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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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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.
Vinyl Reckoning II: Digital Boogaloo
More and more as time goes by, it’s clear to see the writing on the vinyl-sided wall: There is no future for PVC. It may be everywhere right now, and its grasp in nearly every industry may seem as tenacious as the shrink wrap currently ensnaring millions of copies of Green Day’s 21st Century Breakdown; however, as the body count grows and the cancers spread, the evidence becomes increasingly difficult for PVC makers to deny. Why, it was just last December that CBS News reported on a tiny Illinois town, population 1,000, in which 14 residents developed brain cancer—three on the same block, next door to each other, while the national incidence of their cancer is more like seven out of 100,000. Dr. Phil Lewis, Chief of Medicine for the Dow Chemical subsidiary Rohm & Haas whose chemical factory, one mile from the town, admits to having buried toxic waste on its property for 20 years ending in 1979, told CBS, “First thing, it is important to understand that that could be a coincidence.” Who’d a-thunk Dr. Phil would come up with such an easy explanation? And that wasn’t even about the 14 dying townies, either. That was in response to the 12 additional brain cancer victims within Rohm & Haas’ own research-and-development headquarters in Philadelphia.
Polyvinyl chloride (aka PVC, or “vinyl,” as we music lovers call it) is the clear and certain champion of exactly what’s terrible about modern manufacturing, particularly within the music industry, though it’s rarely discussed. Polyvinyl chloride is what vinyl records are made out of, ye olde gold standard for the traditionalist, audiophile, and hipster alike. It’s also the plastic out of which we make CD jewel cases, shrink wrap, the outer shells of most laptops and mp3 players, and a million other things. It cannot be created or broken down without releasing dioxin, which is literally the most toxic poison known to humanity. In the first part of this series, Crawdaddy! examined the ills of PVC, weighed its impact via records vs. CDs, and how independent record labels feel about these primary offenders. Yet whenever the question of hope for a safer alternative was raised, the answer was all but foregone: Mp3 is the “greenest” way to go. However, as any vinyl devotee is quick to point out, there are plenty of physical ramifications to all that supports the cold, virtual world, as well; ramifications worse than laptop wrist, over-caffeination, and getting suspended for sexting, combined.
In 2008, iTunes proclaimed five billion songs had been downloaded from its website to date, and eMusic claimed 250 million. Assuming an average length of 10 to 12 songs per album, that’s the loose equivalent of around 480 million CDs or LPs rendered unnecessary. It’s hard to argue with that kind of environmental savings—but not impossible. After all, some of those albums could otherwise have been purchased used, thereby kept out of landfills. Moreover, mp3s are like the flattened, compressed, digitized sounds of trees falling in the woods; without a player to play them, they barely exist, and these players don’t exactly grow on trees either (though there’s plenty of deforestation in order to mine for the stuff inside them). As mentioned above, laptops, mp3 players, cords, and chargers are also typically encased in polyvinyl chloride, along with a veritable cornucopia of other monstrous toxins, any one of which can kill: Mercury, lead, cadmium, phthalates, arsenic, brominated flame retardants (BFRs), you name it.
Communist Puppets & Riverboat Gamblers At 75 MPH
WARNING: The events in this story are presented as remembered. These hazy visions pulled from the recesses of one writer’s mind may contradict what is known as stone cold fact. If times, dates, or specific individuals are presented out of order, it is not intentional.
When people ask me to name the best concert I’ve ever attended, I usually say, “Oh, that’s gotta be either the time I saw Iggy Pop in 2001 or the time I saw the Damned in 2000. Both had great energy and really put on a solid show, y’know? Just really entertaining, fun, loud rock n’ roll, and that’s what it’s all about, man.” I then toss my head back quickly, whipping my shoulder-length David Cassidy coif through the air, while simultaneously pushing up the sleeves of my “ALCATRAZ INMATE: PSYCHO WARD” t-shirt. These moves never fail to impress the slack-jawed teenage runaways who congregate outside the trailer office of my drywall business.
The sad fact of the matter, though, is the above statement is a bald-faced lie. I only say it because it seems to shut people up and doesn’t really beg further question. Truth be told, the best concert I ever attended was a predominantly hardcore punk show at a VFW Hall in the otherwise unimpressive burg of Casselberry, FL, around the same time as the aforementioned Iggy Pop show. Weirdo terror-noise outfit the Locust was headlining; I’m sure they’re the reason I went, but they are far from the only reason this event was so great. This show was basically a giant freak-ass circus, a cavalcade of musical and visual insanity from the moment my friends and I stepped into that hallowed veteran’s hall until the final buzzing notes of the Locust’s set.
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.
The Bitter Tears
The Bitter Tears
Jam Tarts in the Jakehouse
(Carrot Top, 2009)
Incomprehensibility hasn’t sounded as appealing as it does on Jam Tarts in the Jakehouse since the first side of Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home blew apart the Tin Pan Alley songwriting paradigm that had dominated pop music. The lyrics the Bitter Tears have crafted are linear and convoluted, sometimes unrhyming, sometimes larded through with playful internal rhymes that give the melodies a sing-song quality that might be infantile if they weren’t so disturbing. Then there’s the music. The Tears are ostensibly a pop band, but they don’t fit into any neat category. It is easier, in fact, to tell you what they’re not. They are not a rock band, or a blues or country band. They’re not exactly cabaret, although that word crops up in a lot of reviews. They’re not folk, even if the instruments are largely acoustic. And although they’re self-consciously arty, they don’t hew closely to the lo-fi conventions of indie rock. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht are obvious influences, but there isn’t any obvious Weimar oompah or tango in the music, although it is dark and dissonant, though not without its own macabre sense of humor. They use horns, woodwinds, pianos, fiddles, and other orchestral instruments to add color, but those colors are muted and somber. Ringleader Alan Scalpone sings in a quavering high tenor that’s oddly childlike, a voice that hints at a temper tantrum or nervous breakdown lurking in the wings.
Let’s start the review proper with the album’s most idiosyncratic track, “Starlight.” Scalpone, his songwriting partner Michael McGinley, and Greg Norman croon the word “starlight” in a beautiful choral harmony, but the second word they sing is drawn out into so many melismatic syllables that it looses all meaning. ‘Dreaming,’ ‘meaning,’ ’scarab,’ ‘Susan,’ ‘free,’ ’seraph,’ and ’seraphim’ are just a few of the words I thought I heard. The music is built on a catchy four-note slide guitar hook accented by trumpet, fiddle, viola, and a wordless vocal figure that’s part yodel, part dreamy rockabilly yelp. The tune flows smoothly until it ends in a crash of cymbals accented by sax and trumpet fanfare. It’s puzzling and beautiful, just like the rest of the songs on the album.
“Worthless Sleaze” has a dramatic buildup of jittery fiddles before slipping into a limping circus-march-meets-girl-group rhythm to deliver another in a series of enigmatic lyrics. Scalpone sings in a childlike/castrati tenor, but the sleaze, sex, and sadism is all implied. “Slay the Heart of the Earth” hints at mid-period Rolling Stones, mariachi music, and forlorn folk melodies with a simple driving backbeat, slide guitar, and an odd female chorus: “There’s sorrow above you / Let your arms make a cradle of you / And pray you won’t get hurt.” It sounds more evocative on disc than in print, and that’s true of most of the lyrics, disjointed images that make a kind of melancholic, subconscious sense as they stream by, pulling the listener into the mysterious mood of the music.
“Oiling Up” is vaguely bluesy; a love song, or a hate song, it’s hard to tell. He’s lifting weights and uprooting trees, she’s crying about the child she just had, a baby she doesn’t want anymore. It ends with blaring trumpets riding an undulating merry-go-round backbeat. “The Companion” is a bleak spoken word tone poem that explodes into snarling anger. “The Love Letter” is another dysfunctional love song, this one sung to a bright folk-like tune that leads up to an implied murder. It might ordinarily be shocking, but after the musical and lyrical weirdness that’s come before, it’s easy to take in stride. The Bitter Tears are a band you’ll either love or hate.
One last note: If you’re an urbanite, you may not know that a jakehouse is a camouflaged enclosure for hunters; it allows them to lay in wait for unarmed animals so they can blow them away in the name of sport. I’d think twice about accepting a tart from anyone sharing a jakehouse with this band. I’m sure it would be tasty, but am just as sure it would leave the same kind of haunting aftertaste as their music.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Tags: The Bitter Tears, Jam Tarts in the Jakehouse, Carrot Top Records
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Raunchy Faces Back on Tour
Originally published in Rolling Stone, 27 February 1975
LONDON – “We’re playing as one now like our life depended on it,” Rod Stewart announced, looking down eagerly at his game pie in a posh London restaurant. “This American tour is a turning point for the Faces. If we can get that same rapport going with our audience that we had four years ago, then I’ll say we’ve accomplished something. Then I’ll say we’ve become one of those bands that’s respected. And,” he paused, cutting into the thick, rich feast, “there’s not many of those.”
The Faces are heading stateside for their first tour since the fall of 1973, a trip that resulted in the uninspired Coast to Coast album. Between visits, Stewart released Smiler, guitarist Ron Wood did a solo album, and drummer Kenny Jones recorded a Jackson Browne tune for a British single.
The Darling Downs
The Darling Downs
From One to Another
(Carrot Top, 2008)
There is something both earthy and austere about the Darling Downs’ collection of 11 songs titled From One to Another. Steeped in sepia-toned gravity but also a restless, down-home twang, the twosome that composed this album of sentimental Americana are actually from Australia. That they didn’t, in fact, rise from the dusty roads of America’s heartland or the slippery banks of the Appalachian Mountains could come as a surprise for some upon first hearing their music. But, it soon becomes inconsequential where the duo hails from; no need to put a regional tag on the soulful sincerity found in such a plain and true collection of songs.
One half of the Darling Downs is vocalist Ron Peno of the ’80s/’90s punk band Died Pretty, and the other half is guitarist/banjo player Kim Salmon of Aussie rock bands the Scientists and Beasts of Bourbon. Both men are accomplished and esteemed figures in Australia’s music community; this project so named, presumably, after the western side of the Great Dividing Range in Australia, a rolling, pastoral region that’s dotted with various crops, farm animals, windmills, dilapidated wooden shacks, and rickety strewn fences, an expansive land that the music of the same name evokes in its rustic simplicity. The Darling Downs are humble and unpretentious, candidly refreshing in an age of laptop-generated beats and hip, urban scenes burgeoning in Brooklyn and beyond. The cover art alone practically mocks contemporary life—in hues of brown and grey, two worn and aging men grace the cover side by side, with sloping shoulders, cloaked in suits of seriousness and wearing forsaken expressions, a banjo clasped in Salmon’s arms. Such a picture recalls the rigid, dedicated mind of salt of the earth types that toil on the land, as could be found along the ashy soils of Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains, or in the deep, remote woods north of Wisconsin, or in Australia’s Darling Downs region.
These plucky, at times chilling, countrified sounds recall the music I bore witness to one summer while sitting on a rusty Appalachian back porch while volunteering to help a destitute family install improvements to their home. The man of the house played banjo around those parts, and though he hadn’t performed outside his own local town in some years, the hard and tender sighs of his instrument in that humid evening air sounds so much like the music found in From One to Another. Never contrived, just raw and real and quite beautiful.
Each song plays out like a resigned take on life’s sentimental journey, a melancholic and genuine exploration of the human experience, and its downtrodden beat and weary, dominating vocals derive a cathartic response from me; as an unfamiliar listener, I want to know where these tales come from, from which of life’s experiences the songs are written in regards to. Opening with the melancholic “A Moment of Despair” (“Bring yourself but beware / We are always in a moment of despair”), the album glides into the religious thump of “Gather ’Round (Stomp It Down)”, and the rest of the album follows suit, dark and contemplative, charged by somber recollections (see “Circa ’65”) and weepy reckonings (“Redeemed”), but also a self-effacing ease that’s easy to find in this brand of countrified soul music (“Something Special” and “There’s a Light Part 2”).
The Darling Downs have crafted an unrefined portrait of songs about man peering into his or her own life without those pervasive stimulants many of us are so distracted by. It’s refreshingly honest and well worth your effort—spin it ‘round a campfire with friends or in the shadow of your lone searching self.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
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KatJonBand
KatJonBand
KatJonBand
(Carrot Top, 2008)
If you were wondering when the next Evens record was coming out, even if only because the days we live in simply beg for one, maybe you should take a breath and consider listening to KatJonBand instead. Ian MacKaye and Amy Farina just welcomed their first child into the world this past May, so it might be awhile before they tackle writing and recording. And besides, Kat and Jon of the KatJonBand have invariably had untold influence over MacKaye’s strict moral code (rather than vice versa), so you’d only be sacrificing insomuch that you’d be conceding to the musical forefathers of fiery ideology.
Kat Ex of the almighty Ex from the Netherlands and Jon Langford of the almighty Mekons from Britain have both been rooted in staunchly, politically-driven punk since the late ’70s. And both bands/musicians have maintained relevance by continuing to experiment with sounds from world folk music to minimalist country to avant art rock. Kat and Jon bring those disparate sounds together here on their debut self-titled album for a barebones, politically ardent statement that continues on in the grand tradition of their pioneering fundamentals of lo-fi, experimental punk.
That these two musicians haven’t already done something together previous to this might be the only surprising fact about their debut. The Ex and the Mekons have an intertwining history to the extent that Langford produced several Ex albums. It’s not surprising (at least to me) that they’ve created a record that is seamlessly equal in the duo’s individual contributions, which begets an effort uniquely their own—a powerful one that invigorates with its palpable urgency. For musicians that have been at it for the better part of three decades, it’s not surprising that they’d find a creative and fresh way to marry all of their disparate sounds; Kat’s clear voice, world influences, and polyrhythmic drumming comes together in perfect unison with Jon’s gravel-growl of a voice and his punk/country/British folk-inflected sound, which is all hinged on songs about (not surprisingly) class, greed, globalization, the Iraq War, etc. It’s a tough record, but also fun. Okay, my bad, that is surprising… that these two musicians can keep finding new, interesting ways to deliver the same basic messages without the pathetic feeling of longing for a time already gone by. I can’t name many other musicians who’ve done the same, especially ones that made their name in the realm of punk (aside from Joe Strummer, that is).
The record starts off with “Do You?”, and showcases the duo at their best. The uptempo song is infused with a stark message about Iraq: “I love it / Do you? / I’ll leave it / When I’m through / You break it / You buy / Your country / Bye bye.” Slowing down the pace quite nicely with shimmering, sparse guitars and drums that follow suit into “Albion”, the oldest known name of the isle of Great Britain, is basically a Celtic ode modernized into a tune about greed. “Machine Gun & the Ugly Doll”, has an immediate punk rock meets Spaghetti Western vibe with such biting lyrics on patriotism as, “Slaughterhouse governors / Heroes of darkness,” while “Conquered” takes a more indifferent approach to betrayal that is a no less potent message: “Colonial power struggled for hours / I was distracted when you conquered me.” “Bad Apples” takes a serious, almost hypnotic tone with Kat singing from the perspective of a soldier that’s “walking a thin line between survival and shame.”
There is one brief pause from the serious political matters at the core of this record for a countrified love ballad called “Hey You Don’t Love Me”, which is quite a pretty tune seeing Kat and Jon harmonizing, even if it does still channel the central theme of betrayal and disgrace that graces each song on KatJonBand. The album closes off with “Red Flag” and starts off informed by Gang of Four, building intensity for each stanza with chugging guitars and traipsing drums.
Even though it’s been talked about, real change hasn’t infiltrated the White House yet, and daily headlines aren’t getting any better either. In fact, they are actually worse as of late. And for these heady, anxiety-induced times, we have a new meaningful record about it all to set us straight. Kat Ex and Jon Langford have made careers out of reporting political wrongdoings from a place that’s always maintained a fresh and powerful message for the past 30 odd years. Here we are, and so it goes…
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
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Of Wonder Bread and X-Boxes: Can Tropicália Happen Again?
In our endless search for substance or significance in the arts, radio-friendly pop music is not typically the first place we look. It’s certainly nowhere on our list of stops in the quest to preserve the originality, uniqueness, and independence of any indigenous culture; not in this post-Michael Jackson, post-Madonna era of U2, Celine Dion, and the “extensive world tour” through which we cultivate music markets abroad. Yet to anyone who thinks pop music is and has always been intrinsically meaningless, one need only say, “Hey—not always,” and point to Tropicália.
In the late 1960s, not long after a military coup seized Brazil’s conflicted society into a tense, stifling dictatorship, the popular arts there were essentially polarized into opposing political factions. While Brazil’s burgeoning music industry attempted to capitalize on the divide, in the midst of it all there united an incredibly colorful wave of independent cultural resistance—to the dictatorship, yes, but also to the leftist protester extreme. Film, poetry, music, and the plastic arts were all represented in the groundbreaking populist movement, which took its name from an interactive sculpture installation by the artist Hélio Oiticica, and both defied and embraced various prevailing conventions of its time. Through innovative, collaborative form, metaphor, satire, and attitude, the Tropicalistas conveyed complex progressive and subversive ideas in accessible, downright catchy ways. They rejected the politics of extremism while asserting a desire for a new kind of egalitarian artistic freedom, one that embraced international influences in order to enhance its own unique Brazilian-ness.
The music of Tropicália (also called Tropicalismo) was an ingenious pop sensation by design, incorporating stylistic and philosophical elements that could either attract or offend sects from either side of Brazil’s ideological coin, while capturing the imagination of those caught, frustrated, in between. It was criticized from the left for incorporating too much commercial American influence, yet criticized by the right for its transgressive implications. It attempted to avoid the latter by never being overtly political, and overcame the former by sheer stint of awesomeness, for even if electric rock tended to symbolize the USA, it was at that point a symbol of what was great about the USA and its then-relevant cultural revolution. This amalgam of different influences itself sent a message of desire for freedom, innovation, and tolerance. It incorporated and celebrated the beauty of native Brazilian culture, magnifying elements of it for appreciation on the world stage, while also appreciating and incorporating the cultural differences, freedoms, and achievements of foreign contemporaries.
Handsome Family: “After We Shot the Grizzly”
by: Dan Weiss
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.”
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by: Dan Weiss
published: September 22, 2009 in column: Lyrical Communique
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