Search results for: bromst

Bird Names Blend Mysticism with… Rod Blagojevich

Bird Names: Courtesy of Four Paws Media Bird Names has shifted into top gear. Working as little as possible and taking full advantage of Chicago’s cheap rent by living in the same house, the four-piece pop caravan fronted by David Lineal is synergizing in a big way. Lineal beams: “We all recognize each other and our artistic works as the most promising avenue of salvation, of getting to the second level, of becoming shamans.”

It’s infectiously exciting to see a band deciding to live the dream and throw themselves completely into the music. Guitarist Lineal and bassist Albert Schatz took the time to chat with me through the internet. A new addition to the band, Phelan La Velle, was in the next room impressing the Star of David onto tour-only bars of soap. This spring tour with Georgia-based Quiet Hooves came right on the heels of Bird Names’ newest full-length release Sings the Browns, and the band has just released a new cassette-only EP, Recession Vacation.

Schatz makes Lineal’s metaphysical comment a little more concrete and implicitly reveals some of the wry humor behind Lineal’s mysticism: “I think of Beefheart and how he would have regimented rehearsals and communal living.” Bird Names, it is true, is one of the most raucous experimental pop outfits since Captain Beefheart quit music and wandered off into the desert. Bird Names’ hacked up blues guitar and slipshod rhythm section scarcely holds itself together. In the center of their careening, chaotic orbit is a genuine knack for pop hooks and passionate energy.

The road that brought Bird Names to this point began with just Lineal and a four-track tape recorder. Although band members have come and gone as hundreds of songs have been produced, Lineal had early premonitions of his band’s present ambitions. “I think from my first experiences of the sublimity of art, I recognized or dreamed of its possibility. Those moments of elation, ecstasy that happen, of inspiration. When I was 14 or whatever, I inarticulately dreamed of expanding those moments, of having them constantly. That’s this dream.”

by: Nathaniel Roe

published: August 5, 2009 in column: Introducing

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Dan Deacon

by: Dan Weiss

Dan Deacon
Bromst
(Carpark, 2009)

This is the funniest YouTube video of all time. Just getting that out of the way. Dan Deacon’s eye for comedy far eclipses his ear for music. With 2007’s barely listenable Spiderman of the Rings, he made the most of his video budget and pumped the only halfway-decent track, “Crystal Cat”, with a clip of such seizure-inducing rapid-fire nonsense and made such legendary spectacle from his within-the-crowd live shows that people swore the product itself had to be a worthy souvenir. It’s not. Unless your idea of hilarity is chipmunk-helium vocal effects and sampling Woody Woodpecker’s laugh a thousand fucking times in a row over (ironically?) dated rave beats, Spiderman is a slogm and a forced one at that.

Bromst, which Deacon somewhat correctly describes as “darker” when he means “more serious,” is an enormous step up in craft, like zero to 10 flat. It’s not as funny, thank god, forcing him to care about the truly boring stuff: Melodies, arrangements, making his ADHD-like constructions earn their keep as Baltimore crowd-wetters. And it’s not all that different from his other stuff, just more tasteful in every way. Voice filters and vocoders are subtly employed rather than huffing laughing gas over the top of the mix; synthbeats are hyper, not nauseating. And there are likeable organic textures that appear to be striving for something in the ballpark of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians of all things. With push coming to shove, he surprisingly beats Merriweather Post Pavilion at its own game, taking Animal Collective’s irritating/entrancing moan circles and digitizing them for fully extra-sensory iPod-caveman derelict dancing.

by: Dan Weiss

published: March 25, 2009 in column: Reviews

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