Music Features

Molten ’core

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:34:30 GMT

The triumphant return of Shudder To Think
You might not buy this, but Fitchburg was pretty happening 15 years ago.

VIDEO: Shudder to Think live in DC, 1989

You might not buy this, but Fitchburg was pretty happening 15 years ago. Boston rock folk (of a certain age) will remember treks to the Wallace Civic Center — a drab hockey-plex that hosted uncharacteristically bad-ass rock shows by the likes of Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Jane’s Addiction. If you saw those shows, you also witnessed opening bands like Lush, Half Japanese, and (if you went to see Fugazi for five bucks in 1993) Shudder To Think — who reunite after 10 years this Saturday at the Paradise.

I ditched a dishwashing shift to see that show, and when I recount this to Shudder leader Craig Wedren (graced with math rock’s most beloved falsetto), he gives a long “ohhhhhhh!”, as though wresting the memory from its place in storage. “God, I remember that place. It was like the back cover of Kiss Alive — all these stoned-looking kids in a hockey rink.” He also seemed borderline conversant in the fledgling Fitchburg/Leominster hardcore scene of yore. In the Internet-less hinterlands of 1993, one’s “hardcore” scene often served as a catch-all forum for any type of band who were aggressive on a given front — “hardcore” was less an indicator of sound than a way for a band to say, “We mean it.”

It was within a hardcore scene similar to this that Shudder To Think began cutting their teeth at the end of the ’80s. Hop on YouTube and you can see footage from 1989 of Wedren (beneath a mop of hair) flailing away at the BBQ Iguana (a grimy former elevator-repair space at 14th and P in DC). The band’s formative output had nothing to do with hardcore at the time and a lot to do with the signature sound that would emerge and make them major-label-foxy less than five years later — about the time they ended up at the hockey rink in Fitchburg, playing songs off 1992’s Get Your Goat and leaking hints of 1994’s discordant masterpiece Pony Express Record.

“There’s a ‘first-thought/best-thought’ tendency in indie rock these days,” says Wedren. “But we learned that sitting down and grinding it out can produce good results.” It was this sitting and grinding that distinguished Shudder from everyone else who got stuffed in the Dischord pigeonhole — each of their releases ramps up their obsession with detail and their indulgence in obliquity. Nathan Larson’s guitar would lose you, drop out, reappear, seduce you through chords of his own invention, then shake you awake. Wedren’s lyrics were a psycho-phonetic thrill ride where shameless glam collided with gratuitous rockisms — with “florid . . . almost garish” results, “full of the grandeur and drama of being young.” In other words, Wedren misses it.

Lady killers

MICHAEL ALAN GOLDBERG — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:12:39 GMT

Vivian Girls find fans, lose shoes
“Maybe over there? Try over there . . . ” The muffled voice in the background sounds defeated.

VIDEO: Vivian Girls, "Tell the World"

“Maybe over there? Try over there . . . ” The muffled voice in the background sounds defeated.

I’m on speakerphone with the three ladies of Brooklyn’s Vivian Girls — it’s noon and the trio are driving around Charlottesville, Virginia, searching for one of drummer Ali Koehler’s shoes, which fell out of their gear-stuffed car the previous night after a show at the Outback. They’ve gotta be in Baltimore in a couple hours, but priorities are priorities.

“Ehh, we’re never gonna find it,” mutters singer/bassist Kickball Katy.

So it goes when you’re as fiercely DIY a band as Vivian Girls — no handlers to find shoes, and not a whole lot of money to buy new ones, particularly when your usual gig is a small (though typically packed) house show for six bucks a head. Still, you can’t buy the kind of buzz that’s surrounded the trio in recent months. Tastemaker blogs have been afire with praise for their homonymous album (recorded in two days for $900), which, after selling out its tiny first pressing on Mauled by Tigers Records shortly after its May release, is being reissued by garage-rock label In the Red Records this month.

And rightfully so. The Vivs play a gloriously grimy, careering style of surf punk — kissed by the collective influence of the Wipers, the Slits, the Muffs, and the Shangri-Las — that’s drenched in reverb and dappled with sweet melodies, ’60s girl-group harmonies, and the occasional burst of noise, kinda like a riot grrrl’s Raveonettes. Mixed in with all the house and basement shows has been an increasing number of club dates and festivals. And bigger, more established acts have been showing some love too — at both bands’ adamant behest, Vivian Girls recently shared stages with Sonic Youth and TV on the Radio. Not bad for three girls who weren’t even a band till May of last year.

“All we ever wanted when we first started was to play house parties and to play really fast,” says Katy.

“And to make a record,” singer/guitarist Cassie Ramone chimes in.

“Yeah, and go on tour,” resumes Katy. “That was a year ago, and we’ve done all that and more, and we’re psyched, and we’re just gonna, like, be surprised every day with what happens next.”

Along the way, support has come from a multitude of like-minded DIY bands and show promoters in Brooklyn. (All natives of New Jersey, where Cassie and Katy met in high school a few years ago, the trio have one by one migrated to Williamsburg.) Support also comes from their families, even if, as Katy laughs, the folks don’t always get it.

The doctor is in

JON GARELICK — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:07:54 GMT

Stanley Sagov’s jazz remedies, plus Saxophone Summit
That Stanley Sagov plays jazz at all is impressive. That he plays it at such a high level is stunning.

That Stanley Sagov plays jazz at all is impressive. That he plays it at such a high level is stunning.

Sagov — a Boston family physician whose band visit Scullers this Tuesday for a CD-release show — is from South Africa. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was born with Gordon’s Syndrome, a genetic disorder that left him with two club feet. By the time he was 13, he’d endured 16 different surgeries in London, New York, and Boston. He spent much of his early years walking in iron leg braces. Yet through all the extensive medical care, he found himself bonding with the doctors who treated him. Inspired as well by family members in the medical profession, he decided that he too would become a doctor.

But he was also drawn to music, and a variety of instruments. “I played guitar a lot and played in a band that did covers, R&B — Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis,” he tells me when we get together at his Chestnut Hill home. When the piano player left the band for a time, Sagov was tapped for the job. “I must have driven my parents insane, trying to teach myself to play these boogie-woogie and R&B things over and over and over. Then the piano player came back, but I was hooked.”

Hanging with older musicians, getting into jazz, he acquired mentors. “Bob Tizard, a bassist and trombonist, decided he was going to teach me how to play ‘Perdido’ — a 32-bar song form — and he was going to make this rock-and-roll musician understand about playing more than three chords and how to remember the form. We played the song from midnight until six in the morning.” By morning — “after around the 30th time” — Tizard had Sagov improvising.

This was Cape Town, during the depth of apartheid, about which Sagov had his own epiphany. At about the age of nine, he recounts in his press biography, he was walking uphill, wearing his leg irons, from a violin lesson when he “suddenly understood the parallel between my being stigmatized for looking unusual and the terrible way that black people in South Africa were being treated by whites.”

Later, he tells me, he was among a group of “iconoclastic young South Africans” who experienced the music as a bridge across races. “We had this fantasy about America that the jazz community was an integrated community, white and black people demonstrating across the color bar that you could make great art together.” In the meantime, as a medical doctor, he worked in the segregated townships.

Blown up

MATT PARISH — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 03:11:06 GMT

Shoney Lamar proves there’s life after Florida
Lamar’s voice both ravages and exults in the past 10 years of the Pained Male Pop Singer.

SIMPLE MINDS: “Richard Brautigan and Jim Jarmusch were both doing things the way I like them done,” says Shoney (a/k/a Justin Shirah, left, with Doug Carter).

Let me take you back to 2002 in Daytona Beach. Late summer. Hurricane season. Shoney Lamar, an ex-new-metal guy turned folk-blues bard, was just getting things started, driving back and forth between Daytona and Orlando for shows. His friend Doug Carter was getting a degree in audio engineering at Full Sail University.

“There were two hurricanes that year,” says Carter. “One came and ripped all the shingles off my house; the second rained all over the roof. I lost my bed, that’s about it.” Sound under-devastating? Note that this was pre-Katrina, at a time where hurricanes operated more like a giant, windy apparatus of the FEMA state lottery.

“They ended up handing me $11,000, which was enough for a pretty pro recording set-up,” says Carter. Sweet.

I’m at the B-Side with Carter and Lamar (real name Justin Shirah) on a non-hurricany night, discussing the long trip up the coast and into the strange territory of music they’ve found themselves taking, quietly thriving on home-recorded demos passed out to drunk friends on CD-Rs. Bassist Carter has adopted an Ivy League look, with a sweater over a collared shirt and fluffed hair that maintains a kind of Kirk Cameron–esque float. Lamar, who sings and plays guitar, still looks every bit the Floridian, with a chain around his neck, perfectly messy hair that sort of recalls late-period Pauly Shore, and a pretty fly leopard-print-lined hoodie.

“I really don’t know what we’re trying to do,” says Lamar. “I like simplicity. Minimalism. There’s no era of music or art that I can point to, but people like Richard Brautigan and Jim Jarmusch, from totally different times, were both doing things the way I like them done.”

“Simple” would be a misnomer — the band’s recordings veer from stark vocals and acoustic guitars to nightmare alleys full of junked percussion and dissonant flutes. Lamar plays guitar in a shucking, rhythmic way that betrays his time put in under the flag of late-’90s metal. The songs are more or less straightforward folk and blues sent through a rusty modern radio filter — Lamar’s voice both ravages and exults in the past 10 years of the Pained Male Pop Singer, all growling blue notes and shuffled funk.

The Big Hurt: Rotten butter

DAVID THORPE — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:41:39 GMT

John Lydon spreads it on thick. Plus, intrusive devices and CGI pissoirs

FALL OUT BOY shocker: PETE WENTZ not stoked to collaborate with Nokia? In a now deleted blog post, the heartthrob tweenbait bassist lashed out against the iTunes debut of the “I Don’t Care” video, which featured quite a few intrusive product-placement shots of Nokia cellphones. “The version of the video that we worked on night after night is not the version that aired,” said Wentz, “yet somehow a cut full of glorious camera-phone shots did.”

What’s the big deal? Fall Out Boy are pioneers of video product placement, having already hawked Nokia phones and Tag body spray in their “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs” video. Some speculate Pete is mad that his personal for-the-fans iTunes cut wound up tainted with commerce. According to Wentz, the video was supposed to be a statement condemning “dudes wearing eyeliner and hawking energy drinks.” Might want to wipe off the raccoon eyes and spit the corporate teat out of your mouth before you start attempting such bold statements of principle, ass.

You guys. You guys. I heard some news about CLAY AIKEN that you’re not going to fucking believe.

At last, my lingering doubts have been put to rest: SLASH, legend in the twin worlds of guitar and top hats, has endorsed BARACK OBAMA. “I agree with a lot of his stuff,” declared Slash in a recent NME Radio interview. I guess that means my time as an undecided is over, since I’m a lifelong straight-ticket Snakepit voter.

Actual CNN headline: “BONO pumps fist about end of malaria.” Yesss!

Gold-standard class act ADNAN GHALIB, known for nurturing former girlfriend Britney Spears through her most troubled period, has admitted to owning a sex video of himself and the resurgent star. “There is such a tape,” he told Heat magazine, “but I won’t discuss prices for hypothetical enquiries. Unless there is a locked-in deal, I will go no further.” He’s not all bad, though: “I am not interested in selling out any other details about Britney.” Of course, most of her details are already in the public domain as the result of a series of ill-advised drunken car dismounts.

Eeyew: her most troubled period? Did I really write that? Oh well, can’t go back and change it now.

From the “Yeah, Right” file: MY BLOODY VALENTINE are now said to be working on two albums of new material — which doubles the statistical likelihood that we’ll never hear a new My Bloody Valentine album again. In related news: the rock-solid new GUNS N’ ROSESChinese Democracy release date is November 25. Bet the farm on this one, folks!

Sweet release

BARRY THOMPSON — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:33:50 GMT

The Urinals can’t hold it in any longer
I don’t want to waste your time waxing philosophical about the problematic logic behind qualifying music “good” or “bad,” much less pontificating on whether “sophisticated punk” is an oxymoron.

TAKING THE PISS: Originating as a “parody of punk” in the ’70s, the Urinals’ choplessness turned into their biggest asset.

I don’t want to waste your time waxing philosophical about the problematic logic behind qualifying music “good” or “bad,” much less pontificating on whether “sophisticated punk” is an oxymoron. That said: I prefer the Urinals’ late-’70s/early-’80s UCLA phase to their mid-’00s, post-reformation, oodles-more-sophisticated What Is Real and What Is Not era. So do I write that they were better before they knew how to play their instruments well? Only if I want to look like a jackass.

“What I like about punk now is, it’s turning away from the very strict formula it’s been adhering to for the last 15 years,” says Urinals enduring bassist and singer John Talley-Jones, communicating from Pasadena. “For a while, punk rock was strictly defined as very aggressive, sort of melodic, maybe a little surfy, and very fast. There were expectations about it that people were adhering to. Now, people are going back to an earlier model of what punk is, which is a lot more open-ended. It’s rife with potential.”

He’s referring to faces around the proverbial campfire of LA’s alt-punk hub, the Smell, mentioning in particular No Age. Despite the generation gap, the Urinals are also a periodic presence on the Smell’s stage, and not solely because of their elder-statesmen cred. Like LA’s new batch, the Urinals have always defied punk dogma, ’cause punk with rules is the real oxymoron. Well, fuck yeah!

The Urinals, who are in the class of post-punk precursors with Wire, Mission of Burma, and the Minutemen, originated as a “parody of punk” in 1978, playing their first set at a UCLA cafeteria. Their technical ineptitude limited them to minimalistic, vigorous numbers like “Ack, Ack, Ack, Ack” and “I’m White and Middle Class.” Those songs are awesome, however, so the band’s choplessness turned into a major asset.

The Urinals did ascend the punk totem pole, eventually landing on bills with the Go-Go’s, the Last, and Black Flag. To distance themselves from the chest-beating meathead form of early-’80s hardcore, they changed their name to 100 Flowers. In 1983, citing creative differences, the band members parted company. Years went by and people developed an interest in (or a longing for) the punk of yore. In 1996, the Urinals were invited to re-form for a friend’s CD release. The results — experienced musicians playing songs written by novice versions of themselves — were damn intriguing.

Gossip=Truth

SAM PFEIFLE — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:27:24 GMT

Ray LaMontagne on his new Gossip in the Grain
On LaMontagne’s new Gossip in the Grain (RCA), he’s having a lot more fun.

Gossip in the Grain | Released by Ray LaMontagne on RCA Records | October 14 | see him with Leona Naess at the Opera House, in Boston | October 9 & 10

Ray LaMontagne’s debut, Trouble, left him compared favorably with the likes of Van Morrison in Rolling Stone -- and even covered on American Idol. But that album's follow-up Till the Sun Turns Black “asks a lot of the listener,” he says. “I’ll always be really proud of that record, for a lot of reasons, but I didn’t want to ask so much this time.” On Black he was the anti-Clinton: He wanted you to feel his pain.

On LaMontagne’s new Gossip in the Grain (RCA), he’s having a lot more fun. There are still plenty of songs that will rip your heart out and flay you bare (no one delivers a line more plaintively than Ray’s “Why did you go?/Why did you go away?”), but things aren’t as close to that whole sun-winking-out-and-the-world-made-ice thing. Maybe it’s the revelatory voice of Leona Naess, who accompanies LaMontagne on two of his darker tunes, shining like the proverbial tunnel’s end. Maybe it’s the loose, one-take front-porch old-timey blues of “Hey Me, Hey Mama” and “Henry Almost Killed Me (It’s a Shame),” songs that revel in the tradition of reveling in hard times. Maybe it’s the simple and awe-inspiring exuberance of the R&B-fueled single and album-opener, “You Are the Best Thing,” which puts LaMontagne in the place of Joe Cocker or Otis Redding as big-band leader.

Regardless, this third collaboration with producer Ethan Johns finally seems to fully deliver on LaMontagne’s enormous promise as a songwriter and performer. It is an effortless flexing of muscles, LaMontagne sifting through genres without even seeming conscious of it.

“It’s just another batch of songs, really,” LaMontagne says. “I’m just doing the same thing I always do. I’m just writing songs and trying to trust my gut, that I’m making a record that’s good, that will hold up.”

Part of the album’s coherence, despite its versatility, must surely come from the talents of LaMontagne’s touring partners, bassist Jennifer Condos and guitarist Eric Heywood. They, along with Johns on most of the drum parts, teamed with LaMontagne’s distinctive rhythm strum on the acoustic guitar to create (at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, in Box, England), songs both atmospheric and raw, world-weary and wide-eyed.

Bubble and scrape

SUSANNA BOLLE — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:01:54 GMT

Chocolate Monk at P.A.’s, Preliminary Saturation at the Piano Factory

Men from Mars(eille)

JEFFREY GANTZ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:55:08 GMT

Lo Còr de la Plana invade Boston
“Un jour ou l’autre, parlera l’Europe marseillais” — “Sooner or later, Europe will speak Marseille.”

LO CÒR DE LA PLANA: Rigaudon, bourrée, rondeau — meet techno-groove and ragamuffin.

“Un jour ou l’autre, parlera l’Europe marseillais” — “Sooner or later, Europe will speak Marseille.” That might have been just a sporting-goods-company promotion, but two million Marseillais (out of a total population of 1.5 million!) take it to heart. Founded in 600 BC by Greeks from Asia Minor and subsequently dominated by Romans, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Saracens, Franks, Aragonese, Angevins, and, now, Parisians (just remember, the national anthem is not called “La Parisienne”!), France’s second-largest city is a Mediterranean melting pot of people from Italy, North Africa, Spain, Greece, Corsica, Turkey, Armenia, Vietnam, and China, for starters. Marseille already speaks Europe, and much more, but these days, the city’s music is turning to the Occitan language of the South of France, the language of the mediæval troubadours, and finding inspiration, as well as a cultural identity, in its dense, intricate poetry. Massilia Sound System opened the door in the ’80s with their trobamuffin hip-hop, singing in both Occitan and French. Now another Marseille group, Lo Còr de la Plana, have grabbed the baton, and they’ll be bringing it to the Somerville Theatre this Friday, October 3.

Like Italian, French, and Spanish, Occitan developed from Latin, but its true sibling is Catalan, as spoken in Barcelona and Valencia. (What to call this language is a very hot potato.) In the Middle Ages, it was the lingua franca of the Western Mediterranean, the preferred language of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard the Lionheart. Dante gave some thought to writing his Commedia in Occitan, the better to be understood outside Tuscany. (Had he done so, the history of Occitan, and of Italian literature, would have been quite different.) He settled for a brief hommage (albeit in Purgatorio) to the 12th-century troubadour Arnaut Daniel, whom he called “il miglior fabbro” — “the best craftsman.” (Seven centuries later, Ezra Pound called Arnaut, who’s credited with the invention of the sestina, the best poet who ever lived.)

The rote stuff

MATT PARISH — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:06:52 GMT

The meticulous mayhem of USAISAMONSTER
A USAISAMONSTER show is all third-eye perception and muscle memory.

WORK/ETHICS: “It’s like the old jazz guys you read about: broke. Everything going into the band. Practice every day and repeat the songs again, again, again.”

A USAISAMONSTER show is all third-eye perception and muscle memory. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing them play three sets in 24 hours at a couple of dingy clubs in the Pacific Northwest, and I was struck by how each set was executed almost like a military drill. Each time through, the two-piece worked their hyper-coded music like guerrilla fighters field-stripping Kalishnikovs. Colin Langenus loosed steam-engine guitar parts while drummer Tom Hohmann multi-tasked synth bass lines on pedals with his left foot. Often in rock, a little spontaneity can go a long way; but with USAISAMONSTER it’s more ritualistic; there’s not much room in the songs for surprises.

“We’ve gotten to live a dream,” says Langenus over the phone from his Brooklyn home. “It’s like the old jazz guys you read about, or Black Flag: broke. Everything going into the band. Practice every day and repeat the songs again, again, again. That’s where the joy is for us.”

It’s been a year since the group have toured, but don’t say they’ve let up. The big news this fall is that, on top of the release of Space Programs (Load), the long-standing duo have added two to their ranks: keyboardists Max Katz and Peter Schuette, unveiled a week ago in Brooklyn for the first time ever and joining a five-week that stops at Great Scott on Wednesday.

“I’ve been working with Max and Peter on learning all about music theory this year,” says Langenus. “Max transcribed all these old songs of ours out into sheet music, and now these two can come in and sight-read through songs that took Tommy and me months and months to write and learn how to play.”

Katz and Schuette will be adding the glue to band’s epic compositions, which in recent years have developed into apocalyptic novella length; they now hurtle between swamp-metal freakouts and Close Encounters of the Third Kind–style monophonic anthems.

“We’re not letting them write anything,” laughs Langenus. “We’ll see how that goes. We’ve got new songs that are going in a new direction, for sure. I’m getting a lot more into repetition and meter, learning how to do the freaky things over that instead of being so into chaos and anti-theory. But it’s still me and Tom writing and then Max and Peter learning the songs.

Rate expectations

DAVID THORPE — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:03:58 GMT

The Big Hurt: World-class criticism priced to move!
Grim economic news makes me pretty nervous.

Grim economic news makes me pretty nervous. I get by as a writer, but that’s a skill that won’t be much use in the inevitable Thunderdome situations of the coming years. I can’t fight or build stuff; my tiny pink hands, unsuited as they are for labor, will doubtless wind up as gruesome baubles hanging from the neck of Lord Humungus. My best bet is to save my money now in the distant hope of buying a bunch of gold or gasoline just before the fall of civilization and propping myself up as tin-pot warlord in the savage ruins of America.

So, that means I have to use what little time is left to monetize the hell out of this little writing operation. Although it’s a disgusting affront to my own integrity and the reputation of this newspaper, I’m delighted to announce that my services are officially FOR SALE!

Musicians and publicists, take note: David Thorpe offers critical excellence at rock-bottom prices!

OPTIMISTIC REVIEW: $50 | Nothing sets the stage for success like an upward trajectory, and a hint of cautious optimism in a professional review just might be your first step toward greatness. Although this review will be overwhelmingly negative, probably citing your execrable musicianship and total lack of originality, your $50 will buy a whole lot of room for improvement: “With time, [YOUR NAME] might break free of the shackles of mediocrity and blossom into a bearable act.” In the immortal words of Bad Company, “Don’t you know that you are a shooting star/And the whole world will love you just as long as you are?”

FAINT PRAISE: $75 | In today’s oversaturated rock market, even the slightest critical notice seems beyond the reach of the average working musician. For the frugal troubadour who knows how to settle for less, I offer an assortment of modest adjectives at fantastic prices: “[YOUR NAME] combines capable songwriting with workmanlike vocals for an overall effect that is, in a word, Wallflowers-esque.”

FAVORABLE B-LIST COMPARISON: $85 | Want to see your name mentioned alongside the minor movers and shakers of the music industry? Favorable comparisons like these let you break into the mainstream without breaking the bank: “[YOUR NAME] combines the jaw-dropping originality of Jet with the guitar pyrotechnics of Ben Folds”; “[YOUR NAME] has as much talent in her little finger as Katy Perry has in her little finger.”

Groop therapy

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:43:04 GMT

Stereolab do it again for the first time
I can say without fear of clogging next week’s Letters section that Chemical Chords (the new Stereolab album, and their first on 4AD) is right up there in the top three Stereolab albums evah.

SAME DIFFERENCE: Stereolab have moved through a series of inconspicuously varied states, each phase deepening in color with every overlap.

I can say without fear of clogging next week’s Letters section that Chemical Chords (the new Stereolab album, and their first on 4AD) is right up there in the top three Stereolab albums evah. Which I guess means it comes in third. Right behind Peng! and Emperor Tomato Ketchup, of course.

How? How can I say that with such flip assurance? Well, for one, what’s the last time you heard anybody engage in a heated defense of one Stereolab album over another? If anything, the longstanding likability of this band (they’ve been subject to only a few bouts of turbulence over dozens of releases, nine of them full-lengths) has gradually turned into their biggest liability. Even devoted fans (perhaps “committed” is better) of the Groop might have trouble listing 10 favorite tracks — a condition complicated in no small part by titles like “Puncture in the Radax Permutation” and “Lo Boob Oscillator,” but certainly having more to do with a perceived sameness that seems to pave the band’s œuvre. (Besides, any reader’s attempt to submit a personal ranking of the Lab’s discography would be way over word count by the second or third entry.)

DOWNLOAD: Stereolab, "Three Women" (from Chemical Chords) [mp3]

You’ll often, in reviews, see Stereolab treated with the same encouraging shrug one might offer a reliable furnace after it switches on each year. Dominique Leone’s Pitchfork review of 2004’s Margerine Eclipse almost collapses under the weight of its own respectful indifference, a 960-word room-temperature ehhhh. Chris Jones’s recent review of Chemical Chords for the BBC asks, “How much room can you make in your life for another of their albums, when the results are nearly always the same, no matter how clever?” Despite the band’s sustained multi-lingual adherence to socio-philosophical tenets that urge individual resistance to the myriad exploitations of modern capitalism, they can come off as mass-produced. That Snickers bar you had at lunch is not the Snickers bar of 20 years ago, but as satisfying as it is, it might as well be. That sort of thing.

Post-masters

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:43:19 GMT

47 releases in, Wire can still get it up
In the annals of rock-and-roll-origin stories, Colin Newman, singer/guitarist for the pinned-down cynical conceptualist rock band Wire, has one of the odder ones.

NEWMAN, LEWIS & GREY: “That full-on rock thing from the early part of this decade, I’m not feeling that anymore at all. I’m feeling very bored with rock music.”

Methods to the madness: How Wire songs happen. By Daniel Brockman.

In the annals of rock-and-roll-origin stories, Colin Newman, singer/guitarist for the pinned-down cynical conceptualist rock band Wire, has one of the odder ones. “At the tender age of 20, I was sitting in my bedroom in Watford deconstructing rock and roll. My mission was to take the ‘and roll’ out of ‘rock and roll.’ ” There’s a pregnant pause, and then he deadpans, “You’re supposed to laugh when I say that.” Ladies and gentlemen, if you want to know where the dry wit and brutal irony of so much modern pop music comes from, it is a defensible theory that it all began in a bedroom in Watford.

Although they were thrown into the general category of punk when they formed back in 1976, there was always something . . . different about Wire. Newman’s sardonic voice — capable of being plaintive and yearning in one song (say, the shimmering effervescence of 154’s “Map Ref. 41ºN 93ºW”) and snarkily nasty with punk vitriol in the next (the pummeling proto-hardcore of Pink Flag’s “12XU”) — always met the music at odd angles. Which makes sense, since the simple no-fills clunk-clunk of the drums and the martial rigidity of the bass and twin guitars compelled their songs to move in straight lines. They had a prickly, studied attitude, like a buzzkill at a party. Newman recalls, “When Wire first played America in 1978 at CBGB’s, we were told that we couldn’t play, because we didn’t have proper songs, that they didn’t end properly. Bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash were playing much more traditional rock songs than us. And for me, I could see them for what they were: there was great entertainment value, but it wasn’t so . . . interesting, what they were doing musically.”

Here comes the Whambulance

SHAULA CLARK — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:14:37 GMT

Mass Art hosts the Baltimore Round Robin Tour
The Baltimore loft once known as Wham City is long dead, its inhabitants evicted in 2007, but the twisted DIY art movement it housed has flourished nonetheless.

BAND OF OUTSIDERS: In every city, Deacon’s traveling sideshow will set up camp for two nights of performances, each featuring no fewer than 10 bands.

The Baltimore loft once known as Wham City is long dead, its inhabitants evicted in 2007, but the twisted DIY art movement it housed has flourished nonetheless. The uprooted Whammonites are spreading the gospel of “Future Shock” (a technology-driven ethos that duals as a sound style and a business model) as fervently as ever, and the world (a/k/a the Internet) is lapping it up. As the co-founder and self-appointed caretaker of Wham City, absurdist electronic composer Dan Deacon is a man who thrives on circumventing convention. So it’s no surprise that the Baltimore Round Robin Tour, Deacon’s newest bid to bring Baltimore’s teeming music scene to the masses, is so brilliantly bat-shit insane.

Starting this week, Deacon is packing a whopping 29 bands (that’s roughly 60 humans . . . and we hope a bottle of Febreze) into one vegetable-oil-fueled bus, plus two vans for overflow, for an eight-city tour. First stop: Boston. In every city, Deacon’s traveling sideshow will set up camp for two nights of performances, each featuring no fewer than 10 bands.

The first round, “Eyes Night” (October 2), will kick off with a showcase of dreamy indie pop, ambient droning, and improvisational works from the likes of Beach House, Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez, Jana Hunter, and Santa Dads. The follow-up, “Feet Night” (October 3), will dish out thrashier, more digitally tweaked fare courtesy of Adventure, TheDeathSet, Future Islands, Video Hippos, DJ Dog Dick, and Deacon himself, among others. Then there’s the “Weird Round” — a collection of wild cards like video artist Mark Brown and puppeteers Showbeast — sprinkled throughout both sets.

Here’s where the “Round Robin” earns its title (and more crazy credits): each night, the bands will form a circle surrounding the audience. Then each act will perform a single song, one after the other, going around and around till . . . well, till it’s over. No openers, no headliners, no hierarchies — it’s a playful set-up that mirrors Wham City’s famed chumminess.

Early on a Tuesday evening at Tufts’s Oxfam Café, I sit down with MIDI-rocker Benny Boeldt, a/k/a Adventure, and Future Islands singer Sam Herring (whose gravelly croon gives a Jack Black-meets-Joe Cocker vibe to FI’s synthpop sound) to pry the gory details out of them. In a mere two hours, I’ll witness these guys whip one very tiny crowd into an ass-waggling frenzy, but for now, they’re maintaining a near-reptilian level of chill.

Booked solid

SUSANNA BOLLE — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:23:29 GMT

A week of deconstruction, dubstep, and drones

The Big Hurt: Hagar the horrible

DAVID THORPE — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:49:08 GMT

Plus award-winning awards and buggering Beatles
I was reading a fascinating article about Sammy’s new record deal, and an epiphany struck: every year, Sammy looks more and more like the Dude.

I mentioned SAMMY HAGAR just two weeks ago, so reporting on him again already is pushing it, but hear me out. I was reading a fascinating article about Sammy’s new record deal, and an epiphany struck: every year, Sammy looks more and more like the Dude. And since I have the audacity to call this a “news” column, here’s a fact: his upcoming album, Cosmic Universal Fashion, includes a cover of “Fight for Your Right To Party.” Ever notice how songs about waking up late for school and getting your porn stash busted by mom take on an exotic aspect when sung by 61-year-olds?

From the “alas” file: TRL, American youth culture’s most essential barometer of its own stupidity, is leaving the airwaves after 10 years of abject wretchedness. This is a show that made high-functioning retardates like CARSON DALY and JESSE CAMP famous, that exalted such worthless acts as JESSE McCARTNEY and HILLARY DUFF, that was synonymous with the boy-band boom of the early 2000s — how, in this nation we so love, could a show so monumentally worthless, so insulting to intelligence and destructive to culture, be cancelled? If you can’t make money off bad taste, teenage idiocy, and no-talent hackery, maybe this really is the end of the American era.

DMX is sitting in a Phoenix jail, now facing charges of theft on top of his recent drug conviction and still-pending possession and animal-cruelty counts. And rapper WEBBIE has been arrested after leading cops on a high-speed chase on a Mississippi highway. He’s facing felony counts for running from the cops and driving under the influence, as well as a misdemeanor possession charge. What the hell is society coming to when rappers are getting arrested before I’ve even heard of them?

That’s three paragraphs in a row where I’ve posed thought-provoking rhetorical questions, so I think I owe you an insightful declaration. ROB THOMAS must be fired into the sun; taxpayer money is no object. In case you’re wondering what reminded me of him, I was just checking out a little blurb about his new album on Billboard.com and he actually used the phrase “my pop sensibility.” Can you believe that jive? He’s co-opting the language of shitty critics to describe himself. This is worse than the time Gang of Four called their album “angular.”

Interview: Amanda Palmer

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:48:06 GMT

At home with the Dresden Doll's solo joint
So it’s the eve of the release of local sensation and Dresden Dolls vocalist/pianist Amanda Palmer’s solo debut album, and I’m sitting in her bric-a-brac-filled South End apartment drinking herbal tea.

So it’s the eve of the release of local sensation and Dresden Dolls vocalist/pianist Amanda Palmer’s solo debut album (produced by Ben Folds), and I’m sitting in her bric-a-brac-filled South End apartment drinking herbal tea. We’ve just taken a moment to notice a remarkable spider web forming in the open window of her kitchen; closer inspection reveals a spider in the center packaging up a helpless victim for a later lunch. I interrupt the moment to ask the obvious question:

Okay, so let's get the biz out of the way first: your new album is Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, and now it's like "Ooh, are the Dresden Dolls finished, what does this mean?" What do you think people will read from this?
I don't know what people want my answer to be. I think the fans probably want to hear that the band is going to go on forever and ever. And I think in some incarnation, it will. But Brian and I are also really happy doing our own projects right now, and we haven't nailed down what's going to come out after this.

Was this solo album intentional, or did it just sort of happen?
It all sort of happened, it started out as a much smaller thing, and originally this was going to take a matter of months.

When was this?
This was two years ago. I was going to record it in my apartment with a local engineer, and record it, master it, put it out, no press, no fanfare. And the collection of songs was different back then, it was this collection of piano ballads. And so that changed. Once Ben Folds got involved, it kind of morphed into this large project. Also, while that was happening, the band was evolving. Evolving and de-volving.

What do you mean "evolving"?
Well, I think that Brian and I were getting fundamentally burned on touring. We had been touring for I think pretty much five years non-stop. We were just getting burned on everything: the routine, each other. It's really, really hard to maintain a relationship like that when it's just two people.

Was there ever a turning point or an event where you thought "How can I keep doing this?"
There were a lot of those events. I mean, that's the sort of thing, when you're touring together, and you're constantly — I mean, Brian and I are very different, and —

Getting it live

JON GARELICK — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:44:47 GMT

Noah Preminger, Fernando Huergo, the John Coltrane Memorial Concert, and the BeanTown Jazz Festival
Noah Preminger — bearded, shaggy-haired, 23 years old — plays tenor saxophone like a man at least twice his age while remaining completely of the moment.

FRESH: Preminger floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.

WFNX Jazz Brunch Top Five
1. ROY HARGROVE, Earfood [Emarcy]
2. PATRICIA BARBER, The Cole Porter Mix [Blue Note]
3. MCCOY TYNER, Guitarists [Half Note/McCoy Records]
4. CLAUS OGERMAN/DANILO PÉREZ, Across the Crystal Sea [Emarcy]
5. AARON PARKS, Invisible Cinema [Blue Note]

Noah Preminger — bearded, shaggy-haired, 23 years old — plays tenor saxophone like a man at least twice his age while remaining completely of the moment. At Scullers on September 9, appearing behind his new Dry Bridge Road (Nowt Records), he led a line-up that included veteran pianist Frank Kimbrough and guitar wizard Ben Monder, plus trumpeter Russ Johnson, bassist John Hebert, and drummer Jochen Rueckert. Plenty of younger players extol funk, hip-hop, or rock backbeats. Preminger is pure jazz without being a fuddy-duddy. Instead of the brawn and bray of Coltrane, he likes silky floating beboppish lines in the manner of Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. (The band played Konitz & Marsh’s “Sax of a Kind,” and its trim unison theme fit like a glove.) There was plenty of rhythmic variety — Preminger’s “Luke” mixed call-and-response sections of 4/4 and 6/8. Kimbrough, Hebert, and Rueckert found all manner of ways to vary standard 4/4 pulse, Hebert stepping out of his walks for syncopated counterpoint to Rueckert’s swinging ride and snare, Kimbrough stepping in with odd-beat chords. Monder varied a blurry classic jazz tone with some fuzzy distorted (but still quiet) rock guitar, especially on the last — and most freewheeling — tune of the night, Joe Lovano’s “Uprising.”

Preminger’s lines are always fresh. He likes to start a solo with a long burry low note and then accelerate up through the registers, from his pearly mid range to a top-of-the-horn rasp. And he varies his phrasing — one of the things that make a ballad like “Where Seagulls Fly,” from the album, sound older than Preminger’s years. He’ll use space and tone not to mimic some older balladeer like Ben Webster or Lester Young but to find his own emotions and thoughts, inventing new riffs, new harmonies, in the midst of his melodic embellishments. He starts and stops his eighth-note runs, mixing in plenty of rests or longer tones, and he’s especially good at the blues procedure of “additive” phrasing, which gives his solos a motivic logic. Think of his rhythmic embellishment as a lyric and you get the idea:

A real cut-up

MIKE MILIARD — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:33:48 GMT

An interview with Robert Pollard on the occasion of the landing of Boston Spaceships
Robert Pollard is a Renaissance man.

VIDEO: Boston Spaceships, "Winston's Atomic Bird"

Robert Pollard is a Renaissance man. He’s a head-spinningly prolific songwriter, with more than a thousand songs registered in BMI’s database — the most recent of which appear on Brown Submarine, the debut album from his new band, Boston Spaceships, just out on his own Guided by Voices, Inc. label. He’s an artist, having just published a collection of his collages, Town of Mirrors: The Reassembled Imagery of Robert Pollard (Fantagraphics Books). He’s a witty raconteur, as anyone who’s heard his all-stage-banter album, Relaxation of the Asshole, can attest. He’s a three-sport athlete who dominated in football and basketball in high school and in 1978 threw the first no-hitter in Wright State University history. He’s a noted connoisseur of fine lagers and spirits (Miller Lite, José Cuervo).

DOWNLOAD: Boston Spaceships, "Winston's Atomic Bird" [mp3]

This Tuesday, Pollard’s Boston Spaceships will be touching down at the Paradise, where they’ll share a bill with the recently reunited Big Dipper. “I take it that we’ll be welcomed with open arms,” he says with a nicotine laugh when I reach him at his home in Dayton. “It’s gonna be great. Two Boston bands.”

As I suspected, the Spaceships — who feature drummer John Moen (Jicks, Decemberists) and long-time Pollard collaborator Chris Slusarenko (Guided by Voices, Takeovers) — are named in honor of the album-cover imagery preferred by Tom Scholz’s beloved old band (be it on their homonymous debut, Don’t Look Back, or Third Stage or even Corporate America). “All their covers have spaceships on them,” Pollard marvels.

There aren’t — at least so far as I can remember — flying saucers on any album covers from Pollard’s vast discography. But there are some satellite dishes and a boy looking skyward on GbV’s Earthquake Glue cover, so, uh, close enough. That collage, created by Pollard, is among the 138 works collected in Town of Mirrors, a fine showcase of his surreal, retro-feeling, sometimes disconcerting compositions.

“Before I was in a band, before I could play music, I made collages,” he explains. Indeed, in those pre-1994 days, before Guided by Voices became indie-rock godheads, when Pollard was still a fourth-grade schoolteacher, he would sometimes assign his classes to do collages. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kid who doesn’t like to do collages. Because it’s easy.”

Pollard’s technique is unabashedly simplistic. “I just start moving things around, moving them into sections and piles until they sort of almost leap together. I don’t have very good powers of concentration. I’m kinda scatterbrained. And so it’s much easier for me to have a bunch of imagery to work with, and say, ‘I’ve got this title here, or a few things to work with, and I’m gonna make it happen.’ ”

Mix nuts

TED DROZDOWSKI — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:49:42 GMT

An interview with breakout roots-music production stars the Tremolo Twins
Pop music has a history of great production teams.

ALTERNATE ROOTS: With their penchant for dialing in the right vibe for any type of roots music, Dinallo and Carlisle could call themselves the Rust Brothers.

Pop music has a history of great production teams. There’s R&B pioneers Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegün, Memphis rock ’n’ soul masters Chips Moman and Dan Penn, soundscapers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, Boston’s alt-rock wonder boys Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade, brother team Chris and Tom Lord-Alge, and sample-happy mindbenders the Dust Brothers.

Now Boston has a new duo vying for honors: Michael Dinallo and Ducky Carlisle. With their penchant for dialing in the right vibe for any type of roots music — blues, country, R&B, folk, primal rock — they could call themselves the Rust Brothers if they weren’t already known as the Tremolo Twins. And their moniker can be found on one of the year’s hottest R&B comebacks, Eddie Floyd’s new Eddie Loves You So on the revived Stax label. They’ve also just wrapped a reunion disc by Boston’s own Radio Kings. After a 10-year break, the Kings (with Dinallo on guitar) will play Harry’s in Hyannis on September 25, Toad in Porter Square on October 1, and Sally O’Brien’s in Union Square on October 24.

When Carlisle and Dinallo met a decade ago, they were Savages — members of vocal powerhouse Barrence Whitfield’s band. Ducky was the drummer and Michael played six-string. Carlisle was already a well-established engineer/producer and was in Robin Lane’s band and Kevin Connolly’s. He was also about to score a major breakthrough for his engineering work on Susan Tedeschi’s Grammy-nominated Just Won’t Burn (Tone-Cool). Dinallo was a fleet-fingered musician and songwriter who’d co-led the Radio Kings and backed harmonica ace Jerry Portnoy.

“Immediately it was like we were brothers,” says Carlisle. “We had similar tastes, a lot of the same musical reference points, and we thought the same things were funny.”

In 2004 their friendship become a partnership, and they began producing a series of albums at Carlisle’s Ice Station Zebra studio in his Medford home (which is where I talked to them). The first was Norwegian singer-songwriter William Hut’s Days To Remember (Corazong). Its follow-up, Night Fall, for Universal Records/Europe, went platinum in Scandinavia. They’ve also made albums for local artists: country songwriter Stan Martin and blues guitarist Bill McQuade, as well as Roomful of Blues frontman Dave Howard’s 2006 solo I Tried To Tell You (Gibraltar). And they’ve mixed tracks for bluesman Johnny Hoy. Recently Carlisle mixed several tunes on Buddy Guy’s just-released Skin Deep (Silvertone), the highest-charting album in the blues legend’s half-century career.