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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: tortoise
Pelican’s New Album Streaming on MySpace
Dudes. Here’s some great free music you don’t have to steal: Pelican’s latest release, their debut on Southern Lord, What We All Come to Need.
As Pelican has, in the past, shifted their metal-inspired instrumental music from their heavier foundation to some experimental jamming à la Tortoise, they’ve also always kept it moody and ominous. And that’s no different here… in fact, maybe the switch over to Southern Lord reinstated their love for the doom as well as the glory. This new album has both, and it’s wholly satisfying… not a clunker in the bunch. I mean, their older stuff still contains way more baddass-ness, but a track like “Ephemeral” is hard to deny for any fan of stoner and doom metal. read more
Bowerbirds
Bowerbirds
Upper Air
(Dead Oceans, 2009)
Bias alert: I’m not sure what makes these types of bands tick. Sure, who doesn’t want their songs to be pretty? But why so slow? Folk ain’t mood music—too tuneful—and what sounds are there to sculpt into soundscapes? Can a band like Fleet Foxes, who hit it big last year with the relatively upbeat “White Winter Hymnal”, really be having more fun getting that over with in two minutes to get back to the slow stuff? Is it the technique, the jam? The drugs?
Phil Moore and Beth Tacular play Midwestern plains music, full of wind and mountain with Romanian and Appalachian-style exotica creeping in. In other words, it’s folk unsuitable for moony, heartsick teens or the Nuyorican Cafe. Like Fleet Foxes, the ornithological-minded Bowerbirds’ two albums thus far rally around a singular stroke of impeccable songwriting. On 2007’s autumnal, enigmatic Hymns for a Dark Horse, that was the strangely sexy “In Our Talons”, which stretched for miles with a wanting accordion figure, birdlike dee-dee-dee sounds, and lyrics to match a rueful acoustic guitar. On Upper Air, the centerpiece is “Beneath Your Tree”, with chord changes for stems and relatively intense harmonies for leaves. To their credit, there are actually two this time; the other a pretty country tumble called “Northern Lights”, which they “don’t expect a Southern girl to know.” Having augmented their configuration with a drummer who shakes more like a tambourine, the tune is a welcome update of a ramshackle ballad like, say, the Black Crowes’ “She Talks to Angels.”
Tortoise
Tortoise
Beacons of Ancestorship
(Thrill Jockey, 2009)
Tortoise, of all people, are worried about their age. The sarcastic album title about their elder statesmen status, the even more sarcastic title “Prepare Your Coffin”, and one song, “Minors”, is presumably about what they prize the most in this day—being one, appealing to one, anything to reverse time back away from those meddlesome coffins.
Maybe they felt they were prematurely mellowed out on It’s All Around You. Maybe they felt they were prematurely mellowed out for five records. Beacons, John McEntire and company’s sixth, is their loudest by a bit, even with the second half chilling out for a powder mostly. Beyond the boisterous Standards opener “Seneca” and its molten drumline, “fuzz” isn’t quite a word associated with Tortoise, but here, vibrating, queasy, hairy distortion infests every stroke until the last four songs. Burping Moog and ARPs in particular lead the proceedings—this is also the band’s most synth-heavy by far. Even the most traditionally them track, “Charteroak Foundation”, is crashed halfway through by a buzzing laser more reminiscent of Elvis Costello’s high Farfisa arrangements or Dr. Dre’s G-keyboard swizzle than anything this postmodern-fusion collective’s allowed on their pristine china collections they call records.
Questions and Answers with Janet Bean
President Obama has already been occupying the White House for a couple of weeks, but here in the Smoke-Filled Room, we still haven’t quite gotten over the inauguration. Indeed, Americans from coast to coast welcomed the new President with great pomp and circumstance and, in many cases, with very loud rock ‘n’ roll shows. One of the best was staged by natives of the President’s hometown. “Big Shoulders Ball: Chicago Celebrates Change” was organized largely by the owners of the hip and always politically aware Chicago club the Hideout, and the show greeted the new administration with an all-star bill of fellow Midwesterners that included, among other rock luminaries, Ted Leo, Tortoise, Andrew Bird, and Eleventh Dream Day, who were founded in 1983 and mixed Neil Young’s electric guitar wizardry with the energy of punk. We were lucky enough to have the chance to catch up with Eleventh Dream Day’s Janet Bean to chat about the perils of compromise, how President Obama inspired her to get a new pet, and my great taste in art.
Crawdaddy!: Let’s start out with the Chicago inauguration gig… how did it come together?
Janet Bean: That gig really came together because of the sheer chutzpah of Katie and Tim at the Hideout and the ethics they operate the club under—and live their lives under. They created this sense of community through the club because they are so active in issues of social justice within the community, and it brings out the best in everybody. They are always willing to help out. I’ll call them up and ask for a benefit; I’ll say I want to do this event on what’s going on in the Congo to raise awareness, and they’re always on board. So, because of their political activism, they inspire and foster a great environment, and that’s how the gig came together.
Your Handy Guide to the Year in Music
So, I’ve been doing this column for exactly a year now, which makes the angle for this Very Special Year-End installation a no-brainer: I’ve gone back and read everything I’ve written over the past 12 months and chosen my favorite stories—some serious, many just ridiculous—in hopes of taking a brief, telling snapshot of the year that was. Turns out it’s over 5,000 words long, so it’s not all that brief. Enjoy it, though, and for the love of Christ, feel free to share your favorite moments of 2008 in the comments. I’ll be back next year, but in the meantime, I’m going to drink Budweiser tall-boys and open presents. Hopefully, you’ll be doing the same.
January
R.E.M to Release New Album, Play SXSW
Ordinarily, this wouldn’t concern me much, since I can’t remember the last time I actually liked an R.E.M. record. (Not true, actually: When Monster came out, I was in the hospital with pneumonia, and my mother bought it for me and brought it to the hospital, along with a boom box and headphones, so that I might have something to do to pass the time. I loved that record.) Anyway, Stipe and the gang swear up and down that their new record, Accelerate, is a return-to-form, featuring the type of driving, up-tempo tracks that everyone fell in love with almost 25 years ago. Keep in mind, a band’s definition of “up-tempo” tends to change with age, so while I’m hopeful that it won’t be an adult contemporary snooze-fest, I remain healthily skeptical. Record’s out on April 1st, just a few weeks after their sure-to-be-packed show at Stubb’s during this year’s SXSW festival.
Open Letters to Four Guitars
Dear Gibson SG-Z,
I remember the first time I laid my barely pubescent eyes upon you. I was a freshman in high school, roaming the aisles of Guitar Exchange, the store that reigned supreme in St. Louis until the Guitar Marts and GuiTargets infiltrated the area. You were like nothing I had ever seen before, a matte silver Gibson SG (the double-horned axe that looks like the devil himself) with a black lightning bolt tailpiece. Your over-the-top flamboyance instantly appealed to my just-developing sense of irony, as if you rocked so hard that you transcended rocking and were able to mock the concept as well. You were smart. You were complicated. I had to have you.
When you got dinged under your bridge a few years later and became a discounted floor model, I purchased you. You were mine, inasmuch as anybody could ever truly own such an object. I was proud to debut you to the world at a high school battle of the bands, but was embarrassed when my cheap strap separated from you and I watched helplessly as you fell from me. Oh, what a horrendous noise you made when your strings made contact with the floor!
Deerhunter
Deerhunter
Microcastle
(Kranky, 2008)
After being leaked online months before its actual release date, the physical version of Deerhunter’s modern classic, Microcastle is finally available. As beautiful and dreamy as it is jarring and remote, Microcastle is the most fully realized work the Atlanta, Georgia outfit has produced to date. It makes good on all the promises of their earlier work, where so much of their potential was hidden underneath blankets of white noise and inaccessible mixtures of scathing post-punk and ethereal meditations.
While the band’s eccentric and often murky frontman Bradford Cox has hinted that Microcastle’s pop influences were too heavy-handed, in fact, the straightforwardness of the songs is more of a suggestion than a demand. For the most part, Microcastle leaves its depth open to interpretation. It is listenable and even catchy, but also complex with a mixture of faraway (“Little Kids”) and in-your-face (“Nothing Ever Happened”) noises.
This method of switching between fast and slow tunes is typical of Deerhunter records—their 2007 breakout Cryptograms, was a frenetic hodgepodge of lengthy ruminations and ripping, clamorous rockers—but for Microcastle the group streamlined their recording style and softened some of the seams between the different-sounding tracks. While Cryptograms was assembled piecemeal and therefore suffered from some inconsistencies, Deerhunter’s current lineup—a quintet including Lockett Pundt, Joshua Fauver, Whitney Petty, and Moses Archuleta—completed the recording of Microcastle in just a week at the Rare Book Room in Brooklyn. That incredibly prolific week also birthed Microcastle’s bonus disc, Weird Era Cont., which contains only one double from the album, “Calvary Scars.”
As Cox has proven in live shows, where he allows the dance elements of his songs to shine, he has the ability to accommodate his audience without compromising himself. And so, while Cryptograms requires more work to listen to, this time he’s made an album that’s instantly inviting as well as artistically and fully formed. The songs are shorter and less wandering, more to the point. On first spin Microcastle is great, and on second, it’s one of the best releases this year, if not this decade.
The first time vocals enter Microcastle on the second track, “Agoraphobia.” The unlikely love song could be reclusive Deerhunter mastermind Bradford Cox’s personal anthem. Lyrics such as “I had a dream / No longer to be free / I want only to see / Four walls made of concrete / Six by six enclosed,” describe the cold comfort of being kept in total isolation.
From there fist-pumping anthems and psychedelic ballads trade off. The staccato bassline and soaring choruses of “Never Stops” lead into the distant arpeggios and distant harmonies of “Little Kids.” The album’s tortoise-paced title track, which contains little more than a few lazily strummed chords in its first two minutes, suddenly dives into an up-tempo foot-tapper for the final 60 seconds.
“Calvary Scars” is the album’s least accessible track, but its theme of crucifixion will feel familiar to Deerhunter fans used to watching Cox eagerly sacrifice sanity and physical well-being to perform and create. The fact that this song leads into the album’s most fiery and energetic tracks, “Nothing Ever Happened” and “Saved by Old Times”, the latters features vocals by Cole Alexander of the Black Lips, could be a nod to the positive nature of Deerhunter’s evolution since Cryptograms. The fact is that the stoic and dark themes that drew Cox’s ravenous fanbase to him are still present in the songs, but now so are the smart and well-developed pop tendencies showing that Deerhunter is a band that plans to stick around for a while—a thought that is truly comforting.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
Read more articles like this:
Album review: Atlas Sound, Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel
The Sea and Cake
The Sea and Cake
Car Alarm
(Thrill Jockey, 2008)
The Sea and Cake’s eighth LP comes hot on the heels of their seventh, and in much the same vein. Like Everybody, Car Alarm opens with an almost disconcertingly straightforward rock song, followed by an older-school Sea-and-Cake-style song, then proceeds to mix it up a bit. The difference is that, while Everybody was four years in the making and resolute to an idea of unadorned, live-feeling simplicity, Car Alarm came about in a matter of months and takes cues from a wider variety of points along Sea and Cake’s trail of development, carrying them forward less substantially.
There are songs that hearken back to the immediacy of Sea and Cake’s early days yet without exactly conjuring it, alongside songs that skitter and flex with the poppier electronic glint of interim material. The two are ultimately more similar than they are different, though, as these differences play out subtly. It’s not surprising that Car Alarm would fall in line with its predecessor, as it was directly after the Everybody tour that the band submerged themselves into new material. The promptness of its production therefore seems to be its readiest innovation, as the band would ordinarily go their separate ways after a tour to allow time for their myriad individual pursuits: Sam Prekop’s photography and solo music, Archer Prewitt’s illustrations and solo music, Eric Claridge’s painting, and John McEntire’s production work and music with Tortoise. While time off also would’ve allowed for gestation of new Sea and Cake ideas and freshness upon return, the urgency with which they dove into this one reflects some outside influence as well—a new addition nigh to the Prewitt family. Whatever the inspiration, the jazzy Chicago indie mainstays rolled ahead with their road-generated momentum and tour-honed chops directly into Car Alarm, imparting a sense (if not aesthetic evidence) of forward motion with their usual fluency and grace.
“CMS Sequence” is a pleasantly brief display of the band’s penchant for electronica, which also layers itself into “Weekend” a few songs later. Meanwhile “A Fuller Moon” takes us back to the au naturale casualness of days in The Biz. The title song picks up the distorted alt-rock vibe where the first song left off, both of which seem to mark an expansion from that element of Everybody. One novel element of instrumentation is the steel drum, which sneaks out through a few songs, most notably in “Mirrors”, the album’s charming, distant steel drum conclusion. “Window Sills” plays with effects on the vocals, which is a novelty, and “A Fuller Moon” and “Down in the City” both sport some enjoyable grooves, but in the end, Car Alarm has no particularly towering highlight.
Much like the last one, Car Alarm is neither a misstep nor a milestone, yet the last one had relatively more memorable heavy-hitters like the fuzzed-out “Crossing Line” and psychedelic “Left On” to help it stand out among their discography. Half the songs on Car Alarm end in fade-outs, which is simply too inconclusive and noncommittal a device to rely upon so heavily within a single album of rock music. At some point, a band has to make some choices; with Car Alarm, the Sea and Cake seem to just go with the flow.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
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Calexico
Calexico
Carried to Dust
(Quarterstick, 2008)
The perfect addition to Calexico’s ever-evolving yet always recognizable catalog, Carried to Dust is a beautiful and exotic oeuvre. It sees the band’s masterminds, Joey Burns and John Convertino, revisiting the sounds of the western ghost towns and exotic Mexican border towns that have flavored their songs for the past 18 years, but with a new twist, as Carried to Dust is not just cinematic-sounding; it also has a plot worthy of old Hollywood.
When Carried to Dust’s writer protagonist purchases a road map with a route already marked onto it, what started as a listless road trip turns into an inspiring adventure as the map leads him to climes as far away as Moscow, as well as to a kind of mental freedom. Open road-inspired tunes like “Writer’s Minor Holiday”, “Bend to the Road”, and “Two Silver Trees” outline the tale, which is steeped in beautiful symbolic imagery and dramatic instrumentations—mallets on cymbals build to a crash, urgent flamenco guitars speed like the engine of a car.
“El Gatillo (Trigger Revisited)” leads off with a trilled baritone guitar worthy of a high noon gun duel, and throughout all of Carried to Dust, blaring horns and castanets bring to mind suspenseful moments from dangerous times in history when rattlesnakes slithered across dusty roads and the quickest draw ruled. The cowboy sound is not, however, in any way stale, despite the fact that the theme has pervaded all of Calexico’s past work. Due to experiments with a looser and more collaborative recording style, Carried to Dust resists falling into the novelty western trap, especially with songs like “Fractured Air (Tornado Watch)”, which takes on a very modern rhythm, and “Red Blooms”, which invokes foreign images of statues and freezing cold temperatures.
As usual, Calexico were joined for the recording of Carried to Dust by an enviable group of musicians. “House of Valparaiso” includes Sam Beam (Iron and Wine)—Burns and Convertino worked on his breakout, In the Reins—and album-ender “Contention City” includes Tortoise’s Douglas McCombs. Acclaimed Spanish musicians Amparo Sanchez and Jairo Zavala also contribute, as does harmonica virtuoso Mickey Raphael.
With Carried to Dust, Calexico have maintained their instrumentalist’s concern for orchestration and production. The vocals often seem to act as part of the orchestra—this is especially true of the traditionally sung Spanish language track “Inspiración”, on which horns and voices seem to take on similar qualities and duties—and the story is told as much by the shimmery acoustic guitars, moaning lap steel, and whispery brushed drums as it is by Burns’ lyrics.
Ultimately, while Calexico never stray too far from their Southwestern roots, they are always admirably adventurous with themes and constantly working toward a larger purpose than just good records—a large scale soundtrack for the 18-year-long film that has been playing in their heads. This is especially true on Carried To Dust, as they once again prove that they are far from out of new ideas.
Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]
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David Pajo Ain’t No Goddamn SOB
by: Jocelyn Hoppa
Back when I was learning how to strum catchy, three-chord songs on the geetar my parents swore up and down I would never learn, I thought it’d be cool (see: super passive aggressive) to learn what I know to be the catchiest, most evil song ever committed to tape: “Last Caress” by the Misfits.
Singing about killing babies and raping moms… I dunno, pretty hilarious in a fuck off kind of way. And remembering that lovely family moment got me to thinking about who else might be into weirdly and decidedly not hardcore versions at all of Misfits songs. I then happened upon David Pajo (Slint, Tortoise, Zwan, Dead Child) in a YouTube search, and he’s got a video to go along with his version of “Where Eagles Dare.”
Check it out after the jump. read more
by: Jocelyn Hoppa
published: October 28, 2009 in column: What Goes On
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