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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..."
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Search results for: the excitement plan
Arbitrary List of Century’s Greatest & Best Songs
Last week, Pitchfork counted down the top 200 albums of the past decade in their Ken Burns-y musical aughts retrospective entitled “P2K.” Would you believe Rock ‘n’ Roll Gangster by Fieldy’s Dreams did not take the top spot? So much for my theory that the rap album Korn’s bass player made in 2002 defined the current generation. It’s a shame, because I was really looking forward to watching TV 20 years from now and seeing self-important montages of razor scooters and MySpace set to the dulcet, heart-mending tones of “Child Vigilante” and “Baby Hugh Hef.”
Seems kinda silly Pitchfork wasted so much bandwidth discussing albums when taste-maker/trend-setter Rob Zombie declared that format dead half a decade ago. Don’t worry; this 200 best album list thingy was merely an after dinner mint compared to the steak and potatoes au gratin P-fork unleashed last August: The “Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s.” 500! I bet you didn’t even know they made 500 songs since 1999. It’s true. While radio has seemed like one long, insufferable John Mayer song interspersed with pieces of Britney and Nickelback since the millennium began, there have actually been a plethora of artists slaving away at music having nothing to do with beer commercials or seducing young actresses. Crazy, I know, but true.
Let’s be frank: Out of the 500 songs dissected on Pitchfork’s list, the only ones anyone gives a fig about are the top 10, and that site’s apex faves read like the playlist Jim and Pam probably listen to every morning at grandma volumes during their commute to Dunder-Mifflin. Have a look-see:
Your Handy Guide to the Month in Music
Well, that wasn’t so bad, now was it? We made it through the dog days of summer pretty much unscathed-and maybe we even had some fun, free from the weight of having to pay attention to too many new records, simply because there just weren’t any records to pay attention to. It may not have seemed like a good thing at the time, but it was, believe me. You needed a break, you see, so that you could rest up for all the good shit that’s coming up in the next few months. So let’s take a few minutes to look back at August, but after that? It’s all fall, all the time.
This Month’s Most Notable News Stories
Paula Abdul Leaves Idol, Nation Cries
I know that you guys don’t care about this, but I do, very much, and there’s a good chance it will get picked up by someone on one of the mega nerdy Idol message boards, thus driving an absurd amount of traffic to Crawdaddy! and ultimately earning me a substantial raise, I’m sure. As you may have heard, Paula Abdul has made the difficult decision to walk away from the show that catapulted her back into the spotlight after years of hopeless irrelevance. It was over money, of course, and she turned down a ton of it, on the grounds that she deserved a salary that’s on par with Simon and Ryan. As many before me have pointed out, it’s impossible to imagine the show happening without her, and I continue to hold out hope that this entire thing is but a publicity stunt that will end with her returning just in time for the first episode.
Various Artists
Various Artists
Woodstock: 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur’s Farm
(Rhino, 2009)
The Woodstock Festival looms large in the cultural imagination of the hippie generation—and every generation that’s come of age since that magical weekend of peace, love, music, and freewheelin’ indulgence. In just over one weekend, a city of half a million people (and that’s just the audience) was spontaneously created and good vibes were the rule, not the exception. Woodstock was the “coming out” party for the hippies, in the old high society meaning of the word, an announcement that there was indeed a counterculture, to use a word that may not have even been coined at the time. The festival lived up to its billing with almost no reported violence or friction in the audience; good vibes abounded, even between the police and the stoned hippies in attendance.
Critics and sociologists are still arguing about the significance of the event and its greater meaning. In the August 9th edition of the San Francisco Chronicle Datebook, Country Joe McDonald, Paul Kantner of the Jefferson Airplane/Starship, and percussionist Michael Carabello, a member of Santana at the time, were still disagreeing about what went on at the festival, and they were there. Still, one thing is evident: The music that brought the crowds to Woodstock sent American culture spinning off in hundreds of unexpected directions, and it’s that music that still holds our collective interest.
Wavves at Bowery Ballroom, NYC
Wavves
July 15th at the Bowery Ballroom, New York City
No, he didn’t have a meltdown. And nobody was hoping for one (or so it seemed with the room’s gushing enthusiasm), but people were expecting another onstage public freakout from Wavves frontman Nathan Williams. Well, at least I was. The broken wrist wasn’t what I would call a promising sign in his favor. But he worked through it. Not only that, he seemed to play better with the cast on his right arm—more energy, more to prove.
I saw Wavves at Brooklyn’s Market Hotel back in March, with a bigger band—at Bowery Ballroom it was just a duo, the group distilled to the drum/guitar format of likeminded groups No Age and the White Stripes (Really! Let’s give credit where it’s due, people)—and a similar-sized crowd (big). The set was shorter back in March, and Williams looked surprised that people came to see him play, a kind of aw-shucks look plastered on his face the whole time. That look transformed into a shit-grin this time around: Yeah, I know I haven’t fucked up yet, and guess what? I’m not going to, muthafuckas!
Young Fresh Fellows
Young Fresh Fellows
I Think This Is
(Yep Roc, 2009)
Young Fresh Fellows have been called the godfathers of the Seattle scene, usually by fanatical fans or clueless critics, but they have about as much in common with blockbuster Seattle acts like Alice in Chains and Modest Mouse as they do with fellow Fog City stars Sir Mix-A-Lot and Jimi Hendrix. They were making indie rock before the term was coined, and their first album, Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, came out a few years before the birth of the Sub Pop label and the first stirrings of grunge. They’re certainly a pop treasure, but they’ve gone their own unique way over the years, inspired more by tenacity and innate musical influence.
The Fellows started playing in 1982 with longtime leader and songwriter Scott McCaughey on bass and vocals, Chuck Carroll on guitar, and Tad Hutchison on drums. Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest, recorded with producer Conrad Uno, became an early college radio hit, in 1984, at a time when college radio still had non-commercial street cred. It was an oddly packaged album, with cover art that looked like an AAA poster and spoken-word interludes between songs praising the Northwest taken from a tourist promotion album.
Todd Snider
Todd Snider
The Excitement Plan
(Yep Roc, 2009)
Although he’s a first-class singer, songwriter, and guitarist, Todd Snider has found it hard to get mainstream cred, despite guest shots on high-profile TV shows like Jay Leno’s Tonight Show and David Letterman’s Late Show. He’s nominally a country artist, but his music jumps around from mainstream country to bluegrass, blues, rock, and folk.
Snider grew up on folk and singer-songwriter stuff, and lived all over the United States in his youth, picking up a fondness for country music, or at least the conventions of country songwriting. His problem with the industry, which is also what makes him a unique talent, is that he has a razor-sharp sense of humor and writes lyrics that cut to the bone with their finely wrought observations of human nature and social interactions. He gets tagged as a “funny songwriter,” the kiss of death in an industry that’s deadly serious about the business side of the business, despite all of its legendary excesses and absurdities. Like John Prine, who signed Snider to his Oh Boy label, he laughs with us, not at us. He’s a humorist, not a joker, something many people have a hard time differentiating.
Condo Fucks
Condo Fucks
Fuckbook
(Matador, 2009)
For a band that’s been around nigh on a quarter century, the fun of an album like this (given that it’s a righteous bunch of covers) rests somewhere in its being about as necessary as it isn’t. For those outside the loop, Condo Fucks is a sort of faux-mysterious one-off lark perpetrated by New Jersey indie pillars Yo La Tengo, “masquerading” as a newly resurgent lo-fi garage band of old. Through promotional channels, it has blossomed into a pretty elaborate joke, born out of the simpler one from the packaging of YLT’s immutable ’97 classic, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. The record sleeve of that album featured a sort of mock Matador catalog that had fun with silly-sounding fictitious band/album names while also poking fun at record labels’ practice of actually placing such ads for real. The catalog included albums such as the Electric Tie Rack’s Anyone for Paisley?, the Shitheels’ Bucketfull of Shit, and of course, Condo Fucks’ would-be seminal LP, Movin’ In, summarized as “Punk rock smashingly paraded as only New London’s bad boys can.” Twelve years later, the gag lives on, this time in actual album form, yet it’s more fun than funny-ha-ha, more fist-pump than wink-and-nudge. The premise and backstory as told in deadpan press materials and a YouTube video are worth a chuckle, yes, but the album is just plain unpolished rock, basically for rock’s sake, and there’s nothing all that hoax-y or fake about it, really.
In 1990, YLT released an album of mostly folk covers called Fakebook, which is a term for a loose pile of scantily notated sheet music that a good reader of music could use to quickly learn the basics of given songs. In 2009 comes the Condo Fucks album of ’60s and ’70s garage covers called Fuckbook, the meaning of which you can decide for yourself, though it’s clearly a play off the earlier title. Yo La Tengo is beloved for their two-and-a-half decades-worth of contemplative, well-hewn, alternately shaken and stirred indie rock, equally cerebral in its perfect placid moments as it is in gusts of squawking, fuzzed-out overdrive. It makes sense that they’d guile it up for this raucous, transitory slopfest to shake free of their grown-up reputation for a few songs, enjoy a smidge of distance from their otherwise very deliberate material, and make it easier to forget the calm, cool, and collected Kaplan in the interest of setting free crazy ol’ Kid Condo, amp-kickin’ rocker that he is. Playing up the promotional mythology gag, Matador states that this recorded Condo Fucks rehearsal session is being released to drum up excitement for a forthcoming CF comeback tour of sorts. The reality, if one cares to know, is that Ira Kaplan occasionally lends his piano skills to an actual, little-known Brooklyn garage/blues band called the A-Bones, which, one year ago, was playing the going-out-of-business show of local Brooklyn watering hole the Magnetic Field, shutting its doors after less than six years in business. The A-Bones needed an opening band, Ira roped in Georgia and James, they threw together a bunch of appropriately garage-y covers, recorded it because they thought it sounded good, played that one live show, and that was it. Singer/guitarist Ira Kaplan was indeed the ringleader in the birth of this fandango, donning the full-on Condo Fuck alias of Kid Condo, whereas Yo La drummer Georgia appears as the less committal Georgia Condo, and bassist James McNew delves wackily incognito as… well, James McNew. (Come on, Dump. Where’s the spirit?) The point is that this is not the indie rock Chris Gaines, Hannah Montana, or even Sasha Fierce. Just a hot bunch of garage covers by a band with a healthy sense of humor and more energy than one might expect.
Danny Kalb: How to Have Fun and Still Play the Blues
Danny Kalb, a “commie kid” who grew up with folk music in the house but always ground his axe in his own fashion, was paid 75 bucks for two acoustic blues numbers on an LP that moved 300,000 units. The record was a compilation, The Blues Project, released in 1964, which Elektra Records billed as “a compendium of the very best on the urban blues scene.”
Kalb remained faithful to the blues, but as he set about forming his own band, he went electric, finding that the electric guitar offered more power and fun than the acoustic guitar he’d been plucking at.
Graham Parker and the Rumour
Graham Parker and the Rumour
Squeezing Out Sparks
(Arista, 1979)
When the music video was still in its primitive stages, a raw clip by Graham Parker and the Rumour for “Local Girls” made the late night TV rounds in heavy rotation, if only because there weren’t that many videos to go around. The promo’s slight tawdriness might be attributed to its living room setting and the depiction of “real women” as the object of the narrator’s enmity (and who could blame them? Those aviator shades were something else). But no doubt, the visuals contributed to the popularity of Squeezing Out Sparks: This was Parker, in his newly revised new wave image. Even the album’s cover sported the slanty lettering and tight attire requisite of a genre that was newly on the rise.
Everyone worth his or her stovepipe jeans and Ray-Ban Wayfarers had a copy of it, but Parker’s commitment to stripped-down pub rock came before what to some may’ve seemed like capitulation to new wave lockstep. Parker, whose age skewed only slightly older than his new wave contemporaries, was a veteran of England’s pre-punk pub rock scene; his band was partly comprised of members of Brinsley Schwarz, pub rockers of some renown themselves. The collective did a great job of delivering a ramshackle roots record that was easily camouflaged in the same stacks that held early offerings by straight-up new wavers Talking Heads, Blondie, and Elvis Costello (with whom “angry” Parker shared some stylistic quirks).
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss: Raising Sand
by: Angela Zimmerman
Raising Sand
(Rounder, 2007)
In the wider circles of rock ‘n’ roll, the fall of 2007 was preoccupied with an event of global proportions, an event that had the media and marketing machines of the music industry talking about it way more and way longer than necessary: The Led Zeppelin reunion. Remember? Maybe right now, you read that in disbelief, thinking that it barely raised a blip on your own music radar, but really think back and I think you’ll agree with me. Music movers and shakers couldn’t seem to calm their collective excitement about what was going to go down, and it was mostly on the premise that the one-off reunion show set for December 10, 2007 was a mere inkling of what was yet to come, that being a full-scale tour. This, of course, never happened. The reunion show was pretty cool, I guess, if you were connected or rich enough to actually get there. But basically the concert came and went and now, in retrospect, two years later, it seems clear that it didn’t have much lasting significance, or relevance, or well… much of an impact at all.
In the wake of all that frenzy, there was actually news on the Zeppelin front worthy of our time and subsequent allegiance, and that was the release of the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss album, Raising Sand.
This album ended up going platinum and winning Album of the Year at the 2009 Grammy Awards, so it certainly received its critical and commercial due, but for me—and I bet for many who were sick of all the Zeppelin talk and speculation taking over our RSS feeds—I didn’t even listen to it back when it was actually released by Rounder in ’07. Raising Sand hit the market in the midst of the media storm. It was, and is, a collection of music that’s devoid of any hype or expectation, quite unlike that parallel project that brewed just beyond. Two years later, Raising Sand remains refreshingly free and disaffected—a surprise collaboration that was candidly captured and executed. And that innate harmony shines through on the recording.
Raising Sand is essentially a covers album. Producer T-Bone Burnett threaded the record together and gave it a stripped-down shell. Devoid of excessive studio polish or wizardry, Burnett injected warmth throughout by allowing the collection of songs to feed organically on its modest instrumentation and gorgeous vocal harmonies. Each song demands attention, as they revisit and celebrate the original author who penned it. The legend and lore of Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant is undermined by his folky versatility here, and it’s a testament to the truly angelic vocals of bluegrass nymph Alison Krauss. Who ever thought Plant’s signature spiky yowl could soften like this? Krauss could probably coax the devil out of hell with her rich, honeyed voice, and her perfect pitch effectively coerced Plant into melting right along with her.
The swaggering blues of the first track, “Rich Woman”, first recorded in 1955 by Li’l Millet and his Creoles, is a chilly opening to a record that steadily softens as its moves along. The following song is my favorite. “Killing the Blues” (written by Roly Salley) explores some of the duo’s most beautiful vocal harmonies. With softly thumping guitar chords and intermittent pedal steel, this song beckons sleepy afternoons under a weeping willow tree tossing cares to the wind, or a deserted, lonesome walk in a pattering rain shower headed nowhere in particular. They craft a mood for sure, but leave the song open enough for the listener to take it wherever he and she chooses.
Sam Phillips’ “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us” is next, a sweet, haunting ode by Krauss accompanied by sparse instrumentation and a lackadaisical waltzing tempo. “Polly Come Home”, written by Gene Clark, is stiff and slow, but Plant sounds as gentle as we’ve ever heard him, his near-whispering vocals greeted by Krauss’ heavenly timbre, serving to lift the song to a place of loss and confusion as they incisively sing together, “I searched for you there, and now look for you from within / Polly come home again.”
“Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On)”, an uptempo, countrified rocker by the Everly Brothers, swoops in to rescue the album from sinking too heavily into dreamy doldrums, and then “Through the Morning, Through the Night” (again by Gene Clark) takes the reins, steering us back to broken-hearted introspection. For a song that is already sad as hell, Plant and Krauss take it to a whole other level as they sing in harmony, “But to know that another man’s holding you tight / Hurts me little darling / Through the morning, through the night.”
“Please Read the Letter” was originally recorded by Plant and Jimmy Page for their ’98 album, Walking into Clarksdale, but this duo has, of course, turned it into yet another lonesome love song, albeit this one is a bit more hopeful and circuitous. Tom Waits and his wife/collaborator Kathleen Brennan wrote “Trampled Rose” (for 2004’s Real Gone album) and the distance between Waits and Krauss is not as far as you may think. Waits sings with rust on his lips and a bite in his growl, while Krauss’ delivery is entirely silky soft, but both of them capture the folky breadth of the song and carry with it their own desolation and desperation.
With “Fortune Teller” by Allen Toussaint (who wrote it under the pseudonym Naomi Neville back in 1962) comes Plant’s turn to take over vocal duties, his famous voice metered; he keeps his range within the limitations of the song. Krauss and Plant take on “Stick with Me Baby” (written by Mel Tillis) together, their harmonies hushed and humble, before Plant takes respectful liberties around Townes Van Zandt’s gritty “Nothin’” as saturated strings and a dark, fuzzy guitar unfurl and wind around his singing. “Let Your Loss Be Your Lesson” (by Little Milton) is an Allman Brothers-like country-rocker with a danceable, jangly rhythm, coming up for air just before the album closes out with the Doc Watson tune, “Your Long Journey.” With autoharp leading the way, this triumphant hymn is exactly the right way to end Raising Sand, tenderly accepting the departure at hand as Plant and Krauss together sing, “My heart breaks as you take your long journey.”
Word on the street is that Krauss and Plant are set to do another album together. This time, I’ll be welcoming it, even in the midst of any other media mayhem that might be happening on the outside.
Listen: “Killing the Blues” [at youtube.com]
by: Angela Zimmerman
published: November 18, 2009 in column: Ex Post Facto
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