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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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Search results for: leaves turn inside you
1970 Tales of Byrds and Brownies
In 1970, I left Fleetwood Mac to come to America to work with the Byrds. Quite the stranger in a strange land, my first month in California found this Englishman building equipment for the road, moving into a new house in Sherman Oaks with Jimmi Seiter, the Byrds road manager, and meeting all the group’s families. Roger, his wife Ianthe, and his two sons, Patrick and Henry, lived high in the Hollywood Hills. I have fond memories of playing pool there and checking out Roger’s toys, including a huge Moog synthesizer with wires going back and forth in organized chaos.
During the pre-cell phone days of the 1970s, CBs (citizens’ band radios) were kings of the road; everyone who spent any time on America’s highways had a CB for communication. They were an essential road tool—great for speed traps and accident alerts, as well as for finding gas stations and places to eat while traveling. Popular among truck drivers, Roger had a CB base station at home, units in his Porsche and other cars, and a portable one that he carried with him. Clarence had a CB unit too, and he and Roger would talk to each other all the time, using the 10-codes and other CB lingo, and sometimes setting up practical jokes on the other band members.
However, Roger’s most spectacular toy at that time was his low-powered laser. Sometimes at night, Roger would point his laser across the canyon road through a window onto a white wall in the living room of an unsuspecting neighbor watching television. The laser burst would shine a spot of light on the living room wall, freaking out the man who would look everywhere searching for the light source. Roger, of course, used binoculars to watch the man and would turn the laser off just as the man turned toward the window. In those pre-terrorist days, Roger often took the laser on the road, amusing the band as he annoyed bewildered victims with his practical jokes.
Unwound: Leaves Turn Inside You
Unwound
Leaves Turn Inside You
(Kill Rock Stars, 2001)
I loved the title. Given, I’m biased because my favorite record is Sonic Youth’s A Thousand Leaves and Unwound was milking my sweet spot here by invoking an even more psychedelic autumnal image. Nevertheless, I listened to Leaves Turn Inside You because I liked the title, and the art didn’t hurt either: A stark midnight backdrop with the band name rendered ominously in Middle English-style text à la Beowulf. I took the compliment personally when someone I know called it “fucking metal.” While Sonic Youth’s masterful spelunking expedition had the politeness to finish up over the course of one 80-minute disc, Unwound’s holy tome messily splays across two because it’s fucking metal.
Unwound aren’t metal at all, actually. A post-hardcore noise unit from Olympia who struggled for years alongside, oh, Polvo, and countless other faceless (don’t wince, I didn’t see you picking Sara Lund out at 88 Boadrum last year) groups who struggled to put noises and tunes together in new ways without leaving their world. And granted, it’s hard to distinguish the earlier Repetition and The Future of What from Polvo or make out much of anything from the disconsolate if occasionally interesting dissonances. But on these 1999-2000 recordings released the following year as their swan song, the perennially discordant trio finally succeeded in keeping their sludgier tendencies at bay. The particle beam of feedback—which passkeys a whole two minutes of Leaves opener “We Invent You”—is an audacious start in many ways, not least for its Icelandic clarity. At the pace of a floe, with thundering guillotine drums and elegiac, off-in-the-distance vocals, the tune sets all kinds of bars too high for future standards of art rock, stoner rock, and prog; if there was any justice, some Strat-wielding jughead is transmogrifying it into the next Sunn O))) as we speak.
Bill Callahan
Bill Callahan
Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle
(Drag City, 2009)
There comes a time in many people’s lives when they have to put a stake in the ground for how they’ll choose to move forward on the matter of faith, one way or the other. For Bill Callahan (also known as Smog and (Smog)), the time has come. He closes out Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, his 13th record and second under his birth-given name, with a long song about the end of his faith in God. When he sings “It’s time to put God away / I put God away,” it’s hard to know how to take it exactly, especially depending on how the listener feels about the topic. But it is Callahan’s way of saying there’s nothing more to discuss about it really, but here’s a 10-minute musical ode to the done deed anyway.
But the disconcerting thing about “Faith/Void” and his sentiment is his inclusion of forsaking lines like “Damning the children / Making the ill just a little more sick.” It’s a “wait a minute” moment with the very power to re-open the whole God debate. Namely, if he no longer believes in God, he probably shouldn’t blame God for the atrocities of the world anymore either. I would imagine he’d have to just rid himself of that line of thinking altogether so that this reasoning would cease to exist. It would be a more believable atheist ode if he reconciled that there’s no divine meaning behind life as he knows it, which he never does here. In fact, he only puts God away, tucked inside some drawer of his mind, filed under “denounced.” When Callahan sings, “This is the end of faith / No more must I strive / To find my peace in the lie,” it sounds like a mantra—as does much of the song, which repeats groupings of words—a tool used in a quest for some form of transformation. And it’s this sentiment that could easily be considered a statement of faith as even atheists choose to believe in something, even if it’s in himself or love or humanity.
OK Computer In the Future
Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.
Dai Griffiths is Head of the Department of Music at Oxford Brookes University.
***
Arbouretum
Arbouretum
Song of the Pearl
(Thrill Jockey, 2009)
The follow-up to Arbouretum’s 2007 doom-folk classic, Rites of Uncovering, carries with it high expectation and anticipation for me—after all, Rites of Uncovering was my #2 record of that year. That can be such a dangerous mix, for records or for anything in life it would seem, where the creeping feeling of a letdown weighs heavily on the mind, a surefire path towards a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Maybe I’m just a sucker for framing myself into these situations, but my immediate reaction upon taking a first spin of Song of the Pearl was this: Where Rites of Uncovering rolled back and forth like expansive oceanic fog, somehow still sprightly and contained, yet also detailing an abidingly dark storyline of almost Middle-earth proportions—all things I specifically loved the band for—this new record is heavier, more immediate, less sprawling… almost decidedly myopic. Different. But is this a likeable difference?
The thing is, after playing this album over and over again, plenty of prevailing doom, billowy wandering, and heavy folk-rock passages are to be found; it’s just that things move along a little faster. Gone (for now at least) are the days of the 11-minute opus, providing the listener with more urgent lyrical content to chew on instead—the immediacy almost functioning as a reflection of the times, a result of such palpable widespread despair in a world that seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. Time is of the essence. And the lyrics don’t disappoint with gems like this one from the escapist track “Another Hiding Place”: “I slid softly / Into warmth and amnesia / Derelict and drunken / Softly overtaken.” These abound, not only in this particular song, but on the rest of Song of the Pearl as well.
Song of the Pearl latches on to these ears like Rites of Uncovering did in that there’s still ingenious ebb and flow to the music that’s central to some critical ongoing conversation listeners assume the band’s having with them, as if it holds another key to unlock the journey. In fact, Arbouretum’s songs, let alone albums, can best be summed up by knowing how it feels to be granted access to another level in Zelda. “Down by the Fall Line”, in all its hypnotic, psychedelic glory, slows the pace, bringing layers of sullen, yearning mood swirling into the mix where guitars both tinker and wail. Finding those things interplaying with lyrics like “The leaves are waving the sun down / They’re whispering it won’t be long” is to travel directly into the heart of Arbouretum’s saga, where meaningful prose exudes from everyday things we generally take for granted.
The longest song on Song of the Pearl might be the best: “Infinite Corridors” surpasses the six-minute mark and is much heavier than the five tracks that come before it, made complete with well-handled starts/stops approximating one running from door to door, trying and failing to find a way out, as if stuck inside some long twisted hallway of the mind. After a creamy middle of guitar squalls and otherwise sedated jamming, the music drops out only for the crushing start/stop tactic to return, not alone, but with a layer of cascading, nightmarish guitar inflections, where thereafter the band proceeds to shred the song apart. And how! Likewise, “The Midnight Cry” keeps up the sprint towards something… and perhaps there’s hope after all: “He will come to take us to the throne… One more day and one more night / Then he’s gonna come in on the clouds / And every head will bow / Then with power and great glory.” The album ends with a lullaby of longing—“Tomorrow Is a Long Time”, a Bob Dylan cover—but you’d almost never know it, for it’s relatively skewed but also so apropos to this album’s theme (not to mention being directly correlated to the song that had just come before it), that it fits right in as one of Arbouretum’s own. “There’s beauty in the silver, singin’ river / There’s beauty in the sunrise of the sky / But none of these and nothing else can touch the beauty / That I remember in my true love’s eyes.” Le sigh.
Song of a Pearl could be viewed by some (I just saw Pitchfork’s harsh 5.8) as the band not giving it their all, while possibly indicating that their best may be yet to come. Which may, in fact, be true. But I see this record as part of an ongoing palaver Arbouretum is having with their audience. And, like all great conversations, it’s not about the destination but the trip.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Tags: Arbouretum, Song of the Pearl, Thrill Jockey
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Why Don’t We Do It in the Doll’s House?: A Peek Inside the Beatles’ White Album
I remember what they sounded like. As obnoxious as auctioneers, the loud, peppy DJs on the Top 40 radio stations crammed in as many words as they could between commercials and hit songs that grew increasingly stale, but the disc jockeys on the underground station were low-key. With deep voices, they spoke slowly and softly, and listening to them it was easy to imagine bearded hippies with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure rock ‘n’ roll. They never played hit singles, and they waited until several songs played before they identified anything, which was frustrating to someone trying to become familiar with at least a small fraction of the overwhelming amount of rock ‘n’ roll that was out there. It really didn’t matter, though: At that point, I still had to hear most songs several times before they penetrated.
This was in Des Moines, Iowa in the early ’70s—early enough that it still seemed like the late ’60s. I was in sixth and seventh grade when I listened to the underground radio station. Occasionally, on a Saturday I would walk to a hippie shop called Elysian Fields and try to figure out who the bands were on the posters covering the walls and flip through record bins while wondering what all the records sounded like. As with the underground radio station, you never heard any Top 40 hits in Elysian Fields. I took in what I could, but I processed little of what I heard. Fortunately, a friend whose older brothers left their record collections behind when they moved out set his selling price at a quarter; it was because of him that I first had a chance to listen to, at my leisure, bands like Captain Beefheart and the Electric Prunes.
One day, one of the deep-voiced hippies announced that the underground station was going to play The White Album by the Beatles in its entirety. Because most of the other Beatles LPs had number one singles, The White Album was probably the only serious candidate for an underground station—that or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Although none of its songs were hits, Pepper’s generally had more of a pop sound than The White Album, and because at that point the wow factor associated with Pepper’s was still fresh, it got much more press. Of all the Beatles records, The White Album seemed the most underground.
These United States: DC Band Rocks for Change
The PA at Brooklyn’s Union Hall blasts the opening chords of Led Zeppelin’s anthemic “Good Times, Bad Times”, turning the heads of the cosmotini-drinking office party strays that have wandered downstairs from their bocce tournament. At the front of the room, obscured by the crowd, some member of Washington, DC’s These United States noodles along to Jimmy Page’s riffs on his guitar, eliciting chuckles from a few of the attendees at the foot of the stage—those who, unlike the after-work crowd, came for the band.
Gradually, the back of the room excuses the diversion and resumes talking, but minds are about to be changed. As if responding to the boozy giocatori’s implicit need to rock, the band promptly unleashes a brash rush of crunchy countrified blues, flanked by a genial pedal steel and a beat that’s as steady and powerful as—I cannot resist the simile—that ol’ steam train. Again, heads turn, and not surprisingly, stay turned.
The blues-rock blast that gripped the crowd at Union Hall might be equally shocking for anyone who heard and enjoyed These United States’ debut, A Picture of the Three of Us at the Gate to the Garden of Eden, released just eight months ago. The band’s new album, Crimes, released October 7th on United Interests Records, exorcises the trembling bedroom psychedelia of A Picture, revealing driven, bluesy folk that rambles the length of Highway 61. As their shift in direction signals this election season, These United States has change on its mind.
Daily Previews and Reviews of the Week’s Events
It’s the time of year again, when the weather turns crisp and brisk in New York City, leaves begin to fall to the ground, visions of the underworld start to surface in storefronts, and the streets brim with more cool kids than there’s even room for on any given normal weekend in downtown Manhattan. Yes, it’s the CMJ Music Marathon, 2008 style, where your pricey badge will mean next to nothing and you’ll be left out in the cold at least a few times wondering if you have time to hop on the train to get to Brooklyn for that other show. But, you know what: None of that matters because it’s New York fuckin’ City, and for five days straight, no matter what, you’re going to consume tons of beer, tons of bands, and probably walk away from it all with some sort of cold that’ll put you out for the week following, all in the name of experiencing sounds from the best up-and-coming bands in the country and beyond in one of the greatest places in the world to see live music.
Crawdaddy! is tossing itself into the mayhem of this year’s festival to check out panels, films, and the music being offered up. Each page here represents one full day of the festival, where we’ve provided some preview highlights we’re looking forward to, and then we’ll be reporting back each following morning with what we saw the previous day before. No real agenda, no real cause. We’re gonna go with the flow and see how we emerge from the festival insanity that is CMJ.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
The Best Books on Music of the Last Six Months
There’s something about summer reading lists. They almost always contain must-reads, but they are also supposed to contain page-turners… books that, while not being the most challenging literary content you’ve feasted your eyes on, are highly entertaining without being too heavy on the thinking. It’s summer for crissakes, and that means taking a standard break from life. Summer stands for having time to kick it at the beach or in an air-conditioned place with a cool drink in one hand and a easily-digestable book in the other. Rock tales are the perfect anecdote.
To honor all the great summer reading lists that encourage us to slow down and enjoy the season while it lasts, here’s the first annual list we put together of books on various aspects of the music industry that were published from the first half of 2008.
924 Gilman: The Story So Far
by Brian Edge
(MAXIMUMROCKNROLL)
Polvo
by: Andres Jauregui
In Prism
(Merge, 2009)
Time off can be a good thing. In fact, when it’s requested—in a relationship, at a job, during sporting competitions—it’s usually out of self-care, part of a larger plan to perform better by way of being rested and re-focused. But, with a rock band (and, alas, in some relationships) a hiatus is too often seen as a sign of weakness, a threat to the tenuous charade of stability that albums uphold. A hiatus, eroded by time, can become a permanent break.
Before re-forming to play the Explosions in the Sky installment of All Tomorrow’s Parties and the mammoth Primavera Sound festival in Spain, Polvo’s break indeed looked permanent. Their previous album, 1997’s Shapes, was followed by a “farewell” tour and a 10-year period of inactivity during which members focused on family and other projects. But whether renewed interest led to new recording prospects, or vice versa, the reformed Polvo (original line-up with new drummer Brian Quast) has used this moment in the sun to release the album of their career.
read more
by: Andres Jauregui
published: September 18, 2009 in column: Reviews
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