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.

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.

[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.”

Building Better Bombs Feature in City Pages

Building Better Bombs feature right here, yo.

I had a CD review of the Bad Plus up in there a couple weeks back, but it was a treat to get to do a whole feature on Bombs, who are aboslutely ruining my life with Freak Out Squares right now. I need to listen to it all the time. And oh yeah, A-List for local rapper Golden.

Tomorrow, if all goes well, I'll be putting up a feature on Andrew Bird.

A Hot Ticket retrospective ...

Standing now in the cockshut (and you're crazy if you think I'm not going to use that word every chance I get until the Pulse actually closes up the print edition on May 16) of Pulse's tenure on the local media scene, I thought it would be a good idea to comb through past Hot Tickets I've written and collect them in one spot for safekeeping. The beauty of Hot Tickets, which are the little blurbs we write about upcoming events in the front of Pulse each week, is that I tend to write up to four a week, and once they're written, I tend to forget all about them. As such, it was kind of fun to look back at these. Maybe you'll enjoy it, too. They're in reverse chronological order.

STEVE'S HOTTEST TICKETS

SATURDAY, APRIL 21
Missing Numbers CD Release Show
Turf Club
If there's a band at the end of the world, that band is probably Missing Numbers. Since their first album in 2004, this Jimmy Peterson (of Bellwether) project has broken and weathered from a spaciously unspooling classic rock outfit into a clattering rattle bag. In a slick, streamlined age, Missing Numbers' new disc, More Salt?, is defiantly hydraulic, steam-powered and rusty, grinding along on a shot of Morphine (thanks to the tenor and baritone saxes of Hall Sanders) and co-piloted by the ghost of Bone Machine-era Tom Waits. Layers of grime and distortion transform Peterson's voice into the calls of a carnival barker, and John Crist's drums sound like they've been replaced with the burnt out shells of Volkswagens and discarded gas stoves. Echoing voices drift through "Clean Living," Mike Derrick's slinkily frayed bassline anchors the handclap groove of "Unlucky Numbers," and "10,000 Tens" drifts through a smokey blue haze of beatnik-leaning poetry and free blowing sax, completing a central triptych that would be at home soundtracking a Jarmusch, Wenders or Lynch film. This is ghostly, burning stuff. With Rank Strangers, The Slats and Faux Jean. 9 p.m $5. 21+. Corner of University and Snelling Aves., St. Paul. 651-647-0486.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2007
Grizzly Bear
7th Street Entry
I've long suspected that there's a perfect word out there to describe Grizzly Bear's aesthetic, and I think I've got it now: susurrating. I didn't make that up-- I swear. For a long time I was going with mossy, given the overgrown and organic sonic sprawl of last year's Yellow House, but mossy also suggests a kind of reticence, whereas I'm looking for something with a little more restlessness in it. Susurrating means "issuing soft noises," and that's what all the space around the music does on their record. Curtains gently rustle in drafts, chests rise and fall in loamy late-morning sleep and blades of grass flick to and fro the way they do when you get up real close to your lawn. Plus there's the onomatopoetic suggestion of a slurred, stuttery mumble in sussurating that captures tentative forward motion, forever arrested in mid-stumble. I missed them opening for TV on the Radio, a mistake I don't intend to repeat. With Portastatic and The Dirty Projectors. 8 p.m. $12. 21+. 29 N. 7th St., Mpls. 612-332-1775.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2006
Staying Home
Your House
Come on, admit it: New Year’s Eve is a disappointment nine times out of 10. I spent a good six years as a musician living by my brother’s motto: “Everyone has to have a gig New Year’s Eve.” Enough. I’m getting old, damnit, so here’s my recipe for a great New Year’s Eve: diminshed expectations. When I was growing up, my family took the opportunity of staying up late to watch a really long movie: for a few years it was “The Right Stuff,” then it was “Lawrence of Arabia.” Of course, these days, 153 minutes and 228 minutes (respectively) hardly constitute a long movie. Maybe you could watch all of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 10-part miniseries, where each part focuses on one of the Ten Commandments, “Decalogue.” That’s 550 minutes right there, and Stanley Kubrick called it the only masterpiece he could name that was made during his lifetime. Or how about every single episode of the woefully underrated “Freaks and Geeks?” It’s kind of like “The Wonder Years” if “The Wonder Years” were actually as good as you remember it being. Plus it features the wit and wisdom of everyone’s favorite lanky geek, Bill Haverchuck. And it will last you about 792 minutes. That’s probably what I’ll be doing; sitting on the couch with my fee-ance, some eggnog, maybe a glass of champagne, vicariously reliving my high school years through Lindsey and Sam Weir and turning in shortly after the big ball drops in Times Square. Admit it: you’re jealous. 8 p.m. - 12:15 a.m. Free. All Ages, 21+ to drink.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2006
Deftones
First Ave
The sublime, as a Romantic notion, concerns that which is terrifying and dangerous—think tornado—but which, through the remove of fiction, can be appreciated aesthetically for the very qualities that make it threatening. More than any other band out there today, the propulsively aggressive yet melodically angelic Deftones embody this grotesque beauty. “Kimdracula,” from their recently-released album Saturday Night Wrist, is a good example: Singer Chino Moreno whips from a hushed croon to towering falsetto to guttural howl and back again—it’s enough to give you whiplash, and that’s exactly the point. Since 2000’s White Pony, Deftones have milked that knife edge between the visceral and the ethereal, making forays into ambient textural territory and sound collaging. It’s not so much tied together as loosely bound by Moreno’s animalistic and sometimes violent imagery, all teeth, red leather and, yup, ball gags. For me, they occupy a strange oxbow in my musical taste; I listen to nothing else that’s even vaguely close to them in sound, aside from Japanese art-metal band Boris. Still, I’ll maintain my stance that they’re far more than just noise and fury signifying nothing: They’re an overwhelming amount of noise and fury signifying a vast and yawning emptiness—and it scares me, in the best way possible. 8 p.m. $20. 18+. 701 First Ave. N., Mpls. 612-338-8388.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2006
Timberwolves vs. Nuggets
Target Center
Nothing lasts forever, but I’m way more torn up inside than I expected to be at the thought that not only may Kevin Garnett soon be leaving for greener pastures, but that he actually needs to. Being a fan of a team is a messy business: I love the T’wolves, and I love KG, and for as long as I’ve been a fan, those two things have been synonymous. Thus was sportswriter Bill Simmons’ article in the Dec. 4 issue of ESPN the Magazine all the more painful for being right: Garnett is missing out on a chance to be recognized as one of the all-time greats if he stays here. I was there when the T’wolves came back in the last eight minutes of the fourth quarter against the Los Angeles Clippers last Saturday night, and I was momentarily buoyed by the win, re-energized by the resolve shown by a team notorious for phoning in fourth quarters, but it was ultimately as hollow a victory as a peaceful, romantic dinner in the middle of a failing relationship. I know what has to happen: KG has to leave and find his championship ring with another team (please don’t let it be the Lakers) and, in the end, I know it’s right. The Timberwolves’ playoff run in ’04 will forever stand second in my heart only to the Red Sox winning the championship that same year as the defining sports experience of my life (I was born in Massachusetts). While he’s still here, you better get over to the Target Center and see him in person. In case you’re not up on your T’wolves history, we hate the Denver Nuggets, and this one’s bound to be a knock-down, drag-out fight. Kevin: It’s been a pleasure and an honor. 7 p.m. $10 - $700. 600 First Ave. N., Mpls. 612-337-DUNK ext. 1 or timberwolves.com.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2006
Jeremy Messersmith
Nomad World Pub
I’ve had Jeremy Messersmith on the brain lately. I don’t know if you’ve read “The Twenty-seventh City” by Jonathan Franzen (don’t bother, by the way—it was terrible), but in it, a successful man is brought low by a carefully orchestrated set of disasters that appear to him to be mere chance. Occasionally, I feel that bands are doing this to me, albeit with less disastrous results than the death of my dog or the wooing of my daughter by some ne’er-do-well. Since the first time I caught wind of Mr. Messersmith’s disc Alcatraz Kid via a CD review by Andrea Myers here in the Pulse, he’s gotten love in the City Pages and various other pubs in town, and his careworn blend of introspection and pop savvy has been popping up everywhere I’ve turned. There he is on the Current, and there he is in the pile of CDs I’m about to bring to Homegrown to play this week, and there he is appearing live in person on Homegrown this very Sunday. Not that he should have to embark on a clandestine campaign to win the affections of music critics: His tuneful melodies are the kind that make you stop short when they come on the radio, beguiling and enchanting, but straightforward and honest. You’ve done it, Mr. Messersmith: You’ve won me over, so you can tell your goons to stop rooting through my trash. With Jayber Crow, The Dale Hush Hush (Coach Said Not To side project) and Harbor. 9 p.m. $5. 21+. 501 Cedar Ave. S., Mpls. 612-338-6424.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2006
Band of Horses
Fine Line Music Cafe
Some bands make albums that only blossom when you strap on a pair of headphones and patiently soak them in. Dial in the mood lighting, crack open a bottle of Argentinean Malbec and kick back on your chaise lounge if you want to get the most out of the slow-growers, but Band of Horses is not a band to kill you softly with their songs. Anthems like “The Funeral” and “Wicked Gil” promise to rock your face off live, and that’s just what they did when Band of Horses hit the Entry on their first trip to the Twin Cities. Ben Bridwell and Matt Brooke fashioned the band out of the ashes of Seattle indie rock stalwart Carissa’s Wierd and their debut disc Everything All the Time is just the kind of sentimental arrow that aims for the chinks in every hipster’s emotional armor. In the gorgeous “Part One,” Bridwell sings, “I’d like to think that I’m a mess you’d wear with pride / like some empty dress you laid out on the bed for tonight.” I’m generally not one to quote other reviews, but Aaron Newell at cokemachineglow.com hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “When that’s sung over a slight, high school country waltz, by that voice, you can gauge how thick your skin is by how much you start missing someone.” His point was that Band of Horses aren’t experimental or daring, but rather messily and mercilessly precise in their harnessing of a certain adolescent emotion that never really leaves you. They go for the jugular again and again, and isn’t that why we’re paying attention in the first place? I doubt any rock writer worth his or her salt got into this racket to wax philosophical about popular music, even if that’s what we end up doing. We love music because way back in junior high, in a past beyond reach because we can’t feel ourselves as other than we are now, we heard a song that made the hair stand up on our necks, or pins and needles flood our cheeks, and wanted to feel like that as often as possible for as long as possible for the rest of our lives. With Chad VanGaalen. 7:30 p.m. $14. 18+. 318 First Ave. N., Mpls. 612-338-8100.

MONDAY, MAY 8, 2006
Sigur Ros
Orpheum Theater
Sigur Ros is a band that fairly demands to be the soundtrack to your life in moments of need and transition. Their lyrics, written in a phonetic jumble called Hopelandic, aren’t statements so much as empty vessels into which you inject yourself, and the swell of orchestration that accompanies their dynamic peaks would be overwhelming if they hadn’t been so careful in bringing you along on the journey. Their latest, Takk…, could be called more of the same, but this is a band that knows the power of motif, that creates impact not from aping the frenetic kineticism of modern life, but by applying a steady hand to our musical pressure points: melody, minor-major resolution, dynamic movement. I can’t recall exactly when, but I remember being on a bus in Chicago, mid-fall, headed down Lake Shore Drive late at night, Ágætis Byrjun (their first LP) streaming through my headphones, sodium streetlights flashing by. That night, they were the sound of something beginning curled up inside the sound of something ending. Had I left the East Coast already? Had my band broken up? What is it about buses at night that inspires gentle melancholy and wistful whenandifying (as in, when and if I ever figure this all out)? I can’t tell you; just keep some Sigur Ros handy in case you ever find yourself in similar straits. With Amiina. 7:30 p.m. $30-$40. 805 Hennepin Ave., Mpls. 612-339-7007.

MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2006
The Wedding Present
400 Bar
I feel bad for any woman who’s been involved with David Gedge: Judging by his songs, he either cheated on you, broke your heart and then went on to immortalize it in song or you cheated on him, broke his heart and you still got immortalized in song. Either way, you’ll never live it down—not when Gedge plants his lyrical daggers inside of sticky, bittersweet hooks. After years of fronting the high-fidelity-meets-infidelity Cinerama, Gedge returned to the gritty, guitar-driven fold of his first band, The Wedding Present, who’ve been on hiatus since 1997. If you’ve been watching Tom Hallett’s space, you read his glowing review of Take Fountain, but I’ll sum it up for you: The Wedding Present are as toothy and toothsome as ever, Gedge spinning tales of heartbreak with clear- and cold-eyed honesty. You can bring your girl, but if Gedge has anything to do with it, you won’t be leaving with her. With Sally Crewe & the Sudden Moves. 8 p.m. 21+. $15. 400 Cedar Ave. S., Mpls. 612-332-2903.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2006
Alvin Lucier
The Spark Festival at the School of Music
What is music? No, seriously: ask yourself. My Intro to Experimental Music class at Wesleyan, taught by Alvin Lucier, changed my answer to that question considerably. Lucier has pioneered many new methods of music making, but is best known for his piece “I Am Sitting in a Room,” in which the performer reads a short text into an empty room. The performance is recorded, played back into the room and recorded again. And again and again. It’s an amazing enough concept that’s laid out in the performance’s text (“I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves”), but what’s truly stunning is how unexpectedly beautiful the result is. With the sparest of concepts and tools, Lucier creates a sonic painting of the sounds that lie dormant inside every space we inhabit and in the process makes us realize that music is so much more than arpeggios and appoggiaturas. Lucier is the keynote speaker at the Spark Festival, and several of his pieces will be performed as well. The schedule of performances is extensive and sure to shift your paradigm if you’re willing to open yourself up. Lucier’s keynote lecture is at 11:15 a.m. in Anderson Hall, Rom 370. All events are free. For a complete listing, visit spark.cla.umn.edu.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2006
An Early Evening with John Corbett
The Fine Line Music Café
Actor John Corbett made his name playing a range of characters—from that ruggedly handsome and offbeat nonconformist DJ on “Northern Exposure” to Carrie’s ruggedly handsome and offbeat nonconformist boyfriend on “Sex and the City” to the ruggedly handsome and offbeat nonconformist male lead in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” But his true passion is music: “When I was on the set of my last movie,” Corbett muses in his bio, “all I wanted to do was get back to making music. I wanted to be with my guys on stage, rocking the house.” When he first appeared on “The Tonight Show,” he asked if he could bring his band, and despite not having anything recorded to play for the talent director, they got their shot—“a rare case of a musician getting a coveted performance on the late-night talk show without a record deal, or even a record at all.” Being John Corbett probably didn’t have anything to do with that. His bio has a lot of other heartwarming stories like that, too, but don’t feel alienated if you haven’t yet fallen for his charms. “A lot of my fans are women,” he says, “but when they’re [sic] husbands and boyfriends hear the album or see us live, they’re going to like it, too. When we play, the guys come up and say, ‘Dude, I didn’t know you were going to rock like that.’” His blend of country and Southern rock starts early so you should be able to make it home to catch him in “Raising Helen” at 8 p.m. on Encore. 6 p.m. $16. 21+. 318 First Ave., N. Mpls. 612-338-8100.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 20, 2006
Roy Haynes
The Artists’ Quarter
When it comes to jazz, there are legends, and then there’s everybody else. Haynes is firmly in that first category, and in his five-decade-long career he’s shared the stage with fellow giants Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and too many others to mention. But his long list of credits and plaudits don’t really do justice to what the man has done for jazz in our time. Where Max Roach approached the drums from a rhythmic foundation that allowed for crisp melodic improvisation, and Elvin Jones didn’t abandon so much as steamroll through notions of traditional melody to create a cascading, roiling rhythmic force to match Coltrane’s improvisation, Haynes fuses melody and rhythm in equal parts to create a style that is as comfortable in the bop of Parker as it is in the context of Andrew Hill’s Black Fire (my favorite Haynes performance). The marriage of Hill’s deft and spooky piano work to Haynes’ simpatico backing is emblematic of the phenomenal syncreticism of avant garde jazz in the early ’60s, when rules were stretched without being broken, and free jazz still meant you didn’t have to pay. His three-night stand at the AQ is being recorded for a live album, but you should go see for yourself: There’s a special magic that happens when a drummer who’s swung his whole life hits that ride cymbal with the first triplet of the evening. Suddenly, everything swings. Fri. & Sat. 8:30 & 10:30 p.m.; Sun. 7:30 & 9:30 p.m. $25. 18+. 408 St. Peter St., St. Paul. 651-292-1359.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2005
The Oranges Band
The Triple Rock Social Club
From the instant the chunky sparkle guitars and rehearsal-space drums kick in on “Believe,” you won’t have a hard time believing that The Oranges Band leader Roman Kuebler spent time playing bass on the road with minimalist juggernauts Spoon. “Believe” is something of a red herring, though, as their latest album comes off as decidedly sunny over the long-haul and works as a kind of companion to Broken Social Scene’s self-titled slice of summer breeze. If BSS is the van full of cool kids heading to a beach party, Oranges are the brooding wallflowers reluctantly following in their VW Golf. They’re blasting their Nuggets box set and arguing about whether Morissey could take Robert Smith in a fight. Along for the ride are a couple local vets, including Tad Kubler, who took their promo photos and raved about the band in a recent interview, and Craig Finn, who wrote their press release. With winter fast descending here in lake country, you should take the opportunity to snatch up as much sunshine as possible. With Die Electric and headliners Askeleton. 10 p.m. 21+. $7. 629 Cedar Ave., Mpls. 612-333-7499.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2005
The New Pornographers
First Avenue
I have to admit: I wanted to hold the horrible interview I had with Carl Newman against the New Pornographers and their new album Twin Cinema, but I just can’t. Once you get past the twists and turns and some of the spikiness which separates Twin Cinema from the sunny smackdown of Electric Version, you’ll find a record brimming with fantastic melodies, crisp production and some of the best damned drum beats and fills you’ll hear this year. The kind that make you (or at least, me) look like an idiot while waiting for stoplights to change. Yup, that’s me flailing my arms in the air and trying to hit the high harmonies on Neko Case vehicle “These Are the Fables.” The usually non-touring Dan Bejar will be joining them on this outing, and that’s great news, because his angular and difficult compositions make for great and slightly bitter palette cleansers between Newman’s relentlessly (if nonsensically) sanguine pop gems. You’ve probably heard “Use It” on the Current and even though I can’t make heads or tails of the lyrics, I still shout along. So if you see me at Marshall and Cretin making a fool of myself, laugh quietly to yourself, and if you run into Carl Newman, tell him I’m not taking it personally that he didn’t feel like talking much. 6 p.m. 21+. $15. 701 First Ave. N., Mpls. 612-338-8388.

Parts and Labor: Building steam

"It's interesting to try combine things," says Parts & Labor vocalist/bassist BJ Warshaw, "but I also think we alienate a lot of people out there. The people that really like harsh noisy music can't get with us because we're too melodic and we sing. And also your average indie rock band-- we're a little too ballistic and strange for the average listener. But people that get into it really get into it and that's kind of a rewarding aspect of doing what we do."

Straddling that divide between noise music and indie rock seems to be what Parts & Labor are all about. The Brooklyn trio's getting set to release their latest LP, Mapmaker, and to call it bracing would be an understatement. To put it plainly, Parts & Labor are not fucking around. Atop a high-pitched cycling drone that echoes Pete Townsend's looped keyboard at the start of The Who's "Baba O'Riley," album opener "Fractured Skies" bursts forth with a manic drum pattern that seems on the edge of running the song right off the rails. More loops-- of static, of climbing, oscillator-generated noise-- come in for support, but rather than push the song further out, they seem to bring it closer, and when the vocals come in, climbing in lockstep up a major scale, you begin to sense that this is a wall of sound built not to keep you out, but to give you something to climb and raise a flag of victory on. It's easy to see how it might be a troublesome sound for sensitive ears and people who demand more abstraction, but Warshaw's right: for the right listener (me, apparently) it's a heady mix of seemingly disparate musical influences.

"That's kind of been there from the very beginning," Warshaw replies when I ask about how this clash of sounds developed. "When people ask us this question, we sort of have the same stock reply that it has a lot to do with the music that we listen to. It's really as simple as that and kind of boring. [Vocalist/guitarist] Dan [Friel] grew up listening to a lot of grindcore and harsh noise stuff and free jazz and then also Sonic Youth, but then also got into indie rock in the late '90s-- later than most people. I played music since I was really little. I played saxophone as my first instrument and in jazz band, concert band. My parents liked Peter, Paul and Mary and Simon & Garfunkel and were a folk duo when they first met. And later on I got into a lot of punk and noise. It's sort of this combination of all the things we like about music mushed together in as interesting a way as possible."

Friel and Warshaw are the primary songwriters in the band, splitting songs and vocal duties. Friel's voice is slightly froggier than Warshaw's, lending tracks like the churning "Brighter Days" a tinge of Bob Mould, while Warshaw's slightly clearer tenor guides "Long Way Down" along a fractured groove into a noise rock freakout. The thread that connects all the songs on the disc is a chunky arrangement style that bundles the songs around little pieces of melody or rhythm and then basically playing the shit out of them.

"For the most part," Warshaw explains, "[Dan] and I will come up with a melody or an entire song and then arrange it on our own and then bring it to the band. And then from there, we collectively figure out how we're going to turn it into a Parts & Labor song. We'll collectively talk about what the drum beat and the feel is going to be. We're a little bit all over the place with the feels of our songs. We have a lot of straight pop-punk anthems and also some more pummeling Boredoms-y style or more Krautrock repetitive stuff, too. The long process is really just deciding what noises we're gonna put underneath the vocal melodies. I'm playing electronics and bass and Dan's playing electronics and guitar so we've got this pretty enormous vocabulary of sounds and textures we can use. It's a long process.

"To give you a more concrete example," he continues, "I wrote the melody for the song 'Long Way Down' on Mapmaker and originally intended that to be a straight psych-Krautrock jam-- like, really heavy and really loud and kind of midtempo. And we originally started playing it like that, but it didn't feel right. So we slowed it down and it ended up being this more pastoral, quieter song for us. Arranging kind of has everything to do with how a song ends up sounding for us in the end."

I might take issue with calling "Long Way Down" pastoral, but I get where he's coming from. For bands that rely on samples and loops, there's a real dilemma when it comes to putting the song together in a way that can be performed live and stay true to the studio sounds. It's a problem that first reared its head when drum machines came to prominence in the early '80s, but as the ability to replicate studio trickery in an organic way on stage has become more accessible, band's have solved it in many different ways. The Books create nearly full arrangements of music on DVD to go with their videos, contributing only vocals, guitar and cello to the live setting. Menomena compose their songs around whatever seems right at the time, feeding the bits into a sampling computer program, arranging them, and then doing their best to replicate the finished compositions live, in essence covering their own songs. Dosh recreates his loops from the ground up each time out, and Parts & Labor's approach is probably closest in spirit to that.

"We tend to put a lot of emphasis of being able to do what we do live," says Warshaw. "So pretty much what you hear on our records, we're able to duplicate live and just with three people. We have looping pedals, so we'll create our drones live and then they go through volume pedals so we can swell them in and out and we haven't done much where we're arranging while we're recording, while we're putting it into a computer. There's some exceptions to that rule-- for Mapmaker we recorded all our vocals and electronics ourselves and then went back to the studio for mixing and recorded all the drums in the studio. But the songs were like 90 percent completed and then we think it'd be cool if there were a keyboard melody in the background. We did a couple overdubs, but we really write for the live show, more than the studio record."

Ever since I got Mapmaker back in early March, I've had their show at the Entry circled on my calendar, because it's obvious from the record that they're absolutely going to bring it live. At SxSW, Menomena were fairly impressive in recreating the sounds on their album with just three members, but you could tell they were stretching beyond their reach on a couple numbers. If Parts & Labor can deliver on the live show promise displayed on Mapmaker, they'll be picking up bricks from the Entry off of tables in the Hard Rock Cafe and windows will be shattering on Summit Avenue in Saint Paul, just like when the Washburn A Mill blew its top in 1878.

Parts & Labor play Wed., May 2 at The Seventh St. Entry with headliners ADULT. 8 p.m. $10/$12. 21+. 29 N. 7th St., Mpls. 612-332-1775. Mapmaker comes out on Jagjaguwar Records on May 22. For more info on Parts & Labor, check out their official website at partsandlabor.net.

Tonight on Homegrown

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

The Books: The joy of cooking

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



And here's that full-length article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the war

Yesterday saw the release of Post-War by M. Ward, an album which I've been fortunate enough to get to soak in for the past several weeks already. At this point, it'd probably be a good idea to point out that I had little experience (aside from a few spins through Transistor Radio) with Ward's music before getting my hands on this disc, although I've heard nothing but raves. Post-War gives me little reason to think these people were high. The music on this disc has all the broken-in warmth of a ratty couch in a darkened living room, probably one with fake wood paneling from the mid-'70s. Ward shows a stunning ability to draw from myriad sources (the gritty Delta blues of Son House on "Requiem," Billie Holiday torch ballads on "Poison Cup," the sultry and smoky R&B of, seriously, Sade on "Post-War") and tie them together with his gently raspy voice and spare instrumentation. All of Ward's compositions begin their life on a four-track, and those humble beginnings show through again and again on the record, but his and his engineers' enthusiasm for expanding their sonic vocabulary is admirable, and much like Wilco's pushing of the traditional songwriting envelope on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Post-War shows how it's possible to retain the simplicity of a great melody while spiking it with enough texture to make it new again. I had wanted to get a full-length article into the print edition this week, but forces conspired to keep it out of there. Instead, you're getting the raw interview right here for your enjoyment.

How did your appearance on the Late Show go?

it was a blast--we met dave letterman and the dog from "sex and the city"....

Is touring something you look forward to?

yeah--when i get a nice break in between to sleep and recharge--this tour is especially great because i took a year off from travelling to catch my breath and for the first time i get to tour with the people i recorded the record with--so , im feeling good.

There are a lot of unique vocal treatments on the disc. Is that something you look to replicate when you play live, or do you treat them as distinct arenas when it comes to sound treatment?

the best vocals ever recorded came out of Sun Studios--those are the vocal sounds we were shooting for on this record but crossed with other ideas as it pertained to the song/lyric.

What's your songwriting process like? Do you write pieces and then put them together, or do you write whole songs at once or do you do something else?

there's never been a formula really--the only somewhat constant is that all the songs begin alone and with the 4-track that i've been using since i was in high school--one of the tracks is broken now so its sort of become a three-track now--the only one i know of in existence actually ...

Transistor Radio was a kind of homage to a bygone era in radio--does Post-War come out of any similar overlying concept? It seems like it's consciously divided up into movements or sections.

well the "transistor" record was more of an attempt to create something tangible out of memories of the times when i was a kid and first discovering music/radio--i wanted the new record to sonically go against that sentimentality and try something bolder.

Post-War seems to really reward close listening, i.e. with headphones or loudly in a living room. Was that a natural outgrowth of the recording process, or was it a quality you went in wanting to capture?

every record i've ever made has been an attempt to invent a hybrid between the old 4-track sounds that i grew up recording with and the newer experiences of discovering strange machines and experimenting with weird microphones whose names i cant spell here--a lot of credit is due to my engineers Mike Coykendall and Adam Selzer whose knowledge of the medium can best be described as very, very, very vast.

I read in your bio that you're a fan of David Lynch's films. Me too. His intuitive approach to imagery (meaning not overthinking what an image represents, but rather relying on unconscious associations) is something that I've found equally compelling when applied to lyrical (say, Jeff Tweedy's experiments with cut and paste techniques) or musical (I'm thinking DJ Shadow's Endtroducing) compositions. What kind of influence have his or other filmmakers' work had on you?

there's a ton of free association involved in the process--a melody you stumble on the guitar will remind you of a song from whenever and so you might borrow the tempo or a chord change--and then once the song starts going and it seems to be working you take it to the studio and every once in awhile, usually in the middle of producing a song, the production or chord changes or a lyric will remind you of something you may have seen in a film, or a story you heard when you were a kid--most films go in one ear/eye and out the other but the scenes that a bunch of people like kubrick, lynch, rohmer, almodovar, fellini and mike leigh have made stick around in my head for probably longer than they should and end up coming out in unconscious ways in the recording process ... weird, i know ...

You also talked about some older jazz influences like Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong in your bio. It seems like a lot of current music doesn't like to look back further than the late '60s for inspiration, but there's so much great stuff out there to draw on. Do you feel that
musicians--especially young musicians--aren't getting enough exposure to things like Duke Ellington or even Bach or Beethoven?

what you have here is a good question and one that i honestly dont know the answer to--i still believe that there are millions of Americans who still listen to ellington and bach but most of them have either moved to europe or just don't seem to get around much anymore.


M. Ward plays the Varsity Theater on Tue., Sept. 3 with Shelley Short. 8 p.m. $13/$14 18+. 1308 4th St. SE., Mpls. 612-604-0222.

ben lee: the great awakening

once again, horrible restrictions of space have forced a wonderful piece to the web, but fear not. the web is the future! arise and go see ben lee!



by Sally McGraw

Youth is not always wasted on the young.

By the time Australian singer-songwriter Ben Lee was 16 years old, he’d befriended Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, released his first full-length studio album on the Beastie Boys’ (now-defunct) Grand Royal label and had one of his songs covered by the Lemonheads. While most of us were locked in our bedrooms listening to these tastemakers, Lee was touring with them.

The teenaged Lee came on the scene just before the late-nineties deluge of teen performers hit the American airwaves. But the earnest, hooky and charmingly-awkward songs on his first release, Grandpaw Would, would set him miles apart from the Disney-manufactured teen-pop parade that followed. And over the course of the next decade, Lee refined his sound—moving from Jonathan Richman-derivative geek-rock toward a quietly polished, uninhibited, folk-pop that thrums with vibrant emotion.

Although Lee’s staggering talent and relentless ambition have kept his career afloat, there’s no denying that kismet played a part in both his early and his ongoing success. What would’ve happened if Fallaheen Records’ Steve Pavlovic hadn’t stopped by a library book sale to hear Lee’s band, Noise Addict, in 1993? What if Evan Dando had hated Lee’s tribute song, “I Wish I Was Him,”—instead of loving it so much, he recorded his own version? What if Lee hadn’t come to the mainstream public eye as Claire Danes’ boyfriend?

“I don’t know what would’ve happened had circumstances been different,” Lee states simply. “But I have always felt destiny calling me onwards. So I have to assume that there are many roads that could get me where I need to go.”

Having powerful and talented friends has helped keep Lee on the radar, but his gang of famous cohorts has influenced his music as well as his buzzworthiness. Lee has worked with everyone from Aussie pop diva Kylie Minogue to the Twin Cities’ own Har Mar Superstar, and found every collaboration valuable.

“Forced collaboration is meaningless. It’s gotta have a flow,” says Lee. “When I’m working with someone I admire, I often hit a moment when I disagree with something they’re saying and I want to chicken out. ‘That’s Ben Folds,’ I think, ‘he must be right!’ But then I remember my own musical power, and the fact that they are trusting my intuition, too. It’s a great test of self-esteem.”

Being surrounded by legends and luminaries from his career’s start has doubtlessly influenced Lee’s sound. But, ultimately, he is a self-taught musician, and has an instinctive knack for pairing hypnotic hooks with deceptively simple lyrics. He seems to have hit upon a foolproof method for creating engaging pop songs.

“There has to be a message,” Lee explains. “Whether it’s a story, a feeling, or a viewpoint—the song has to mean something. Then it has to be covered in sugar! Think of it like medicine—you need sugar to sweeten the medicine. The soul of the song is good for you; it awakens your heart. The hooks and melodies make it go down smoothly.”

His most recent album, Awake is the New Sleep, goes down smoothest yet. More melodically mature than 1998’s Breathing Tornados, less experimental and frenetic than 2002’s Hey You. Yes You, Lee’s fifth record is welcoming, gentle and ultimately seamless. His brilliantly simple musical ideas blossom through organic-feeling arrangements and Brad Wood’s deft production. This group of songs is uncluttered without being austere; Awake is the New Sleep relies heavily on the sonic staples of guitar, bass and drums with few unusual instrumental adornments. But the album never veers toward the boring or predictable. Lee’s ardent vocal delivery gives each song a seductive inner glow, and his mercilessly catchy melodies will wrap themselves around your brain.

Lee’s lyrical style often employs unrhymed, storytelling verses, followed by perfectly-crafted pop refrains. It’s a technique that keeps listeners in a state of relaxed alertness – the ideal mindset for absorbing quality pop. And although many songs on Awake is the New Sleep appear to push a love-thy-neighbor philosophy, others smack of heady heartbreak—lending the album credibility and balance. Upbeat grooves, such as the party-ready “Catch My Disease” and the buoyantly melodic “Into the Dark,” stand out on first listen. But careful examination brings the slightly sinister ballad “Apple Candy” to the fore, as well as the frustrated seduction anthem “Get Gotten.” “Gamble Everything for Love” pairs a rhythmic minor melody with a rolling, repetitive, staccato lyrical line—creating a song that is at once familiar and utterly new. Although every song on the album is carefully crafted and emotionally ripe, it is these slightly darker tracks that showcase Lee’s full musical potential.

That potential has long been acknowledged in the U.S. But although Breathing Tornados went platinum in his native Australia, Lee has endured years of patchy praise from Australian critics and music fans. With this new album, he’s finally garnering some serious accolades : last week, Awake is the New Sleep won three ARIA awards (the Australian Grammy equivalent ) for single of the year, best indie release and best male artist. Although it must be gratifying and relieving to be back in the fold, Lee has adopted a wizened attitude toward the experience of being adored abroad while ostracized at home.

“Looking back it all seems like a difficult adolescence or something,” he says. “I used to throw stones at windows if I didn’t like them. Now I just build new windows that I like better. It’s a more joyful experience.” ||

Ben Lee performs Thu., Nov. 3 at the Fine Line Music Cafe with New Buffalo. 8 p.m. 18+. $13.50/$16. For more info on Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee, oh Mr. Lee, visit his official website at www.ben-lee.com.

Heroine Sheiks: New York Hates Us

this lovely piece by the awesome holly day is not going to get to appear in this week's print issue because of space constraints, but it had to get out somewhere. i particularly like how it craps on new york. enjoy.

For nearly 15 years, local boy Shannon Selberg and his mighty Cows cut a swath through the heartland of America that left people quivering and quaking in their boots—and usually pretty damn inebriated. From the release of their 1987 Treehouse Records debut Taint Pluribus Taint Unum, and during their subsequent 7-year, 8-album relationship with Amphetamine Reptile, Selberg and crew created some of the most beautifully sloppy and hilariously frightening music this side of punk rock. Nothing was sacred so far as the Cows were concerned—farm animals, old women, school children and even various hygienic practices were all fair game, set to a stifling wash of loud guitars, static, machine-gun fire percussion (broken up by occasional unexplainable bangs and clatters) and, of course, Selberg’s fantastic bugle playing.

When the Cows called it quits after their 1996 release Whorn came out, Selberg relocated to New York and started up a new band, the Heroine Sheiks. Drawing heavily on the sound the Cows laid out near the end of their career, the Heroine Sheiks were a little tamer musically, but a lot more daring lyrically. Selberg’s Heroine Sheiks have been determined from Day One to rattle the cages of everyone from the mice to the clergy, and have done so, quite successfully.

“The Cows used to tour through New York, and this paper, The New York Press, they’d have us up on their weekly calendar of picks for the week, and they used to make a big point of making us a ‘pick’ so they could proceed to say how shitty we were,” says Selberg of his New York experience. “Like, the first thing we’d do in New York was to pick up the New York Press and read our shitty plug—I mean, it was obvious that the guy had never listened to our albums or anything like that, so it was really kind of funny.

“When I moved here to New York, I was working at this bookstore, and part of my duties were—okay, you know how you have to check in your backpack at the front door of some places? I was working bag check at this book store, and this guy comes in, and he’s like, ‘I’m with the New York Press,’ and we went and had a beer, and we had a really cool interview, and then, the music editor the New York Press got hold of it, and edited it to make me look like a pathetic, washed-up has-been who’s been reduced to checking ladies’ purses at a bookstore. And then they drew this really, hideous, ugly picture of me, like a cartoon, and obviously that guy’s never laid eyes on me, or even a picture of me! It was like, Jesus, welcome to fucking New York!”

And things just got colder. “We don’t get any press! Not even negative press! Recently, the Village Voice sent our publicist a note saying, ‘You don’t have to bother sending us any more releases from the Heroine Sheiks, because we will never review them or listen to them,’” says Selberg. “The New York Press did the same thing, but that’s because they’re just assholes. Back when we were just starting out, and we were packing the clubs up, and doing really good, and there were some hot shit bands that were actually opening for us that got hot shit press reviews everywhere, these papers would never even mention we existed. So I told the music editor, ‘Even if you hate us, at least we’re new! The guy from the Swans was in the fucking band, you know? Isn’t that at least news?’ And she got all pissed off at me for trying to tell her what to write. ‘If you don’t like it,’ she said, ‘just don’t read it. You’re an asshole!’ So I guess I’m an asshole.” He adds, “New York is a trendy kind of media center, so people only think you’re as good as you are talked about. To be playing on your third album, having been here for five or six years, and have that going on kind of stinks. But we’re doing all right.”

Despite the lack of NY critical acclaim, the Heroine Sheiks just keep plugging along, as can be heard in their most recent release, “Out of Africa” (Reptilian Records). “There’s actually a theory in anthropology called Out of Africa, where all modern people migrated out of Africa, and spread their culture all over the world,” explains Sleberg of the title. “The album’s indirectly about how America is a blend of America and Africa. I mean, America kind of thinks it’s the be-all and end-all of all culture, like, the whole world started with America. And say what you want about America, but everyone digs our culture. I mean, there are certain characteristics that even Americans say, ‘Hey, we’re winning the Cold War, because Russia has a McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and blue jeans!’ It’s actually quite brilliant, the way America quietly took over the whole world without really firing a shot. All the wars and fighting hasn’t made nearly the impact on people that American culture itself has been making for decades. People who were formerly under Taliban rule are now letting their kids wear blue jeans and listen to hip-hop. We’ve pretty much won. So the album’s kind of an anthropology joke/political statement about imperialism.

“What I usually end up doing on albums is like, I get really experimental, and then the next one, I just put together what I’ve learned since working on that album, kind of expand what I know about what I’m trying to do with music?” explains Selberg. “And then the one after that is kind of an explosion of trying new stuff. And that’s what this one is: all the shit that I’ve ever wanted to do on the last record, and even those before, is on there.”

The Heroine Sheiks perform on Fri., Oct. 21 at the 7th St. Entry with Seawhores and Shotgun Monday. 8 p.m. 21+. $7.50 advance/ $9 door. For more info on the Heroine Sheiks, visit their official website at www.heroinesheiks.com. Head over to pulsetc.com to download an mp3 of their song “Pillow Talk.”