Tag Archives: music mondays

3 New Summer Songs Picked By Critic Jon Young

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1. “Is What It Is”

From She Keeps Bees’ Eight Houses

FUTURE GODS

Liner notes: Smokey and languid, Jessica Larrabee croons defiantly, “Be not completely consumed/Do not surrender,” on this hazy ballad, with kindred spirit Sharon Van Etten singing backup.

Behind the music: Larrabee fronted the Philadelphia band the English System before teaming with drummer Andy LaPlant to form the Brooklyn-based duo.

Check it out if you like: Moody chanteuses (Cat Power, Angel Olsen, PJ Harvey).

2. “Pressure”

From My Brightest Diamond’s This Is My Hand

ASTHMATIC KITTY

Liner notes: The fourth MBD album gets off to a rousing start with this joyful brew of marching-band rhythms, xylophone, brass, and Shara Worden’s big, operatic voice.

Behind the music: An alumna of Sufjan Stevens’ band, Worden’s résumé includes collaborations with David Byrne, Matthew Barney, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and the Decemberists.

Check it out if you like: Brainy art-poppers, meaning St. Vincent, tUnE-yArDs, or Joanna Newsom.

3. “To Turn You On”

From Robyn Hitchcock’s The Man Upstairs

YEP ROC

Yep Roc

Liner notes: Hitchcock gives Bryan Ferry’s morose love song a charming, irony-free makeover, setting his surprisingly tender vocal to a delicate chamber-folk arrangement.

Behind the music: The former Soft Boys leader teamed with producer Joe Boyd (Fairport Convention, Anna and Kate McGarrigle) for this vibrant mix of originals and covers (Doors, Psychedelic Furs).

Check it out if you like: Vital vets like Richard Thompson and Marshall Crenshaw.

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3 New Summer Songs Picked By Critic Jon Young

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Gettin’ Rowdy and Real at Berkeley’s Old Time Music Convention

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When I catch fiddler Suzy Thompson on the phone, she’s pretty amped to tell me about the 10th annual Old Time Music Convention in Berkeley, California. As BOTMC’s director and founder, Thompson has coaxed old-time musicians from around the world to not only perform at the small annual festival, but to lead its square dances and workshops with eager local participants and amateurs. The outdoor string band contest, held at the park near the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, often takes center stage: jug bands, Italian tarantellas, a Greek band complete with undulating belly dancer—”anything goes as long as it’s unplugged,” the program reads. The result is a gathering modeled after Appalachian fiddle and banjo conventions that emphasize “doing rather than just watching.” There’s not much separation between the stars and the regular folk who take part.

That attitude is what attracted Foghorn Stringband fiddler Sammy Lind to old-time music in the first place. “I was really drawn to the social aspect of it,” he tells me during a break from his current tour in Washington. “I loved getting together; it felt great to be part of a crew of people like that.”

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Gettin’ Rowdy and Real at Berkeley’s Old Time Music Convention

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Review: Radiation City’s "Animals in the Median"

Mother Jones

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Radiation City
Animals in the Median
Tender Loving Empire

Dreamy and wistful is the default mode for plenty of modern bands that haven’t figured out who they want to be when they grow up, but the striking Portland, Oregon quintet Radiation City shows how to do it right. Their second album, Animals in the Median, shimmers like a unearthly mirage, weaving together misty melodies, analog electronics and the siren vocals of keyboardist Lizzy Ellison to create a poignant sense of faded optimism and missed opportunities. Hazy gems such as “Wash of Noise” and “Lark” echo the melancholy retro-futurism of Stereolab, albeit with a more delicate touch, while the gauzy “Wary Eyes” evokes the gently eerie sensation of hearing soft music from another room at 3 a.m. Ellison and company could create a great soundtrack for David Lynch.

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Review: Radiation City’s "Animals in the Median"

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The National’s "Trouble Will Find Me"—Place on Repeat

Mother Jones

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Photo by Deirdre O’Callaghan

You know how when you get a song stuck in your head, you’re not always sure how it burrowed its way in there? Well, people who attended The National’s May 5 performance at New York’s MoMA PS1 museum can be pretty damned sure. Over a six-hour period, the band played “Sorrow,” off its 2010 release, High Violet, 105 times in a row.

The special performance, aptly dubbed “A Lot of Sorrow,” was technically a work created by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson as part of his ongoing “explorations into the potential of repetitive performance to produce sculptural presence within sound.”

The following clip, supposedly starting around 2 hours and 40 minutes into the show, includes three of the repetitions.

During a Reddit AMA three days later, a band member reflected:

Actually as the hours went on I think we all realized that this experience was something special for us—there was a weird hypnotic resonance and spirituality to repeating the song over and over. We almost didn’t want to stop and we learned something about our capacity for endurance and the song opened up in surprising ways…By the end it didn’t feel like we were playing it anymore. We know the idea seemed pretentious in some way, but Ragnar has this mix of humor and sadness that feels quite similar to what our songs about…We’re very glad to have done it.

This week, The National, follows up its hypnotic performance with the release of Trouble Will Find Me, their sixth studio album, on the 4AD label.

Trouble Will Find Me

Trouble… is replete with the usual mix of sorrow, longing, depression, and nearly infrasonic tone of singer Matt Berninger’s voice that fans of The National have come to know and love. But some of the tracks still provide you with the opportunity to rock out, lest you need a break from your whimpering.

For example, there’s “Sea of Love,” the video of which the band premiered during its AMA. A fan had asked, “What is your guys’ favourite music video?” Whereupon the band replied, craftily, “Actually there’s one video that we all really love, so we made this homage.” They revealed the link to the new video. And the sleuthing promptly began for the original.

A single-take shot in a sparse, nondescript room, with nothing but a dangling microphone, air-conditioning unit, and boy wandering in from off-screen: It didn’t look familiar.

Nor should it. It mimics a video for a song first released in 1995—in Russia—by Soviet-era punk band Zvuki Mu. The song title, “Grubiy Zakat,” means “Rough Sunset.” Check it out:

Bryce Dessner, who plays guitar for The National, told PRI’s The World that he “fell in love with it immediately” when he first saw the video on YouTube. “We have to do something like this,” he told his bandmates.

They reached out to Zvuki Mu, but were unable to track down any of its members. Obviously, that didn’t deter them from making their own version.

Next up for The National: a vinyl version of their six-hour MoMA performance for charity. Seriously.

If the new album, epic vinyl repetition party, and homage to a Soviet video aren’t enough for you, you can get more of The National in movie form. Singer Matt Berninger’s brother Tom was brought on tour as a roadie and ended up making a haphazard documentary about the band called Mistaken for Strangers. If you can make it to Australia by June, you can catch the next screening at the Sydney Film Festival. I’ll leave you with the trailer.

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The National’s "Trouble Will Find Me"—Place on Repeat

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Photos: Flamin’ Groovies Hometown Return

Mother Jones

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Cyril Jordan and Chris Wilson of the Flamin’ Groovies. Photos by Mark Murrman

Following a quick romp through Japan and Australia, San Francisco legends the Flamin’ Groovies played a hastily arranged show in their hometown this past weekend—the first time this version of the band has played locally since 1981.

The mid-’70s era Flamin’ Groovies, with founder Cyril Jordan, George Alexander (bass), Chris Wilson (also of UK band the Barracudas), and Victor Penalosa (drums) tore through a tight set of their near-hits, kicking off with the slow-burning “Yeah My Baby,” before running through their power-pop classics, “You Tore Me Down,” “I Can’t Hide,” and of course, “Shake Some Action.”

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Photos: Flamin’ Groovies Hometown Return

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Richie Havens’ Passion for Peace, Justice, and Damn Fine Music

Mother Jones

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On Monday, celebrated folk singer Richie Havens died of a heart attack at his Jersey City home at the age of 72. The Brooklyn-born musician was famous for his distinctive, husky baritone, and was a skilled and tough guitar player who could turn strummed rhythms into rhapsodies. He recorded and performed some of the best acoustic covers of the ’60s and ’70s, including renditions of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman” and (my personal favorite) George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun.”

Havens dabbled in cinema, including acting alongside comic giant Richard Pryor in 1977’s Greased Lightning, a film about Wendell Scott, the first African-American to get a NASCAR racing license. Quentin Tarantino used his signature song “Freedom” in a pivotal shootout sequence in Django Unchained. Havens toured tirelessly for nearly five decades. But since history has a nasty habit of reducing notable lives into single episodes, Havens will forever be remembered as the man who opened Woodstock ’69 with a mesmerizing three-hour set.

Through all this, he maintained his passion for liberal politics, environmental action, and education. Though he wasn’t the most fiercely political or ideological of his generation of entertainers, his dedication and interest were impressive nonetheless. In 1976, Havens cofounded the North Wind Undersea Institute, an oceanographic children’s museum in the Bronx that reportedly “has a history of rescuing marine animals.” He also formed the Natural Guard, an international organization created to promote hands-on activities that teach children about ecology and the environment. Here he is talking about it in the early ’90s:

“I’m not in show business; I’m in the communications business,” Havens told the Denver Post. “That’s what it’s about for me.” You could feel this in virtually everything he recorded or sang on stage, most evidently in “Handsome Johnny,” a song he cowrote that became a civil rights and anti-Vietnam War anthem. In 1978, his song “Shalom, Salam Alaikum,” written after watching Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, was a huge hit in Israel. And on a lesser note, Havens performed at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration in 1993.

To the very end, he was a gentle soul pushing for peace, justice, and damn fine music.

I’ll leave you with footage of the Transcendent Nation Foundation interviewing Havens in 2008 about “how to save the world”:

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Richie Havens’ Passion for Peace, Justice, and Damn Fine Music

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Music Review: "Stare Back" by Wax Idols

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TRACK 1

“Stare Back”

From Wax Idols’ Discipline

SLUMBERLAND

Liner notes: The spooky Oakland quartet unleashes a perfect storm of brooding guitar pop, smothering everything in delicious echo.

Behind the music: Wax Idols’ debut was basically a solo effort by Hether Fortune (a.k.a. Heather Fedewa), who assembled a band for this mesmerizing album. She’s also worked with Hunx and His Punx, Blasted Canyons, and Bare Wires.

Check it out if you like: Moody noisemakers from Love and Rockets to Lush to early Dum Dum Girls.

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Music Review: "Stare Back" by Wax Idols

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Dawes’ "Stories Don’t End" Is the Perfect Road-Trip Album

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Dawes
Stories Don’t End
HUB Records

I was first introduced to Dawes on a stretch of deserted highway in 2010, following the band’s first release, North Hills. It was a fitting introduction. My production team and I were struggling to film a grueling cross-country video series, but we lost our motivation somewhere in Mississippi. Our cinematographer thankfully plugged his iPod into the van stereo and launched the opening track, “That Western Skyline.” It was soft, simple, and became a prescription for our myopia.

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Dawes’ "Stories Don’t End" Is the Perfect Road-Trip Album

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The Revival of Thao Nguyen

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It was 2008, and amid the wreckage of the financial meltdown, indie folk was having a moment. Bon Iver’s “authentic” melancholy dominated a generation of breakup playlists. Fleet Foxes’ swelling, choir-boy harmonies packed the pews. And a little-known songwriter named Thao Nguyen was picking up Cat Power comparisons with her album We Brave Bee Stings and All.

Reviewers praised Thao as quirky (she learned how to play guitar in her mother’s laundromat) and perky (the record was stuffed with beat-boxing and handclaps), if not raw—at times her voice swung stubbornly off-key, which lent her an air of rough-hewn realness. The lyrics, too, cut deft and deep: Thao would sing in one moment about dewy childhood nostalgia, and in another dive into a dark corporeality of blood, bones, and heart attacks. She was 23 years old.

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The Revival of Thao Nguyen

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Highlights (and Lowlights) of Noise Pop 2013

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It’s possible that a concert lineup actually discriminates against the headlining act. By the time these bands saunter onstage, folks in the audience have been standing for hours, shifting weight from their bruised heels, and dealing with the fact that they are slowly, involuntarily being pressed into a malodorous neighbor as the venue fills. We’re cranky, we’re impatient, and our personal space has probably been violated. It’s part of the reason why headlining bands have a responsibility to be better than their openers. Sometimes they aren’t worth the wait.

While Noise Pop 2013 offered an expertly curated lineup, we found that some of the headliners fell flat. Toro y Moi’s anticlimactic experimentation lost the crowd, and new material from Rogue Wave was charming but boilerplate. Some of the festival’s most pleasant surprises were found off the beaten path (in a warehouse on a dead-end block), or opening for the larger acts. Here’s our abridged roundup of festival highlights (and frustrations).

Tiny Telephone Anniversary Party
Thursday, 2/28, Tiny Telephone studio

Approaching the address typed into a phone, past the empty playground and toward a cluster of darkened warehouses on a dead-end street, you can’t help but wonder if your GPS is trying to get you killed. But tonight, the faint beats from a DJ set signaled that it was the right place: Tucked away at the southeastern edge of the Mission District is Tiny Telephone, the recording studio responsible for recording Death Cab For Cutie, the Magnetic Fields, Spoon, and countless other projects from indie royalty.

Owned by California music legend John Vanderslice, the studio celebrated 15 years in business last week, inviting friends and band members to come hang out around the keg and sound boards. With his vast collection of digital and analog equipment and his cadre of highly trained, not to mention super friendly, engineers, Vanderslice, or JV as his friends and clients know him, has cultivated a reputation for helping artists achieve exactly the sound they seek. On Thursday, Tiny Telephone pilgrims got to see the inside of that operation, mingling in hallways lined with vintage recording gear and reading love letters from musicians posted on the kitchen fridge. For its first-ever open house, Tiny Telephone hit just the right note. —Maggie Caldwell

Shmoozing over a Tiny Telephone soundboard. Maggie Caldwell

!!!
Thursday, 2/28, Great American Music Hall

“Like I give a fuck!” belted out Nic Offer, the frontman of Sacramento based dance-punk group !!! (pronounced chk-chk-chk), Thursday night at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. (Read our Q&A with Offer here.) But perhaps that’s what makes his performances stand out. Dressed in shorts and a simple white tee, Offer danced on top of speakers, waded into the crowd, and leaped off the stage, effectively catalyzing the audience into a massive rave. !!! rewarded the crowd for its enthusiasm, playing the new track “Slyd” live for the first time. Like !!!’s other songs, “Slyd” drilled the crowd with a repetitive beat and acid-house grooves, while strobe lights stoked the dance party. But odds are that concert-goers weren’t playing close or critical attention to the introduction of new material—everyone seemed content to dance and drink until the show ended, going home soaked in sweat and beer. —Mitchell Grummon

Nic Offer fronts !!! at the Great American last Thursday night. Mitchell Grummon

Rogue Wave
Friday, 3/01, Bottom of the Hill

Roughly halfway through his set at the Bottom of the Hill late last Friday night, lead singer Zach Rogue leaned into the mic and asked, with complete earnestness, “Are you guys comfortable?” Despite the fact that the band has played just one show in two years (and had three new members along with a bevy of new songs to test out during the set), Rogue definitely seemed comfortable; like a kid at the first pool party of the summer, Rogue was back on old turf, looking for familiar faces and a chance to get his feet in the water. This palpable giddiness was arguably the most enjoyable thing about the show, which consisted mostly of simple, straight renditions of crowd-pleasers like “Lake Michigan” that earned them indie fame in the mid-2000’s. The new songs harken back to the band’s early Guided by Voices-meets-Springsteen style, a feel that has been thoroughly mined by other indie rock bands in recent years, though the audience didn’t seem to mind. —Maggie Severns

Toro Y Moi
Friday, 3/01, The Independent

Fresh off the cover of SF Weekly and consecutive nights of sold-out shows, I came to The Independent on Friday filled with hope about Toro y Moi, a.k.a. Chaz Bundick. The show started with promise. Opening with “Rose Quartz” off his new album Anything in Return, Bundick slowly began to build layers of sound, combining synth, keyboard, and a sparse beat culminating in a chorus: “Don’t lie to me/ Because I feel weak.” But that’s about where my hope ended. I felt as if the song never reached its full potential, seemingly unsure of what it wanted to be.

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Highlights (and Lowlights) of Noise Pop 2013

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