Arcade Fire :: Chicago Theater :: 05.19.07

A SIGNAL EATS NOISE SPECIAL ROAD TRIP REPORT FROM CHICAGO

Before Arcade Fire's sold out show at the Chicago Theater last Saturday (the second of three such shows), my father asked me how they got to be so big.

"They made a great record," I replied.

"Well, making a great record isn't enough on its own to get a band this kind of success, right?" he replied. And he's right. Plenty of amazing albums languish on shelves, still shrink-wrapped, and lots of mediocre records sell millions. Arcade Fire certainly benefited from rave reviews on Pitchfork and other sites, and the buzz that came trotting along behind, but it sure doesn't hurt that they're a transcendent live band, the kind of group that has acolytes instead of fans.

As we found our way to our seats (sort of just stage right of center, about 20 rows back), openers Electrelane were working their way through a set of noisy and largely instrumental rock. General consensus was that the British quartet of women looked like a band straight out of the mid- to late-'90s, an association reinforced by their music, which shared roots with Sleater Kinney. Their set showed flashes of inspiration--Arcade Fire singer Win Butler couldn't say enough good things about them--but the Chicago Theater's a big space, the mix was not the greatest, and they just didn't seem to connect to the audience, although they were definitely warmly received. They were certainly interesting enough to warrant a closer look at their new album, No Shouts, No Calls.

As the lights came up and we found the other members of our party, it became clear what a phenomenal space the Chicago is. I've been to a handful of theater shows in my day--Sigur Ros, New Pornographers, and Belle and Sebastian recently, Robert Cray and, yup, Spin Doctors--and they're the best. You get a seat, you're usually guaranteed a pretty good sight line, and I'm pretty sure that bands love them.

The stage is strewn with instruments, including pipes from a pipe organ suspended from the rafters, and more amps than you can shake a stick at. A set of circular screens are arrayed around its edge, and a line of flexible lights attached to poles stand at the front of the stage.

After a mercifully short wait, the lights drop and Arcade Fire take the stage, launching immediately into "Keep the Car Running" from their latest, Neon Bible. There are 10 people up there, including two horn players, one with a bass clarinet and one with a french horn, and they hit the ground running. Win Butler, sporting the latest in 19th c. strongman fashion, manifests very little of a frontman mentality, and yet he's clearly leading the band. Like their countrymen (and women) Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire are masters at broadcasting an all-in-the-family vibe from the stage, and the audience responded immediately.

By their third song, "Haiti," from Funeral,it was clear that they were playing each song as if it were their last. A lot of bands throw themselves into their music, but it can often come off as spectacle. Arcade Fire, however, made it feel, for lack of a better word, like church. There were plenty of stage dressings, including fiber optic cameras mounted around the stage that would send fisheye images of the band to be projected on the circular screens and on the curtains at the back of the stage, but none of the lights or the video took over the power of the music.

The set was drawn in equal parts from Funeral and Neon Bible, and, as is often the case, the live setting erased a lot of the distinction between the two records. Funeral may have been more directed, concerned primarily with the transfer of responsibility from one generation to the next, and Neon Bible might sound bigger and bolder, but it's clear that even if their second effort hasn't been lauded in the same way as their first, they're still mining a rich vein of material.

Personally, I couldn't get past Regine Chassagne's onstage antics. Dolled up like a cross between Madonna or Cyndi Lauper circa 1984, and dancing awkardly, drawing attention to herself constantly, she came off like a Canadian Bjork, which is to the real Bjork as the Canadian dollar is to the American. However, she kicked some serious ass on the drums, especially on "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)", and her vocal performance was uniformly great, although especially on "Haiti." Learning that Chassagne (who's married to Win Butler, in case you didn't know) was born and raised in Haiti definitely makes the song resonate more deeply, and it also nicely complexifies the French bits of their songs, since the band is not just French-Canadian, but also Haitian. In any case, I can see that she's clearly a love her or hate her proposition, and a necessary counterweight in the band, so that's a push.

The rest of the band was going absolutely apeshit by the time they closed the set proper with the one-two punch of "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" and "Rebellion (Lies)". Tim Kingsbury was tossing a mic stand with a megaphone mounted on it high into the air again and again, and when they came back out for the encore ("My Body is a Cage" and "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)"), Kingsbury and Richard Reed Parry had begun to hit anything they had handy--the stage, the monitors, an a la carte crash cymbal. The crowd was itching for "Wake Up," but it was not to be on this night.

Some shows are nearly overwhelming, displaying the true power not only of the band performing, but of all music everywhere. Arcade Fire did make a great record, and then made at least a very good one, but it's clear from their live show that they've tapped into much more than just a successful formula for crafting wordless sing-along hooks and ramshackle narratives of loss and growth--they've made their own world, miraculously connecting the dots from '70s David Bowie to '80s Bruce Springsteen to the mossy glory of Neutral Milk Hotel. The trick is that they've made music that makes this path seem obvious and natural, even when no one ever really followed the path before.

It's a popular opinion that there's nothing truly new to say with music, that the borders are set and it's getting harder--if not impossible--to be original. But maybe there's still space in between to say the old things in a new way, to re-energize the old forms in bright new ways. Arcade Fire are living, breathing proof that tradition doesn't have to be an albatross and that the power of song and performance are enduring.

I caught Kyle Matteson, who runs arcadefire.net, at the show, so I'm sure he'll have a full setlist up over there pretty soon.

'Round the Dial - 05.16.07

When I was music editor at Pulse (Remember that? Last week?), Tom Hallett and I had our issues, but they were mostly caused by me being stuck between him and his check, which was handed down from on high, so naturally, he had to be dogged in his pursuit of funds.

And lord knows we don't share the same taste in music and don't have the same opinions on a lot of topics, but over the almost two years I read and edited his column every week, I gained a lot of respect for the man, not least of all for his ability to keep up a weekly column for nearly all of Pulse's 10-year tenure in the local print media. He always got the same amount, no matter how much he wrote, but he never shied away from turning in 2500 or 3000 word columns when he was really fired up about something.

The point is, he and I have had our differences, but I made it a policy to publish Hallett's full 'Round the Dial column on the web every week, even when I had to trim here and there to get it on the page in the print edition. It seems this practice has been discontinued, because here's a link to Hallett's full final column for the final print edition of Pulse, as he wanted it.

'Round the Dial - 05.16.07

We moved!

Sorry I haven't been able to get more content up here over the past couple of days, but I've been dealing with some techincal issues related to the blog, plus my brother graduated from college this past weekend, so I was a little caught up with that.

So quick: You know what are some still awesome albums you may have forgotten about? God Fodderby Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Relationship of Commandby At the Drive-In, and Blue Johnby Big John Patton.

I'm not saying run out and buy these-- okay, I am, but I'll be posting stuff about these albums soon and also a new CD review or two within the next couple of days.

We're moving!

I'm going to leave things as they are for the moment, but next Wednesday, I'm going to be switching some technical stuff around with the site. The upshot of this is that pulsetcmusic.blogspot.com will no longer be the underlying address of the site-- signaleatsnoise.com will still work, as will pulsemusicblog.com, at least for the time being. Heck, signaleatsnoise.org will work. So if there's anybody out there who has this bookmarked (as opposed to on their RSS feed, which, really, that's what you should be doing), if something looks funky next week, just try signaleatsnoise.com, and it'll get you there.

Severing ties ...

Well, I was just officially fired from Pulse of the Twin Cities, ostensibly for converting this blog from the Pulse Music Blog to Signal Eats Noise, which is patently ludicrous. The Pulse has one print edition left that's supposedly going to come out next Wednesday, and I'll be impressed if it happens.

I don't have any interest in tearing anybody down over this, so I'd just like to thank the great people I worked with there and all the fantastic writers I got to work with during my time at the paper. I'd also like to offer you a bit of advice: when Pulse comes knocking looking for writers for their new online venture, don't write for them. After two years of hard work above and beyond the call of what I was hired to do, with one week left before I could leave on good terms, Ed Felien decided to can me for trying to walk away with my own body of work, which he claimed he "owned." I offered him the pulsemusicblog.com name, which he declined, saying I could have it and he wouldn't fight me over it. That's all I really wanted anyways, and now I can look forward to building this as its own entity.

Welcome, if I haven't said it already, to Signal Eats Noise.

We're getting the band back together

The rock reunion has long been the subject of scorn and ridicule, and for good reason. Jane's Addiction seemed to embody everything that was great about alternative music in the '90s while they were around: they were dark and depraved, but catchy and expansive. Daring, artsy, funny, devil-may-care-- and then, at the height of their popularity following the release of Ritual de lo Habitual and the first Lollapalooza tour, they broke up. Much as I knew I was going to miss them, I had to kind of admire them for going out on top.

And then they reformed for a reunion tour with Flea on bass because original bassist Eric Avery was the only with sense enough to leave their legacy alone. And Jane's Addiction is only one example in the endless parade of bands that are flogging their crusty reputations to make a buck.

But a really odd thing has been happening over the past few years: A handful of significant alternative bands from the '80s and '90s have been reforming and putting out records that, while perhaps not the classics that their early stuff is, are vibrant, current and excellent albums that deepen and refine their earlier efforts.

I could be wrong, but it seems like the trend really began with Wire, who put out the LP Send back in 2003, garnering a 7.5 from Pitchfork and even then only because they'd already released most of the album on two previous EPs.

Then came Mission of Burma, the Boston stalwarts who re-formed to put out OnOffOn, then arguably bettered that already solid comeback effort with last year's The Obliterati.

Now, just this past week, Dinosaur Jr's Beyond arrived in my box. This disc even looks like an old Dinosaur Jr record, complete with handwritten band name and title on the front cover. The album's also resolutely lo-fi, and it sounds like they J. Mascis and company picked up right where they left out.

Of course, I'm not hear to review Beyond, which will happen later when I've gotten more familiar with it, but rather to talk a little bit about what makes bands like Wire, Mission of Burma and Dino Jr able to come back to relevance (well, at least critical relevance) when Jane's Addiction put out Strays, which basically sucked.

Music fans of an older generation are enamored of pronouncing rock and roll dead. They point to things like classic rock songs in car commercials as a sign of the death of rebellion in rock and roll, as if that were what rock and roll were about. Now, I'm not going to argue that rock songs in commercials is a good thing per se, but I think we have to face facts and acknowledge that rock and roll stopped being rebellious a long long time ago, and consider the fact that it may just have grown up, and more gracefully than a lot of boomers have managed.

For groups like Wire, Mission of Burma and Dinosaur Jr, I really don't think rock was some kind of tool to be used against the man. For Wire, it was maybe a way to rail against the mores of upper class England. And for MOB and Dino Jr, it was maybe a way to carve out their own niches in New England (which, let me tell you, is harder than it looks), but I think these bands were primarily interested in the freedom granted them by the idea of being in a band, by the idea of making something personal into something they could share.

But I guess maybe I doubt that that separates them from Jane's Addiction. Again, we've circled back into a discussion of authenticity, which is something I'd generally like to avoid whenever possible. I don't believe my ideas about who's realer than who are very illuminating.

Maybe-- just maybe-- what lets a band hold on to whatever made them great in the first place is as elusive as what made them great. It probably works better for bands that were ahead of their time than bands that were distinctively of their time-- for instance, a lot of Jane's Addiction's stuff now sounds awfully tinny and metally and kind of bombastically huge in a way that hasn't held up very well, whereas Wire and MOB made albums in the early '80s that sound like they could have come out yesterday.

To continue down that line, I have little doubt that Fugazi could reform five years from now and put out a great record. I doubt the same could be said for Smashing Pumpkins.

I'm still working on it. Dinosaur Jr review to follow soon.

Signal Eats Noise media taster

So there's this fantastic little company here in the Twin Cities called Intelligent Media Platform. They're all about delivering great audio and video content that's curated by reputable websites like this one, and also The Bottle Gang, which is less than reputable, really, but I'm partially responsible for that.

ANYWAYS ... Signal Eats Noise's media taster is going to live over there on the sidebar to the right, but I'm also posting the wider version right here.



What's beautiful about this is that IMP has already worked with a lot of bands to put up free, downloadable content-- in fact, all the tracks that are on there right now I found in about ten minutes of initially setting this up last night. I'm particularly excited to have Grizzly Bear's version of "Owner of a Lonely Heart" up there. My plan is to try and bring you new content (local and national) that relates to the stuff I'm covering on the site. It might not always be the songs I'm talking about, but they'll always be great. I swear.

If you choose to download the full version of the player, which you can do by clicking download, then the version on your computer will be updated whenever the one online gets updated, plus you'll have the opportunity to buy music by these artists and to support creative endeavor, which is about the best thing you can do.

I'm brimming with joy.

Drive 105 to become Love 105

According to Chris Riemenschneider in a story in the Star Tribune, Drive 105 will be changing to Love 105, which wouldn't mean much, given Drive 105's middling brand of alternative rock, if it weren't for the fact that that means no more Homegrown on Sunday nights at 10 p.m. I had a great time during my tenure on the show as a co-host, and as guest host the couple of times I got to do it.

Homegrown, my hat's off to you, and may you land on your feet, whatever that means.

So at this point, in the last couple months, the Strib has cut 145 employees, the Pulse has ceased print publication, Jim Walsh got unceremoniously axed from City Pages, and now Homegrown's done?

Just what in God's name is the world coming to?

CD Review: Six Parts Seven

Six Parts Seven
Casually Smashed to Pieces
Suicide Squeeze Records

I see a lot of CDs, and this necessarily entails seeing a lot of crappy CDs. Red flags tend to include the following: blackletter typefaces, pictures of vikings and song titles like "Awaiting Elemental Meltdown." Things were not looking good for Casually Smashed to Pieces, the latest release from Ohio quartet-and-then-some Six Parts Seven, but I trust Suicide Squeeze, so in it went.

For a moment, I thought I had once again failed to remove the previous CD from the cut-rate CD boombox on my desk, creating an album sandwich up in there (it's happened), but no: "Conversation Heart" really does begin with a gently pulsing electric guitar motif that ably sets the tone. When it's joined by a banjo, the interplay of the parts sets in motion the model that will dominate the songs here: simple, well-crafted melodic lines will be spread across guitars, lovingly passed over to keyboards, and gently handed off to the sweetly yearning harmonies of a modest horn section. If you've come looking for messy, sprawling masses of orchestration, best look elsewhere. This is wallpaper music, and I mean that in the most generous way possible. Any given three seconds off this record could have been lifted out of the careful and crystalline confines of Sufan's Illinois, but as they cohere into entire mini-suites, they call to mind other products born of the Land of Lincoln, erstwhile Tortoise member Bundy K. Brown's Directions in Music and his later albums under the name Pullman.

I first heard Directions in Music under unusual circumstances. I was at an Indian restaurant in Los Feliz in Los Angeles back in 2000 or so with a small group of friends. A DJ (in a restaurant-- how L.A.!) was spinning instrumental rock music built from spare melodies and suspended chords, and it sounded, for lack of something more appropriately critical, magical. It was languorous and lush, beautiful in an understated way that eschewed sentiment. In short, a perfect soundtrack for a twentysomething's night out in a foreign town, and to someone who wasn't far removed from the snobbery of a degree in jazz performance, it came as a shock that you could even make music like this. That was Directions in Music, but Casually Smashed to Pieces could be an able understudy for the part.

Six Parts Seven display a great deal more intentionality than Brown's project. Where DIM often seemed willfully aimless, its improvisatory roots showing through when the music got away from the players a bit, CSTP simply bleeds careful planning. The songs blend gracefully into one another, drifting across dynamic shifts with a minimum of fanfare. Since the band began as a duo consisting of brothers Allen and Jay Karpinski on guitar and drums, respectively, it only makes sense that the compositions proceed forward from the guitars. "Confusing Possibilities" builds itself up around harmonics and stumblingly unresolved strums before revealing a rising-then-falling central riff composed of slippery hammer-ons and pull-offs. The stateliness of the arrangement presses up tightly against the casual charm of the execution, and the band works the pressure back and forth. The flesh and blood players behind the music are present throughout, revealing themselves through slightly muffed notes, the hum of tubes in amps (particularly noticeable on the very beginning of the opening track) and the barely audible click of effects kicking in. What makes "Confusing Possibilities" the highlight of the disc is the way it seems to draw to a close on a shimmering triplet guitar figure that goes from ornament to foundation as the song finds its legs once again. And then it happens again, the tempo slowing around that same figure, taking the song in yet another direction. The casual yet measured progression from idea to idea belies the tune's title, and this is when the album is at its best, holding your hand on the musical equivalent of a twilit, late-summer stroll.

The danger here, of course, is that an album of modest instrumental numbers is apt to come off as same-y, and that's a fair criticism of Six Parts Seven's approach. If you've spent a goodly amount of time digesting any of the other artists mentioned in this review so far, none of this album is going to come as a revelation. The best way to enjoy it is via a kind of middle distance focus that lets you absorb it without looking directly at it. Or better yet, drop it on someone who hasn't heard all those other bands yet, ideally at a hip Indian restaurant, where it might end up making him rethink his idea of what makes instrumental music interesting. It could happen.

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.

You can't go home again

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

Friendthrens-

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

It's true.

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

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

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

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

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

Love and Jason Kubel,
TPC

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

That is all. More later.

The Books: The joy of cooking

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



And here's that full-length article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think we're all poseurs on this bus

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

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

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

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

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

Too tight to squeeze in ...

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

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

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

New features added

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

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





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

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





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







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







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

That's just good rock and roll.

OTHER ALBUMS MENTIONED IN THIS POST

Battle of the Underage Underground

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

Hey Steve,

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Music Industry: Your days are numbered ...

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

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

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

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