, misunderstood New Wave, Against Me! either betrayed its anarchist-punk past or made a bright new future with the most important major-label debut in years. Interview By Ben Lee
God bless the sellouts, recovering punks and traitors to the scene. Think about rock’s modern era, about Nirvana’s Nevermind and Green Day’s exile from Gilman Street. Then consider the minor and almost quaint infamy of Against Me!, the grassroots-style punk band led by 27-year-old singer/guitarist Tom Gabel. The Gainesville, Fla., quartet spent the first half of 2007 defending its decision to sign to major label Sire and eliciting the scorn of sanctimonious former fans. It spent the latter half of the year basking in critical acclaim for New Wave, performing on Letterman, gladhanding with Bruce Springsteen and opening arena shows for the Foo Fighters.
Against Me! might be the last band to endure accusations of selling out. The charges just don’t stick anymore in what’s literally become a post-punk world where Ramones T-shirts are peddled at every mall and “Lust For Life” shills for cruise-ship vacations. To understand why Against Me! had major-label hesitations in the first place, you have to look at the band’s back story.
Read More »
Being a whiz kid has its privileges. For Ben Lee, success came early and easily, first as the 14-year-old frontman for Australian pop/punk band Noise Addict (whose fans and patrons included Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and the Beastie Boys’ Mike D), then as a relatively wizened teenage solo artist. Lee did some acting, dated Claire Danes (the nearly six-year relationship ended in 2003) and dabbled in a variety of side projects, which ranged from a Kylie Minogue duet to songwriting for Evan Dando to a one-off band called the Bens with namesakes Folds and Kweller. But when it comes to his own music, Lee wasn’t satisfied with being the acoustic-guitar ingenue.
“My career could’ve been an easier ride if I’d just done what was expected of me,” says the 29-year-old Lee. “Once you get your foot in the door of the music industry, you’ve got the opportunity to play nice and do the same record 50 times in a row and just keep building that same fan base and not challenge yourself or anyone. For me, though, those were never the artists I responded to. I love Jonathan Richman and Bob Dylan and David Bowie, and change was part of it. The other night, this girl came up to me and, dead-earnest, said, ‘You need to make an acoustic record, just you and a guitar.’ I started giggling—I didn’t mean to offend her—and said, ‘I’ve already done that.’ It’s not my job to placate other people’s need for security because they can’t handle the chaos of the universe.”
Read More »
Mark Lanegan has been a grunge misfit, a folk-blues drifter and a gutter-dwelling addict. But whenever he appears to sing in that bone-chilling baritone of his, Lanegan is simply known as the gravest voice of his generation. By Andrew Parks
Mark Lanegan is pissed. At least he sounds that way on the phone, letting out a deep sigh and giving directions to a secluded park near his Southern California apartment. For the third time.
Read More »
John Reis isn’t too keen on discussing his immortality. The San Diego punk/indie demigod who helmed Rocket From The Crypt, Drive Like Jehu and Hot Snakes is too cheeky and self-effacing for such serious contemplation. (Reis’ official statement on RFTC’s break-up reads: “We felt we needed to take a stand and fight for the future of our children and our children’s children’s friends. On Halloween 2005, we decided to disband in protest of illegal music downloading.”) But time and again, Reis has proven he’s a hard man to keep down.
Read More »
After the Beta Band crashed and burned under a dark cloud of drugs and mental illness, some of its members picked up the pieces to form a fitter, happier psych/pop group called the Aliens. By Neil Ferguson
It’s a balmy early Friday evening in one of the less salubrious neighborhoods of the nation’s capital, and I find myself backstage in a venue called the Rock & Roll Hotel. I’m here to talk to cosmic Scottish three-piece the Aliens, who consist of erstwhile Beta Band members John Maclean and Robin Jones, plus Beta Band founder and occasional Lone Pigeon Gordon Anderson.
They’ve just finished soundchecking on the fourth night of their inaugural U.S. tour and have agreed to discuss their days as art students, the Beta Band and their current incarnation. The Aliens are enjoying widespread critical acclaim for their debut album, Astronomy For Dogs (Astralwerks), a gorgeously frazzled, kaleidoscopic explosion of Day-Glo psych/pop. Right now, however, I can barely get a word in. As they reminisce about how they met, the conversation rapidly descends into inter-band piss-taking, with each member ridiculing the worthlessness of the others’ individual tastes at the time.
“Fuck me, John,” splutters Anderson. “You were into some really bad dance stuff. The Brand New Heavies?”
“Yeah, well,” counters Maclean, “you were listening to what’s quite possibly the worst album of all time.”
Read More »
Please excuse Glen Hansard for being incredulous and downright giddy when it comes to Once. Hansard, who for the last 17 years has fronted Irish folk/rock band the Frames, is the male lead in Once, a heartfelt rock musical that’s become an art-house sensation. He’s just been told what the micro-budgeted film has grossed—a whopping $9 million—in the U.S. since its May 10 release in New York City and Los Angeles.
“That’s fucking incredible, man,” he says of the box-office tally. “I honestly don’t know what it is. Some films get a bit of attention. It doesn’t make one better than the other. Fucking hell, this is amazing.”
The 37-year-old Hansard has been enjoying all the accolades that have come his way since Once won the World Cinema Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival in January. (It’s due out on DVD in December.) He and Markéta Irglová, his costar in the film and off-screen girlfriend, are also performing as musical duo the Swell Season. Last year, they released their first record, which includes some of the songs that hold together the gentle, lovelorn narrative of Once. This summer, the two sold out a 750-seat venue in New York weeks in advance. But before the film, they could barely attract 50 people for an American gig.
Read More »
A haunting image of Albert Ayler appears throughout a new documentary that explores the free-jazz saxophonist’s too-short life and legacy. It’s a black-and-white film clip in which he’s standing shirtless, silent, staring into the camera, the white patch on his beard beaming like a headlight. It’s as if Ayler is saying to the audience, “I told you so.” Ever-confident during his brief and underappreciated career in the mid-to-late 1960s, he had this to say about his chaotic, spaced-out brand of jazz: “If people don’t like it now, they will.”
Filmmaker Kasper Collin was one person who liked the saxophonist’s music from the get-go. He first heard Ayler in the early 1990s, when he was 18 and living in his native Sweden. “It really stood out from everything else I was listening to,” says Collin. “It’s incredible, powerful music.”
Read More »
YouTube may be the peepshow of the inane, but being famous for 15 megabytes can work wonders for your music career. Just ask Alamo Race Track, the Amsterdam quartet whose performance of the song “Black Cat John Brown” has topped a half-million views on the video site. While you might expect such a popular clip to include irony-laced gags, celebrity spoofs or trippy animation, singer/guitarist Ralph Mulder explains otherwise.
“It’s just four guys sweating in a small dressing room,” he says.
Read More »
Of all of the underground movements of yore, the late-’80s/early-’90s shoegazer genre seems to have aged the best. Maybe it’s because the preeminent recordings of the time sound like nothing that had come before. Or maybe it’s because the sound was never embraced by the mainstream, thus avoiding widespread saturation or burnout. Perhaps this is why Airiel’s The Battle Of Sealand (Highwheel) feels simultaneously fresh while offering what seems like a gift bag of lost tracks by My Bloody Valentine, Ride and Pale Saints. Hailing from Chicago (via Bloomington, Ind.), Airiel has gradually astounded attentive listeners by issuing five EPs since 2003 and putting on a deafening live show.
Read More »
In order to erect the new, you have to raze the old.
That’s all you could hope to expect from a band started amid the rubble of Germany’s post-punk scene. A band whose name translates to “collapsing new buildings” and whose scabrous sound was born from the belly of true industrial noise: the crunch and crash of found objects, tortured synthesizers, charred guitars and downward-spiraling screams.
That Einstürzende Neubauten—guitarist/vocalist Blixa Bargeld’s junk-scientific testament to deconstruction—has managed to be more than the sum of its parts is what makes even the band’s harshest machine music tender, odd and gloriously messy. There’s a supple quality to Bargeld’s sharded whisper, hoarse holler and whimpering croon (mostly delivered in German), whether on the group’s literally smashing Kollaps debut or the quietly curvaceous new Alles Wieder Offen.
Read More »
When trying to comprehend the complicated world of Matt and Eleanor Friedberger, it may help to understand where it all began. Long before forming the Fiery Furnaces and assimilating into the art/music mecca of Brooklyn, the garrulous, keyboard-crazy brother and more reserved, coolly headstrong sister spent their childhood in Oak Park, Ill., a quaint Chicago suburb known for its conflicting mix of modern, sprawling Frank Lloyd Wright houses and boxy, heavily ornamented Victorian architecture. This dynamic of new and old, simple and grand, expansive and densely jumbled is something the Furnaces have perfected over the course of seven years and five albums. Appropriately, when Matt is pressed to describe the Furnaces’ sixth LP, Widow City (Thrill Jockey), the band’s composer and chief lyricist answers in typically elusive fashion.
Read More »
Whether pulling cookie dough out of his pants as the leader of Austin punks Scratch Acid in the ’80s or getting arrested for indecent exposure onstage at Lollapalooza as singer for Chicago noise-rockers the Jesus Lizard in the ’90s, David Yow was one of the greatest frontmen to wield a microphone. He still is. Yow is back as part of L.A. trio Qui, whose new album, Love’s Miracle (Ipecac), is a complex tangle of punk and metal. Largely absent from music for eight years, Yow is snarling, growling and stage-diving again.
I learned about being a frontman while coming up punk rock in central Texas, going to see local bands like the Butthole Surfers, the Big Boys and the Dicks. They were all really fun to watch; it was kind of a spectacle. I remember the night that Gary Floyd, the singer of the Dicks, was dressed as a nurse, and he’d stuffed a bunch of liver in his underwear. He kept pulling it out and smearing it all over his enormous belly. It was hideously beautiful; he was a huge Divine fan and was inspired by all that weird, flamboyant John Waters shit like Female Trouble. Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers would put clothespins in his hair, light cymbals on fire and sing through a roll of toilet paper. The first time I ever saw the Butthole Surfers, they’d Xeroxed the top and bottom of a cockroach onto the front and back of a small piece of paper. They had thousands of these pieces of paper, like cockroach-sized confetti. I was pretty influenced by those folks, and their attitudes were refreshing. Alcohol had a lot to do with it. LSD had something to do with it; everybody did LSD.
Read More »
Great bands don’t form via drummer-wanted ads or happenstance encounters at the local guitar shop. Instead, they come together in a fashion similar to New Hope, Pa.’s Ween, whose two members met in a middle-school typing class and decided to jam later that day. Twenty-three years later, Aaron “Gene Ween” Freeman and Mickey “Dean Ween” Melchiondo have given the world nine studio albums featuring some of the weirdest, most disturbing and utterly glorious rock ’n’ roll imaginable. (Incredibly, six of them were released by a major label.) Ween has become the quintessential cult band for stoners, meatheads and record geeks who remain united in their worship of the duo’s uniquely “brown” sounds.
Read More »
Pretension, prog and the politics of dancing. Forward-thinking New York quartet Battles overcomes all obstacles to deliver 21st-century fight songs. By Michael Barclay
“Make me believe!”
The plea comes from the back of the audience at the sweltering-hot Lee’s Palace, the Toronto venue where Battles are midway through a set during their summer tour. The band is awkwardly attempting to fix a blown speaker cabinet that’s derailed the show, ending a weekend of Friday the 13th curses that also plagued Battles’ set at the Pitchfork Music Festival two nights ago, in front of 17,000 people. But since the May release of debut full-length Mirrored (Warp), very little else has slowed down the New York quartet. And the legions of believers are growing.
Read More »
