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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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ABC: The Lexicon of Love
ABC
The Lexicon of Love
(Mercury, 1980)
When King David lamented “How are the mighty fallen” in the Second Book of Samuel, he had more on his mind than the demise of a once promising pop band, but the quote fits the amazing rise and fall of ABC. They were new wave/new romantic gold record-winning hit-makers one day, and flowers in the trash bin of pop history a few short months later. Seldom has a band released an album with so many great tunes that it was a virtual greatest hits collection, only to vanish and never return. Well, okay, they did return, but their albums after The Lexicon of Love were so paltry that even the band’s website sums up their post-The Lexicon of Love output in five sentences. They’re currently playing the new wave nostalgia circuit.
ABC wasn’t exactly a one-hit wonder, they had five great ones, including four—”Poison Arrow”, “The Look of Love (Part One)”, “Tears Are Not Enough”, and “All of My Heart”—from The Lexicon of Love, but they were never able to duplicate the magic of their debut.
Tin Machine Dispenses Glitz and Bombast
Tin Machine
Tin Machine
(EMI America, 1989)
It’s easy to dismiss Tin Machine—the band and the debut album—as a David Bowie misstep, until you realize that no other major label release from the late ’80s sounds quite like it. Sure, Living Colour’s Vivid is loud and rockin’ and angry too, but it has melody and a production sheen that Tin Machine doesn’t. It’s fair to say Tin Machine didn’t want any of that stuff, anyway.
After the mega-successful Let’s Dance in 1983, Bowie released the diminishing-returns Tonight and the downright bad Never Let Me Down. Tin Machine was a democratic band and a way to ditch the Top 40 pop star thing that Bowie was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with.
Baby Teeth
Baby Teeth
Hustle Beach
(Lujo, 2009)
In a landscape crowded with vacant high-rises, dusty storefronts, and a budding population of vagrants, imagining the American Pastoral that Baby Teeth paints in their newest album is a relief. Inspired by Philip Roth’s 1997 novel—which unfolds during a post-WWII America and follows the unraveling of a Jewish-American’s upper middleclass life—the Chicago trio reevaluates and re-thinks the American Dream in an economic recession.
Recorded in only four days, using as many live takes as possible, the band’s deliberation is not lost on Hustle Beach. With their gaudy guitar riffs, excessive repetition, and grandiose organ-key intros, Baby Teeth outlines what Seymour Levov’s grief and America’s current economic recession identify as their catalyst: An idealized perception of the world. The band experiments with this fantastical projection by way of their silly demeanor, yet their substantial delivery captures the distortion of the American Dream: They postulate that chasers of the American Dream, people just “longing for soul,” mutate contentment and purpose into an acquisition of material possessions and conformity. How retentive can the age-old recipe be? What’s the shelf life of a pre-packaged meal with a few courses like marriage, a mortgage, and some kids?
Flight of the Conchords vs. Stephen Lynch
When one thinks of musical comedy, names like the Smothers Brothers, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and Cheech and Chong come to mind. However, the last couple of years have seen a revival of the genre. Comedians like Mike Birbiglia, Jon Lajoie, and Demetri Martin have all risen to fame largely by featuring music in their acts. Meanwhile, Saturday Night Live’s Andy Samberg has assured his place in the show’s pantheon with his humorous digital videos parodying the tropes of old-school R&B (“Dick in a Box”), hip-hop (“Lazy Sunday”), and European techno (“Jizz in My Pants”).
One of my favorite musical comedy acts is Flight of the Conchords, the New Zealand duo who swept into the American consciousness on the strength of their eponymous HBO show, which began in 2007 and recently finished up its second season. My other favorite is New York singer/songwriter/actor/comedian Stephen Lynch, who has starred in the Broadway adaption of The Wedding Singer and whose latest CD, 3 Balloons, is hysterically funny. Don’t get me wrong, Flight of the Conchords’ music is funny too, but the two acts are extremely different.
At the risk of dating myself to mid-2008, I think they can best be compared using the terminology from Christian Lander’s “Stuff White People Like” blog, which chronicles the tastes of upper middle class, liberal arts-educated, NPR-listening Caucasians. In fact, item #77 on the blog is “Musical Comedy” and the entry features a picture of Flight of the Conchords. “If you find yourself at a corporate retreat where you have to put on a skit for the other employees in your office, it’s always a good idea to suggest doing a funny song,” the entry reads. “Do not worry about the music part, if you have more than two white males on your team, it is certain that one of them can play the guitar.” The post doesn’t mention Lynch, however, and I would posit that he, with his non-politically correct, borderline gauche stylings, would be preferred by the “wrong kind of white people,” in Lander’s terms—in other words, not NPR types. Unlike Flight of the Conchords, Lynch clearly isn’t worried about being seen as offensive.
Music Books of the Last Six Months: Summer Edition
Well, it’s that time of year again where we all collectively attempt to slow down the pace of our roundabout lives, and for good reason. Shit, we all need to partake in some summertime activity, like some going to the beach or pool, or some eating of some hot dogs and drinking of some beers at a baseball game, or, you know, in some being especially lazy. Let the summer breeze blow through the jasmine of your mind, as it were. Record releases come to a proverbial halt, so we’re following their lead, however inanimate they are. What we’re trying to say is that we aren’t publishing for the next week, due to a twice-a-year necessity to hit the reset button and come back refreshed and ready for more rollickin’ rock journalism. The good news is that we’re keeping up the tradition of our bi-annual book review! This summertime edition features music-related books that have come out in the last six months. You should pick up a few and add them to your summer reading list, and really, really focus on taking things down a notch. Enjoy!
Family
Photographs and text by Lauren Dukoff
(Chronicle Books)
Tiny Masters of Today
Tiny Masters of Today
Skeletons
(Mute, 2009)
The Tiny Masters of Today are indeed tiny. Ivan, a guitarist with significant (if primitive) chops, is 15 years old. Ada, his bass-playing little sister, is 13. In photos they look like they weigh maybe 100 pounds combined and appear to be more like music nerds than punk rockers. The duo hit the ground running back in 2005 when a couple of tracks they uploaded to their MySpace page went viral. They made the recordings at home using GarageBand. When they got wind of the buzz the Tiny Masters were making, British indie label Tigertrap put three tunes on an EP titled Big Noise, which sold out immediately. David Bowie called them geniuses and a second UK EP, K.I.D.S., came out in 2006 and also sold out.
Jon Spencer’s drummer Russell Simins contacted the duo and became the third member of the band for most of 2007. He also produced their first album Bang Bang Boom Cake. You couldn’t call that incarnation of the band a power trio, because at times Ivan and Ada sound like they’re skirting the boundary between minimalism and ineptitude, but they made a lot of noise and a lot of it was really fun. The borrowed licks and derivative lyrics were easy to forgive because they were obviously so sincere. Bang Bang Boom Cake featured quite a few guests—Fred Schneider, Gibby Haynes, Kimya Dawson (who often sounds like a lost adolescent herself), Nick Zinner and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and one-man band Angelo Spencer (Ms. Dawson’s hubby), who added some actual lead guitar to a couple of tracks.
Part I: King Crimson’s Adrian Belew
When I am in some chain store, big or small, cool or cool’s opposite, and I see that woman or man who looks older than the rest of the crew—like maybe pushing 30 while everyone else is dabbling with 20—I wonder how they got there. I mean, how and why did fate deposit them here, cashing me out for my purchase of dog biscuits and underwear? And if I perceive them as a musician (sometimes the hair gives them away, sometimes it’s the ‘artist pheromone’), I wonder if it is the dream that has placed them on the smock and nametag side of the counter, or is it the dream’s demise? And then I think, there but for the grace of Zappa goes Adrian Belew.
If you do not know who Adrian Belew is, I could say forget everything you know about rock guitar because Belew has turned the medium on its truss rod. But you can easily find examples of his genius in the work of David Bowie (the albums Lodger and Stage, and the tours for Heroes and Sound + Vision), Talking Heads (Remain in Light, both the album and the tour, which resulted in the second half of live album The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads), Nine Inch Nails (The Downward Spiral, The Fragile, Ghosts I-IV), and the seminal prog-rock band King Crimson, which he has fronted since 1981. But it was the aforementioned Frank Zappa who plucked Adrian from the precipice of Kmartyrdom.
While my recent hour-long conversation with Belew left stones unturned, he is a fascinating artist and a humble rock guitar revolutionary. The following is Part I of that conversation.
Promiscuous Anglerfish: David Bowie vs. Kanye West
There are several ways we might go about demonstrating that hip-hop, not rock (or country, or old-time folk, or jazz, or blues, or chamber, or orchestral classical music, or opera, or musical theater, or mainstream radio pop, or whatever else you might name as a world unto itself), is the dominant form of today’s American popular music. We might demonstrate it via an example as significant as hip-hop’s lyrics, which speak for the nation the way rock used to. (There is a straight line leading from Buddy Holly’s “My love bigger than a Cadillac” to Biggie’s “Birthdays was the worst days, now we sip champagne when we thirst-ay”—the desire for size, appreciation, and material goods, belted out in primal grammar. Revivalists like the Hold Steady approach arena legacy, but their songs are about that tradition, not part of it.) Or we might demonstrate it via an example as mundane as the fact that a twentysomething douchebag like Asher Roth feels most comfortable using rap, not backwards-baseball-cap-party-band music, as the vehicle for his frat-tastic boasts. But the way we will go about demonstrating this premise here is by noting how hip-hop now does what rock used to do: Namely, absorb all the lesser genres it comes in contact with, in much the same way a male anglerfish is absorbed into the bloodstream of the larger female with which it copulates.
There used to be rappers invited to drop by and lend some novelty to rock songs (KRS-One on “Radio Song”, remember?); now rappers have little guitarist catamites that they carry around like itsy bitsy dogs in sweaters (Lil Wayne with Kevin Rudolf, for instance). But I’m talking less about head-to-head dominance than relative gravitational force. In its origins as a collage of samples, hip-hop has an undeniable advantage here; still, note how we’ve gone from horn loops to undisguised lifts, like in Flo Rida’s frankensteined ’80s one-hit-wonder “Right Round.” But the clearest way to make this point is with an SAT-style analogy:
Rock : Hip-hop :: David Bowie : Kanye West.
New York Dolls
New York Dolls
’Cause I Sez So
(Atco/Rhino, 2009)
Typically, 90 percent of any successful comeback is just showing up. The presumption being that the artist or band in question has long since proven themselves and their reunion album is little more than a quickly forgotten souvenir to sell on some sort of victory lap reunion tour.
Thankfully, the New York Dolls are no typical band and have not, I repeat, HAVE NOT taken that cynical route on their loud-ass, confident new album, ’Cause I Sez So.
“Don’t Bring Me Down”
by: Denise Sullivan
The basic definition of the bring down might seem obvious and unnecessary to outline, but since over-explaining is a bit of a specialty of mine, I’m going to do it anyway. If it’s too much of a bring down for you, you can skip this part. But the general idea is that a negative person or event come to destroy an otherwise perfectly good situation—an instant depressor and a real bad vibe—is a bring down. Born from ’50s jazz and hipster lingo (look, I’m no William Safire, but it’s my best guess), whether it’s a party, an idea, a person’s lifetime hopes and dreams, or even their delusions—to be told, ‘That’s not gonna fly, Jim,” is a definite bring down. Ruining someone’s high or coming down from one? A bring down. Get off my cloud, and don’t be a downer, a bummer, or a drag—these are all other ways of saying, “Don’t Bring Me Down.” As jazz lingo had a way of finding its way into R&B and rock ‘n’ roll, and into the vocabs of the people who listen to the stuff, the bring down found its way into hundreds of songs, some more memorable than others. Dig?
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by: Denise Sullivan
published: November 4, 2009 in column: Origin of Song
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