twin town high release show #1: a smashing success!

thanks everybody, bands and fans, for making the first twin town high release show the hott jamm! each and every band pretty much killed it outright and it was fantastic to see so many familiar and new faces at the turf. we even got photo of the week over at howwastheshow.com!

twin town high release show this weekend!

hey y'all. the twin town high page at myspace has been blowin' up, but apparently now it's just blown up, along with a lot of other pages there, so who knows if it'll be back in time for me to lay the hot jam on you?

:: S A T U R D A Y,  J U L Y  2 9  A T  T H E  T U R F ::

THE FIRST (OF TWO) TWIN TOWN HIGH RELEASE SHOWS!!!

featuring: Halloween, Alaska :: Kill the Vultures :: Martin Devaney :: The Pines :: The Glad Version

$5 gets you in and a copy of the CD. $2 gets you a pint from 8-10 p.m.

doors are at 8 p.m., music at 9 p.m. sharp.

the current has been jamming the disc all week and we've been getting some truly incredible and amazing press around the twin cities. doubting thomas? just look:

Press for Twin Town High 8

City Pages, 07.19.06 by Lindsey Thomas

Various artists
Twin Town High Vol. 8
I wish I could say that Pulse music editor Steve McPherson and I are engaged in a bitter rivalry that involves plenty of trash-talking (Hey McQueerson, I heard you like the new Scott Stapp record! Ooh, snap!) and poorly executed dance-offs in the Clown Lounge. Sadly, this is not true. Steve is a stand-up guy and he knows how to put together a damn good compilation. The disc has plenty of tracks worth mentioning, but some highlights include Painted Saints' accordion-and-violin lilt, "Lights Hanging Low from Heavy Cottonwoods" and Friends Like These's semi-apologetic lullaby, "Excuses." And the denouement to Middlepicker's "Top Down" ("Who's got the chops to make me shiver?") is my pugnacious new rock-crit battle cry. Watch out!

City Pages A-List, 07.26.06 by Peter Scholtes

Future collectors researching the Twin Cities music scene of the '00s will have no cheaper or more entertaining option than picking up all eight volumes of the Twin Town High Music Yearbook series. The latest edition (released by Pulse of the Twin Cities) follows the usual surefire formula: 22 exclusive tracks by one band each, which in one way or another pass through the organic confines of Ben Durrant's Crazy Beast Studio. Highlights this time around include contributions by Hockey Night, Claire de Lune, Bellwether, Big Quarters, and Jessy Greene (with Dessa). The disc also includes tonight's excellent CD-release celebrants: Halloween, Alaska; Kill the Vultures; the Pines; the Glad Version; and Martin Devaney. 21+. $5 (includes a copy of the CD). 8:00 p.m.

Pioneer Press, 07.27.06 by Ross Raihala

Pulse has issued the eighth volume of its venerable "Twin Town High" compilation, a 22-track snapshot of what the local music scene looks like these days. Kill the Vultures, Martin Devaney, the Glad Version, the Pines and Halloween, Alaska play the first of two CD-release shows Saturday at the Turf. (Another follows Aug. 25 with Building Better Bombs, Big Quarters, Middlepicker, These Modern Socks and Beight.) Fans get the disc for free with paid admission.

The Onion, 07.27.06 by Chris Bahn

Even though Pulse is a competitor, we’d be remiss if we didn’t give a nod to the latest edition of its Twin Town High compilation CD series. A strong lineup of hometownsters gathers at the Turf on Saturday for the TTH release show, including Halloween, Alaska, Kill the Vultures, Martin Devaney, The Glad Version and The Pines (who, by the way, signed with St. Paul folk label Red House earlier this month, and good for them).

Star Tribune, 07.28.06 by Chris Riemenschneider

“High on 'Twin Town 8'
Consistently the best local music compilations for the past half-decade, the Pulse-sponsored "Twin Town High" CD series hits arguably its highest note yet with installment No. 8. There's a release party for the 22-track collection Saturday at the Turf Club with Halloween, Alaska, Kill the Vultures, the Pines, Martin Devaney and the Glad Version. All have new/unreleased cuts on the disc, as does Bellwether (from its long-in-the-can album "Stinging Nettles"), Big Quarters, Hockey Night, Friends Like These, Joanna James and P.O.S.' band Building Better Bombs, plus Jessy Greene and Dessa contributed a great duet. The discs are free with Saturday's $5 cover, or free with any local CD purchase at Cheapo stores. The Pines, by the way, have a much-deserved new record deal with Red House Records. Look for a CD early next year. The St. Paul label's next big release is Greg Brown's long-awaited album, "The Evening Call," co-produced with Bo Ramsey (father of Pines co-leader Ben Ramsey).”

and, just in case it starts working ever again:

twin town high myspace page

the page has the tracks from four of the five bands playing on saturday. plus, hal, ak has put their track from twin town high up on their page, which you can get to from ours.

the live/recorded dichotomy

so i just came back from seeing phoenix at the fine line. first strange thing: it's a camel-sponsored event, at which i'm pretty sure they were giving out cigarettes in the alley or something, and yet phoenix had the marshall logos on their amps covered with duct tape. certainly wouldn't want to give an amp company that's helped thousands of musicians achieve their dreams any promotion when you can shill for a tobacco company that kills those same musicians.

but i digress. there are only a handful of bands that i've seen that were worse live than on record, the main ones being spoon and phoenix, and i think they suffer from the same problem: their albums are just too stunningly good.

i remember when my band back east recorded our first album. we were a blues band, and so our live sets leaned heavily on improvisation, but pretty soon after we recorded the tape (that's right, tape, muhf*cker), the other guitarist and i found ourselves playing the solos from the record, or at least little bits from the record, at every show. the thing about albums is that there's a dictatorial quality to them, and not just from the end of what the audience expects. i think that musicians, unless there is a stated goal to shy away from this, often end up replicating the album without even thinking about it. and most bands don't have records as good as phoenix and spoon.

phoenix's latest album, it's never been like that, feels like the product of countless hours honing every part--every guitar riff, string squeak, guttural grunt and drum fill--into the absolute perfect part. it's like a katana: a forged piece of metal folded a thousand times until the edge is so compressed and fine it can cut through stone. mess up one of those folds and the whole thing's shot.

so when the drum intro to "consolation prizes" kicked in, i knew just what i expected to hear: a gritty, growling ostinato on the guitar. so when it didn't sound like the album, it was a let down. same goes for the similar guitar part after the first chorus. the way the album sounds makes it seem as if they picked the only really possible and correct part for every instrument at every moment, and this is a pretty much impossible thing to replicate live. and even if they did, looking so definitively french and louche didn't really help the energy. understand, they weren't bad. just not as good as their disc.

it's a weird dichotomy, this live/recorded thing. the plastic constellations, despite putting out their best-sounding album so far, are still better live than on record. the absolutely unhinged energy they put into live performance is a huge part of it, but does that mean it can't be captured on record?

it seems like one has to suffer in comparison to the other, simply because they're always being held up to each other. the bands that seem to do the best at straddling the divide seem to be the ones who treat the two things very differently: jimi hendrix and wilco spring to mind immediately, but i'm sure there are others.

anywho. off to read.

god damn doo wop band

just got this release from afternoon records, who are expanding the sound of the label nicely with this disc from GDDWB. i met ross (piano/guiatr) at twin town guitars the other day the day before the band was heading out to nyc for some shows, about which he was pretty psyched, saying they hadn't had a bad show yet. bringing this kind of punk tock attitude to girl group pop from the fifties, it's hard to see how they'll ever have one. seriously, they just absolutely nail the structure of the phil spector-produced stuff, but then messy it up with a looseness and live feel that's instantly appealing. have i mentioned that the cover art is great? the three women in the band (kat, carissa and saumer) stand in floofy skirts, cut off from the waist up, in defiant stances. one of them holds a baseball bat behind her back. and then on the flip side lie all the guys from the band, beaten to a bloody pulp and laying spread out on the asphalt. i'm only making my way through this disc for the first time, so don't expect any kind of deep insight here. i'm simply trying to give you the heads up on this one.

halfway home

so in scrambling to assemble a half-as-long-as-it-should-be list for the best records of the year at the halfway mark, i thought i should check out riemenschneider's list to make sure i wasn't cribbing anything from him and found this:

The Plastic Constellations, "Crusades" -- "We started so young and so thrilled we could burst," TPC co-leader Jeff Allen sings in "Sancho Panza," a 23-year-old reflecting on his band's 10-year existence. They're not as young as they used to be, but these four childhood friends from Hopkins are bursting like never before on their third and best CD. Imagine all the pent-up, Fugazi-like roar of today's emo bands minus the whiny vocals and melodramatic lyrics.

i guess chris doesn't read this blog, so this won't make a difference, but seriously: the song is about jeff's wife, allison, not the plastic constellations. funny, though, since pretty much every other song on the disc is either obliquely or literally about the band.