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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: handsome family
Gin Blossoms: “Hey Jealousy”
The Gin Blossoms’ “Hey Jealousy” is a bona fide have-a-kick-ass-summer jam. It’s four minutes of late nights, joy rides, and low-speed police chases. The song’s protagonist is a charming wreck. He’s in no shape for driving with no place to go, looking for permission to reminisce and reconcile with an old flame. Threads of regret are sewn throughout, as is a glimmering optimism: “The past is gone but something might be found to take its place,” he declares to her immediately before reiterating the song’s title. He can’t change the past. There is hope in the future. First, he must crash on her futon.
Songs written in first-person rely on the vocalist’s delivery to portray the emotion of the lyrics; they become the “me” and “I” of the song. Whereas Neil Young or Chris Martin would milk the drama from a line like, “If I hadn’t blown the whole thing years ago, I might not be alone,” Gin Blossoms’ frontman Robin Wilson sings it with emotionless nonchalance—in the music video, his hands are appropriately/inappropriately in his jacket pocket at that moment in the tune. If the song’s author, the band’s original guitarist Doug Hopkins had sung the song, it certainly would have felt different.
Hopkins was the most hopeless brand of addict, consistently self-medicating in the face of depression. He penned “Hey Jealousy” and “Found Out About You”, but never was able to appreciate the spoils of his labor. Hopkins drank so often during recording sessions for the Gin Blossoms’ debut that he was unable to stand up in the studio. He was kicked out of the band before the record was released. There is no irony in the album title New Miserable Experience.
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.”
Loudon Wainwright III
Loudon Wainwright III
High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project
(2nd Story Sound, 2009)
Loudon Wainwright III has a reputation as a wiseass songwriter, but he has deep folk roots. Some may think he’s a one-hit wonder, with “Dead Skunk” being his only charting song, but his catalog is wider and deeper than that novelty hit might suggest. In the past two decades especially, he’s been turning out albums of wrenching beauty. History, his 1992 album written after the 1988 death of his father, examines family dynamics with telling insight, while 2001’s The Last Man on Earth, written after his mother’s death, explores mortality, self-destruction, and alienation without cracking a smile.
Last year, Wainwright announced his intention to do an album to honor the work of singer and banjo player Charlie Poole, another musician with a smart-aleck reputation. Poole would have been a superstar if the word had been in use in 1925. His first 78 RPM record, cut with his band the North Carolina Ramblers, was “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Blues / Can I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight Mister”, and sold 100,000 copies. It was the first country hit for Columbia Records, before the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers helped lay the foundations of what became today’s country music. Poole’s lightning-fast banjo playing also inspired Bill Monroe—Poole could be considered the father of bluegrass as well as a cornerstone of country music. He was an amazing, acrobatic performer, but very self-destructive. He drank himself to death a few weeks before he was scheduled to go to Hollywood to provide music for a hillbilly film.
The Mekons at Great American Music Hall and Jarvis Cocker at the Fillmore, San Francisco
The Mekons
July 28th at Great American Music Hall, San Francisco
It’s possible, maybe even probable, that you’ve never heard the Mekons. So you might not know that they’ve been around since the first wave of punks emerged from the UK’s rebellious political underbelly, that they’ve consorted with the likes of Gang of Four, John Peel, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, or that they’ve ventured into a variety of musical genres and styles, from their inception as outspoken three-chord blasters to bluegrass, country, folk, and Celtic-inspired punk. They’ve released over two dozen albums and EPs. They remain one of the most respected, unsung bands in music today.
The Mekons’ sound is big, and with the live band standing seven members deep, it ought to be. Instrumentation includes electric guitar, accordion, harmonica, bass, drums, violin, bouzouki (a Greek long-necked lute), and a sassy singer named Sally Timms. They are wry and self-deprecating, flooding the space in which they perform, filling in the cavities and hollows with their raucous songs and rowdy personalities—in this case, doing so from the venerable stage of the Great American Music Hall, at which they expressed sincere gratitude for being able to perform. On the first two songs, Jon Langford, arguably the group’s leader, broke two guitar strings, respectively, thus setting a conversational tone for the evening as he fumbled to try to fix them under the expectant eyes of band and audience; the witty, sexual innuendo and banter throughout the rest of the night was laid on thick right from the get-go. My personal highlight of the show was Langford’s ridiculously entertaining dance to “Cockermouth”, a Caribbean-flavored tune which brought him front and center stage to face his crowd of reveling fans. Through English folk-flavored tunes heavy on the violin to accordion-driven countryside pop to sloppy bar music reminiscent of the Pogues, the energy level never wavered, and the audience ate it up. The Mekons are extremely comfortable with one another, both as musicians and in their personal relationships—jokester Timms, who effortlessly commanded the stage and the band behind her throughout the night, heckled her fellow Mekons at the end of the set, disclosing that she’d slept with everyone in the band, “who were all lousy,” except for the bouzouki player, former Damned member Lu Edmonds, which resulted in snickers and all-out roaring, appreciative laughs from the audience.
Ty Segall at Thee Parkside, San Francisco
Ty Segall
July 26th at Thee Parkside, San Francisco
“Thank god the songs are all under 10 minutes,” I repeated to myself. Exploding lights. Shrieking guitar chords. Drowning in the crowd’s sweat. These are but snippets of the sensory overload I experienced during Ty Segall’s set at Thee Parkside on Sunday night.
The night began calmly enough. Punk enthusiasts from age 13 to 30 jabbered about a punk revival, psychic hotlines, and galleries in Oakland while they chain-smoked American Spirits on the patio. Thrift-diggers stood near the merchandise table in their crepe skirts and black tights. The antique bar near the stage was hassle-free with only a handful of concert-goers at each end, and Miller High Lifes were a reasonable three bucks. I wondered what forces aligned for me to have such luck.
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.
Sarah Jarosz
Sarah Jarosz
Song Up in Her Head
(Sugar Hill, 2009)
This debut album from the barely 18-year-old Austin, Texas-born Sarah Jarosz is a veritable breath of fresh air, and one of those albums that truly makes a reviewer’s task worthwhile. It’s not just good, it’s an exceptional album of sophisticated folk-meets-bluegrass-tinged music. Most genres that produce teenaged artists usually rely on elements that have little to do with musical ability, but rather fads, fashions, looks, or some other gimmick. Jarosz is the real deal with immense talent. She’s somewhat of a local legend, having been involved in music almost her entire life. While only 12 years old, she jammed with the likes of David Grisman and Ricky Skaggs, and she’s already played major bluegrass festivals including Telluride, Wintergrass, and Old Settler’s Music Festival, to name but a few.
Song Up in Her Head reveals an extremely accomplished multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, banjo, and mandolin, and does so with a mixture of precision, passion, and adventure. The album also showcases a convincing vocalist and songwriter. Jarosz is in no way overshadowed by her cast of supporting musicians, who are among the cream of acoustic performers: Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Byron House, Darrell Scott, Alex Hargreaves, Tim O’Brien, Chris Thile, and Mike Marshall. Unlike many star-studded albums, this one feels natural and vibrant, like a group of friends drawn together to play music that they cherish. All these accolades still don’t prepare you for the majesty of this album, produced by Gary Paczosa (John Prine, the Duhks, Chris Thile). The disc contains 13 cuts, 11 of them Jarosz originals.
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
For your sake, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you made the most of May. I hope you listened to the new Grizzly Bear record a lot. I hope you danced to the new Phoenix record while cleaning your apartment. I hope you watched American Idol with the type of dedication you haven’t had toward something since you were a teenager. And I hope you were school-girl excited the day the Wilco record leaked. Because you know what? Shit’s about to slow down to an absolute crawl. Summer’s upon us, and aside from some outdoor shows and some big summer tours, the music industry is gonna go into hibernation, and it’s gonna be lame. But for now, let’s take a look back at the month that was.
This Month’s Most Notable New Stories
American Idol Ends, I Get My Life Back
After five-and-a-half months of devoted, twice-weekly watching of American Idol, I am finally free to attempt regaining the massive chunk of my social life that I’d abandoned so that I could sit around trying to figure out how the American people go about picking their pop stars. The winner of season eight was, obviously, Kris Allen, the young, handsome, God-fearing, acoustic-guitar-toting, vaguely fratty, but still totally nice-seeming kid from Arkansas who will presumably go on to release a record that sounds a lot like Jason Mraz or early John Mayer or any number of other boring white people I don’t listen to.
Barnstormer II: On the Road with Daytrotter
by: Michael Harkin
Daytrotter’s founder, Sean Moeller, put out a call earlier this year for barns in the Quad Cities region that would potentially make for cool venues, and received several responses worth scouting out, eventually choosing the best spaces in Iowa and Wisconsin. “We wanted to try and expand what the website does,” explains Moeller, namely its presentation of bands “all live, no overdubs,” the context in which Moeller and company claim is “the best way to hear someone.” The first Barnstormer took place from July 25th through 29th this year, featuring bands who had previously recorded sessions for the site at Daytrotter’s Rock Island, Illinois-based studio, and it went well enough that preparations began immediately for a fall installment of the tour. read more
by: Michael Harkin
published: October 23, 2009 in column: Feature Story
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