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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: british sea power
Video: British Sea Power, “Down On The Ground”
performed March 1, 2008 at Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, CA
Part II: A Fakebook for the Health Care Debate
“The people fighting for the public option are the people I am behind,” says Portland-based musician Lou Thomas, bassist for A Weather and singer/guitarist for Chores. “I have written both my senators and my representative repeatedly about this.” And yet, does this make him feel any more empowered? “I don’t feel particularly empowered, no,” he replies. Thomas has also written a song called “NoInsuranceLand” with his band Chores, the meaning of which isn’t hard to decipher, although it’s not about his own experience or that of any musician, specifically. [In Part 1 of this series, Thomas shared his harrowing health care system survival story.] It’s about any of us, which is part of what makes it a powerful song. The irony is that, while our health care crisis hits musicians particularly hard [again—see Part 1 for details], whether they’re onstage, at work, or conversing with strangers on a bus, the plight of our musicians isn’t going to be the thing that wins enough hearts and minds in order to gain us all affordable access to health care.
“In some cases, a lot of people are going to say, ‘Well, boo-hoo, you want to be a rock star more than you want to work,’ and it’s gonna be tough to get sympathy from a large portion of the country,” says Alex Maiolo, an insurance specialist that offers free advice to musicians through the Future of Music Coalition’s HINT program. (Case in point, the first line in the bio on the Chores website is point-blank: “Chores is a band without pretensions. It’s just four people who love music and hate work.”) “But the arts are what make society what it is. And [one’s art] doesn’t have to be being a rock musician; it can be playing in a symphony orchestra, it could be painting. The thing that keeps us from doing what we want to do is this health care thing.”
It’s an interesting catch-22, in that so much art (music especially) resonates with people because they relate it to their own grind-intensive lives, even as society turns its back on those musicians trying to escape said grind in order to make the art that helps society deal with it. As such, most musicians (and fans) are left out of the debate, armed only with points about morals and ethics but lacking the competitive, big-picture agenda needed to sway “patriots,” captains of industry and others in power. Day by day as the health care debate rages on, we, the un-indoctrinated music lovers, are basically reduced to just sitting with baited breath, scanning the headlines, waiting to see who will make good on an ex-beauty queen’s flailing dementia, rising to the occasion of the low-hanging fruit she dangled out from that undeserved podium. Will it be rock? Metal? Liberal alt-country? Who will become… the Death Panels?
The Beatles and the End of the Album
Philip Larkin’s poem “Annus Mirabilis” opens with this: “Sexual intercourse began / In 1963 / (which was rather late for me) / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.”
Like much of Larkin’s work, he’s speaking about his own sexual experience as a metonymy for culture as a whole, and like much of his work, he’s on to something. The British Invasion, the LP Era, the Golden Sixties, was the birth of sexual intercourse as commodity, marketed to anyone with a record player and TV set—the cameraman began shooting below Elvis’ waistline, so to speak. Anyone, youth especially, could now access the previously elusive sexual act through the exchange of goods in the capitalist marketplace. Sex and metaphor transformed into one another. read more
Women: Crashing the Glass Ceiling
The index finger on Patrick Flegel’s playing hand oozes blood from under a makeshift bandage of white masking tape. As he strums, the wound smears a widening trail of gore across the would-be pristine pick guard of his electric guitar. As the final chord of one song rings out, Pat takes a deep breath and pockets his pick: The next song in the set is a soft, finger-picked number. New York crowds can be tough on opening acts, but for one reason or another, the audience at Music Hall of Williamsburg maintains a cool hush. Whether it’s bated breath or respectful awe is hard to tell. The blood clots and thickens on the strings of Pat’s guitar, forming a silent disruption, maintaining an uneasy peace, a marred tranquility. The gore is inescapable, but Pat pays no heed. He keeps playing, even as the oozing gives way to streaking—as slow, red rivulets creep down his hand.
It’s only a matter of time before a member of the audience extends a compassionate hankie, which Pat accepts. “I cut my hand before,” he announces to the crowd. “It was a stupid accident.” He offers no further explanation, and makes no other mention of his injury. The show goes on.
Jay Reatard
Jay Reatard
Watch Me Fall
(Matador, 2009)
Unbeknownst to most of us for many years, Jay Reatard, born Jimmy Lee Lindsey, Jr. has been making one heavy record after another. Since 1997, he has released seemingly countless records with several bands, including a few full-lengths with his old bands the Lost Sounds and the Reatards, as well as singles and an album (2006’s Blood Visions) under his own name. Of course, it was only a matter of time before everyone started to catch on. His songs were too memorable to be avoided, his live show a little too relentless to ignore. He doesn’t scale back on Watch Me Fall—Reatard’s, oh, let’s call it 200th release and save everyone the trouble of some difficult research—but there is an added layer of emotional intensity that makes this album one of the strongest moments of Reatard’s already long career.
“It Ain’t Gonna Save Me” opens the record, and it’s a pretty fair metonym for everything else that follows: An explosion of punk traditionalism with jangly guitars, clockwork drumming, and a cranky child’s temper (“And then a cloud came in the sky, it shit on me, I don’t know why”). But about three quarters through, as the drums continue at breakneck speed, the song goes through a delicate metamorphosis. The guitars fade out and a modulating synthesizer takes over in a heartbreaking coda as Reatard sings, “All is lost / There is no hope.” He’s harmonizing with himself, which only adds to this brief interlude’s emotional bite: He really is alone.
Various Artists
Various Artists
Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur’s Farm
(Rhino, 2009)
The Woodstock Festival looms large in the cultural imagination of the hippie generation—and every generation that’s come of age since that magical weekend of peace, love, music, and freewheelin’ indulgence. In just over one weekend, a city of half a million people (and that’s just the audience) was spontaneously created and good vibes were the rule, not the exception. Woodstock was the “coming out” party for the hippies, in the old high society meaning of the word, an announcement that there was indeed a counterculture, to use a word that may not have even been coined at the time. The festival lived up to its billing with almost no reported violence or friction in the audience; good vibes abounded, even between the police and the stoned hippies in attendance.
Critics and sociologists are still arguing about the significance of the event and its greater meaning. In the August 9th edition of the San Francisco Chronicle Datebook, Country Joe McDonald, Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane/Starship, and percussionist Michael Carabello, a member of Santana at the time, were still disagreeing about what went on at the festival, and they were there. Still, one thing is evident: The music that brought the crowds to Woodstock sent American culture spinning off in hundreds of unexpected directions, and it’s that music that still holds our collective interest.
The Boy Least Likely To Make Lemonade
Back in 2005, the Boy Least Likely To charmed audiences with their debut album, The Best Party Ever. It was an endearing record fraught with peppy melodies and eclectic instrumentation (glockenspiel, banjo, clickity-clack percussion, and recorder solos) alongside melancholic lyricism, wide-eyed wonder, and a dash of neurosis. There’s a sad, scary world out there after all, full of monsters and spiders and the onset of adulthood. On their sophomore album, The Law of the Playground, two boys continue to hold their heads up high, clap their hands, and sha-la-la while battling life’s anxieties and fending off false nostalgia. In other words, it’s the kind of music that’s childlike, yet never childish. We chatted with lead singer Jof Owen via email about their new album, what it means to be twee, the English countryside, and “the most rubbish cartoon superhero ever invented.”
Crawdaddy!: It took four years for your follow-up album to arrive. There were some issues with your record label, right? What were some of the hindrances that prevented Law of the Playground’s arrival sooner?
Jof Owen: I still can’t believe it took that long. It was held up because of the label that we signed to. It’s difficult to explain exactly what happened, because we’re not really allowed to talk about it, but basically we finished recording the album two years ago and took it in to the label, and that was when we were told that they didn’t exist as a label anymore, and that they had no intention of releasing our record, and that they weren’t able to release it even if they did want to. It was frustrating. We thought that they would just give us the record back, because they weren’t going to do anything with it, but they didn’t. So we were stuck signed to a label that wasn’t a label anymore. We might as well have been signed to a cake shop. We spent most of last year trying to get the record back so we could release it ourselves. It ended up taking a lot longer than we thought it would. I wish the truth was more exciting. I wish we’d been doing something constructive with the last two years, but we haven’t. It shouldn’t have taken two years for it to come out, and it feels like there’s so much more expected of the record because it took so long, but I try not to think about it too much because it just reminds me of that horrible time. Every time someone sent me an email asking when the album was going to come out, it would break my heart. I was completely disillusioned with everything. I always thought a record deal was everything I’d ever wanted. It was as if I’d spent my whole life dreaming about something, and now that it was actually happening, I couldn’t believe how unhappy it made me. I didn’t ever regret signing with the label, because there isn’t any point in regretting things, but every day I would wake up and wonder how my life would be different if we hadn’t done all the things we did.
James Blackshaw’s Minimal Folk for the 21st Century
James Blackshaw plays acoustic guitar and composes music that draws listeners into a fathomless space that’s both comforting and mysterious. He grew up playing in punk bands, but ditched his electric guitar a few years ago to start playing a 12-string acoustic. Combining folk finger-picking, subtle pop melodies, and the repetitive, slowly unfolding compositional techniques of new music, he forged a deep trance-inducing style all his own. His music has been called “pastoral psychedelia,” “minimal,” and described as “Nick Drake meets Leo Kottke.” His wide-open, subtly driving sound occupies its own psychic and emotional space. The music is too dark and dissonant for new age, although it can be soothing at times, and too stark for folk, although John Fahey and Robbie Basho are obvious influences. It’s also too melodic for the minimalists, although there are hints of Steve Reich and Terry Riley in the way the music both expands and curls into itself, suggesting unheard melodies and implied rhythms with its overlapping overtones. On his latest album, The Glass Bead Game, the overtones are especially prominent. Blackshaw’s 12-string sounds immense, each string ringing like a bell, with miles of sonic space between every carefully placed note.
“When I record, I use open tunings,” Blackshaw explains from his London flat. “They’re within the root note of a chord, but they’re not straight open tunings. The bass strings are tuned way down, while the high-end remains where it usually is. It produces weird harmonic overtones. When I listen to the playback [during recording], it sounds like the guitar is playing three or four different parts: Bass, midrange melodies, and counter melodies that come from the harmonic overtones. With a 12-string, most people think of a jingly Byrds-type sound, but in lower tunings, the sound takes on a life of its own and those boomy, low resonant frequencies come out. You can’t drop a six-string from an E down to an A, but with a 12-string you can, even if it’s a struggle sometimes to stay in tune.”
Blackshaw was born in 1981 and was inspired to start playing acoustic by Fahey’s finger-picking and Basho’s 12-string guitar compositions. He then incorporated sounds drawn from 20th century classic music, the minimalism of Reich and Riley, the odd time signatures of Erik Satie, chamber music, and subtle hints of New York’s no-wave movement. Although the music is acoustic, it has irresistible power and presence, with cascading overtones that suggest industrial rock or the symphonic force of an orchestra playing at top volume. On record and in live performances, his pieces display a restrained emotional power and a dynamic range, full of stops and starts and unexpected changes in volume and tempo, which keeps them balanced between composition and improvisation.
Bonnaroo: June 11-14, Manchester, TN
When June reels around every year, I hear the siren call of Tennessee’s mega-music bacchanal, and despite the rabid heat, grungy camping, and general hassles involved, I’ve made the ’Roo pilgrimage the last four years in a row, including this one.
Bonnaroo stands outside the hamlet of Manchester, TN, on a 700-acre farm, an hour south of Music City. Every summer, Bonnaroo becomes Tennessee’s sixth largest city, and the festival even publishes its own daily newspaper, the Beacon. This isn’t the little hippie-fest-that-could anymore; though jam bands are still well-represented, it’s become something else: America’s arguably biggest, most musically diverse, and probably best music festival. It’s the Woodstock for the digital age.
I arrived this year on Friday morning; though it technically starts on Thursday, few bands play that evening. I spent that night in Nashville on honky tonk row, getting in shape for the upcoming events. It’s a good thing too, because thunderstorms soaked the area all evening.
Alex Chilton: 1975-1981
by: David Gendelman
Jim Duckworth, a jazz guitarist who would soon join the band on drums, saw them for the first time in December 1980. “I’m walking down the street, I’m not even at the club yet,” Duckworth says, “and all I can hear—they’re on stage playing, and it’s in between numbers—but all I could hear was this shrieking, screaming feedback. Not your Jeff Beck-style feedback… more the guitar’s too close to an overpowered amp, shrieking feedback. It was that Metal Machine Music [Lou Reed’s 1975 experiment-in-noise record] on crack sort of thing… They had a synthesizer player. He had no conception of what they were doing. He played between tunes, during the tunes; it was all the same to him. They were doing this back-to-basics roots-rock thing and it was hilarious. It was the funniest fuckin’ show you ever saw. It was loose and it was raw and it really worked. When those guys were on, it was a beautiful thing.” read more
by: David Gendelman
published: November 12, 2009 in column: Feature Story
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