Pulsetc.com to go the way of the dodo, the dinosaur and Pulse.

The Minnesota Monitor is reporting that pulsetc.com is going to go dark as of today. I'm quoted in the story from something posted on MnSpeak, and I stand by that assertion. One of the reasons I wanted to continue the blog I had started at Pulse was that a.) my understanding was that there was not going to be a music editor at the paper and b.) I knew they were not going to revamp the website in any way other than posting daily instead of weekly and that it would be dead inside of two months.

Q.E.D.

Live blogging from the Minneseries :: 06.28.07

10:23 PM

Oh yeah. It's live, it's a blog. Harbor's onstage right now, churning out some rather solid indie rock/pop. I'm sitting in the back of the Nomad with Peter Leggett, Bill Caperton and my brother, Sean, from Ela. One Negroni down, Corona on the table. I actually tried to order a Negroni, which the bartender heard as Corona. But maybe it's for the best. Drinks with limes are kinda my stee-lo right now: Caipirinhas, etc.

It's finally an honest-to-god pleasant evening in here. It's impressively well-attended. Thanks, y'all.

In other news, the Timberwolves selected Corey Brewer with the seventh pick of the 2007 NBA Draft. I can't help but feel like this is a mistake. The consensus was that Brewer was a Top 5 or Top 10 candidate, but John Hollinger, the master of all things stats-related in basketball, developed this fancy new way to judge prospects, and he found Brewer to be hideously overrated. His being drafted by the Timberwolves would seem to confirm this. According to Hollinger's math, he's the worst of the three past first round picks Minnesota has made (Rashad McCants and Randy Foye being the other two), and they haven't exactly turned into superstars. I mean, Foye looked great last year and the jury's still certainly out. I wish they had taken Noah. He's a character guy, which is what we're sorely lacking, outside of KG, who may be outside of Minnesota before too long. Ricky Davis? Eddie Griffin? These guys do not a team make. You need the glue, and Noah's the glue.

Sean needs some water right now.

10:37 PM

Harbor have wrapped it up, and the members of Ela have abandoned my booth to get set up.

Here's what I saw when I saw "Live Free or Die Hard" the other day. A preview for a Peter Berg-directed film called "The Kingdom" about American investigators going to Saudi Arabia to look into a suicide bombing. And, presumably, to discover how the culturual differences between the Western world and the Islamic world go deeper than we know, but are in fact not so deep as to divide us as human beings, trying to find our way in the world. I'm extrapolating here, but the thing is that I had seen basically this same preview before, but this time, it was cut with "Bullet the Blue Sky" by U2 as the background music. Seemed like a much better film this time around. Odd, isn't it, how music can frame things? The urgency and heat of the U2 track imbued all the clips of the movie with so much more weight and drama. Plus, you know as a viewer that U2 are Irish and have some kind of relationship to the conflict in Ireland, which seems to deepen and broaden the association.

I only bring this up because the track that's playing right now over the house speakers has a guitar part that sounds like "Bullet the Blue Sky."

10:55 PM

Ela opens with "You Die," from their latest, Real Blood on Fake Trees. Or possibly Fake Blood on Real Trees. I can never keep it straight.

11:00 PM

Steve gets a beer.

11:01 PM

Lime in a beer is a scam. The greatest scam ever pulled by a beer company: Our beer's kinda shitty? Well, you just need a lime, my friend. That great ad with the palm trees with the Christmas lights they run around Christmas doesn't hurt either.

You know what? Ela kinda fucking kills it, and I'm not just saying that because my brother plays bass. 'Cause you know what? I wouldn't just say that.

I just realized Knol is playing my Telecaster. I take it all back.

11:08 PM

P.S. Sean's also playing my bass. Kind of trippy right? I mean, maybe not to you. But I bought that bass in New York back in '99 so I could record bass parts on ProTools. And I bought that Telecaster in Amherst, MA back in, oh, 2000, I think, at the Fretted Instrument Workshop for like $400 because I couldn't find an American Tele re-issue that was any good. It's from Japan. And here they are, being played by other people while I blog about it.

The door's propped open. The breeze is nice.

11:22 PM

In the second round, the T'wolves drafted somebody named Chris Richard. Sounds made up to me, like a guy created by the computer in a video game franchise of NBA 2K3.

11:48 PM

Chris Riemenschneider's in the house. He just came from the Black Keys over at the Fine Line, which he said was good, but apparently, there was a pretty large contingent who got their tickets for free through promos and clearly had no idea who the band was. Bobby Bare Jr. opened. I would have liked to have seen that, but I'm really looking forward to catching Mouthful of Bees final show of their stay as the hosts of the Minneseries, especially now that their guitarist, Mark, has returned from tour with Battle Royale.

We Became Actors' singer Jesse Stensby is also here, and his hair's looking flat and great. Apparently, Paul Mitchell De-Tangler is the key. Dude showers twice a day, just so you know, even though he only washes his hair maybe two times a week, he reports. It's nice to be able to just call someone a singer, you know? Not a singer/guitarist or a singer/something. But I went over that last week with regards to Mr. Stensby.

Still awaiting Mouthful of Bees. I may be fading.

11:59 PM

Mouthful of Bees are opening with "Jessica." That's the shit. It is an ugly sweater party in here and all the dudes are skinnier than the chicks. They follow it with "Under the Glacier" which is still my second favorite song from their album. They're just so chaotic and sprawling. Like, explosive and uncalculated, but they always rein it in a bit and never go on too long.

I thought this was a news song, but it isn't. It's "The End." They're pretty great at tacking on these cool little intros to stuff.

12:21 AM

For ther record, singer/guitarist Chris Farstadhas removed his ugly sweater. Perhaps he's conceding defeat here.

Trade rumors

I have mixed feelings about a Kevin Garnett trade--it's as simple as that. My gut tells me it's time to move on (and, as Stephen Colbert knows, there are more nerve endings in your gut than anywhere else in your body) but I also really really really don't want him to go to the Lakers. Celtics? Sure. The Suns? That'd be ideal actually since they're my favorite team after the T'wolves, but I don't see it happening.

But KG teaming with Kobe? That's like Spiderman turning into Venom, like Annakin turning into Darth Vader, like your first best friend from fourth grade going to your enemy's house to play. Worst of all, I'd have to like the Lakers, because team's change, but players are forever and KG is bar none my favorite player of all time of anything.

But also, the prospect of having the 5th, 7th and 19th pick in a loaded draft is enticing, particularly with already having Craig Smith and Randy Foye on the team. I mean, if we somehow end up with Bynum, Foye, Smith, Yi Jianlian, Joakim Noah (or Corey Brewer?), and the 19th pick--which, can we get Petteri Koponen or Tiago Splitter? They have the best names in the draft--that's interesting. It smacks of the Bulls a couple of years ago when it was all young guys and they sucked, but look at them now! Whether or not anybody on that above list blossoms, there's always a shot that you can roll them over to the Knicks and get something good back. Or at least something expiring.

I'd also trade Kevin McHale to anyone, anywhere for a $5 coupon to Dairy Queen.

Live blogging from the Minneseries :: 06.21.07

11:06 PM

Another week, another live blog from the Nomad. We Became Actors has just taken the stage, and I've just taken a couple of Negronis (Gin, sweet vermouth and Campari). I love Campari--it's official. You probably won't, but that's cool.

Jesse Stensby (We Became Actors' frontman) has got some frontman skills. I really appreciate bands with a singer who just sings--doesn't play guitar, doesn't play keyboards--just sings. It's nominally less hot in here than it was last week.

Mouthful of Bees guitarist, Mark, is on tour with Battle Royale, so they have his brother sitting in this week (as well as last week, apparently), but that's part of the beauty of a weekly show, ain't it? Shit happens, and you deal with it. I'm looking forward to MOB.

11:24 PM

We Became Actors play loud, tight rock and roll. It doesn't get much more straightforward than this. Stensby does actually have a keyboard onstage, for your info, but it's way over on the side, precluding his playing of it simultaneously with his singing, so I'm standing by my earlier point.

Lookout: Drum solo.

11:39 PM

Cure cover in the house. I confess, I can't remember the name of this song. It's the one that starts, "Show me show me show me how you do that trick ..." You know the one I'm talking about. Yes, I have some blind spots.

11:42 PM

On a completely unrelated note, King Kaufman has a great column today on Salon. Basically, he talked about the way people who are phenomenally talented, as a part of the whole self-denigrating and generally ingratiating way we expect people like that to act, play up the whole confidence and experience angle while downplaying the whole "I'm so much better than most living human beings at doing this" angle. I particularly like this part:

It's hard to believe this didn't dawn on me till I was in my 30s, but one day it did: Nobody ever interviews unsuccessful people about this subject. There must be millions more failures who had the confidence they could do it, whatever it was, than there are successes.

It's true, and it's something nobody talks about. All those motivational posters that tell you to believe in yourself and not listen to the critics and to follow your heart? There are some people out there who really need to listen to other people. Obviously, the whole believe to achieve thing has been played up by the movies in terms of sports, but Kaufman also makes the connection to music, because he was a musician. Bands always feel slighted when they don't get the attention they think they deserve, but you know what? They probably aren't all that.

I had a band, and we were pretty good, and all that, but there's probably a reason we didn't make it. You can blame it on timing and breaks, and that certainly plays a part, but there was definitely a moment where we decided what we were good at (blues) was not what we wanted to do forever, and thus stranded ourselves in a world that we didn't really fit into--indie rock. Sure, we could have stayed a blues band, mining that circuit and probably doing pretty well in that musical world, but I don't think we would have been happy doing that. Of course, I don't honestly think we ever could have made it in a meaningful way in terms of being an indie rock band because we were too a.) old by then and b.) not raised in it and c.) not really all that cool. So we were pretty much destined to break up and fall apart, unhappy with where we were and unable to get to where we wanted to be. But isn't everybody?

11:50 PM

We Became Actors' last song is definitely their best, a hooky pop wind-up with a classically yin-yang chorus that goes, "She looks so pretty but / acts so ugly." They should sell it. Either that, or take over the world with it and cash in.

12:01 AM

Just chatting with Todd, who runs the Nomad. Y'all people need to get out here and enjoy these nights, man. I'm not afraid to say it's a bit dead in here and that you should be out here enjoying it with us. Mouthful of Bees is "teh shit," as the kids say, and here they are, playing every Thursday in June and there you are, sitting in front of your computer reading this. You know where you shoulda been last night? Right here, among the clouds, with us. You've changed. You used to be cool.

12:35 AM

Holy cow, Mouthful of Bees are loud. And great. Some bands, when they play loud, can't really drum up any energy other than fury and/or anger. And some just sound like a mess. But MOB sound like a glorious and glorying mess. They've already torn through "The Now", "Jessica" and "Under the Glacier" from The End and now they're sinking their considerable teeth into a new tune.

And now they're on to "Serpent," which gets a brand new intro courtesy of some looping, it sounds like. Once you've gotten over the shock of just how good the songs they write are, what continues to impress is their ability to remake and re-imagine these songs. It's an ability that seems well beyond their median age, which, if I remember correctly, hovers around 20. "Jessica" is a sleepy ballad on the record, but it gets a swift kick in the pants thanks to a revised drumbeat from Katelyn Farstad. It just seems like most young bands are content to recreate what they already recorded, or perhaps to radically revise it for live shows. The subtle shifts they effect are all the more amazing for that.

12:44 AM

In other exciting news, Cloud Cult's manager, Adrian Young, has just passed me off not one but THREE unreleased tracks from The Meaning of 8 to check out for possible inclusion in this year's Twin Town High compilation. That's just great. In still more news, MOB are on their last song and I'm headed home. Puppy to walk, etc. See you same time next week.

Tonight at the Nomad

It's the Minneseries! Sponsored by Signal Eats Noise, 89.3 The Current, the Minnesota Music Academy and Reveille Magazine. This week, it's gonna be headliners and June's resident band Mouthful of Bees and the hot hot shit of We Became Actors. I had such a good time liveblogging from there last week that I think I'm gonna do it again this week. If you're a bunch of bikers who hate clothes, think about showing up.

06.20.07 :: Feist with Grizzly Bear :: Pantages Theater

Here's what I recommend to everyone: theater shows. My experience seeing Arcade Fire at the Chicago Theater was superlative, and I've had similarly great times at the Orpheum here in Minneapolis seeing Sigur Ros and New Pornographers. This, however, would be my first trip to the smaller Pantages Theater.

In scope, it's a lot closer to the Fitzgerald in Saint Paul than the other theaters in downtown Minneapolis, but it's all the more charming for it. It's got all the trappings of a theater show--good sight lines, seating, decorative elements on the walls--but it's not overly baroque or full of windy staircases and ratty seat cushions.

By the time Grizzly Bear starts, the place is only maybe half full, but that kind of suits Grizzly Bear's live presentation. Their last album, Yellow House, sounds like it could have been recorded in an empty theater anyways, and live, they strip out a lot of the texture of the songs to reveal their skeletal beauty. Only half their set is drawn from my favorite album of last year, including "Lullabye," "Little Brother," "Knife" and the closer, "On a Neck, On a Spit." Onstage, they perform with economy, singer Ed Droste still tentatively holding the mic stand and multi-instrumentalist Chris Taylor spending a good amount of the time bent over a mic into which he played flute and clarinet to loop as background textures. The other thing this set brings home is just how much Dan Rossen contributes to the band. Most of the press centers around Droste as the singer, but Rossen sings at least half the stuff, and possibly more.

Above them hang strings of Christmas lights that I can only presume will be used for Feist's set, and so hang unlit--a kind of perfect visual complement to the low-wattage and rusty organic beauty their songs are imbued with. Drummer Chris Bear, I realize at one point, has no kick drum at all, but just a snare and a floor tom tuned to the high range of a kick. He's also just a killer drummer. In addition to a couple of newer (or possibly older--I'm not that familiar with their back catalog) tunes, they play a cover of "He Hit Me (Felt Like a Kiss)," a track written in 1962 by Carole King and Gerry Goffin and recorded by The Crystals. It's a fairly harrowing track about spousal abuse, but it's given an entirely new twist by Droste and co., given a.) Droste not changing the sex of the song's characters and b.) being gay. Add to that their supremely dark take on the music for the song and the cover becomes a multi-valent exploration of abuse and power dynamics.

The real highlight comes with "On a Neck, On a Spit," which remains probably my favorite track from Yellow House. Once upon a time, I wrote this about that: "This tune has a kind of fractal quality to it--it's at least three different songs in one, and it embodies in miniature the grand dynamic sweep from intimate to epic that made this my favorite album of the year. The liltingly beautiful melody and pastoral imagery ('The yards around your feet / Fall away while you're asleep') of the first part give way to the nearly epic middle section, which teases resolution multiple times before giving up. Suddenly the song is overtaken by a jangly and dark acoustic guitar that paves the way for the bracingly cacophonous coda, a lament that could be sung by a man slowly going mad: 'Each day, spend it with you now / All my time, spend it with you now / Out here no one can hear me.'"

Still true. Onwards to Feist.

When the lights drop to introduce Feist's set, you could say the crowd is excited. So excited that they cheer loudly when the first silhouette crosses the stage, even though it's clearly not Leslie Feist. They settle down a bit, but when Feist finally emerges, they go nuts. She launches straight away into "Honey Honey" from The Reminder, a gentle song built around a mellow synth bass line and her own looped vocals. There a little guitar here and a little guitar there, but overall, it's strikingly bare, but she's got the crowd right in the palm of her hand, so it's not hard to catch every nuance of the performance.

Her set is a wide-ranging mix of rockers ("When I Was a Young Girl," "My Moon, My Man" and "I Feel It All") and barely there ballads ("The Park," "Intuition"). This is the fourth time I've seen her, now, and her ability to go from full band to solo is getting increasingly fluid, and as her popularity has grown, so has her audience's willingness to go along with this format. She gets everybody to sing along several times, engages in more than her fair share of stage banter and struts about the stage like Mick Jagger when she's on fire about a song. When she's not, she stands very still behind the mic, hair in her face and Guild Starfire guitar slung low--very low--using her ultimate weapon: her voice. It's rather difficult to describe exactly what about her voice is so seductive, but it has something to do with the way that it sits ouside the traditional spectrum of evaluating singers. If you'd believe American Idol, there's a one-dimensional spectrum that extends from terrible singers up through very accomplished singers that has only to do with technical ability. But Feist's voice seems both simultaneously untutored and extremely flexible and capable. It's brimming over with character,a syrupy smooth honey-ness that bleeds charm.

Oddly, though, the sound wasn't impeccable at Pantages. It wasn't bad, but her voice didn't come through as I've heard it do at the Varsity. Now obviously that's a smaller room, but you'd expect the sound at a theater to be great. Her performance didn't seem to suffer at all, though, as she confidently led her band (which seemed to include the drummer from Snowden. Am I crazy? Can anyone tell me if he might be moonlighting with Feist's band?) through a lengthy set of songs from her two albums, as well as one cover. I couldn't place the cover, but she did say that anyone who could identify it in the first 30 seconds would win a ... Grizzly Bear CD. If anybody knows that it was, lemme know.

Also: I bumped into Josh Grier from Tapes 'n' Tapes in the lobby while he was waiting around for Droste to come out. They know each other, apparently. Not surprising, really. Sounds like Tapes is in the process of writing for a new record which they're going to begin recording later in the summer.

Also, I had a camera was unable to get a dececnt shot from where I sat. Having already barely squeaked into the show under the wire after my tickets were stranded in Memphis (long story), I didn't feel like pushing my luck by pressing for photos. I'm sure there'll be some over at City Pages, as I bumped into music editor Sarah Askari there.

Complete Feist setlist:

Honey Honey
When I Was a Young Girl
I'm Sorry
My Moon, My Man
The Park
Limit to Your Love
I Feel It All
Intuition
Now At Last
Gatekeeper
(cover)
The Water
Mushaboom
1 2 3 4

ENCORE:
Brandy Alexander
Sea Lion Woman
Let It Die

Tullycraft getting jacked by hot dogs and Nutter Butters

I may not know much, but I know my demographic, and I know Jesse Stensby reads this blog from time to time. I also know he loves Tullycraft, because he threatened to strand me in Austin during this past SxSW if I didn't get out to see them. I did, and yes, they were great. This disturbing news comes courtesy of Idolator. Is nothing sacred? And by nothing I mean licensing rights, I guess.

Music news from a coffee shop

I'm currently at the Dunn Bros. near my place, and this is where I always run into Stook, a fantastic singer/songwriter who's always picking up coffee on his way to work when I swing through, it seems. Maybe you should go to his MySpace page and check out some of his music. I particularly recommend "One Blue Teardrop".

He also mentioned The Cates, who are a duo from Minneapolis and are pretty great. They don't have any real studio recordings yet, but my colleague Andrea Myers from HowWasTheShow played a cut from a live disc they have on Homegrown once upon a time,and it really was quite fetching. They've got a winsome and delicate take on "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" on their MySpace page. They really have to record this in a studio, 'cause I smell breakthrough hit.

Live blogging from the Minneseries :: 06.14.07

9:47 PM

So here I am at The Nomad on the West Bank in Minneapolis for Mouthful of Bees' second week of their monthlong residency as the headliners of the Minneseries, which is now proudly brought to you by this blog, 89.3 The Current, The MMA and Reveille Magazine.

Tonight, shit's real. Giga Fox, the band that was supposed to open and are friends of Katelyn Farstad from MOB, just had their car and all their gear stolen near downtown, so things are running a little behind at the moment. MC/VL's in the house already, and John Henry's looking mighty fine with his mullet-hawk.

The Cavs are probably still getting creamed by the Spurs. So much so that they've switched the TV to a meaningless interleague game between the Twins and the Braves. Of course, that game's in the bottom of the 9th and the score is tied 2-2 and ... oh ... the Twin just won. Walk-off single to left. A better choice than the travesty that has been the NBA Finals. I'll come back and post more to this later ...

10:11 PM

Hey, you know what? It's hotter than Hades in the Nomad. Why did I wear jeans? The TV's now showing Manchester City vs. Arsenal. I'm putting my money on Arsenal. That's all I've got for now.

10:19 PM

Now I've got something worth talking about. A kind of co-ed semi-nude bike crawl just rolled in, led by none other than Rob Skoro. The girls are mostly in tank tops and panties, the dudes in even less than that. A couple brave young ladies are in bra and panties. You wouldn't believe how much this improves the ambiance here. One guy's wearing boxer briefs that are too revealing by half.

Why oh why did I wear jeans? A lot of them have messenger bags, which I would imagine would chafe like the dickens without a shirt. I think I once tried to play guitar shirtless. I wouldn't recommend it. Shit gets pinched.

And someone should make them wipe down the barstools after use, a la the Nautilus machines at the gym.

10:33 PM

MC/VL are taking the stage right now. First track is the last one on their disc that bites AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" to gloriously retarded effect. In a true show of class, the bike crawlers are actually crowding the stage and listening, not just bending the space over and then leaving, which I've seen more than a couple of crawls do in the past. MC/VL are not unlike the Beastie Boys, but think of the Beastie Boys from when they got a little smarter doing the songs from when they were dumber.

Here's what comes highly recommended on a hot-ass night like tonight. Campari and soda. I know, you think I'm nuts for liking a liquor which is basically bitters, but if you can get into it, it's mad refreshing in a way that most drinks aren't. It's so unheavy and unbloated.

MC/VL have now taken their shirts off. This not a Mark Wahlberg or C+C Music Factory moment. More of a Les Savy Fav kind of thing. Of course, between Har Mar Superstar and D4, Twin Cities bands have something of a reputation for getting shirtless even when it's not advisable, so why stop now?

10:49 PM

MC/VL have stripped down to their skivvies now. They appear to be grey briefs. Props. Man City's up 1-0, surprisingly. There's also an Asian man wearing glasses and a pink, flower-print one-piece bathing suit. And Ryan Olcott (lately of 12Rods and currently of Mystery Palace and doing sound at the Nomad tonight) seems unphased by the whole thing.

11:08 PM

Lamentably, the "Panty Posse" (as MC/VL branded them) have left the building. Now it looks more like the Nomad on a weeknight. You just can't plan for things like that, though. Who knew? Alls I'm saying is you should come check out Mouthful of Bees these next two weeks. They're one of the best bands in the Twin Cities right now, and will very soon be very much more popular and don't you want to say you knew them when?

11:25 PM

Mouthful of Bees is just getting set up. Stef Alexander (P.O.S.) showed up randomly, and that makes me happy. He reports that Building Better Bombs is putting together a European tour 12-inch for when they go across the pond in October, and also that the stuff he's working on for the next P.O.S. record is "awful". But he likes it, although he doesn't believe I will. All I can say is I'm looking forward to hearing it.

11:42 PM

Giga Fox are taking the stage with MOB's set up because, again, their stuff (including their car) was stolen. That seriously blows. Don't hold it against us, Giga Fox. Minneapolis is really a very nice place. It's one guy on guitar and vocals and a drummer, playing what seems to be a fractured brand of post-rock. The singer is struggling a bit with a guitar that isn't his, but they're doing a game job.

I, however, cannot take the heat in here, and so am getting out of the kitchen. I have to get up early tomorrow and really get cracking on some work, too. So that's it for this post. Hopefully I can clear the calendar next week so I can stay up for Mouthful of Bees.

Forgotten instruments

Salon's Audiofile has a great piece on forgotten instruments like the Stroh violin (a violin with a metal horn attached to it for amplification) and the Birotron, which, man, just listen to this thing. Pretty badass, but good luck finding one--there are only four in the world.

Crazy instruments can lend some really interesting textures to straight-ahead stuff, like Mercury Rev's copious use of saw, or Ben Harper's use of the Weissenborn, which gets a mention in the Salon piece. Regine from The Arcade Fire was using some kind of strange instrument that you played by winding, kind of like an organ grinder. Maybe that's what it was. And they also made great use of horns like the bass clarinet, euphonium and flugelhorn, which has always been one of my favorite instrument names.

Or what about Don Cherry's pocket trumpet that he played on so many Ornette Coleman records from the '60s? Or the oud from John Coltrane's Village Vanguard shows from that same era? Sometimes all it takes is a subtle tonal shift to dramatically alter and enhance the setting of a song.

I'm sure there are some Minneapolis/St. Paul bands that play some pretty weird instruments, but I'm strapped to come up with them. Anyone?

Timberwolves PG Mike James to Houston for PF Juwan Howard

The only thing good about this deal is that Howard's got less of a contract left. The T'wolves have been notorious for trading players who are almost done with their deals (Olowokandi) for players who aren't an upgrade and have longer contracts left (Blount), so this seems like a step in the right direction.

I'll miss Mike James' crazy, but not his lackluster playing. Looks like the people in Houston have more of the same to look forward to, according to this part of the Star Tribune's report:

"I'm coming in with a whole new attitude," James said. "I'm going to change my number, if I can. I'm going to change to No. 7 [from No. 13], because it's God's perfect number. I'm going to come in with a whole new approach to life, to everything, the way I approach the game of basketball itself. One thing I'm going to do is have fun. I'm going to smile."

In addition to smiling, I'd recommend learning to play point guard and maybe not jacking up so many threes in the first five seconds of the shot clock. If I played basketball, I'd see if I could make my number 1.618. Because it's Pythagoras' perfect number.

Chunklet gets real about AmRep Records

There are some serious devotees of Amphetamine Reptile Records out there, and that's incredible. It's a part of the Minneapolis music scene that I completely missed, so it's always great to hear about someone else's experience, especially when they post mp3s of the band they're talking about. This post mostly concernes a band called Halo of Flies, who sound great. I'm particularly fascinated by the way they're described as threatening. That's always been an underrated quality in music, I think. I'm not talking about theatrical darkness (like Marilyn Manson) or simple thuggish obnoxiousness (Limp Bizkit?), but rather something closer to the Romantic notion of the sublime--something that's so overwhelming to your aesthetic apparatus that you're transformed.

In other news, I just got a lovely little package of discs from James Everest of his and his sister's new CDs, for which they're having a release show at the Bryant-Lake Bowl on June 29. I haven't gotten to dig into the discs yet, but for more info, you can check out jgeverest.com.

Today, perhaps I'll write six or seven CD reviews.

Guerilla marketing? Or just slimey?

I managed to drum up some music-related content, although I'm really just passing on info from The Onion's A.V. Club. Thing is, looks like this stuff is going down right in my own backyard. Here's the text of the e-mail that the A.V. Club got on Friday:

A party was going on a few doors down from my friend's apartment complex in Minneapolis a few weeks ago. My friend said that she'd been invited to the party earlier in the day by the tenant of the apartment (with whom she was only a casual acquaintance) with promises of "Guitar Hero on the XBox360, great tunes coming from the Zune, and free beer." When we stopped by we found two dozen college students relaxing, drinking, playing Guitar Hero, in a room covered with posters for Microsoft's mp3 player, the Zune. After some free social lubricant (MGD), the host told us the whole story: Microsoft paid him to host parties like this. As long as he documented the party with pictures, he was reimbursed for all the expenses and paid a little extra for his "trouble." What sort of marketing is this? Does it happen with a lot of other mega-corporations? If so, how do I get such a sweet gig?

This just seems kinda icky and scummy. And you know, what's actually the worst part is the Guitar Hero on an Xbox 360 part, because what it screams is that they can't drum up enough interest in their crappy product, so they're reduced to pimping their successful product. Is there anyone out there who would've heard an invite to a party with Guitar Hero on an Xbox360 and sweet tunes on a Zune and gone, "Wait, you have a Zune?!"

Plus, how do you play Guitar Hero if there are tunes coming from an off-brand mp3 player? And? MGD? Gack.

Asst'd non-music related things

1.) The NBA Finals are tremendously disappointing. If you've got ESPN Insider (sorry, them's the breaks), you can check our John Hollinger's excellent idea about how to fix this. I'll give you the basic idea: the playoffs get seeded like normal, but then you have the #8 team in the West play the #1 team in the East, and vice versa. This way, you're far more likely to have the two best teams in the league play each other, rather than the West champ killing the "best" of the East. I can't say for sure this'd work, but usually Hollinger's on his stuff and they have to try something.

2.) I went and saw "Don Juan Giovanni" at Jeune Lune last night. It's a play/opera that combines Moliere's take on the Don Juan myth with Mozart's musical that did the same. And it's real weird. But not rewardingly weird. I found it incredibly flat and unresonant. The music was taken from "Don Giovanni", but it seemed like the words had been changed a bit here and there to fit the story. And then there were definitely elements taken straight from Moliere, as when Don Juan began speaking in French for a long monologue towards the end.

It was all rather muddled--a kind of mashup that expects the audience to be well-versed enough with both Moliere and Mozart to appreciate it, I think. It was sort of like someone making a play featuring the Adam West Batman and the Christian Bale Batman, but not nearly as fun.

See, I think that when you have an archetype like Don Juan, whose story is told over and over by different cultures in different periods, they draw him in such a way as to illuminate something about their own society. Is he a scoundrel whose defiance of societal mores ends in his downfall? Or is he the ultimate romantic, brought low by his own impulses, but still a heroic figure? I think "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" is, in essence, a late 20th-century American reading of the Don Juan story. Sexual promiscuity ain't what it used to be these days, so what Bueller does is refuse to live by the rules. He's surrounded by people who want him to conform to a certain standard of behavior and he defies that at every turn and *he gets away with it*. It's a reading that rewards the carpe diem approach to life because hey, that's who we are.

This play didn't really seem to interpret the story in any way. I didn't come away with a sense of what the character was supposed to mean to us, nor even who he really was. In fact, almost none of the characters felt like real people, although Steven Epps' turn as Sganarelle was at least entertaining.

There was also a lot of modern-day slang and commentary thrown into it that didn't seem to connect with the subject because they refused to place the story in any concrete time period. So here we have Sganarelle spouting off about George W. Bush and Iraq, but driving around a beat-up Studebaker and meeting Italians who at first speak no English, and then suddenly fluent English in the second half.

Did I mention yet that Don Juan, played by an older gentleman whose name escapes me at the moment, threatened to pull out a can of whupass at one point? That was probably where it jumped the shark.

Anyways, I was disappointed, because I was really looking forward to my first show at the Jenue Lune Theater. The staging was at least well done, and the aforementioned car was handled really interestingly, set up on tiny wheels that could be turned almost 90 degrees so the car wouldn't drive so much as drift across the stage.

3.) I got nothing music-related. I just finished an article on Moon Maan, which will be out in next week's City Pages, and I'm working on some CD reviews and a Low feature for Skyscraper Magazine. Once that's all done? I dunno. We'll see where we're at.

Review of The Pipettes with Smoosh

I know, I know: it's like Pipettes central around here recently. We'll be getting onto some other new stuff once I crawl out from under all the freelance writing I'm doing at the moment. For now, here's a link to my review of The Pipettes show on City Pages' website. Photos are by the illustrious Dan Corrigan, and you can even see the back of my head in one of them. I'm right in front of the stage right Pipette in the second photo.

06.08.07 :: The Pipettes with Monster Bobby and Smoosh :: 7th St. Entry

MONSTER BOBBY



ASYA of SMOOSH



CHLOE of SMOOSH



MAIA of SMOOSH



MAIA of SMOOSH



THE PIPETTES' SETLIST



THE PIPETTES



ROSAY of THE PIPETTES



RIOTBECKI of THE PIPETTES



GWENNO of THE PIPETTES



ROSAY



RIOTBECKI



GWENNO

The Pipettes and Happy 200th Post

Just got back from The Pipettes at the Seventh St. Entry. This is all I have to say about that for now:



Also, happy 200th post to Signal Eats Noise.

[Balloon drop goes here]

Shows tonight.

If you have legs and the will to use them, and aren't already going to check out The Pines at the Cedar Cultural Center or my band, Big Trouble, at the Kitty Cat Klub, you should go check out Mouthful of Bees at the Nomad. It's the first night of their month of Thursdays hosting the Minneseries, which I'm proud to say is now sponsored by this very website. Tonight, they'll be joined by Milk Automat--fresh off their participation in Radio K's Battle of the Underage Underground--and The Haves Have It, who are crazy and good and crazy good.

Haven't heard Mouthful of Bees? Oh man, you should. Here's an article I wrote about them back when their CD came out:

Mouthful of Bees: You can't teach heart

I'm on 46th Street, just crossing over Lyndale, when my cell phone rings.

"Steve? This is Kate from Mouthful of Bees. I just got out of the hospital, so I'm going to be about 10 minutes late."

I'm meeting Mouthful of Bees before a show at Java Jack's in South Minneapolis. There's an all ages venue tucked under the coffee shop, something I was completely unaware of as I walked in, trying to figure out where a budding young rock band could set up, much less rock out in the way that Mouthful of Bees' debut disc, The End, shows them to be capable of. But can you bring the rock with a broken toe?

"Well, I was making pancakes today and then—this is the third time I've broken this toe, mind you all," explains drummer Kate Farstad. "Then I was running to turn this water off and caught it on the edge of my fridge and it just snapped. I have to have a pin put in it tomorrow."

We're seated around a small table and Farstad has just joined her bandmates (bassist Micky Alfano, guitarist/keyboardist Mark Ritsema and singer/guitarist Chris Farstad, Kate's brother), and the conversation is quickly steered away from Kate's injury. It seems Chris and Kate have been playing together for quite a while already.

"We've been playing together since 8th grade," she explains, "so five years. I'm 19." That's right: the median age of the band is 19, and I later discover that this is only their fifth show (maybe seventh—there's some debate), but somehow they've already managed to make a rough-hewn gem of an album. The overwhelming quality of The End is its palpable excitement—it's rambunctious and restless, brimming with an overgrown lushness and a giant amount of heart. It's a little Velvet Underground, a little Jeff Buckley, a little Arcade Fire. All of which is fairly amazing, given its decidedly offhand and humble origins.

The album was recorded over the course of five days last summer and Chris says, "It was kind of a joke almost: we were like, 'We should do an album.' And Micky's like, 'We're doing 11 songs.'" Chris wanted to do eight, but Kate explains they only had five at the time, so a lot of stuff had to get written pretty quickly. "I think we stayed up pretty much all night," continues Chris.

They enlisted Ritsema's brother, Davis, to silkscreen the covers of 200 copies and then threw a little release show in the basement of Java Jack's. "Like, 80 people came," says Kate, "and we made back enough to pay for the silk-screening and then we had $100 profit. We sold 'em for $5, I think. Then we just gave the rest away."

And that was pretty much going to be that, except that Ritsema also plays in Battle Royale, and thus had the ear of Afternoon Records' Ian Anderson. It took some prodding, but eventually Anderson got to hear them when they opened for his band, One for the Team, at the Triple Rock. He signed them up shortly after, and now the label has re-released The End, making it possible for journalists like me to start salivating all over them in print.

It's a little difficult to say exactly what it is that makes Mouthful of Bees so compelling, but listening to any of the first four songs on their album should be enough to convince you there's something there. "The Now" breaks in with cacophonous drums and a hesitating dual guitar line before Chris' quavering voice enters, singing lyrics about a novel and the space between houses that get half-swallowed by a contrapuntal guitar melody. The song advances and retreats several times before boiling over at about the two-and-a-half minute mark, and from there it's a breathless run to the finish. "Jessica" downshifts into a gentle coast, albeit one with enough slightly strange twists (squelchy keyboard runs, resonant bass frequencies that give it an odd contour) to make it fit comfortably before "Under the Glacier," which explodes in an almost arrhythmic way before settling into a rusty, shaky groove. The song climaxes with a spiky, frenetic coda that gives way to the song I've been pimping pretty much endlessly since I first heard it, "I Saw a Golden Light," a choice which comes as a bit of a shock to the band.

"We were so wigged out when you picked it because everyone hates that song," laughs Kate. They've been unable to duplicate its sound live, and now I know why. "The drums were recorded with the internal mic in a laptop," says Chris, and I'm flabbergasted because, frankly, they sound incredible, like the drums at the end of the world or something. "I don't know how it got that way," he continues. "We've tried to figure out how to play it live. I have never found a mix I've been satisfied with."

True to form, there's no "I Saw a Golden Light" in the set they play that night. The basement of Java Jack's has been turned into the kind of venue I remember fondly from college; all Christmas lights and street signs and folding chairs. The sound leaves a lot to be desired—vocals are all but absent, and Chris' overwhelmingly fuzzed-out guitar seems like almost too much for the room to take. The first couple songs are clattery and unfocused, but when "Jessica" emerges in a slightly different arrangement from the record, propelled by an endearingly funky new drumbeat, it all begins to fall into place. I have to confess: I'm stumped for an adequate way to describe their fuzzy, lo-fi charm as other than the way it felt at that moment: magical.

When my friends and I are playing basketball, we like to mock sports commentators for saying that NBA draft prospects as have "tremendous upside," but that's pretty much what Mouthful of Bees have: upsideability. And so I sit in the basement of a coffee shop, wondering if I might not just be witnessing the beginning of something really huge, when I notice that Kate's still got her hospital admit bracelet around her right wrist—you just can't teach that kind of heart.

Feature on The Pines in City Pages

The Pines are playing the CD release show for their new one (and Red House Records debut), Sparrows in the Bell, at the Cedar Cultural Center on June 7. I wrote an article on them for City Pages, which you can check out here.

Can't resist another Minnesota music LOLcats

Can't resist.

Oh hai.

You know lolcats? Perhaps not, since I know there's some part of my demographic (hey, Dad) that might not be standing on the bleeding edge of Internet geekdom, so here's the short explanation.

Pictures of cats doing funny things + captions in poor English and usually rendered in the Impact font (you know I had to throw that observation in there) = lolcats

It's kind of hard to explain why it's funny precisely. All I know is that my introduction came one night when I was checking out a show at the Triple Rock Social Club and Rob Skoro was doing sound. He had his laptop open and this was his screensaver. I couldn't look away and I couldn't stop laughing.

So go spend some time on icanhascheezburger.com. Check out this one, this one, and this one.

Familiarized? Okay, then go check out the thread of people doing much the same thing but with embarassing promo photos of bands right here. Just try to appreciate the fact that part of the appeal is that only one in ten is going to make you laugh, but when it works, it's kind of like magic. I made this one:



It's The LOL Steady.

And the winner is ...

Andrea Myers has a nice piece on Radio K's Battle of the Underage Underground over at Minneapolitan Music.

Long story short, Rivet carried the day with some seriously rockin' thrash metal action. Plus, one of the guys looks like Matt Dillon circa "Singles". Read for yourself.

In other championship news, it looks like former Lifter Puller guitarist Steve Barone is your 2007 Mashed Potato Wrestling Champion of the Universe. You can't make this shit up, people.

And also, I worked out "Axel F" on guitar this afternoon. That's gotta be worth some kind of trophy. It was all inspired by watching "Fletch," newly re-issued on DVD. Harold Faltermeyer did the soundtrack for that and "Beverly Hills Cop", whence "Axel F", the theme for everyobdy's favorite donkey-laughing detective, Axel Foley.

She used my head like a revolver...

In all the foofera surrounding the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's, I'm pretty sure that Chris Molanphy has written the last word. You can check out the full text of his column right here over at Idolator.

In essence, he argues that the current re-ascendance of the single song over the album form has vaulted Revolver over Sgt. Pepper's in the critical consciousness as the best Beatles album. I particularly like the part where he calls Revolver the Beatles' greatest mixtape, which sums it up nicely.

I just went back and listened to all of Revolver myself, and with a quite different set of ears than I had on the last time I listened to it, I'm sure. See, I'm an album guy going way back, and for a long time, my favorite Beatles album has been Abbey Road. Plus, like many people, Sgt. Pepper's was the first Beatles album I fell in love with.

But listening to Revolver, and trying to evaluate it a.) on its own merits, and not within the canon of Beatles albums and b.) with something approaching fresh ears, I'm struck by a couple of things.

First of all, the album sounds amazing. I listened on headphones, and it's striking how few of the techinques that make Revolver such a unique sounding record are used today. Panning, people. Menomena's Friend and Foe is actually the current album that it most closely resembles it in the stark separation between the component parts. The bass and drums, particularly on a track like "Taxman" act as a unit. The guitar on "Taxman" sits way to the left and the vocals are right down the center. What makes this sonic picture challenging is that there's absolutely nothing on the right side of the stereo picture. It's like a giant dead spot until first the tambourine, then the cowbell and finally the guitar lead come in. Show me a band bold enough to leave such a giant swathe of space not just unoccupied, but postively and purposefully empty.

The cumulative effect is that it feels like you can hear every single thing, and yet everything is sliced so thin that you're not getting the whole picture of any individual instrument. Check out "She Said She Said": The drums are completely restricted to the left side of the stereo picture, reduced to just a kick, snare rolls and cymbal crashes. The cymbal crashes are the particularly brilliant part, because if you map the kit out over the whole stero picture (as the bulk of engineers are wont to do these days), that crash would wash out the whole song, but as it is, it's like a velvet punch that echoes the overtones of the sitar.

Secondly, "Eleanor Rigby"'s achievement as a pop song built around strings and nothing more hardly needs to be restated, but how about "Good Day Sunshine" being built entirely around two pianos? And not Elton John or Billy Joel-style piano songs, but more like what Spoon would eventually do with "The Way We Get By." And then there's the French horn solo on "For No One." It's bold and amazing, indicative of Paul McCartney at the peak of his game. It's like he's realizing he can do whatever the fuck he wants, and no one can stop him. Well, except himself, which is really what happened, post-Beatles. McCartney always played to the level of his competition, like so many forgotten basketball teams that would beat good teams and lose to bad teams. When he was pushing against Lennon and against himself, he wrote classics. Once he had conquered those two competitors, who could stand up to him? So he wrote "Spies Like Us."



Which leads me to my third and final point about Revolver. It's ripe. It feels like the moment when The Beatles had just gotten a handle on exactly what they were capable of. They weren't doing exactly what they were capable of, but the album's shot through with a sense of invulnerability. Ringo sounds muscular and authoritative on the drums (!), the vocal harmonies are crisp and clear, and they whip back and forth between guitar-driven pop numbers and exploratory, boundary-pushing structures without making either direction feel played out.

By contrast, Sgt. Pepper's feels almost overripe. They were hitting their stride as an album-making, studio-wizard band, but is full-stride ever as compelling as the moment just before? That's part of the beauty of the music industry system that was in place then: bands put out albums every six months, so there was a much greater "lightning in a jar" quality built into the release of albums. Revolver is an album teetering right on the brink between two ways of making music, as much a capper on an era of singles-based albums as Sgt. Pepper's is the keystone of an era of albums qua unified works.

OK, I just used qua. Must be time to wrap this up. Please note all discussions of the critical merits of different Beatles albums stem from an understanding that the best Beatles album must generally be considered the best album of all time, and even the fifth best Beatles album is at worst the tenth best album of all time.

SEN [hearts] Parts and Labor

Because I don't like just complaining about stuff, here's some positive Parts and Labor content for y'all, courtesy of the Twin Cities' own Minneapolis Fucking Rocks:

Links to Parts and Labor's performance on Sound Opinions

Also, the Currently Bumping section of the website (it's over on the right there, down a ways) has now been updated.

[insert 40 years ago today joke here]

I've been reading a couple different things about the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band coming out.

But the best thing I've read so far is Aimee Mann's Op-Ed in the Times. I can really identify with Mann's contention that it's almost children's music--it was the first Beatles album I can remember listening to, and I definitely played with the fake mustaches and all the stuff that came with the record (Why? They could be worth some money, now). Damn. Check out those mustaches, seriously.

And I agree with her that it doesn't stand up quite the way that other Beatles' albums have. Marchese over at Audiofile touched on the same thing, although I think a little more callously, and without as nuanced a reading of the way that people relate to the disc.

In a lot of ways, I think it's a very successful stepping stone for people in their appreciation of music. Whenever it gets at you, you can bet it's probably more thick with care than what you've been listening to before. If you're a little kid, you're going to respond to the bright colors of the jacket, the bright colors of the songs. And as Mann alludes to, if the shimmer of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" draws you in, "A Day in the Life" plants a darker seed, and isn't that what growing up is often about? A recognition not of nothing so much as a wider world out there that's both more wondrous and more strange than the one behind you?

When I re-discovered the album after I had begun playing guitar, I was drawn to the structures--the cleverness of the "Sgt. Pepper's" reprise, the massiveness of "A Day in the Life." Do those things come off as too clever by half now? Yeah, they do. Abbey Road has held up as an adventurous and unbelievably cocky album--what other band would throw five amazing pop songs at you, then only play them for a minute apiece? And Rubber Soul and Revolver are now feted as the hipster favorites when it come to the Fab Four. Revisionist history has led us to the conclusion that you can hear the Beatles' growing disinterest beginning with Sgt. Pepper's, continuing through The White Album, and only getting brushed aside on Abbey Road. Keep in mind, however, that the Beatles are really only competing with themselves when it comes to the album format.

Anyways, for no other reason than Mann wrote that Op-Ed and because I've been listening to her a lot recently in the wake of watching "Magnolia" again, here's an article on her I wrote a while back ...



A majority of songwriters I hear treat songs more or less like diary entries. But there are also songwriters who treat songs like chemistry experiments, blending words and imagery together until they achieve a reactive compound. Here I’m thinking of Jeff Tweedy’s experiments with chance operations to mix up Wilco’s palette, or The Books work with found sound and snippets of spoken dialogue. And of course, the vast majority of music produced in these United States treats songs like candy bars or light beer. A song is a commodity, a blank screen onto which to project a pop singer’s personality, image and attitude in an attempt to sell more. And then there’s Aimee Mann.

“I’m from a different era,” she says by phone from Los Angeles.

I’ve caught her in the studio a few weeks before she’s set to start an acoustic summer tour, and she’s busy tracking, of all things, a Christmas album. “Probably half of it is traditional stuff,” Mann says. “I did write one song for it and there’s a Michael Penn Christmas song that I thought was really great that I did. A couple of goofy things like ‘You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.’ You have to throw in a little humor.”

A Christmas album is probably not the first thing you’d think when you think Aimee Mann, provided you’re familiar with her history. After doing time in the major label pop world with ‘Til Tuesday, Mann struck out on her own with two solo albums (1993’s Whatever and 1995’s I’m With Stupid) that both received critical acclaim but very little in the way of support from Imago and Geffen Records, respectively. Most people probably picked up the plot with her breakout contributions to the soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” in 1999. Since that time, she’s released three studio albums (2000’s Bachelor No. 2, 2002’s Lost in Space and 2005’s The Forgotten Arm) and a live album. She’s a unique talent who’s managed to forge her own path through the music industry.

What makes Mann unique is her approach to songwriting. She creates characters who aren’t just thinly veiled slices of her own personality- they’re living, breathing people with psychological depth. Think about it this way: Whenever an author (or songwriter) creates a narrative, there are at least three people involved- the author, the narrator of the story and the story’s protagonist. In confessional songs, these three personas are squished so close together as to be almost indistinguishable from one other, whereas at the other end of the spectrum, with someone like Britney Spears, the goal is to completely hide the author and the narrator from view so that the persona of the song’s protagonist becomes overwhelmingly dominant.

Bear with me here, because this is about to get hairy. Whenever I get into talking about this, I have to talk about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. To make this as painless as possible, I’ll just say that for Tolstoy, his characters are tools created to demonstrate a point whose meaning they may or may not have access to. For Tolstoy, the narrator retains what Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called “a surplus of vision.” This allows the narrator to draw the reader to the conclusions that the author wants them to be led to. Dostoevsky, meanwhile, created psychologically complete characters who were basically wound up and set free to bump against each other within the pages of the book. Dostoevsky’s narrators don’t hold the secret to his novels; the secret lies within the characters interactions with each other. This is what Bakhtin meant when he talked about Dostoevsky’s dialogic style.

I swear to god this is a useful way to think about music. The key is recognizing that the narrator, when it comes to songwriting, is not the person who wrote the song (since plenty of singers don’t write their own material), but is instead an amalgamation of the person singing it and the musical arrangement around it. Let’s take “It’s Not,” from Lost in Space as an example. It’s the story of someone who feels detached in some essential way from the world, and Mann sets up the song beautifully with this image: “I keep going ‘round and ‘round on the same old circuit/ A wire travels underground to a vacant lot/ where something I can’t see interrupts the current/ and shrinks the picture down to a tiny dot/ and from behind the screen it can look so perfect/ but it’s not.” Note the consistency of the metaphor here. As the song progresses, she moves on to talk about waiting at a stoplight and watching as the lights cycle through: “All I have to do is depress the pedal/ but I’m not.” The protagonist is caught on the horns of a Hamlet-esque dilemma here- the problem is not deciding which way to go, it’s deciding to do anything at all. The bridge gives a hint at the cause of the dilemma- the protagonist has been hurt after showing him or herself to be vulnerable to someone they trusted. And then we get the sucker punch in the last verse: “So baby kiss me like a drug, like a respirator/ and let me fall into the dream of the astronaut/ where I get lost in space that goes on forever/ and you make all the rest just an afterthought/ and I believe it’s you who could make it better/ though it’s not.”

What’s entirely brilliant about this is how Mann finds a middle way between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky here. The last verse shows that the protagonist is fully aware of the essential problem that’s keeping resolution at bay- a desire to put your faith completely in someone else- but at the same time he or she simply cannot move past it. The structure and arrangement of the song, however, provides the listener a way out. The way the setting moves from an electric circuit out to an intersection and out into space; the delicate way in which Mann’s voice climbs up into a vulnerable falsetto before landing back on earth with the last line of each verse: The musical structure provides the narrative framework to show us, as the audience, that this situation that feels unbearable will pass with time.

“It’s like everything in the arts,” Mann replies when asked about her experiences in the music industry. “You can’t do it unless you really love it because there’s no guarantee that you can make any money or get any ego satisfaction out of it. You can’t get into that headspace of competing with other artists—where am I in the charts, or how many records am I selling. I have a manager to kind of think about all that other sort of stuff and I get to worry about making records and writing songs and what I’m going to do for cover art. Of course, nobody buys CDs anymore, so that’s kind of becoming an obsolete idea.

“I definitely come from a different era.”

Prejudice: The best laxative when it comes to crapping on bands

Lindsay Anne Arnold is a former intern for The Village Voice and is currently studying communications at NYU. Idolator had her thumb through the music section and wipe her ass with it, which I'm not saying is a bad idea, exactly. I don't think it's news to anyone that The Village Voice has gone pretty far downhill in recent years, and I'm not contesting that it's probably a den of iniquity filled with former music directors from college radio stations, but here's what I have an issue with:

Michael D. Ayers wrote about a band called Parts and Labor who play "art-jam-noise." I like jam bands, so I downloaded some of this stuff. It sounded like a sheep taking a dump with a Green Day album playing underneath it! Maybe the sheep pooping part is the "art" part, I dunno. Like one time, back in Baltimore, the music editor told me, "art in music is like pornography--you know it when you get a hard-on." That's when I asked to be moved down to the IT offices.

What blows about this part is it's a classic fallacy in several parts. First, it's begging the question. You're nominally evaluating VV's music section to see if it's any good, but you've already decided it's no good. So as proof that it's no good, you're simply positing that the bands the critics are writing about are no good. Now, obviously, there's no yardstick for measuring creative virtue, but do you really think she gave an open-minded listen to Parts & Labor?

I mean, the hypocrisy is staggering if you really look into it. By quoting Ayers, she sets up an expectation--and a false one at that, because the quote is completely removed from the original context of the article. She then complains that the band didn't sound like what she wanted and then makes a simple-minded simile in an attempt at humor. Sheep! Green Day! Poo!

When you break it down, this is really nothing more than someone saying a publication is crap because they have a writer who likes a band that isn't good. And why aren't they good? Because aside from how they sound, they were inaccurately described by a crap writer for a crap publication.

Call me crazy: I happen to like Parts & Labor. I'm sorry Ms. Arnold had such a rough time at The Village Voice--it sounds like a terrible place, really, but does a hard-working and inventive band have to get splattered with shit because of it?