Signal eats noise.

T-HUD's CD to T-HUD: Thud!

2007-07-28T09:19:00.000-05:00

I'm not being mean-spirited about this, but man, you might want to reconsider looking for a buyout to pursue a rap career when you only sell 78 CDs in the first week of your album's release.

More from the blues ...

2007-07-20T09:55:00.000-05:00

In the wake of my column on Otis Rush's Classic Cobra Recordings on Reveille, I got into it a little bit with singer/songwriter/baller extraordinaire Stook about blues guitarists at the Nomad. See, apparently Stook and I have some differences of opinion. I love Spoon. Stook not so much. I love Otis Rush. Stook loves Albert Collins. I love Collins, too, but for pretty much every guy I talked about, he had a counter-proposal.

So eventually we got around to discussing a ridiculous topic, namely, who's the greatest blues guitarist of all time. Yeah, I know. But, I made my statement with the proviso that I'm making my pick for myself, and no one else. See, I used to play a lot of blues guitar—it's pretty much all I did in high school and college—and to a large extent, I feel like I can't say Albert King or B.B. King or basically any black blues guitarist could really be my personal pick because I could never have done what they did. We can fight about it all day, but being a white blues guitarist is being a white blues guitarist, and so while I might have looked to all the greats (Muddy Waters in particular) for inspiration, for a role model, I looked to one man: Peter Green.

If you haven't checked out his work with the original Fleetwood Mac, I suggest you get on that shit. It's incredible: better than, in my opinion, Clapton's work with the Bluesbreakers or Mick Taylor with the Stones or Stevie Ray Vaughan or pretty much any white guy playing blues.

What kills about him is his taste: the man almost never took more than one chorus for a solo in a slow blues, and every note he played was delicious. Here's a video from YouTube as proof. And yes, they're lip synching and no one really knew what to do with themselves in videos in 1969, but the song's great:

Stook, for his part, was all about Roy Buchanan. So here's a vid of Roy. You can make your own decision. Or not. I mean, this isn't a contest.

On a different note, Oliver Sacks has a great piece in this week's New Yorker that begins by talking about a man who was struck by lightning and suddenly developed an intense and overriding passion for music, first picking up the piano (you know what I mean) again, then starting to write his own music where before he had never had any real musical inclination. Sacks goes on to discuss more about this strange neurological phenomenon where people can suddenly become intensely passionate after traumatic brain injuries or surgeries.

Reveille is GO!

2007-07-16T12:13:00.000-05:00

All right, the thing that's been keeping from posting much of anything here on Signal Eats Noise is finally up and ready to go at reveillemag.com. We've already got a bunch of content, including a couple CD reviews by me you may have already seen here, plus a brand new column by me called Warp + Weft that will be going up every Wednesday from now 'til infinity in which I'll take an in-depth look at one album. This week it's At the Drive-In's Relationship of Command. Next week: Otis Rush's Complete Cobra Recordings.

I'll still be posting here on SEN, although I suspect the tone and content of the postings will shift somewhat, probably towards a more catholic selection of topics.

Brush your goddamn teeth

2007-07-11T12:37:00.001-05:00

All seven and we'll stand in line to see Prince

2007-07-07T09:56:00.000-05:00

You want to see Prince at First Ave tonight? Get in line. On second thought, maybe you're better off staying home. Kyle Mattson from More Cowbell is in line right now, at 10 a.m., and he estimates himself to be halfway down the line, somewhere in the middle of 8th St. between 1st Ave and Hennepin. And he got there at 7:15 a.m. Matt Perkins, who books the Nomad and is a solid guy, apparently got there at 3 a.m. and he's halfway down the Hennepin side of First Ave. He's getting a ticket, but just one, because that's all anybody's getting.

Kyle's reporting that someone just came by with a cart of french toast and water for sale, and he's passing the time chatting (presumably both with real life people and on the internet), browsing the intertubes, and reading mags and newspapers.

Tickets go on sale at 3 p.m.

Robert Skoro: Musician, Bartender

2007-07-05T15:01:00.000-05:00

This interview is the continuation of a piece that begins on The Bottle Gang. That part of the article concerns local musician Robert Skoro's dayjob (nightjob?) as a bartender at the 331 Club in Northeast Minneapolis. To check that out, head right here.

Signal Eats Noise: Let's talk a little bit about music: What are you working on right now?

Robert Skoro: I gotta finish my record. I totally put it on the backburner because I decided to go to school [for Anthropology]. So I have 70% of a record that is about 90% tracked. The great thing is that it's a project where I started recording stuff for it in winter of 2006 and have kind of been all over the country working on it with different people. Did a lot in Austin during and around South by Southwest last year and then continued working on it last summer at the house that I now live in. So it's kind of fortuitous that I get to continue, after taking this long break, to work on the record in the same environment that I did a lot of production in over the last year. That was really fun. The control room is upstairs and then running a 250 foot cable snake down to the main floor and going to town down there. But now that we're living there, I can get even a little bit crazier and start running stuff into the basement and there's an external structure that has a sauna in it, so we can use that for isolation.

SEN: So is it a pretty old house?

RS: 1880s. It's got character. In terms of a home recording situation, it's pretty damn good because the rooms aren't that big. It'll be interesting to hear what it sounds like when I start doing drums again in it, because the interior of it has changed a lot. There's some bookcases and stuff that are gone, so it'll sound different in some ways, but I thinkfundamentally it's a lot the same because it's still the same shape. I'm really lucky. It's kind of sick how great it is to record in because there are a lot of options. There are just so many different sounding rooms in that house and it's a really small house so it's just one microphone cable to the next room.

SEN: So is it safe to say this is going to be fairly different from your last record, That These Things COuld Be Ours, which was done sort of all in one shot and live?

RS: Whereas the last record was very documentary in spirit, like almost entirely tracked live, this is more of—because of the travel involved—a field recording. There are things on there that will make engineers cringe. I mean, there's a lot of ground buzz, which I'm cleaning up to some degree, but at the same time, it's great to have these recordings and hear the place that they were recorded. There actually might just be a few minutes of birds on it from some of the recording that I did in Austin. Just hanging out in a house and turning the gain all the way up. Some kind of stuff like that. It is going to be really different from the last record.

SEN: I like that approach. That's always been something that I've wanted to do more of and never really have had the freedom or time and space to try that kind of stuff. Everything I've ever done has had to be in a studio and here we go. But then I listen to Grizzly Bear's last album, and you can hear where they recorded it so much. You can hear stuff outside, you can hear ice clinking in glasses and all that stuff. you get a sense of place.

RS: I think that if you're, as a musician or an engineer or a producer, you're going to take advantage of the digital domain and the fact that you don't have to set foot in a studio anymore to track a record. You should really run with that. Give people as much detail about what's going on as you can.

SEN: It makes a lot of sense to, whichever way you go, embrace that route. If you're gonna be in the studio, make a studio record. If you're going to be taking different snippets from different places and recording people in different situations, embrace that and go towards that. If you try and go half and half, you end up nowhere.

RS: And that's what the last record was about. Like, OK, we're going to be in the studio? So we have no shortage of mics and cables and actually, I think we used every cable in the studio when we recorded that in Chicago. It was a lot of cables; we dug in for two weeks. It was really fun.

SEN: There's definitely something to be said for sequestering yourself away in a studio and working on something.

RS: That first record, the stuff I did with Ed Ackerson, I literally walked in with a notebook and was like, "OK, we're going to record this, this, these drums in this section like this, and then we're gonna record this guitar in this section like this." Just going through and doing it. And that was the kind of things where the stuff on my first record is one day per song. Record and mix. He had a lot of good habits for that mode of working that would just get things rolling super-quick.

SEN: So you've sort of done a different approach for every album so far.

RS: Yeah, I don't know. Maybe that's totally self-indulgent, but that's the name of the game for me. If I'm gonna go to the trouble of writing the songs and taking care of all the logistics, until I find a process that trumps everything else, I don't find it necessary to have a really consistent sound from album to album. There are definitely bands—like Spoon—that benefit greatly from consistency. Their records change, but the sound of the band doesn't change all that much. But that's the fun part for me: the experience of going in a completely different direction every time. To create a body of work like that.

Pitchfork taking the piss out of Tapes 'n' Tapes?

2007-07-02T20:49:00.000-05:00

Picking apart Josh Grier's blog

You be the judge. Is nothing sacred? I guess this is the price of fame. I pulled these sentences out of a hat.

Pardon my absence ...

2007-07-02T00:37:00.000-05:00

I've been busy with a couple things lately, including getting stuff ready for the July 16 launch of Reveille, but I plan to have some new and at least somewhat non-traditional content up here, as well as the return of the Signal Eats Noise media taster, which has been on vacation.

In the meantime, you can look at my unspeakably cute dog, who's now going to be world famous as the Daily Puppy for July 2, 2007. Someday I'll have kids, and maybe I'll be proud then, but this is pretty great until then.

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

2007-06-29T09:37:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-28T22:22:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-26T10:13:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-21T23:05:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-21T15:17:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-21T08:43:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-19T21:44:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-15T09:05:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-14T21:39:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-14T13:30:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-14T09:44:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-14T08:58:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-06-13T18:36:00.001-05:00

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

2007-06-13T17:30:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-11T16:47:00.001-05:00

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

2007-06-09T12:19:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-09T01:02:00.000-05:00

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]