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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: stephen king
White Rabbits: From Missouri to the Big Time
Brooklyn band White Rabbits is composed of six guys, and their live shows sometimes feature as many as three drummers at a time. Each member contributes lyrics and riffs, and—since many of them come from music school backgrounds—they sometimes switch off on instruments. So perhaps it’s not surprising that the group can sometimes get out of control. “On our first album, it was like, ‘How much noise can we create?’” remembers drummer Jamie Levinson of their 2007 debut, Fort Nightly.
“It’s a little exhausting to always be going on all cylinders,” adds singer/guitarist Greg Roberts.
I spoke with the pair at a Williamsburg bar one sunny afternoon a few months back, and they were joined by the act’s singer/pianist Stephen Patterson. Drinking a Bloody Mary and smoking a cigarette with his Ray-Ban sunglasses propped atop his mussed blond hair, Patterson plays the part of the rock star, while Levinson is more casual in a hooded sweatshirt. Roberts, meanwhile, looks preppy in his blue sweater, white collar, and slicked-back hair, and offers up intellectual tidbits every now and then. “We have graduated from the ‘anxiety of influence’,” he says at one point, quoting Harold Bloom. read more
Jay Reatard by Andres Jauregui
Jay Reatard
October 2008
Music Hall of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY
By Andres Jauregui
Before I bought my DSLR (a present to myself the day I got axed from a shitty office job), I took pictures on a lowly point-and-shoot. This is one of my favorite concert photos taken with that camera. I love how Jay and his bassist, Stephen, are just a throbbing mass of hair, testosterone, and substance abuse. You can’t really make out Jay’s face because his headbanging was a little more than my setup could handle, but contrast that with how clearly defined the rest of his body is, and you get an idea of how firmly planted and intense he was. The light spots and haze add a little lo-fi charm. I took this at the Rhapsody party during CMJ ‘08. Mission of Burma and the King Khan & BBQ Show also played and they were both awesome, whereas the Duchess & the Duke complained about the lighting and the sound at the venue (Music Hall of Williamsburg) throughout the entire set. I guess it was a weird bill for them to be on, anyway.
Reach out to Andres at andres@dutchvowels.com
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
Well, finally. After an entire summer spent twiddling my thumbs and waiting for some halfway decent shit to start happening, it finally has. Kanye, Taylor Swift, the Beatles, Jay-Z, Girls… Ellen DeGeneres! September has come and gone, people, but it was good to us while it was here. Let’s look back on it.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Kanye West Hates Taylor Swift or Whatever
For those of you still fighting the urge to fully give yourself over to the whims of the biggest stars from the world of popular music and culture, there were probably bigger news stories during September. But for the rest of us, there was no such thing. The moment Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift as she received the VMA for Best Female Video, we knew we were going to be in for an amazing week. First, the Twitter universe went crazy, and then it went a little crazier. By the next morning, all the major news outlets—and all the minor ones, too—chimed in, and that following night, Kanye appeared on the premiere of Jay Leno’s new 10pm talk show. Not a day later, the internet was overrun with “Imma let you finish” parodies, and that went on for a pretty long time. It was awesome, then less awesome, then not awesome at all. As for fallout from the incident, who knows? Kanye just cancelled an upcoming tour with Lady Gaga for no apparent reason, so something could definitely be going on there. And my mom thinks he’s a jerk now, so that can’t bode well for him either.
Richard Hawley
Richard Hawley
Truelove’s Gutter
(Mute, 2009)
Richard Hawley makes the ultimate sad bastard music. Combining the sad-sack balladry of a pre-Swordfishtrombones Tom Waits and the English angst of Morrissey with elegant melodies all his own, the former Pulp guitarist continues his career trajectory with his fifth album—yet another record about heartbreaking loneliness.
Of course, with its swelling strings, melancholic twang, and British baritone croon, music this achingly romantic always runs the risk of being maudlin. Additionally, an album this unabashedly retro also runs the risk of trying to recreate the music of an era awash in nostalgia. Not a lot of people make music this untrendy, after all. Luckily, any possible yearning for a past that never existed (that’s what nostalgia is basically is, right?) is absent. Only stark melancholy remains with occasional doses of over-sentimentality.
Apples in Stereo
Apples in Stereo
#1 Hits Explosion
(Yep Roc, 2009)
Some have already questioned the need for this product, whose title simultaneously mocks its own superfluity and celebrates the kooky K-Tel nostalgia these Elephant 6 torchbearers have always lovingly and unaffectedly made their own. And it’s true: Burn your own disc from iTunes, and this time make sure to bring “7 Stars”, “Sunndal Song”, “Stream Running Over”, “Look Away”, “Baroque”, and “She’s Telling Lies.” But what #1 Hits Explosion signifies is nice: A well-respected band of three-star reputation lobbying to be taken seriously as contenders at the end of a decade marked by heavy-hitting titles like Funeral and Hell Hath No Fury. Robert Schneider was happy to languish, churning out mathematically air-tight pop at home in between getting his weird friends off the couch to make Holocaust-era epics, seeming somewhat like a sideman in his own collective. His tunes got fluffier, bubbling up for Cartoon Network spots now and again, with innocence so unfeigned that even the cast of American Idol was permitted to take his most wide-eyed tune, “Energy”, for a joyride. And earlier this year, the cheerful, bald frontman didn’t have to jump far from his adult persona to become Robert Bobbert, his wackier children’s music project.
Although aging as gracefully as a Beatles-besotted psych-daddy can in latter-day pop or indie, Schneider is rightfully entertaining the desire to rise up with gloves on. Yep Roc isn’t the sort of label that goes around dropping cash-vacuum best-ofs; Apples in Stereo isn’t the sort of band that demands their fans pay double. What he seems to want as the ultimate prize is pop-songwriter fetishization. A greatest hits, a best-of with his name on it, a “best” period, something Apples in Stereo fans probably don’t waste many Twitter characters on before dropping another tab of acid to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
Sunn O))) at the Independent, San Francisco
Sunn O)))
August 8th at the Independent, San Francisco
For those who dig metal of the deconstructed, doom-filled variety, the drone hardly gets holier than what’s delivered at a performance by Sunn O))) (simply pronounced “sun”). The band, which centers around the long-collaborating core duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, began as a tribute to the buzzing landmark drones of Earth (especially the Earth 2 album), but their sound has gradually assumed a more dramatic, theatrical shape—a change that, while not obvious on the stage in the way that it is on their records, could be subtly detected in their overwhelming San Francisco performance last weekend.
The ambience at a Sunn O))) gig, no matter where it takes place, is akin to that of a moldy, ancient church: Not that unlike a priest shaking burning incense fumes around an altar, the band fires up two fog machines about 15 minutes before coming onstage, shrouding their guitars, organ, and enormous stacks of Sunn brand amplifiers (from whom they got the project’s name) in a mystical overcoat. O’Malley and Anderson, along with collaborator Steve Moore, emerged to the darkened, fog-filled stage in their black, hooded cloaks, assuming a druid-like appearance as they ceremoniously began playing their crackly, reverberating riffs and chords at a hypnotic, molasses-like clip, taking occasional swigs from bottles of red wine that rested onstage. Their enormous supply of amplifiers gives the audience a full-body experience as the quaking environs alternately conjur a soothing, cocoon-like feeling and a sense of imminent danger. If you dare remove your earplugs for even a moment, you’ll be quick to replace them—it’s much more difficult to suss out the sonic intricacies of their sound in the live setting than it is with their records, but the incredible impact of their stage configuration more than makes up for these difficulties.
Living in Harmony: Fleet Foxes vs. CSNY
In 1968, when members of three recently deceased bands—the Byrds, the Hollies, and Buffalo Springfield—improvised a cappella on a newly written song as a party trick, a whole new era of music was born.
The moment Graham Nash and David Crosby joined Stephen Stills on his “You Don’t Have to Cry”, history was made and arguably the best supergroup (my apologies, Traveling Wilburys) in the history of rock laid its foundation. Not to say that Crosby, Stills & Nash were perfect from the outset. Their first label audition, for Apple Records, was less than a success, and the group ended up levying a deal from Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records off his Buffalo Springfield fandom. Because it was, after all, a trio of rock stars, the group had to be handled delicately to prevent ego conflicts, and their record deal had to be structured to include an unusual amount of creative freedom to accommodate them.
CSN’s eponymous debut was filled with soaring, Baroque-influenced harmonies, and its songs were built out of layers of classically styled movements, all of which immediately struck a chord with the hippie generation already obsessed with old-fashioned madrigal-styled folk. Crosby, Stills & Nash was a culmination of what so many groups, especially Crosby’s own Byrds, had been working up to for years.
Questions and Answers with Slaid Cleaves
Here in the Smoke-Filled Room, we make it our business to keep a keen eye on politics and current events. But with the presidential election, legislative politics, and everything else going on in the world (pirates!), we haven’t quite had the time to delve into our current economic troubles. But who better to talk declining economic fortunes than Texas troubadour Slaid Cleaves? Cleaves is an Austin-based rock and folk guitar-slinger in the tradition of Woody Guthrie—though he’s a bit more subtle in his delivery of the truth. From his early days playing Texas honkytonks to the release of his new album, Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, Cleaves has painted extraordinarily vivid portraits of ordinary men and women just trying to stay sane and make ends meet. We caught up with the gravelly-voiced Cleaves to talk about Stephen King’s taste in music, Woody Guthrie and the Death Star, and the fragmentation of American culture.
Crawdaddy!: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us. So, you mentioned you just finished pumping gas. Are you out on the road touring?
Slaid Cleaves: Yeah, the record comes out tomorrow (April 21st). I thought it’d be out earlier this year, so I booked all these tour dates and now I’m out here and the record’s not out yet. But I’m out here playing shows and telling people about it.
Check Out Jay Reatard’s A>D>D Four Track/VHS Session
by: Jocelyn Hoppa
[via Pitchfork]
Enjoy this clip of Jay Reatard and company performing “It Ain’t Gonna Save Me” in an empty warehouse of some sort. The footage is kinda fuzzy and raw, adding to the overall lo-fi experience of his music. According to Matador, this was Stephen and Billy’s “last stand,” referencing how those two quit the band last month. read more
by: Jocelyn Hoppa
published: November 9, 2009 in column: What Goes On
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