The Pipettes and Happy 200th Post

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



Also, happy 200th post to Signal Eats Noise.

[Balloon drop goes here]

Shows tonight.

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

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

Mouthful of Bees: You can't teach heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feature on The Pines in City Pages

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

Can't resist another Minnesota music LOLcats

Can't resist.

Oh hai.

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

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

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

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

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



It's The LOL Steady.

And the winner is ...

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

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

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

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

She used my head like a revolver...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

SEN [hearts] Parts and Labor

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

Links to Parts and Labor's performance on Sound Opinions

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

[insert 40 years ago today joke here]

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I definitely come from a different era.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rolling Stone gathers Maerz

Former City Pages music editor Melissa Maerz is headed to Rolling Stone

It's weird how nowadays in music journalism, as you move up, it just gets worse. I mean this as no crack on Melissa, who's always struck me as a stand-up gal and great writer, but Rolling Stone hardly seems to be a paper to aspire to anymore. I guess their longer articles can often be good, and I did really enjoy their look at whether George Bush is the worst president in history, or merely one of the top five. Maybe they're like the reverse of Pulse--a music magazine where their political coverage is the best thing they do.

Still, though, their CD reviews have become laughably vanilla in recent years. Look at any given page of the reviews section and you'll find that nine out of ten CDs get three stars. Stars are so ridiculous when it comes to reviews; if you just want to know quickly whether a reviewer liked a CD, read the last sentence. How hard is that?

I always liked Maerz's piece on Friends Like These where she spent 10 days on the road with them.

Best of luck to Ms. Maerz. We at Signal Eats Noise are above mentioning your boyfriend.

How we like music

There's a part in Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" towards the end, after Elizabeth and Darcy have gotten together, where Elizabeth demands to know how he ever fell in love with her in the first place.

"I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation," he says. "It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun."

I often find myself in similar straits when it comes to albums that have become favorites, but it never stops me from wondering, as I first become familiar with a band or an album, if this is going to be a band that I'm going to fall in love with.

There are just so many ways that a band can get at you: maybe you hear a song on the radio one day, and then hear it again and again, and finally wonder who it is. You stick around in the car long enough to find out, then go find out if they have a webpage. Maybe you buy their disc. And then maybe that track you couldn't get out of your head is the only decent one on the disc, and it ends there.

Or maybe you find out that song that you were so taken with is not even the best song on the disc. But then what you thought was the best song is simply the most immediately appealing, and in fact you come to realize that some deep album cut is really the best one, even if by then it's no longer your favorite. Your favorite is that unassuming seventh track--the one you used to skip when you first got the disc.

This is the point at which a band and an album have gotten under your skin: the point when you have a favorite track on an album which you acknowledge is not the best track on the album. Case in point: You'd be hard-pressed to admit that "The Way We Get By" is not obviously the best song on Spoon's Kill the Moonlight. They're a band that's all about swagger and feel, and "The Way We Get By" has been stripped of every unnecessary element, leaving nothing but a knot of perfectly menacing pop. It has one of the finest opening couplets of all time: "We get high in backseats of cars / we break into mobile homes." It has handclaps.

But "Jonathon Fisk" is my favorite song on Kill the Moonlight. The first couple of times through, it seems strikingly unremarkable compared to "The Way We Get By," but repeated listenings reveal a subtle structural and melodic genius. First of all, it's the story of a school bully. The melody of the verse hovers in a tense relationship to the muted guitars behind it, and the tension holds until the third verse, which opens with a line that descends down a major scale. Satisfaction is delayed, and the song is three minutes and fifteen seconds of uneasily riding nerves.

See, this is the kind of thinking I get into when a band really gets under my skin. I've tried to watch it as it happens, but it's so hard to tell. Sometimes I listen through an entire album, and nothing really hooks into me. But then, magically, at the end of the disc, I need to go back and start it again. Building Better Bombs' Freakout Squares was like that for me. Something sticks, is the thing, on albums that are going to turn out to be favorites. A melody in a chorus. Something the drums do.

I probably view these things too piecemeal for my own good. I come from a background of being a musician, so sometimes it's the little musical things that I latch onto, or just the way an album sounds. That's the way it was with Grizzly Bear's Yellow House. Right from the first moments of the first track, the feel that the band imbued the album with is astounding. You can feel the floorboards in the titular house, the glass in the windows, and the Atlantic Ocean washing up drowsily on the beach outside. Behind it, a forest stretches back up a hill, lights floating in it. Sure, maybe someone else gets something completely different from the album, but I can't believe that it won't hit an open-minded listener as redolent of something, and that's an achievement.

So I can say, most of the time, why I think this band or that band is worth your time to check out, but when it comes to how I first discovered that, I feel like Darcy. I was in the middle before I knew it had begun.

First Judas Priest, then video games, now ... emo?

You might as well blame music

I first heard about this from Steve Seel on the Current, and you can go ahead and file it under ridonkulous. Ah well, emo was always kind of a bullshit name anyways, right? I mean, I'm pretty sure what's generally considered the first emo band, Rites of Spring from D.C., predates the Internet actually, and I always think of the good "emo" stuff as being from the late '90s, i.e. Jets to Brazil, The Promise Ring, etc.

The term "emo" has obviously taken on a different connotation nowadays. For instance, a whole lot of shirts over at Threadless are what I would now call "emo." This one, say. And I used to get a lot of CDs that were covered in blackface fonts and had a lot of black and a lot of red and maybe some silver hits, and these were often considered "emo." When exactly did emo go from being cute little Davey von Bohlen and the boys in The Promise Ring to being My Chemical Romance? It's weird, because stuff like The Get Up kids and Promise Ring always seemed to have the straightforwardness of punk, but stripped of all desire to change the world, acknowledging that it was hard enough just to change ourselves. Somehow this got all bound up a kind of dark, black, gothic thing, somewhere between Thursday and Taking Back Sunday. Ha. That's a days of the week joke.

Anywho, it hardly needs to be said that Salt Lake City is off its rocker. Spurs in 5, I say.

CD Review: Digitata :: II Daggers

Digitata
II Daggers
Totally Gross National Product

You could take a look at the component parts of Digitata and think you know what's up: Female vocalist, Rhodes keyboard, squiggly electronics plus live drums equals breathlessly slick electro, right? Not quite. While Maggie Morrison's voice is capable of swooping nimbly from a hushed croon to a catty yowl, she's neither as dispensable as the guest vocalists on most trip-hop tracks, nor as front and center in the mix as all those electro divas with one name (Annie, Kylie, etc.). Instead, her vocals ride in lockstep with Ryan Olson's digital manipulations and Drew Christopherson's crackingly live drums. That duo's done time as the rhythm section of art-hoppers Mel Gibson and the Pants, and it shows. The texture of the album as a whole is kind of smooth peanut butter to MG & the Pants' extra chunky.

The first proper track, "Bangin' Jessica Alba," has been up for streaming on their MySpace page for a while now, but it's an entirely different animal when it makes its way out of quality stereo speakers, and not the shitty little ones on a laptop. What the track has to do with movie star and newly-minted Golden State Warriors fan Alba is anyone's guess, but the groove is certainly thick enough to bang whomever it chooses. The title track that follows is even more darkly menacing and the interweaving components of the song (a skittering flute-like triplet, a pulsing and distorted bass, Morrison's bell-like Rhodes chords) do their best to stay out of the way of the beat's thundering stride. It's not all menacing bass and pounding drums, though. "Marinos Amores" is almost breezy--Morrison's yearning vocals are drawn out over a pastoral backdrop that builds into a slow burn by the song's end.

In a uniformly solid album, though, the two standouts are "Digitata 4 Ever" and "Enter the Palace." The first's hyperkinetic and breathless pace stops up short in the chorus, creating a yawning gap that only makes what surrounds it sound more urgent. And the second features Ryan Olcott (of Mystery Palace, hence the title, I'm guessing) as a male counterpart to Morrison, and the pairing is perfect. Olcott's icy and ghostly vocals seem to grow from the electronics, while Morrison's have just a bit more flint and spark, and are grounded in the woodier tone of the Rhodes. It's most obvious on "Enter the Palace," but that intersection of organic and electronic, analog and digital, is the fulcrum around which Digitata teeters, and II Daggers provides ample evidence that it's a crossroads with a lot of directions to explore.

Buy it from Totally Gross National Product.

Digitata play Wed., May 30 at the Turf Club with Pit er Pat, Mystery Palace and Priestbird. 9:30 p.m. $5. 21+. Corner of University and Snelling Aves., St. Paul. 651.647.0486. turfclub.net. Check out Digitata's MySpace page for more info.

The confusing circumstances of Hockey Night's breakup

My boy Chuck Terhark (Can I say he's my boy? I think so.) over at City Pages reported this week that Hockey Night broke up. A long time ago, apparently, and that was news to some of the members as well, it seems. Here's Chuck's story:

The Hockey Night calls in the Zamboni

This just in: The Hockey Night split up. Two months ago.

News of the local indie-rock quintet's demise would have broken the hearts of fans, especially since the band was rumored to be on the brink of signing a major contract with DFA Records, an imprint partly run by LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy. Except that news never got out. Even the band members were sketchy on the details after it happened.

"We did a really bad job of communicating with each other," says drummer Alex Achen. "It was dudes talking. You know how dudes talk to each other. They're terrible at it."

Then, unbeknownst to the band, the music website Daytrotter.com issued a statement from Paul Sprangers, the group's founder and lead singer, making the breakup official.

"We were operating under that indie-rock idea where it was fun and everybody's buddies," the website quoted Sprangers as saying. "We just want to do it right and we couldn't get things done."

The post went on to say that Sprangers and Scott Wells, Hockey Night's other guitarist, were still signing with DFA. Almost immediately, the message board on Modernradio.com—frequented by Hockey Night members and fans—exploded with criticism, much of it accusing Sprangers and Wells of firing the other three members of the band in order to hog the glory of the major label. The separation was especially underhanded, posters sniffed, because Achen, Sprangers, and Wells had gone to high school together and were supposed to be best friends. As one poster, who calls himself Coach, wrote, "That's integrity my friends, spelled c-o-c-k-s-u-c-k-e-r-s."

Achen admits that the breakup was hard at first, but he looks at the situation with considerably less ire than those anonymous message-board posters. "It wouldn't be inaccurate to say I felt kind of betrayed," he says delicately. "But I don't begrudge Paul and Scott. I would have liked to remain in the band, but there were ills. We weren't being productive."

Neither Scott Wells nor Paul Sprangers responded to CP's requests for comment.

Achen, who says he loved playing in the band but couldn't stand its name, prefers to remain positive. "Hey, at least I'm not in a band called 'the Hockey Night' anymore."

It's too bad it had to end like that. Hockey Night put out one of my favorite albums of 2005, Keep Guessin', and contributed a great track to the one Twin Town High compilation I was involved in. I guess I learned recently the hard way that things usually end badly--if they weren't bad, they wouldn't end, right? So cheers to Hockey Night for a good run, and I hope everybody invovled keeps making great music, one way or another.

Andrew Bird :: Armchair Apocrypha :: Making the album with Ben Durrant

Ben Durrant runs Crazy Beast Studio in Minneapolis and has recorded local artists from Dosh to Roma di Luna, but last year, he began to work with Chicago-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird after Bird began working with Martin Dosh as a duo. His last album, The Mysterious Production of Eggs, was something of a breakout hit for Bird, who first came to prominence as a member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers and later as the leader of Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire. He's a notoriously restless and genre-devouring musician, a virtuoso violinist, a mellifluous and sometimes acid-tongued singer and certainly a decent enough guitarist. When all the diverse elements of his repertoire are combined with a nimble talent for looping parts and harmonies, Bird becomes a virtual one-man band, and Dosh brings many of the same abilities to the table. Translating all this work from a live duo into a full studio album was Durrant's task, and I recently got to sit down and talk with him about his part in making Bird's latest album, Armchair Apocrypha, and his general approach to recording.

Signal Eats Noise: How did you get hooked up with Andrew Bird?

Ben Durrant: It was totally because of Dosh. I don't remember how it first happened. They had been here after tour and went and did a couple songs at Third Ear [Studios, owned by Tom Herbers] and they were still just trying to figure out where and what and what kind of songs and how they were going to work together for recording purposes. So he had told Andrew about working at both places, and I got a call from his manager one day and they wanted to do, like, two days to see how it would go. Martin [Dosh] told me that he's kinda ... not fickle, because fickle wouldn't be the right word ... decisive about what he likes and doesn't like. Then [the manager] was telling me the stories about how, with the last record [The Mysterious Production of Eggs], they had done it three times and scrapped it and started over. So I was thinking, we'll see how it goes, but it probably won't be a match.

But we did "Fiery Crash" first, which is kind of loop-based, so it was sort of along the lines of something that Martin and I would've done on one of his albums, and we just ended up clicking pretty good. A lot of it was that we personally clicked well, too. Liked a lot of the same kind of stuff when we were talking about music. So we did those two days and it ended up going well, so they came back for another five days in a few weeks. All along, you didn't really know--it certainly wasn't one of those things like, we're gonna do these 14 songs. It was very much a just-keep-going, see-which-things-work thing. In the end, most of it worked out really well. There are pieces from different places and people, which made it kind of tricky, within the same song, to meld different places, different people playing different instruments, kind of different songs, but in the end it all jived.

SEN: So there was stuff that had been recorded other places that you then had to mix with stuff that you were recording?

BD: In some cases. "Heretics" was the main one. That one, the drums were done in Chicago with his other drummer. I don't know if that was done before any of this other stuff--I'm not sure of the order of things. And I think they did the bass at Third Ear and then I got the tracks for that. On that one in particular, nothing was labeled. The drums were amazing sounding, but I didn't know what any mic was. I think it was like 20 drum tracks and no idea what any of them were. The left side of the room? An overhead? That one was nuts. "Armchairs" was another one that was a shared one. Most of the basic tracks on that one were from Third Ear. Then we did the vocals and guitars and some of that sort of stuff. I don't think, in the end when I listen to it, it doesn't seem like, that was this and this was this. There's enough mixing of things that it seems unified.

SEN: Well, it seems like it has a sonic identity that's cohesive. Sometimes you hear albums--you know Feist?--Feist's first album had 12 tracks that sounded like they were recorded at eight different places because they were all approached so differently. Armchair Apocrypha seems like it has a unity of purpose to it. Is going from place to place way that he had worked before? Is that his general way of doing things?

BD: It seems like it. Mostly just from hearing stories about the last one. I don't know if it's restlessness or trying to get the right sort of vibe for a particular song--whether that's a different place or a different space, I'm not sure, or people--he definitely seems to be someone who really absorbs the people that he's playing with and the people that are around him. For better or for worse. It seems like he can definitely get ... if he gets in a bad mood or he feels like the takes aren't good, he can definitely get [to feeling like] everything sucks. So, from my standpoint, definitely a chunk of this whole thing was to get him to do his best. To feel like he was doing his best, to get him comfortable. I think a lot of that happened because we jived pretty well and when it wasn't working out, it would be OK.

I think that had a lot to do with him moving around to different places, especially with that last one, because I looked at the credits for that and it was like, Whoa. Every song was different places, although I think in the end David [Boucher] mixed all of it, and he obviously did a great job of making it all seem pretty cohesive. It didn't seem as crazy as you'd think it would be.

SEN: Well, I think the role of the person who's running the boards--especially if someone's particularly sensitive to it--has such a huge effect on the album, because ultimately I feel like albums are a collection of little things. You might have an idea about some big thing, but it's going to be made up of all these little choices and little decisions you make. If you have somebody who's attuned to those things--I've always had to work in situations where you go in and do five tracks or ten tracks and then you're done, because I haven't had the luxury to do it any other way. But, if you've got somebody who wants to make sureeverything's right before they proceed to the next step, then you've gotta have the right people working around you.

So did he come to you with distinct ideas about where he wanted things to go, or did he just feel it out as they progressed? It seems like when you've got somebody who can do so much live by themselves--I mean, by himself he's a whole band, and then you bring in Marty, who's by himself a whole band. You've got two guys like that--is that a lot different than working with somebody who just has one perspective from one instrument?

BD: Oh yeah. On a given song, he had a pretty good idea of how he wanted to approach laying down that song. It wasn't like he had a road map, but it seemed like in a given song, there's a pretty good idea of at least the basic elements of what was going to be there and how they would do it. Would it start with Martin doing a loop? Or was it live drums and he plays guitar and sings? Some of them started with him on the guitar and then the drums came afterwards. Almost every song is done in a completely different way. Overall, he had a pretty good idea of how he wanted to do it, or between the three of us, we would sort of figure out what seemed like the right feel for that particular song, but again, a lot of it sort of morphed along the way and kind of took on the collective identity of all the people that were working on it and along the way it got more streamlined as it went.

The earlier [songs] were still sort of--not only were they [Bird and Dosh] figuring out how they played together, but also how they were going to record together, and we were figuring out how we were going to work together also. So some of the earliest ones, in the end, were the hardest because they took the longest to figure out. Some came together incredibly fast. Like "Simple X": I think we did that from end-to-end in like an hour and a half. The lyrics, I think he wrote really fast. Another funny thing is that there's a line in there about "scattered about from hell to breakfast? My friend--that's a saying he uses all the time and I used that in the course of a conversation that day, talking about all our crap spread around the studio. And he just looked at me and said, "What did you just say?" And I told him and what it meant and everything and he said, "That's the weirdest sounding phrase I've ever heard," and sure enough, he drops it into the song. As we got more in tune to how to approach things, it got a lot faster.

SEN: Aside from Marty, there are a lot of other local musicians on there--Haley Bonar and other people. Did you work with them on that stuff or did their tracks come separate?

BD: Yeah, they came here. The Haley things, he had a pretty good idea of which ones he was going to use her on because I think she had sang on a lot of those songs on their tour, because she had opened for him. Chris [Morrissey, bassist], I think it was the same kind of deal because he was touring with Haley at the time. He didn't play with Andrew, but Andrew knew who he was. Jeremy [Ylvisaker] totally happened by accident. We went to see Haley at the Cedar Cultural Center and Redstart opened [Ylvisaker's band with Wendy Lewis, Mike Lewis, Greg Lewis and Martin Dosh] and we got there right at the end of their set and they were playing one of their real pastoral kind of tunes and Jeremy was playing fingerstyle electric. We'd been working on "Scythian Empires" at the time, and that was one where he wanted to add fingerstyle guitar and he had laid down a good fingerstyle part that worked pretty well, but then when we went to that show, he was like, "I love that; I have to work with that guy." He went back to Chicago with some rough mixes of things, knowing that we wanted to do something on that one song. So when [Bird] came back, Jeremy laid that on there and did some other things that were on songs that didn't get on there, but again, [Ylvisaker's] one of those people that, musically, they hit it off and next thing you know he's in the band and playing on Letterman.

SEN: It seems right, because that community that he's slotted in with here is a group of people who seem very well-suited to what he does. it just seems like a great match with Marty and Jeremy and theRedstart people and Fog. It seems like it a really good fit.

BD: And Andrew plays on one of Fog's tunes on their next thing and I think that he used a loop of one of [Andrew] Broder's things for one of the dance--he just recorded some stuff for a dance performance thing--and I guess he used a couple of Broder's loops for that. So he's become pretty intertwined with that group of people, which totally makes sense. He's just kind of a sponge--he definitely picks up, musically and personally, on the feel of people, so I can totally see why those three [Bird, Dosh and Ylvisaker] fit together so well.

SEN: And for you recording is that the best way for you to work? To just react to what's needed? I know that some engineers have processes and ways to go about things; how do you approach it?

BD: I don't really know how to answer that other than to say that I'm not someone who has a process. Other than that, I couldn't really tell you, but I'm definitely not that.

SEN: What's your background like for recording? Did you study it as a discipline?

BD: No, no. Very much came at it from being a frustrated recording musician, probably like you. The few times I got to record it was 6-8 hours jamming everything in and then you'd move on and you aren't very happy with it. So for me, it was four-tracking to try and record things I was working on and then getting a little Mackie mixer and kind of never really intending to anything all that serious with it and then just gradually, you buy more crap and do more things and you end up somewhere else.

But no, I never studied or anything like that and don't really care to. I'm not all that interested in the technical side of things. It's definitely more coming at it from the musician side of things, and I'm more interested in that. I think, again, that's one of the reasons that we got along, because everybody's had the engineers that are like, "We have to redo this because this moved." That's just not my thing at all. We like the same sort of sounds, and a lot of times I'd play things and dick around with stuff when people are gone. If they like it great, if they don't, fine. So that was part of it, too. Throwing stuff at it and seeing what worked.

SEN: Well, I've done some home recording stuff and I always liked getting the chance to just mess with stuff. I've read some books and things and got a couple tips on starterEQ things, but the exploration of it is nice. A lot of times, you get people who come out of learning to be an engineer and think they're an expert. Well, yeah, you can turn out the same thing that somebody else who went to that school can, but can you do something interesting with it?

BD: Yeah, I'm very averse to that kind of thinking. Most stuff I just don't like the way it sounds; it sounds boring. Or it sounds--I remember when we were getting the mastering done on this CD, which, the first time through we ended up sending it back because we didn't think it quite was right, but I remember telling the person that we wanted it to sound good on the radio, but to not sound radio-y, you know what I mean? There's just this certain kind of radio-y sound that I personally hate. And other people, that's the deal. But that's not my cup of tea.

SEN: Yeah--the album's got such a nice, warm--warm is the kind of thing that when I listen to stuff, that's a lot of what I like to get out of things: a sense of place about it, a character, and that warmth, which is sort of antithetical to what you hear on radio-ready stuff. It's crisp and clean, cold. Here's the guitar, here's the kick drum.

BD: I remember afterwards listening to [Armchair Apocrypha] and thinking that it didn't jump at you in the same way that Eggs does. Both the songs and the way that it was done. I remember sitting down and listening to it all the way through and thinking that it doesn't say, "Pay attention to me," in the same way that that one does. And that was all right. At least for my way of thinking, that it rewards sitting down and listening to in its entirety. Ideally a couple of times and that then you really start to get the layering of things. And I think it's really sort of comforting if you can do that. But if you're wanting it to bonk, it just doesn't. Some of the songs are that way, but I think even in the way it's mixed, it's maybe not as glossy and that's me, I guess.

SEN: It seems like a good match for his stuff, because I know that I had at least one Bowl of Fire CD and I'd heard stuff on and off, and it never really totally grabbed me. I saw him at the Pitchfork Music Festival two years ago and that was the first time where I realized--he's an amazing singer and I got more of an appreciation for the looping thing, but then it takes time. Despite the fact that his stuff is really pretty--you know, it's not difficult--he's got a great voice, his stuff is a little elusive. It's not the type of music that's gonna jump up and grab you and say, "This is what I am," and I think matching those things is a good thing for his stuff.

BD: Exactly, because he's a little elusive, too. It just makes sense that his music would be also. I think that's the same reason why he changes stuff live so much, because he gets bored with it. He wants to keep it interesting for him because I think if he's not interested--and this was true for recording, too--he's got to be in the right mind frame to give it up. And seeing him live, too, you can tell--at least I can--when he's in the groove or not.

SEN: Is it strange for you to have done an album where it's getting so much attention? Where you can read reviews of it all over the web and in major publications? Have you done anything that was like that before?

BD: No. It's really strange. I wouldn't have at all been surprised if it didn't get very good reviews. I think I personally was prepared for that and I think he was, too. Just because it is pretty different--there's guitars and it's in some ways kind of more indie and in other ways is a little more accessible. Whatever, it's hard to describe. But I was prepared for a lot of people being like, "What's with the guitar? Why isn't there more violins or whatever?" I hadn't listened to it in six months; I think that was part of it, too. When we got done, I was like, "It's done; I don't want to obsess about it." Didn't want to think about it, and how it would end up getting reviewed. It is what it is. It just represents this period of six months and, at least for me, a lot of work. So yeah, it's been wild, but it doesn't affect me day-to-day. It's been interesting ... and my mom is excited.

SEN: Going back to working with Dosh and Ylvisaker, it's great to hear that he's so able to be influenced by what happens around him. I think that's a great quality--it can be a difficult quality, like you said, but it's really good to be able to have so that you can constantly change what you're doing and he's already been like that through his career.

BD: That was definitely the most fun thing about it: He's totally not afraid to just scrap things. There's different versions of most of that stuff, some of which started out a lot more like the older stuff. Whether it's from different environments or Marty or me--you know, I like distorted guitars--most of the stuff on there is him playing my old Jag[uar]. It just kind of lends itself to a certain thing and next thing you know, "Dark Matter" is more that kind of song. There's another version that was more like the old one, and it's fun with people like that that are not afraid of trying things different ways, whether it's new instruments or new sounds. Speed, slowing down, all that stuff is fun, because most people are so ...

SEN: Well, I think with most people you get attached to a certain sound you have an idea for and you get so tenacious with it, you don't want to let it go. It's tough, it's one of those upper level things about making creative stuff that you can't just teach somebody to be able to give up stuff like that. You either need to be like that or just sort of acquire through experience that that's the best way to work. You're never going to go study music and have them tell you to just give up on an arrangement and do something else. It's such a meta way to think about this--how do you think about thinking about this stuff? To have somebody with that ability is great.

BD: Yeah, the idea of not being that precious about things and to just do it this whole different way was pretty neat. But then there were things that got scrapped that I still don't think should have gotten scrapped and there was this one song ("Sycophants") that was totally one of my favorites, that got scratched and sort of replaced with another one, "Cataracts." When I saw him in New York I told him, "Taking that off there was a bad idea, that was a mistake," and he said, "Yeah, in hindsight we would have cut that one and kept the other one on there." Then there was another one--and I still bug him about this, too--another version of "Sparrows" that's completely different and super-sparse and that's still my favorite of all the stuff and it didn't end up on there because they wanted something a little more upbeat. Not that I don't like the one that's on there; I like that one a lot.

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.

Veronica Mars cancelled

All right, apparently I'm late to this party, but it's shitty that the CW pulled the plug on Veronica Mars. Apparently, creator Rob Thomas had pitched a possible story jump arc for next season which would leave the rest of Veronica's college career to the imagination, and jump forward to Veronica's first year at the FBI academy. Unfortunately, it looks like they didn't go for it.

A shame really, that we're not going to get to see Veronica at the Academy, but I have to say the college thing wasn't going so well. Havrilesky is right: Veronica's better than finding the lost football playbook. When the show was based in high school, it was tapping into the long line of great high school shows like Freaks and Geeks and, to some extent, The Wonder Years. The drama on those shows could be ramped up so high because we forgive teenagers their trespasses into the realm of hysterics because they are, first and foremost, the most solipsistic creatures on the planet. Rob Thomas crafted the stories for the first two years out of a fantastic blend of real world tragedy (Lilly's murder, the bus crash) and social anxiety (Veronica's balancing act at Neptune High's periphery, her everyday problems with relationships), conflating and equating the two in the process, and you believed it. Thomas was very much in touch with the way high schoolers have this sense that everything happens to them, and are never very good at telling the difference between a real disaster and their own problems.

Witness the way Logan stumbled again and again into trouble without ever learning his lesson. When he was a senior in high school, it was almost endearing to the viewers, even as it was alternately threatening and seductive to Veronica. Now that he's in college, though? His puppy dog eyes and inability to man up have worn thin.

And then there's Veronica herself, a character in the model of Jimmy McNulty from the Wire in that she's amazingly good at her job--taking her job as sleuthing, getting revenge and doing it all while looking great--and absolutely abysmal at personal relationships. She keeps being drawn to the bad boys, and even when she isn't--that is, when she was with Duncan or during her current dalliance with Piz--she's clearly ill-suited to them. It's a masterful tone that's been struck in the series: she's a classic perfectionist who's completely out of her element when forced to yield to someone else's needs and desires.

If you haven't yet, you should really check out the series on DVD. Season 1is maybe the better of the two, although Season 2does have a couple of the best episodes, like the one where Wallace and Veronica visit Hearst College.

To make this at least somewhat music-related, I should mention that VM has always done a great job with music. Britt Daniel from Spoon appeared as a cafe customer who sings a karaoke version of "Veronica" by Elvis Costello and they've also championed (albeit slyly) the music of Austin's Cotton Mather, a band that put out one absolutely killer album called Kontikiback in 1997. It's just about the best slice of Beatles-tinged indie psychedlia you could imagine, with Robert Harrison's lyrical world populated by strange characters like Aurora Bori Alice and places like the Church of Wilson. They first popped up in VM at the end of the first season, where their song "Lily Dreams On" played over the last scene, and then they popped up again two weeks ago. Paul Rudd appeared as a quasi-washed up rocker who was still peddling the songs written by his dead bandmate when he came to Hearst College to play a show. Of course, the tapes he used as backing tracks (well, they were CDs, actually) were stolen and Veronica had to find them. When she did, they included a disc labeled "New Crap," and when she put it on, what should come out but a re-recorded version of "My Before and After" by--you got it--Cotton Mather.

Robert Harrison is currently playing with a group called Future Clouds and Radar, and I just got their CD last week. Expect a review soon.

[sigh] I'll miss Vron-vron. Personally, I think it's all the fault of that ridiculous outfit they made Kristen Bell wear for the promos.

Housecleaning

I spent a couple hours today going back through all the posts on here and labeling them in some kind of way that makes sense, so now you can move your eyes slightly to the right and see a list of topics like CD Reviews, Show Reviews and my personal favorite, Uncategorizable. Those are the things that weren't completely off-topic (that'd be Non-Music Related), but nor were they strictly related to a particular album or show. Hopefully, this will make everything just way easier to deal with.

Coming soon: review of II Daggers by Digitata and a review of the Arcade Fire show in Chicago last Saturday, if I can ever figure out what I have to say about them, precisely.

Tapes 'n' Tapes to play Urban Outfitters

Hey, just got word that hometown heroes Tapes 'n' Tapes will be playing at the Urban Outfitters on Hennepin in Uptown on June 5 at 7 p.m. as a benefit for the Current. It's all part of a campaign called Free Yr Radio (which means, I believe, Free Your Radio) that's been mounted by Urban Outfitters and Toyota (?!) to support non-commercial radio stations across the country. I love the Current, guys, but you might want to consider some non-commercial radio stations whose coffers are a little less full. I'm just saying. Still though, we're talking the lesser of two goods here.

Tapes 'n' Tapes are riding a wave of sponsorship deals after landing on the soundtrack to 2K Sports' MLB 2K7 and headlining the national tour package put together to promote said soundtrack. You might have heard of a couple of the other bands on the soundtrack: Nirvana, The Pixies and others make appearances. I guess Nirvana weren't available for the tour.

So now they're going to be playing a hometown shindig at UO that's co-sponsored by Toyota. Apparently, you can also win a car or something. Details (as well as tickets you can print out for free entry to the show) are available over at freeyrradio.com.