Tonight on Homegrown

Tonight at 10 p.m. CST on Drive 105 and also at radiohomegrown.com, I'll once again be guest hosting in Dave Campbell's stead while he's out on the road. Tonight's guest will be Minneapolis hip-hop duo extraordinaire Big Quarters, who just released their debut LP, Cost of Living, about a month ago. Good times are guaranteed.

You can't go home again

After getting the following bulletin from The Plastic Constellations on MySpace, I knew I couldn't resist:

Friendthrens-

The four of us in TPC went to high school together, back in the proverbial day. Did you know this? Odds are yes since it seems to be mentioned fairly frequently in press coverage of our dumb band. Did you know that this aforementioned high school was none other than Hopkins High School (aka Tha 270, as in "Independent School District #270) in Hopkins, MN, a small industrial suburb ten minutes to the west of Minneapolis?

It's true.

Since we're at the "let's play a bunch of crazy little shows for fun while we finish writing a new record" stage of 2007, we've decided to book a show at a Hopkins mainstay -- Decoy's on Mainstreet -- just like, cause, it'll be crazy fun. If you've ever been there, you know that the bands who usually play there are of the bar band-cover jams-keyboard solo-long hair variety.

On this Saturday, April 28th, we will be ripping this venue a new asshole along with our rapper friends (and also Hopkins High School graduates) Sims and Mictlan from Doomtree. Here is the stats:

Saturday, April 28th
9:30 PM till close
Decoy's in Hopkins, MN
1022 Mainstreet (corner of 11th and Main)
The Plastic Constellations
Sims and Mictlan from Doomtree
$5 - 21+

A show this special deserves a special approach. We'll be playing mutliple sets, covers, tracks from our entire catalog (including a bunch of new jams), invoking audience participation -- you know, all the ridiculous stuff that a bar band normally does. Except it will be us, TPC, inciting the riotus good times and not Wicked Slammerz or whatever other bands normally play there.

We think that you should come to this. For reals. Hopefully we'll see you there.

Love and Jason Kubel,
TPC

I don't spend a lot of time in the West Metro. All right, I don't spend any time in the West Metro, so a set of MapQuest directions and one Friends Like These EP later, I parked on Main Street right out in front of Decoy's last night around 10:30 p.m. Decoy's is pretty much what you'd expect from a suburban bar-- long sightlines, tables strewn around the area on different levels, a bevy of televsions (half tuned to the Devils/Senators game, half to the Rockets/Jazz game), a lot of locals and a whole lot of smoke. Right, I forgot about smoking in bars.

The stage is set on an angle in the northeast corner of the room (at least, I think it's northeast-- the 'burbs have a way of messing with my internal compass), rising all of six inches from the bar floor and adorned with neon beer signs featuring guitars. I run into Jordan Roske (bassist for TPC), and we chat about the upcoming set and how things have been going. TPC have been at work composing a follow-up LP to last year's Crusades, and apparently, they've got six songs done, all of which they'll be playing tonight. Recording's supposed to start in August. Just a heads up.

I grab a Sam Adams and make like Magellan around the bar, running into Doomtree rapper Sims in the back. He's sporting winter hair, which for him means hair, and it's a little unnerving. But not as unnerving as this whole thing seems for him. Sims went to high school in Hopkins, like TPC and several other members of Doomtree, and he has that glazed/manic look in his eye that I imagine I have in those dreams where you're wearing pajamas (or less) in the middle of second period math class. I empathize, man. I was back in Williamstown not all that long ago, and experienced a truly odd mix of emotions upon seeing people I had gone to high school with. Sort of an initial reaction of shock and horror that they're still in that tiny-assed town all these years later immediately followed by scolding myself at feeling superior. So I moved; so what? It's perhaps a little more jarring for the assembled Minneapolitans tonight since it seems like it shouldn't be that tough to achieve escape velocity from Hopkins when the Twin Cities are just up the road. I don't know much about Hopkins, though-- I just know Main Street seems sleepy as shit on a Saturday night.

Cecil Otter comes up and gives me a warm greeting, the warmest I think I've ever gotten from him, perhaps a reflection of the above. People who've come out from the Cities are kind of like little liferafts for the graduates of Hopkins High, it seems. Cecil starts his set by saying, "Hi, I'm Kyle and I went to Hopkins." He spends the whole set on the floor in front of the stage, drawling his lyrics out against the booming backdrop of cuts provided by Paper Tiger, and the effect is, well, odd, although not in the way that the performers seem to think it is. Cecil Otter's stage persona is a marked contrast to that of Sims or P.O.S. or really most of the whole rest of Doomtree, who seem to feed off each other, moving to create more motion. Sims tends to prowl the stage, Mictlan kind of stalks, but Cecil just kind of lounges. Sometimes it seems like he belongs more to the Rat Pack than Doomtree, like he should be holding a martini and telling dry jokes, but tonight the music's so big and his presence so bracing in this space that he just seems huge and absolutely in command, but not in a dominating kind of way. It seems like effortless aplomb.

When he gives way to Sims and Mictlan, things get considerably more rambunctious. Mictlan mostly sticks to saying things with his rhymes, but Sims is clearly a little unhinged by the whole thing, telling people that a real rock band is coming up real soon, and relishing the prospect of people in the back coming up to him after the set and giving him shit. It's not so much that the crowd isn't into it, because a throng of about 40 people have crowded around the front of the stage; it's more that they just chatter real loudly through everything, even the people up front. In a way, it's probably harder than dealing with either reprobation or approbation. The crowd isn't wicked into it, but it's not like they hate them-- they're mostly just not paying attention. As a performer, pretty much a fate worse than death.

Paper Tiger keeps it going between Sims/Mictlan and TPC, cueing up "Be Easy" by Ghostface Killah and following it immediately with a tantalizing slice of "Luccini" by Camp Lo. That's the good shit, but again, nobody's really giving notice.



TPC hits the stage, and the crowd seems to warm a little more to the idea of a real band, but it's still a bar-band bar. Really, though, it's a grand and kind of hilarious experiment that peels back all kinds of things about being a band that your average gig doesn't get at. For everybody playing tonight, their music is unmistakably theirs-- they've forged these sounds out of their influences, beginning at some derivative sound and ending up where they are now. Which is not to say that they've reached their destination and are fully-formed-- this isn't like Bruce Springsteen coming back to play a bar in Asbury Park or something, but that's what makes it particularly deliciously meta, really. The bands who usually play here are cover bands, playing someone else's music to people who want to hear somebody else's music. In a lot of ways, the music that bands are usually playing at Decoy's is further removed from what Doomtree and TPC play than other forms of original art are. What Doomtree and TPC are doing is creating themselves through creative expression. It's more than just saying, "This is who I am"; it's the metaphorical fashioning of themselves through the act of creation. It's really profoundly artistic in a really beautiful way. And most of the people here couldn't seem to care less.

Whatever, though. In keeping with my previous post about authenticity, I want to clarify that I'm not in any way saying original music is more "real" than that made by a cover band. They're both engaged in the kind of sleight of hand that's necessary for performance. I'm not saying, I'm just saying.

TPC are willing to play the game, though, and before their set break ("Because that's what bar bands do," says singer Jeff Allen) they play a cover of Journey's "Separate Ways." It's kind of funny, and it kind of rocks, but frankly, the smoke's starting to get to me. My eyes are starting to burn a bit, plus I'm coming down with a cold, so I head out, away from Decoy's and Hopkins and back to the welcoming embrace of Saint Paul.

My heart ain't in it but I'll hold the door ...

Hey folks: As you might have heard if you're around town here, Pulse of the Twin Cities will be shuttering its windows and closing up shop with a final issue on May 16. It's a sad day for local media, but this blog will continue. There'll be a name change, but you'll be able to get here through your current links with no problem. It's the magic of the internet.

That is all. More later.

The Books: The joy of cooking

Just to give you a little context, I caught up with Nick Zammuto by phone while the band was on their way from Knoxville to Atlanta, and we just got through chitchatting about North Adams, Mass., which is a town over from where I grew up and how the Purple Pub just burned down in Williamstown. Exactly: it's not interesting to anybody except Zammuto, me and the residents of Williamstown.



And here's that full-length article:

“Well, we sell these oven mitts,” says The Books’ Nick Zammuto, “and so there were these two guys fighting over this oven mitt right in front of our van and it was about to come to blows and I wasn’t just going to sit there and let them punch each other.”

You wouldn’t think that fans of The Books’ thoughtful, intelligent music would roll so hard over a cooking accessory, but then again you probably haven’t seen those oven mitts. Like The Books’ music, they’re lovingly handmade, a collision between found object and a deft artistic touch that recontextualizes the familiar. Zammuto (vocals/guitar/bass) and Paul de Jong (cello/bass) are, primarily, collage artists, combing through source material and building a musical bird’s nest out of snippets of dialogue, the sound of a bouncing basketball, a language instruction tape, interviews, old newsreels and their own original instrumental compositions. Like any collagists worth their salt, they’ve found that preparation is far more important than any kind of methodical process.

“People use the word ‘random’ all the time when describing our sample library,” says Zammuto, who’s on the road between Knoxville, Tenn., and Atlanta, Ga., when I reach him, “and I think of it as totally the opposite of random. I mean, it’s really carefully selected material. And it’s selected for its quality—not with any particular use in mind, but just because it stands well on its own and it makes for something that’s compelling every time you see it or every time you hear it. So it’s sort of like cooking: if you have good ingredients, it’s hard to go wrong with the composition. So that’s always been the approach: We just try to make really compelling bodies of material. And then from there, things start to coalesce in subconscious ways. We just listen through the sample libraries on a regular basis and kind of get them in our working memories and things crystallize from there.”

The result, on record, is music that’s simultaneously bracing in its originality and comforting in its familiarity, composed as it is out of the rhythms of spoken language. Even the parts that Zammuto sings in his modest tenor voice (“The fact that it’s my voice is completely arbitrary. If I could find somebody else to sing, that’d be great,” he laughs) are often drawn from texts that they simply didn’t have a recording of. These, then, are samples not as decoration or ornamentation in music, but as a structural element, as the very lifeblood of the work, and the line between incorporating found sound into a song like “None but Shining Hours” from 2005’s Lost and Safe, or composing music to go with a piece like “Venice,” where a reporter interviews an artist who seems to be Salvador Dali as he creates a painting live.

“More and more, it’s an integrated process,” Zammuto says. “What sparks the composition—it could be anything. We don’t have much of a preconception of how it’s going to work; there’s just a feeling of integrity that we’re looking for within the process. We don’t want to ruin anything with what we do, so you can’t force a sample into place. You can’t force an idea; you kind of have to wait for it to find its right place. So there’s a lot of patience and a lot of trial and error involved.”

When the pieces come together, as they do powerfully on the recording of “Be Good to Them Always” on Lost and Safe, the result is a kind of ever-expanding dialogue between the music and the texts, creating a new text in the process. As the music settles after an agitated intro, Zammuto sings in a soft monotone, “You know, I simply cannot understand people / Oh how sadly we mortals are deceived by our own imagination / This is not real; this is for us aleatoric television / A mixed consulate of soft instruments.” As the verse continues to unspool, Zammuto’s voice is joined by samples of people speaking the lines he is singing, and they match up to his sung rhythm, eventually taking center stage. For those with a passing familiarity with work like composer Steve Reich’s “Different Trains,” in which Reich took short spoken samples from interviews and then crafted melodic lines that would match their inherent spoken melodies, this is the intellectual seeds of experimental music bearing powerfully affective and effective fruit. The juxtaposition of disparate elements creates new meaning and a new space for the recombination of ideas.

But what’s particularly stunning is that The Books’ audio recordings are only half the story. A live performance by The Books integrates video samples as well, fashioned into artistic pieces in much the same way as the audio. “That was really our vision from the beginning,” says Zammuto, “to have this kind of performance where attention was moving around a lot between sound and the image and guitar here and cello there and a voice there. To keep it from becoming this egoistic rock star thing. We wanted to diffuse attention in a way that you would meet people halfway. Whatever they had within themselves, they can engage with it in their own way. So the image became really important right away for us, and we wanted to go after this synesthetic approach, where there was really a one-to-one relationship between what was going on in the music and what was happening with the image.”

When the recordings are combined with the imagery, which ranges from stock footage to a video recording of another musician playing a part that Zammuto and de Jong play along with, to moving type compositions, the effect can be nearly overwhelming from a synaptic perspective, but in the best way possible. The only word I can really come up with for it is joyous—the sheer joy of the human act of creation.

“People are really focused during the shows,” Zammuto says. “They’re really trying to take it in and they smile a lot, too, which just makes me happy. That’s definitely one of our goals: to make people laugh. Not in a comedic way—in a ha ha way—but like that Zen approach of using language to destroy itself. To find something profound within the absurd. And yeah, the joyous quality of it comes very naturally from our own engagement with it. It is really a joy to be able to find this stuff and then put it into a context where it can really shine.” ||

The Books perform twice on Fri., Apr. 27 at the Walker Art Center in the McGuire Theater. 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. $13 members/$16 general. 1750 Hennepin Ave., Mpls. 612-375-7600. For more info on The Books, visit their official site at thebooksmusic.com.

I think we're all poseurs on this bus

Here's a well-written review of what sounds like a pretty interesting book by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor called Faking It.

I haven't read the book yet, but it seems like they're pointing to the inherent pointlessness of dividing musical acts into authentic and inauthentic. And it feels kind of liberating to think of all pop music as essentially contrived, and therefore it becomes a matter not of judging realness, but of examining all kinds of other aspects of the music. After all, authenticity has this monolithic quality based on the fact of its indefinability-- most often it's cited by people as something you "feel," or as something a performer either has or doesn't. Well, that's not very helpful, now is it?

It seems definitely true that certain bands are going to get at you in a way that feels profound and for which you have no explanation, but that doesn't mean they're any more authentic than a band that doesn't do that to you. We're all conglomerates of influence and experience, and it seems to be, by my own internal reckoning, that a band that strikes me in that peculiar way falls in a kind of sweet spot between so familiar to my taste that they don't challenge me, and so outside of my familiarity that they don't connect with the things that I've previously found meaning in.

One thing that always perplexes me a bit is when people say they like a band because it's not like anything they've ever heard before. I mean, I can appreciate the feeling of discovery, but in my experience, the things I've heard before (and heard a lot), I've heard because I liked them. That is, I've chosen to delve into and listen to things because they reverberated in some way with me, and things I haven't gotten into, well, they've left me cold. I can always appreciate it when a band does things differently enough that I begin to reconsider things I've previously ignored (viz. Jay-Z w/r/t mainstream hip-hop or Boris w/r/t metal), but those artists are gateway artists precisely because there are aspects to them which connect to what I know. Boris bring elements of experimental music into metal, which everyone acknowledges, but their recordings also have a garage-y quality which is quite different from most of the metal that I've heard in passing. The drums often sound more like the Meters in tonal quality-- they have a kind of boxy, woodiness to them that sounds more Motown than Motorhead. And then seeing them live totally sold me. There was very little of the posturing I associate with metal; the whole thing was very zen and calm, despite being overwhelmingly loud. Of course, I also appreciate a band like Zebulon Pike for embracing those very inauthenticities w/r/t their album art and stage presence.

Sigh. I guess we're back to discussing realness. But at least we're discussing it, rather than just haphazardly attributing it to stuff we like.

Too tight to squeeze in ...

So we had a ridiculous flood of Hot Tickets this week for the print edition, but there are a couple shows I wanted to call your attention to because they sound, frankly, awesome.

Firstly, on Sat., Apr. 21, Afternoon Records is having a fourth anniversary blowout, and when I say blowout, I mean BLOWOUT! That means not one, but two shows, both All Ages, the first at 3 p.m. and the second at 8 p.m. And the lineups. Afternoon Records doyen Ian Anderson has stepped up his game over the past year, diversifying and deepening the AR roster beyond the fractured math-punk leanings that the label was known for in the early days to include everything from the folk/roots of Haley Bonar t the punk/doo-wop of God Damn Doo Wop Band and this showcase is going to feature them all. You can see the full lineups for both shows right here on Afternoon Records' website. It's going to be hard to pick a moment to duck out for some crispy orange beef at Shuang Cheng, but I'd circle the part of the program from 8 to 10 p.m., which will feature recent signees We All Have Hooks for Hands, soon-to-be blown up Mouthful of Bees, the Black Keys-meets-White Stripes-in-a-power-outage-knife-fight bluegrass and folk of A Night in the Box and the darkly melodic and deceptively complex pop of Ela. Maybe they should have tailgating starting at noon in the parking lot over on 5th.

Also of note is another showcase of sorts, the first edition of Revival Show, a new night of acoustic roots music hosted by The Get Up Johns at the Turf Club. I can't say exactly what you should expect, except that Josh Wenck from The Get Up Johns says the show "embraces the style of an old-time tent revival meeting while requiring only that the audience pay the price of admission ($5) and not that they get right with God." Well, thanks goodness for that. I'm ready for a night of old-timeyness, complete with "prayer benches and a rough-hewn pulpit," but I don't know if I'm ready for salvation just yet. For the series' debut, The Get Up Johns have enlisted Charlie Parr, Mike Gunther & His Restless Souls, The Ditchlilies and Molly Maher & Her Disbelievers. Back when House of Mercy was holding events on the Old Stage at the Turf, they were always a fun time, and I expect much the same from Revival Show. More info at turfclub.net. OK, you know what? There's not really more info there, but I feel obliged to put the venue's website.

New features added

So I've added a couple new little sections over there to your immediate right to highlight albums, books and DVDs I'm currently into, although I might not have time to always talk about them actively on the blog. At this time, however, I am.

Man, I couldn't have slept any harder on Emily Haines (of Canadian bands Metric and Broken Social Scene) and her debut album Knives Don't Have Your Back, but now it's what I listen to practically every time I'm listening to music without a distinct agenda.





"Doctor Blind" is the second track on the disc, and I think it's the first place I detected a bit of an Aimee Mann vibe to her stuff, which is something I would cherish in any artist. Haines also has this way of constructing her piano lines in skeletal fashion, rather than via complete chords. So the progressions don't always seem to make sense right away, but they hang together beautifully on repeated listening. So maybe skeletal isn't quite the word I'm looking for-- it's more like your nervous system: intimately linked to an underlying structure but weaving in and out of that foundation. The music geek in me also loves how the chorus breaks down into a measure of 5, a measure of 4, a measure of 3 and a measure of 4. I know, you probably don't care, but I have a deep love for tender and beautiful music that falls across the drums in weird ways. The lyrics from the chorus are also very Mann-ish: "My baby's got the lonesome lows, don't quite go away overnight / Doctor Blind, just prescribe the blue ones / If the dizzying highs don't subside overnight / Doctor Blind, just prescribe the red ones."

Here's another key to a good album: if the first four songs are good, and all in slightly different but related ways, it's usually an album worth your time. Other examples I can think of: Menomena's Friend and Foe and Grizzly Bear's Yellow House. I'm going to skip ahead to the fourth track on Knives Don't Have Your Back, though.





"Detective Daughter," aside from fitting rather nicely right into my recent mix, "A Mix for Private Dicks," has a fantastic rhythm track, all bass drum and handclaps. The ominous walking piano line and guitar hits put it squarely in the path of Fiona Apple comparisons, but, much like that guy in the U.N.K.L.E. video for "Rabbit in your Headlights," she blows that car apart. Check it out:







"The Maid Needs a Maid" has probably the finest line on the album: "Your mouth should be working for me, for free." This would be a great choice for plopping right into the middle of a mix, a romantic song that skewers the genre in kind of a Clem Snide-esque kind of way. The twist is basically that Haines is saying she wants a kept man. Um, sign me up, incidentally.







It's also the rare album that buries a track as exceptional as "Nothing & Nowhere" as deep as track 9 of an 11-track album. Much like "Doctor Blind," the song is draped loosely across its pilings, but here, there's no rhythm section to drive that home, so it floats a bit more. The conceit here is a nicely literary and narrative one ("Some say, our life is insane," goes the chorus, "but it isn't insane on paper") but what I'd really like to draw your attention to is the first couplet of the second chorus. "Some say, we always only want to get off," goes the first line, and it's delievered in a flat enough way that the double meaning could fall just as easily in either direction, but when she delivers the second half, her mischievious smile is actually audible as she coos, "Some say, our hands are much too soft." Sexy isn't a sexy enough word for the effect, because it's not just hot-- it's brittle and apologetic and vulnerable and forthright, all at the same time.

That's just good rock and roll.

OTHER ALBUMS MENTIONED IN THIS POST

Battle of the Underage Underground

Hey folks: Just got this e-mail from Aimee over at Radio K, so if you're a high school band looking to do something great for yourself, read on:

Hey Steve,

This is Aimee over at Radio K. Once again, I am in the process of planning
the Battle of the Underage Underground. This year, the high schoolers will
compete in the First Avenue Mainroom for a $2000 recording contract with
Say Rah Records (a brand new record company - a division of Afternoon
Records), $500 towards making CDs and promotional matierials at CopyCats
Media, and more.

We are accepting submissions until May 15th.
Demos and contact information can be sent to:

Radio K's Battle of the Underage Underground
610 Rarig Center
330 21st Ave. South
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0415

More information at www.radiok.org or www.myspace.com/radiokBUU.

Note: This battle of the bands is an exception to this website's motto.

Dear Music Industry: Your days are numbered ...

Yesterday evening, as I was ripping a stack of CDs to iTunes, I decided to hunt down some music by Ames, Iowa's The Envy Corps. I'd heard their stuff in the van on the way back from SxSW because I believe Jesse Stensby knows them, and they sounded good. Then I heard "Story Problem" on the Current. Damn, thought I, that's a catchy goddamn song that sounds great. Plus they're from Ames! Ridiculous.

So I hit the iTunes store and searched for "envy corps." Nothing. I went to their website, which wasn't very helpful, so I went to their record label's website. Their label, Vertigo, is in the UK. So I clicked on The Envy Corps' EP link and got a bunch of options for buying the EP, including a link to the iTunes store. I clicked through, at which time the iTunes store told me that the product I was looking for was only available in the UK store, and would I like to switch to the UK store. Sure, as long as I can switch back. And then I arrived at the iTunes page for The Envy Corps EP, which cost something like £1.50, and I clicked on Buy Album, at which point the iTunes store told me that I could only buy products from the US version of the iTunes store.

At this point, I switched over to Acquisition, my rarely-used P2P program, typed in "envy corps" in the search box, and downloaded the songs for free.

I tried. I really wanted to give someone my money to get this disc AND THEY WOULDN'T LET ME. I don't know what the answer is here, but if they can't figure out some way to make this work better, nobody's making money off records anymore--and they don't deserve to.