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Straight to Video
Rock Art Rock
The Decemberists
September 19, 2009
Terminal 5, New York, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "The Decemberists played a special one night 'lottery show,' where the songs played were picked at random by a master of ceremonies, played by John Wesley Harding..."
Ra Ra Riot
April 4, 2009
Webster Hall, New York City, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "This show was, at the time, the biggest one Ra Ra Riot had sold out as headliners, and it was clear to me after watching it that the band is destined for even bigger and better things..."
Florence and the Machine
October 28, 2009
Bowery Ballroom, New York City, NY
By Amanda Hatfield "Florence Welsh and her backing band delighted and mesmerized a sold-out crowd at Bowery in her first official NY headlining show..."
Dirty Projectors
July 19, 2009
Williamsburg Waterfront (Brooklyn, NY)
By Amanda Hatfield "I was skeptical about how well Dirty Projectors' gorgeous, complex vocal harmonies would carry over outdoors, standing under hot sunshine..."
See more in the Rock Art Rock gallery.
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Search results for: Jive
Burial: Untrue
Burial
Untrue
(Hyperdub, 2007)
I blame LCD Soundsystem, frankly. I was mad at James Murphy’s effortless ascent to the top scrap of the techno heap for the first half of the decade. So what if this aging hipster could program his 808? He couldn’t bring it to life. Then he did, with Sound of Silver, which has five good songs in a row: A funny, rave-wise David Byrne impression, a typical DFA cowbell jam, a typical Murphy sarcastic rant with an actual hook, a sappy earbud ballad, and one classic, “All My Friends”—seven minutes of Steve Reich-like bliss that could’ve been groomed into a Killers hit. Then Murphy gave up the deep cuts and set his studio on auto-masterpiece before sitting back in for the mediocre “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down”, a wan piano ballad out of his métier which helped sour techno for me in 2007. But then everyone started exclaiming, “Burial! He’s done it again.” I didn’t look up until the word “Maxinquaye” was being thrown around. Suddenly, I needed to know everything about dubstep—who was this guy that dare challenge the champion on my desert island of trip-hop?
Sure enough, I threw on Untrue and was underwhelmed. I loved the title and the great drum sounds, but what else was there? Any anonymous studio tech could fashion such a pristine clockwork tick from his rhythm makers, but like the case of Mr. Murphy, I didn’t hear them sing. And after a month of pressure, on-off tries, and contrarian dares, I left Untrue—which I ultimately found repetitive and underdeveloped—off my year-end list and filed it.
Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears
Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears
Tell ’Em What Your Name Is!
(Lost Highway, 2009)
Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears have been tearing up the clubs of Austin, TX for about two years with a sharp, horn-driven sound that recalls the glory days of American soul music. At last year’s SXSW, they started a buzz that resulted in a deal with Lost Highway, and their self-titled debut, a four-song EP—on vinyl, no less—promised great things. The standout track of Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears was “Bitch, I Love You.” Its title was deliberately provocative, but it was a finely tuned piece of retro soul. If you closed your eyes, you’d swear that you were in the presence of James Brown and the Famous Flames in their early days, all the rough edges still intact. Lewis shrieked the lyrics with a sexy, dangerous aura that was show-stopping. The raw power of his vocals and the force of the Honeybears was brilliant, with the searing lead guitar of Zach Ernst giving Lewis the kind of support every singer dreams of.
Tell ’Em What Your Name Is! follows up their promising EP with 10 tracks that smoke and sizzle like the fuse on a stick of dynamite. They don’t always ignite, but even the tracks that sound tossed off display a solid mastery of groove and grit. Most of the album was cut live in the studio, and the tracks have the feel of a live gig. “Gunpowder” leads off channeling Junior Walker and the All Stars, with a hint of Chuck Berry and Otis Redding tossed in for good measure. Lewis, who belts out an incomprehensible lyric with unrestrained energy, leads this blistering Motown-meets-Memphis mash-up. Ian Varley’s big ominous organ, Ernst’s clattering guitar, and Grupo Fantasma’s sharp horn parts ride a sweaty, dinosaur stomping beat. “Big Booty Woman” is swinging Chicago blues gone country with a hint of Cab Calloway’s big band panache in the call-and-response between Lewis and the band. Bill Stevenson’s bluesy bassline, Grupo Fantasma’s unruly horns, and Varley’s organ build to a satisfying climax. “Boogie” sounds like an improvised jam, a three-minute frenzy of hip-shakin’ South Side jive with a punky blues vibe. “Get Yo Shit” is another showcase for Lewis’s Memphis soul style—a half-talking, half-screaming scorcher with a shot of nasty humor on the side. When his back door woman tells him he never buys her anything, Lewis replies, “I bought you a box of chicken, uh, but I ate it on the way over…” He heads for the door with a wink and a smirk while the band plays a stinging getaway groove.
Living Things
Living Things
Habeas Corpus
(Jive, 2009)
Oddly storied quartet Living Things have run into all kinds of bad luck in the original failing industry, but November 4th brought the worst of all with regards to their artistic output: Obama won. To say this rendered their new album’s Guantanamo-protest title and lyrics like “Glory days are over / Yeah, the glory days are gone” almost as unfashionable as… well, their music, is an understatement.
Songs called “Mercedes Marxist”, “Snake Oil Man”, and “The Kingdom Will Fall” are a bit late. While they would’ve made dandy supplements to Kerry’s presidential bid, they register in this day as big duhs attached to undeniable riffs. But “Cost of Living” is ridiculous—“Money don’t solve your blues.” Tell that to the foreclosure victims, Lillian. It goes on to satirize religious hypocrisy, which is so yesterday. Even Miley Cyrus did a global warming song, dudes. Time to shift paradigms.
A weird, misunderstood band to begin with, brothers Lillian, Bosh, and Eve Berlin (real names) raised a few eyebrows five years ago with the grungy Black Skies in Broad Daylight, a really cool title with a badass cover, the Virgin Mary flanking an A-bomb. That album never saw the light of day in the US, but a neutered and surprisingly improved reshuffle called Ahead of the Lions was released a year later to little notice. A shame because one of the additions was “Bom Bom Bom”, a sarcastic “Born in the USA” for the Iraq years with an indelible glam riff, and one of the most addictive singles of the decade. Even a good-natured iPod endorsement couldn’t scare up the numbers to please their label. So what’s an out-of-time grunge-glam amalgam who sing about writs doing there?
“Let It Rain” is a good hint. The first single from Habeas Corpus isn’t likely to be topped by anything else on AOR in the first quarter of 2009, with deft changes and a catchy, soaring chorus topped by an even catchier one that goes “Sky’s going black / Let’s celebrate.” Mass cynicism is rarely transmuted with such avalanching sweetness, let alone on a major label. It’s not as great as “Bom Bom Bom”, but it’s close enough and has more notes. Beneath all the autoerotic second-coming-of-Nevermind hype, what Living Things do is make outrageously good music from heavily Pro Tooled and uninteresting elements.
They use the same Gary Glitter shuffle as their two best singles on half the tracks here, probably scribbled into their contract by an “I Kissed a Girl”-hungry Jive, always to the same pleasures and same chopped-crunch effect. Those money and kingdom songs work it to especially good effect, stealing the backup chorines from Marilyn Manson’s amusing Mechanical Animals to sell their corruption-obsessed gospel. And four-on-the-floor ones rock too: “Oxygen” and opener “Brass Knuckles” have more foot than the last album’s misleadingly metallic “Bombs Below.” And even though they refuse to let up grousing about “working for the chain gang,” they know the only slogan that matters carries from presidency to presidency, context to context: “Everybody let’s keep the peace.”
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Tags: Living Things, Habeas Corpus, Jive Records
Read more articles like this:
Joni Mitchell: Court and Spark
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
* * *
A Broader Sensibility
Daily Previews and Reviews of the Week’s Events
It’s the time of year again, when the weather turns crisp and brisk in New York City, leaves begin to fall to the ground, visions of the underworld start to surface in storefronts, and the streets brim with more cool kids than there’s even room for on any given normal weekend in downtown Manhattan. Yes, it’s the CMJ Music Marathon, 2008 style, where your pricey badge will mean next to nothing and you’ll be left out in the cold at least a few times wondering if you have time to hop on the train to get to Brooklyn for that other show. But, you know what: None of that matters because it’s New York fuckin’ City, and for five days straight, no matter what, you’re going to consume tons of beer, tons of bands, and probably walk away from it all with some sort of cold that’ll put you out for the week following, all in the name of experiencing sounds from the best up-and-coming bands in the country and beyond in one of the greatest places in the world to see live music.
Crawdaddy! is tossing itself into the mayhem of this year’s festival to check out panels, films, and the music being offered up. Each page here represents one full day of the festival, where we’ve provided some preview highlights we’re looking forward to, and then we’ll be reporting back each following morning with what we saw the previous day before. No real agenda, no real cause. We’re gonna go with the flow and see how we emerge from the festival insanity that is CMJ.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Crybaby, Cry (Old Enough to Know Better)
Around the time I got my first electric guitar, maybe even on the same holiday (relatives are conspiratorial that way), I got my first guitar effect. It was a Crybaby wah-wah pedal.
Within a few days of owning the pedal, I had neatly written at least three porno soundtracks. Not bad considering I had never seen a porno let alone heard the soundtrack to one. But my friend Jeff had, and he smartly pointed out that my repetitive koo-whacka-whacka’s reminded him of the videos his older brother had stashed in the closet. I asked for proof.
Several eye-popping hours later, I replied listing all the guitar players I knew who used a wah. I started with Jimi Hendrix and ended with Jimmy Page. Okay, it was a short list but I was a kid, really, and I was still in my Ace Frehley, Angus Young phase. Kiss wasn’t a wah guitar band, and Angus could never stand in one place long enough to operate a pedal. But I felt Hendrix, Robin Trower, and Jimmy Page should be enough to convince anyone that wah pedals were cool.
Bo Diddley: The Originator
By now the word’s been heard that rock ‘n’ roll lost the Originator last month when Bo Diddley left this earth. The supersonic rock man’s outlaw style and attitude will be missed: He was an innovator, a gunslinger, a road runner, and an M-A-N (and when he put a woman up front on guitar he was the first to do that too). Of course, it’s the famous beat he rocked that he’ll be most remembered by—and it’s not one that will fade away anytime soon. Bo Diddley, as well as “Bo Diddley”, his signature song with the heavy monster beat, were both crucial to the origin of rock ‘n’ roll, and this month’s edition of Origin of Song is dedicated to both of them.
Opinions vary so widely on how he got his name that even Diddley told his biographer George R. White, “I would love to know where that sucker came from.” He generally went with a version that said school pals christened him Bo Diddley because it means “bad boy”; other versions say his boxing buddies named him, or maybe it was harmonica player Billy Boy Arnold. Diddley always maintained that the name was in no way a nod to the one-stringed instrument the diddley-bow, though in one metaphysical interpretation he says his mother told him a story of a traveling song-and-dance man named Bo Diddley and that for his whole life, old folks would come up to him and ask, “…where you been all these years?” much to his confusion. He went on to tell White that 30 or 40 years from now, “…when I die and leave here, I am liable to go and come back in an Indian.”
William F. Gibbs
William F. Gibbs
My Fellow Sophisticates
(Old Man Records, 2008)
William F. Gibbs kicks off his debut recording with the dark, rollicking “Darling, You Were Beautiful Once”, a tune that sounds like Cab Calloway and Tom Waits trading punches in a Kansas City honky-tonk during a total eclipse of the moon as the power fails and the band goes falling down a flight of stairs while Vanilla Ice stands in the background mumbling bitter recriminations. Chuck Lichtenberg’s dissolute piano adds to the tune’s stygian feel. “Come Back to Me (for My Love)” is a song that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a 1940s Bing Crosby flick, with Gibbs crooning poetically about the heartless Juliet that he still loves. Then there’s a sudden shift, a time warp if you will, and the chorus soars into the psychedelic ’60s with cascading, Beatlesque harmonies oohing and aaahing and some dreamy keyboard effects rising up like the bubbles in a glass of pink champagne. “Operate” keeps the Beatle thing going with a vocal that suggests McCartney at his most sincerely soulful, with a slide guitar solo that’s pure George Harrison.
“LA Money”, a fantasy of West Coast excess, gets a smooth Memphis soul arrangement. This time Lichtenberg’s Hammond B3 has a restrained, churchy feel, while Gibbs turns in a subtle Al Green-influenced vocal with hints of mortality and repentance in the lyric. Then it’s back to the ’50s for the rockabilly of “Here Comes Your Steamboat Brother!, Here Comes Your Freightline Sister!” and back even further for “Brother Jon!”, a taste of jumpin’ jive that brings to mind a smoky Paris cabaret in the heady days just after World War II. Gibbs’ guitar on “Here Comes Your Steamboat” combines bass twang, jittery high string fills, and great female backing vocals from Stephanie Morgan, while on “Brother Jon!” the guitar has a pleasing, jazzy influence with just enough grit to remind you that it’s 2008, not 1948. Lichtenberg’s piano adds plenty of boozy energy to the playing.
Lee Michaels’ 5th
Lee Michaels
5th
(A&M Records, 1971)
I’ve been a car radio listener for as far back as I can remember: It’s part of the reason I’m a prisoner of rock ‘n’ roll, and I expect I’ll keep listening as long as vehicles are outfitted with am/fm push buttons.
If ever you’ve cruised the radio and eventually settled on the oldies station, then you’ve probably heard “Do You Know What I Mean.” It’s a standout among the standard, finite tracks on the playlist of your local, computerized, oldies radio station. It plays frequently, nestled somewhere in between “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay”, “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)”, and “Killing Me Softly With His Song.”
Rock the Bells at Shoreline Amphitheatre, SF
by: Marissa G. Muller
August 9th at Shoreline Amphitheatre, San Francisco
“What you’re about to see… is what we’ve been trying to put together for a while: Peace, love, unity. This is what this music is about.” In an act of unity, a banner falls from the top of the stage as KRS-One, host of Rock the Bells, announces this year’s headliners: Nas and Damian Marley. Representing two segments of hip-hop culture, a portrait of Nas against Brooklyn’s skyline and a snapshot of Marley in front of Kingston’s horizon provided the backdrop for their performance and the final act of Rock the Bells on the final night of the 2009 tour.
“Hip-hop is dead,” Nas chanted as he swaggered onto the main stage for his shared set with Marley, the “Jamrock” prodigy. With a populous band ensemble and a twirling Rastafarian flag, Nas reminded the crowd of an era when the mainstream rejected hip-hop, when the game was about delivering a message instead of an advertisement, when hip-hop spoke for the community instead of the corporations who commission it. “Reminiscin’ when it wasn’t all business / If it got where it started / So we all gather here for the dearly departed.” Spitting rhymes to a crowd of over 10,000 people, Nas berated the “rap culture” hip-hop has become throughout tracks like “One Mic”, “Made You Look”, and “Road to Zion”, his duet with Marley off their new collaborative album, Distant Relatives. While Nas commanded the crowd’s attention for his more popular songs like “The World Is Yours”, Marley got them to move. Covering a slew of his legendary father’s discography, Damian jived with two frenetic vocalists and the Roots’ guitarist, Captain Kirk Douglas, who wailed electric blues throughout his set. Dancing around on stage with meters of bouncing dreadlocks, he finished off the evening with “One Love.” While Nas and Marley’s pleas of unity may have been romantic, their sentiments were echoed by other performers throughout the day.
read more
by: Marissa G. Muller
published: August 14, 2009 in column: It Shows
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