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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: Sparks
Video: Voxhaul Broadcast, “Flickering Sparks”
performed February 28, 2008 at Mezzanine, San Francisco, CA
Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash
The List
(Manhattan, 2009)
Rosanne Cash has been going her own non-country music way for almost 20 years. She’s proved herself to be a formidable pop singer-songwriter, albeit one with a folky, confessional tone. Her last opus, Black Cadillac, was written after the death of her father, mother, and stepmother, June Carter Cash. Shortly thereafter, Cash had her own brush with mortality when a non-malignant growth was removed from her brain. After she recovered, she started planning to make The List, her first “country” album since King’s Record Shop in 1987.
The album is a collection of covers—tunes that provided the foundation for the working-class music that ruled the airwaves before Nashville discovered pop crossover, demographic studies, and marketing campaigns. When she was 18, Johnny Cash gave her a list of 100 essential country and folk songs, trying to wean her off a steady diet of Beatles and Beach Boys singles. Looking back at Rosanne’s career, it’s obvious that the lesson was learned, even though she made country music with plenty of obvious rock and pop influences.
Jack Logan: Bulk
Jack Logan
Bulk
(Medium Cool / Twin/Tone, 1994)
Bulk is one of those golden records of lore, the kind that languish in relative obscurity despite the fact that once someone happens upon it they fall instantly for its endearing surplus of cheerless mystery and loner laments. Yep, this record is one huge downer, but if being down is your thing, Bulk is almost unsurpassed in its pursuit of all things bleak. Upon its release, the record was met with a lot of critical acclaim but it didn’t get much further than that. Currently out of print, let’s consider this Ex Post Facto my plea for re-releasing the record so it can be celebrated by all once more.
Bulk is a two-CD project by Jack Logan who, in 1993, sent Peter Jesperson (responsible for the early career of the Replacements) a prolific 600 home-recorded songs that he’d documented since 1979 with a rotating cast of musician friends he hung around with in a town just outside of Athens, Georgia after he was done with his day job as an auto mechanic. Jesperson quickly signed Logan to his label, and thereafter, they whittled down 600 songs to the 42 that appear on Bulk—a masterful lo-fi excursion through droning Southern gothic ballads and blotter-enhanced meditations. The narratives of the small town drifters and losers found on this record permeate the atmosphere like the stench of whiskey, stale smoke, and decaying patrons of a dive bar adorned with a jukebox playing an array of proto-punk, listless country-blues, and ’60s-inspired white-boy rockers. Logan treats his down-and-out cast with the humility of a fiction writer like Raymond Carver, and we, in turn, feel all the empathy in the world for these crusty characters.
Handsome Family: “After We Shot the Grizzly”
The nice thing about shocking people is that it’s very capitalist these days. It’s still possible, but you have to be clever in the business and you’re on your own. Since Eminem (“I know you’re probably tired of hearing about my mom”) and Marilyn Manson (“Arma-Goddamn-Motherfuckin-Geddon”) records aren’t winning any respect for their tired attempts to make the public consciousness blink like they used to, I bring up the Handsome Family. Playfully spiky spouses Brett and Rennie Sparks play country-gothic paeans to everything gruesome or, at the very least, depressing.
Between Rennie (author of short story collection Evil, which features, among other things, abortion attempts via falling down stairs and a tenant serving the homeless woman on her porch a glass of milk with ground-up glass in it) and her husband (who’s allegedly spent time in the psych ward), they’ve nailed an old-fashioned, on-the-surface sound and look fit for the Grand Ole Opry, with peasant dresses and thick Buddy Holly rim glasses respectively. But the underneath is far from Music Row, Nashville: Tales of drug dependency, cannibalism, arson, and Nikola Tesla starving himself to death in a hotel room… oh, and good old murder.
“After We Shot the Grizzly”, off the duo’s high-watermark Last Days of Wonder, is a beaming example of their grotesque, vaudevillian music. The tune begins with an increasingly dire list of bummers from the narrator’s expedition: Crashed airship, lost compass, dead radio (and grizzly). The humorously overblown story comes off like the Swiss Family Robinson—what limestone cave are they vacationing by that has both horses and bears?—before settling into a fantastical parody of Survivor. Check out the chilling cruelty of this lyric: “The captain caught a fever / We tied him to a tree / We stared into the fire / And tried not to hear his screams.”
David Bazan
David Bazan
Curse Your Branches
(Barsuk, 2009)
“Wait just a minute,” he sings, having waited but one modest verse into his debut solo LP to tear asunder humanity’s relationship with God. “You expect me to believe,” the man asks, “That all this misbehaving / Grew from one enchanted tree?” This ain’t your preacher’s David Bazan.
The former Pedro the Lion frontman, after a truncated retelling of Adam and Eve’s fall in album opener “Hard to Be”, divulges that he’s been on a spiritual sabbatical. The oft-questioning but previously pious 33 year old, long the fellowship troublemaker, has “swung the tassel to the left side of [his] cap, knowing after graduation there would be no going back.” Ignorance, it would seem, is no longer bliss.
The Handsome Family at Bottom of the Hill, SF
The Handsome Family
July 23rd at Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco
From the first guttural notes unleashed by the fairly intimidating Brett Sparks, I knew the Handsome Family was going to give me what I wanted. The night outside was thick and damp with fog, the sort of evening that makes you want to hunker down somewhere dark and protected, a perfect backdrop for the husband and wife duo’s brand of Southern Gothic country music. Brett and Rennie Sparks have played under the Handsome Family moniker since 1993, and are joined onstage by a drummer and a fiddle/bass player. And on this night, they were also joined by Ralph Carney on some songs, a wind instrumentalist best known for his longtime association with Tom Waits, who played, among other things, a very long flute, bringing some ambient, jazzy accents to their Carter Family-influenced tunes. Rennie, who pens the lyrics and trades duties on guitar and banjo, peppered their set with near constant chatter at the audience between songs, at ease up there alongside her husband, directing at Brett quips like, “That’s the first time you’ve touched me in over 20 years,” and receiving subsequent snickers from the audience. Despite the fact that they are from Chicago, which casts their music in a refined, subversive urbanity, it’s also steeped with an Appalachian flavor that guides their darker narrative tales. They tell the sort of stories that live among the natural splendor of a riddled America—think a deserted dirt lane by moonlight, folklore storytelling on a sagging front porch, the beauty and paranoia that resides in a spider spinning its web. Nature, both in its literal and symbolic meaning, is entrenched in this music. They also sing about love, most thoroughly expressed on their latest release, Honey Moon.
Intrigue and mystique cloaks the Handsome Family. Brett has faced the demons of his own mental problems, and that deep, raw feeling resonates in his vocal delivery of the songs. His baritone is an unfurling growl, a tempered twang, and a roar all at once; he has the ability to change his voice to fit the composition, and their best moments are when husband and wife harmonize. They have a unique way of fitting their voices together, trading off on melody and harmony even within the course of one song. For a night that almost beat me down, keeping me alone inside the comfort of my apartment, turns out the deeply authentic American music of the Handsome Family was exactly the kind of company I was craving.
Magik Markers
Magik Markers
Balf Quarry
(Drag City, 2009)
I loved the Magik Markers’ 2007 full-length Boss, and I’m not ashamed to say why: It sounded like Sylvia Plath fronting Sonic Youth. Rife with allusions both musical and literary (John Updike!), a myriad of old-fashioned amp noises that were sucked dry back when Pavement made them, and a dry stance between avant-garde sound-blattering and blistering garage, the art-enveloped duo seemed like they had it together and would move onto something else pretty soon.
The big surprise with Balf Quarry is that they’ve stagnated and seem pretty comfortable in no-chord purgatory. There are less spiky moves though; only one of the new tracks exceeds six minutes, and rather than testing their audience with a minute of feedback like Boss opener “Axis Mundi”, they settle into a Neil Young-style lumber just out the gate with the low-rent fuzz chug of “Risperdal.” Elisa Ambrogio lurks behind this track, opting for droning grind-blues rather than a witchy spell. Her slightly off-key howling is more on keel with the Kills’ Alison Mosshart than a distinct iconoclast like PJ Harvey or Karen O. Here she’s content to repeat herself, with her most PJ-like track yet, the swampy “Don’t Talk in Your Sleep”, which rides a mutated wah vamp and a rudimentary hip-hop beat.
NOFX
NOFX
Coaster
(Fat Wreck Chords, 2009)
2009. The number. Another summer. Sound of… well, in 1989, it was the funky drummer. In 1999, it was Y2K hype. Remember? Web URLs as album titles (www.thug.com is a favorite), Will Smith sampling the Clash for not-quite-a-smash “Will 2K” (on an album called Willennium no less). And in 2009, the decade-shedding skin du jour is, with the release of NOFX’s Coaster, mocking the end of the music industry. One of their meanest jokes yet, the band points out their own commodity’s uselessness by calling their new album a coaster before I can, and showing how well it complements a scotch on the cover, with the disc itself dressed like the titular drink holder. The vinyl one’s called Frisbee. And in the climactic song here, “One Million Coasters” (“One Million Frisbees” on vinyl I assume?), Fat Mike suggests they’d make great “guardrail reflectors” and “Christmas ornaments.” So long, labels.
And it’s easy to believe their humorous disdain, because they play like they couldn’t care less. They play punk-pop that went out of style three waves ago; Green Day’s trying to replicate the Who now, but everyone else is wearing eyeliner. Actually, Green Day are too. NOFX is still about beer, lesbians, speed; essentially Beavis and Butthead rock, without much of an angle this time. Having ousted Bush and the Republicans after a heavy few years of protest-rock and MoveOn.org benefit paraphernalia, mostly bored with ska (though they still indulge from time to time, not that that’s hip either), they settle for one jazz-inflected bouncer (“I Am an Alcoholic”) and scale back even the metal-ish shredding of last round’s Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing.
The Handsome Family
The Handsome Family
Honey Moon
(Carrot Top, 2009)
The Handsome Family plays country music, but don’t expect them to appear at the Grand Ole Opry anytime soon. While their music is grown in the mulch of the old-time ballads and mountain folk songs that are the foundation of the country genre, they have an arty cosmopolitan aura that’s all their own. They’re mining a vein that is seldom prospected by today’s country artists, with the possible exception of bluegrass bands.
The Handsome Family is Brett Sparks, composer, singer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer, and his wife and songwriting partner Rennie Sparks, lyricist, Autoharp player, and harmony vocalist. The music is country, but it tends to be lethargic. It glories in solemn, measured tempos and subject matter that tends toward life’s other side, as Hank, Sr. once sang: Heartbreak, depression, decay, and implied ecological disasters abound. Brett’s baritone is so low it sounds like the earth rumbling, and it gives every tune an oracular presence that’s amply backed up by Rennie’s mystifying lyrics, which meld poetic impulses and everyday language with an effortless grace.
Music and a Woman’s Right to Choose
by: Howard Wyman
It wasn’t that the justices had warm, fuzzy feelings about abortion, or even that a person ought, on principle, to have control over one’s own body. They approached it as more of a clarification of the legal definition of “privacy,” of where the power of government ends and where personal privacy begins, and it has remained such a hot-button argument that even today, most people’s views remain exactly that—private. This goes doubly for those whose meal tickets depend on their general popularity, i.e. artists and entertainers. Most artists wouldn’t touch the fierily polarizing subject with a 10-foot pole, and those that do seem to do it with a direct correlation between their striven-for level of popularity and the forthrightness of their stance.
There aren’t many recorded examples of abortion rights in songs prior to Roe v. Wade. The second wave of the women’s movement did have its cultural wing, however, and from there we got the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band and its East Coast parallel, the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band. Together these comprised the agitprop (or “agit-rock,” as their liner notes proclaimed) arm of the Chicago and the New Haven Women’s Liberation Unions, and though they were absolutely not known for any semblance of expert rock musicianship, they can safely stake a claim on being the first real all-woman feminist rock bands.
read more
by: Howard Wyman
published: October 26, 2009 in column: The Smoke-Filled Room
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