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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: smog
Band of Horses: June 11th at Carnegie Hall and Bill Callahan: June 13th at Le Poisson Rouge, NYC
Band of Horses
June 11th at Carnegie Hall, New York City
“The last place we played was just like this,” Ben Bridwell cheekily remarked during Band of Horses’ night out at Carnegie Hall. While the show at the renowned venue was billed as a one-of-a-kind acoustic show, in actuality it wasn’t completely acoustic—more like partially electric and undistorted.
But it was certainly an unusual set-up for a band that tends to imbue their woodsy rock with ample grit and reverb. For such a formal setting the band was surprisingly relaxed and laidback, which worked particularly well given the new stripped-down arrangements. The added accompaniment of banjo, violins, and harmonica lent their material a newfound twang and brought out the countrified edge that’s only been hinted at before. “Great Salt Lake” sounded majestic with its crescendoing orchestral grandeur. Meanwhile, “Weed Party” was sped up in jaunty double-time tempo, and “Wicked Gil” was dramatically slowed down to near un-recognition. Fitting in perfectly with the night’s music was a cover of Gram Parsons’ “A Song For You.” There were also a handful of new songs, including a starkly beautiful and still untitled song penned by Tyler Ramsey, and another harpsichord-laden song called “Compliments Down There.” After hearing them live, it’ll be interesting to see how they translate on record and if the acoustic direction is one that will carry over in the studio as the Horses prep their third full-length. After hearing the breezy beauty of the band last night, lord knows it certainly should. – Jessica Gentile
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.
The Ghost of Christmas Lists Past
In pulling down our holiday decorations from the attic, I came across a massive box of four-track recordings on cassette—decades old and over a decade’s worth of songs that may never be heard again if they were ever heard at all. They were recorded on a remarkable tool, a portable multitrack recorder that could record four distinct tracks of audio onto a cassette tape. Historically, audio cassettes are four-track mediums—stereo left and right in one direction (Side A), and stereo left and right in the other direction (Side B). But since a four-track recorder records all four tracks in one direction, listening to these heartfelt musings would require a trip to Ye Olde eBay.
While I was going through this archive, reading labels, and trying to remember by the look of the tapes what was on the ones I never did label, I spied a large envelope. Inside, surprisingly, I found dozens of old letters from me to Santa, mostly from the ’80s as far as I could tell. How and why they ended up with these multitrack archives I had no idea, until I read a few and realized; here’s this week’s column…
Dear Santa,
Why Punk Rock Can’t Do the Talking For You
There are plenty of ways to get your point across these days—some better than others. Op-eds are fine; civil disobedience is better; taking personal responsibility every day of your life to avoid supporting things that are unjust, unsustainable, and destructive is the best. Protests, culture jamming, boycotts—these also send messages in ways the entire public can either get behind, defy, or at least discuss. The arts, however—once the sole venue outside of actual politics in which citizens managed to air controversial opinions—have long since been so thoroughly commoditized, subjugated, and padded with tacit approval that to effectively distribute a work unambiguously subversive enough to actually rattle some cages is virtually impossible. Music, while arguably the most revolutionary artistic medium of the late modern era, is not only included in that misfortune, but has suffered perhaps worst of all.
With generations of practice, the Man and his cultural-capitalist minions have successfully maneuvered all former musical rebellions into some pretty dang snug kid gloves. Having mastered the ability to view any cultural or political movement as a market, they know that when the time is right and the market is big enough, the most effective and profitable way of squelching its seditious potential is by no means to stifle it. To the contrary, they embrace, co-opt, promote, and sell it ’til it’s just another half-priced t-shirt on clearance at Wal-Mart.
With art, entertainment, and commerce so noxiously intertwined, whatever political views are expressed in popular music carry about as much weight as advice from a fortune cookie. As far as unpopular music goes—who cares? No one’s going to hear that stuff anyway. Folk, hip-hop, and, of course, punk rock remain the three genres most commonly associated with the idea of “political music,” and all three, in their best-selling guises, generally convey but gutted husks of slogans for the various upheavals they once represented. Yet even down here at Political Threat Level: Green, one genre’s bind is even more debilitating than the other two, in its continued futile attempts at political relevance.
Of Great and Mortal Men
The 2008 general election season is in full swing, and here in the Smoke-Filled Room, we’ve been doing our best to bring you interesting political conversations from a diverse and outspoken group of musicians. But indie songwriters Christian Kiefer, Matthew Gerken, and Jefferson Pitcher have done more than just talk about the highest office in the land—they’ve gone and written 43 songs, one for each President of the United States. And they’re promising a fall download to cover whoever will be number 44. It’s a tremendously ambitious project and, against all odds, they’ve succeeded in crafting a wonderful record that’s timeless, intelligent, and entertaining. The trio’s three-CD set features some impressive collaborators, including Califone, Rosie Thomas, Bill Callahan of Smog, and Mark Kozelek. But Kiefer, Gerken, and Pitcher are the stars of the show—imparting history lessons and political commentary along with jangling guitars and killer hooks. Crawdaddy! spoke with the three armchair historians about Reagan’s Casio tribute, the obligatory presidential penis, and why it’s about damn time that Scarlett Johansson gets tapped for a campaign theme song.
Crawdaddy!: Your forthcoming record, a triple CD titled Of Great and Mortal Men: 43 Songs for 43 US Presidencies, is set to hit stores in September. It features a song for each of the 43 presidents. How did the project come about? Have you always been politically and historically-minded?
Jefferson Pitcher: The year previous to writing these songs, I was living in a small town in Ontario, Canada, experiencing more snow and less sun than I knew was possible. Kiefer turned me on to www.fawm.org, which stands for February Album Writing Month. The idea for FAWM is that one writes and records an album in the month of February, posting the songs on a community website as they are ‘finished.’ I suppose the idea here is to abandon to some degree one’s inner critic and to develop a sense of community. In short, I was ripe for both. I’ve had a longstanding interest in both songwriting and improvisation, so this seemed an interesting way to let them leak together a bit. I enjoyed the process immensely. The following year I had moved back to California and, as February was approaching, found myself longing to do the exercise again. The problem was I felt completely dry in terms of songwriting material. My work often explored themes or even direct plot lines in fiction, and while the autobiographical spills in here and there, I was really looking for something else to work with. I don’t remember exactly how the idea came about, but I pretty quickly decided that it could be a really interesting project. So I asked Kiefer if he wanted to join, he asked Gerken, and we were on our way.
Yardbirds Question Time
Originally published in NME, 9 July 1965
The Yardbirds were in no mood for pulling punches when I called on them in their dressing room at the Ready, Steady, Go! studios in Wembley Park. Keith Relf expressed the desire that they should be “the first group to tell the truth” and that he was tired of “watered down interviews which said nothing.”
Ready, Steady, Go! itself has been the subject of a great deal of controversy recently. What do you think of the show?
Heading for the Ditch: Smog and Will Oldham
Originally published in The Independent, February 2000
It’s only the first week in February and already spring’s sonic daffodils are poking through the boy-band mulch. Those who feared they would live their whole lives without seeing Mercury Rev and Tony Christie in the same Top 20 singles chart can now rest easy. And a double bill of albums every bit as deliciously twisted as that unlikely coupling has got 1999 off to a flyer in the long-playing stakes. Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s I See a Darkness and Knock Knock by Smog are the sort of records decades get remembered for, never mind years.
Both are released on the same label—Wandsworth-based boutique imprint Domino Records, which has for some years been carving out a reputation as Britain’s most inspired independent—and both were made by serious-seeming Americans with a lot of history behind them. Bill Callahan, aka Smog, and Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy, sit stiffly in different South West London bars, eager to explain themselves.
The Hollywood Binliner: LA Punk
Originally published in NME, 19 November 1977
There are 70 punks in LA—here’s most of ‘em:
If India sank into the sea, the Los Angeles Times would probably run the story on page 34 at the bottom of column seven. That’s about the measure of importance the Angelenos attach to the rest of the world. Southern California increasingly sees itself as an insulated Garden of Eden that just can’t be touched. It’s sunny and affluent, and as far as its inhabitants are concerned nothing, but nothing, can happen to change that.
1970 Tales of Byrds and Brownies
by: Dinky Dawson
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.
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by: Dinky Dawson
published: July 16, 2009 in column: My Life Is the Road
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