Things have been a little quiet these first couple of weeks here in Philadelphia, but this weekend looks to set things off!
Somehow we’ve made it half way through the first month in 2013 and already there have been some amazing new tunes from bands young and old released. In terms of live music however, little has transpired. All that changes this weekend—and there is a little something for everyone too.
Friday, January 18th | Wednesday night, up-and-coming British soulful singer/songwriter Jessie Ware made her national debut on American television as she performed her hit single “Wildest Moments” on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. This comes in the middle of her first tour of the United States. It’s a short trek, only hitting six cities, and thankfully Philadelphia is one of them. She makes her way to Union Transfer tonight, along with opener Rochelle Jordan.
On Wednesday night I stood ten feet away from Morrissey for 90 whole minutes, and well, there is really nothing higher to aspire to in show going—that is, unless Joe Strummer came back from the dead. If you weren’t as lucky, may I suggest these three shows for your long Inaugural weekend and journey towards reaching your show-going Holy Grail? I give you punk in Baltimore, dirty folk, and a soft moon to land on.
If you didn’t snag tickets to the sold out Blonde Redhead show, throw up your hands in defeat and get out of the city. Take the short drive to Baltimore for a punk rock bill that is sure to please your palate to include DC band, Möbius Strip.
Möbius Strip started in 2009 and are a trio of pro-animal activists, Shane Carwile, Mark Kennedy, and Pitt Stains. Unlike the physical appearance of a Möbius Strip, the DC punk band does tend to have only one surface when it comes to animal cruelty. The outspoken vegans are sure to begin the bill with their crusading lyrics in our sister city, releasing their last album Escalate in 2011. Show your support and let’s show Baltimore that we know how to drive over the bridge and maybe they’ll start to do the same.
“We’ve been trying to turn people back on to vinyl for a few years now, mostly because of durability.”
“There’s a lot to be said about the sound quality and the warmness of vinyl, but the fact that after 50 years the only thing that changes is a little extra crackle is a good selling point to regular folk. I’ve lost innumerable amount of CDs to floorboard scratches or breaking in half. There’s nothing better than a kid coming up for a CD and leaving with a Weeks record as his first record.”
Between rehearsals for three, count ’em three, shows in New York City in the coming days, we chatted with The Weeks’ Sam Williams in advance of our giveaway which will find the band’s September 2012 EP release, “Gutter Gaunt Gangster” in the mailbox of one of you reading this right now.
If you’re in the New York area, your three opportunities to check out the band are at the Mercury Lounge on 1/20, the Knitting Factory on 1/22, and at Maxwell’s on 1/24.
The feverish pace of Memphis’s Switchblade Kid doesn’t slow down.
The thrash/shoegaze/throwback/rock outfit has been busy over the past few months, working on more than just music. Past their album that was released in December of last year, band leader and movie maker Harry Koniditsiotis has been hard at work handcrafting music videos from old 8mm footage that drip with warmth and are well-worth watching.
From a dance hall from decades past to ’90s gothic imagery, Switchblade Kid videos have an eclectic scenery list but all carry one unifying theme: relatable visual nostalgia that seems to hit where it counts.
To say that Ken Stringfellow is intense is an understatement. The co-founder of The Posies is relentlessly honest, self-critical, and he’s released one of the finest under-the-radar albums of the previous year, Danzig in the Moonlight. He says it’s his best work, and it’s hard to disagree with him. The album’s great strength lies in its diversity, which is a virtue the multifaceted Stringfellow takes to heart. Danzig is a masterful collection of songs, from power pop to the blues to soul to country,woven together by Stringfellow’s sage storytelling and set to his distinctive, otherworldly vocals.
Despite an eight-year break between solo albums, the music never stopped for Ken. He has been in constant collaboration with artists worldwide, from Norwegian garage rockers to Dutch film stars to R.E.M. to a re-formed Big Star. Currently residing in France, Stringfellow is Stateside through early spring on tour–first with The Posies at the Todos Santos Music Festival, then with The Maldives as his backing band before crossing the country solo. When TVD spoke with him, we got a glimpse into the thoughts of an artist who is ambitious, unapologetic, and one of the most unique singer/songwriters of the last three decades.
I am wondering how I escaped 2012 without listening to Danzig in the Moonlight. You’ve said it’s your creative apex and that you want it to be heard by “everyone, everywhere, as soon as possible.” I get that, but I’d love to hear why you feel it’s so important to you.
Well, I think because of the amount of information that’s out there in the world, people have a lot to sort through. Often, and this has been true even before the information age, people sometimes go with what’s easy. They go with preconceived notions or they go with hearsay; few people ever have the time or the access to information to get really in-depth into something. Any musician, and this is true even for the biggest at the top, there might be someone out there who doesn’t know what they’re doing.
And then there’s me, who’s a small fry… for example, if I see something about The Posies in an article or even me… if they’re writing about me, they’ll sometimes say, “’90s alternative musician, Ken Stringfellow.” That’s like a horror story for me. I mean, I’ve made so many records—so many more records—since the ’90s than during them and I’ve grown so much. I’m sort of mortified that people might be directed to not even look at those things and see that they exist. That’s kind of the danger of having even the tiny success that [The Posies] had back in the day, that becomes the reference point and then everybody just goes there and says, “Oh, that’s what he does. I understand and, whatever, it’s out-of-date.”
“Vinyl, she’s a classy broad and demands some long term commitment.”
“Vinyl…because you have to take care of it, protect it, and love it right—not like a flippant little mp3. Sometimes those girls are too easy. Flying around, duplicating themselves on different devices with the click of a button.
My gran used to play us her Sinatra and Dorris Day records when me and my brothers and sisters would go and stay with her in the summer holidays. I was brought up in a house full of cassettes, CDs, and yellow Sony Walkmans, so back then the idea of playing music from fragile discs the size of dinner plates seemed very old fashioned to me.
As I grew up I began to realize that my CDs didn’t last 5 minutes before I had cracked the jewel case, and barely a week before a huge scratch ruined your entire album. In fact, I didn’t really care for them at all, and yet every summer Gran’s LPs still played almost like the first day she’d bought them.
Tav Falco’s Panther Burns are one of the truly inspired entries in the annals of fringe-roots musical science. They ruled the roost throughout the ‘80s, uncorking the potent zest from bottles labeled blues, rockabilly, R&B, country, small-scale rock ‘n’ roll, and even tango music, combining it all with an amateurish verve that was unlike almost anything else happening at the time. Their essence still kicks with undiminished strength and one of their most forceful records was 1988’s tidy and dynamic Red Devil.
Much has been made of the importance of the city of Memphis in the history of 20th century music, but what sometimes gets overlooked is the weirdness that hovered around the edges of all the greatness. Looking back upon what all happened provides essential insight into creative synthesis and mutation, but basking in it all too often ignores how these big steps in the march of modernity weren’t consciously conceived as such, far more often simply being the survival tactics of poor people, their very actions frequently ignored or even derided by the arbiters of taste at the time.
Robert Gordon’s indispensible book It Came from Memphis did a fantastic job of relating some of the low-culture kookiness that fueled the city to its current renown as a true hub of modern culture, its chapters alternating tales of whacked disc jockey Dewey Phillips and professional wrestler Sputnik Monroe with considerations of far more well-established Memphis phenomena like Sun Studios and Stax Records, classic early blues survivors like Furry Lewis, and the fascinating career of the late great Alex Chilton.
But an exalted, museum-like air does persist in being attached to the achievements of that truly crucial locale. This doesn’t really do Memphis’ cultural history a disservice as much as it only imparts a portion of the picture; how it all relates to right now. Maybe that’s why Gustavus Nelson, more (in)famously known as Tav Falco, remains such a divisive figure. Many complain that he can’t sing, and still others gripe that he’s an eccentric non-talent whose sideways swagger endeared him to far more legitimate artists from his home city like Chilton, drummer Ross Johnson, and the truly indispensible Memphis denizen, Jim Dickinson.
Keane and Youngblood Hawke together on one stage. One band delivers the best album of 2012, and another is poised to launch their debut album in 2013 alongside a cornucopia of buzz. Both bands are critics’ darlings and serenaded a sold-out crowd at the Warfield Theatre here in San Francisco last Friday.
Youngblood Hawke are one of those bands whose sound you really can’t pinpoint in a review. You really have to see these guys (and a girl) live to understand the genius behind them. Their anthemic song “We Come Running” seems to be the song that you really can’t get away from recently, but then again who would want to. The gang-style (not to be confused with the worst trend of 2012, “Gangnam Style”) vocals are a throwback to Def Leppard’s hey day, while their music is a wall of sound built upon one part fun., one part Passion Pit, and two parts Freelance Whales.
Their debut EP that was released last year should scare the shit out of all the other bands that are currently clamoring for the spotlight in this mixed-up genre. If these four songs are any indication of their full-length, then I see the superstar band of 2013 shining bright early on in the year.
Our Facebook news feed was overwhelmed recently with a slew of charts and graphs relating vinyl’s continued rise in both popularity and sales for 2012—to which we say with all sincerity, “No shit.” And it’s not just new releases. Bands and labels are taking stock of their back catalogs to give items a proper vinyl release, some of which having never seen the light of day on our fetish item of choice around here. Case in point, Sum 41’s sophomore release, Does This Look Infected?
SRC Vinyl has announced a release date for the first ever vinyl pressing of Sum 41 Does This Look Infected, available Feb 26. The vinyl edition includes two bonus tracks and is pressed on 180 gram limited edition colored vinyl. It will be housed in a gatefold jacket and includes an 11 x 22 insert.
Does This Look Infected? is the second studio LP from the Ontario, Canada pop punks, which was originally released in November of 2002. The album peaked at No. 32 on the Billboard top 200 chart and at No. 8 on the Top Canadian Albums chart. It was certified platinum in Canada and gold in the U.S.
“Nobody likes us / What a shame / We played the Black Cat / Nobody came / Toured North Carolina / Everybody stayed home / But we showed them / We broke their microphone…” “Black Cat,” Lesbian Boy
It’s a familiar story: One night you find yourself hanging by the legs from the rafters at the Velvet Lounge, no shirt, body soaked with beer, a McDonald’s fish filet sandwich shoved down your pants, singing “Nyquil Party tonight / Everybody gonna get real stunned” when your head collides with the spinning ceiling fan, and it really, really hurts. And you wonder, not for the first time, how did I get here?
Well, maybe it’s not that familiar a story, but it’s my story—the story of my career as a rock’n’roll star. During said career I regularly poured hot wax down my pants, stage dove into nonexistent mosh pits, put out a cigarette on my chest, burned dollar bills—you name it, I probably did it, if it would get me a laugh. I was a cut-rate Iggy Pop for a cut-rate town, and I’m glad it’s over.
But during its time, oh was it glorious. It started the way it always does: Idiots get together to form band, think they’re going to become famous, don’t. We decided to call ourselves Lesbian Boy. We sat down, wrote some songs of deep social import—songs like “Sammy Hagar” with its immortal lines, “I can’t drive 55 / With my thumbs stuck in my eyes”—and then set about learning how to play our instruments. That was the part we never quite got down.
Our first gig was a fiasco. We played a house party—it was my house, actually—and made sure to set up our instruments blocking the front door, so nobody could escape. Unfortunately we failed to block the stairs to the second floor, which is where everyone trapped in the livingroom with us promptly headed. And this despite such great songs as “Song for John Lennon to Sing,” with its lines “I’m just a soldier in the war of Rock’n’Roll / My microphone is my grenade / I took a bullet at Live Aid.”
“Like a lot of the better things to impact my life in a good way, I’d have to say, I was pretty late to the party as far as my love of vinyl goes. When I was younger, I was too cool for vinyl, if you can believe that.”
“My parents split up when I was two or three, but I’ll never forget my Dad and his stereo. It’s funny, at least to me, to remember stuff about your parent when they were dumb kids, but I guess they had to do it before we could. Anyway, I don’t know if I just have a great memory, or if that turntable and record collection was just so important to my Dad that I’ll never forget it, probably a little of both. I remember a lot of Conway Twitty and Eagles, yeah the f’n Eagles. Could be the reason for the late bloom.
I grew up in El Paso, TX (which matters for this story), and I remember being around seventeen when the drummer from the band I was in, made me come along with him to this guy Jim’s house he had started hanging out with. Sitting in this guy’s driveway that night, he told us all the things he thought our band needed to be doing different to get more out of all the work we were putting in to it.
Everything he said made so much sense, I mean I was really floating on a cloud of ambition, ready to take this guy’s gospel to work! But then, as we were saying our goodbyes, he handed me and my friend a handful of 7 inches of his new band, At The Drive-In. I remember thinking, “What the hell does this guy know, who’s gonna buy a little record, and what kind of a band name is ‘At The Drive-In’?”
I know this is The VINYL District, but a lot of us vinyl cats are into cassettes too! So I wanted to hip you to the fact that the great garage-rockin’ label, Burger Records, is releasing a tape a day in January!
They’re dubbing it “A Tape a Day, Okay?” and it features cassettes from such artists as Ty Segall/Mikal Cronin, Nobunny, Gris Gris, Zig Zags, Painted Hills, and even the Masters of Reality! In fact, here’s the schedule…
And while you’re over there at Burger’s website ordering some tapes, pre-order yourself one (or all) of the three, great vinyl releases that they’ve got coming out soon!
As part of San Francisco’s short lived but highly impressive Girls, impressive young songwriter and guitarist Christopher Owens came on like a house afire, weaned on classic pop yet connecting as very much of the nonce, a combo that resulted in his name being heralded far and wide as a major artist. Owens quit Girls in July of last year, but not with the intention of leaving the music scene. His first record as a solo artist is Lysandre, an ambitious project that concerns a very familiar occurrence; he met a girl. Unfortunately, the record is plagued with problems, and is a far from auspicious beginning to his solo career.
In Girls, Christopher Owens made a solid statement regarding the durability of the tried and true strains of pop-rock song craft. His writing, which was snuggly tied to the past while lacking in heavy indebtedness to the impressiveness of his influences, integrated with his sharp guitar playing and sturdy if somewhat emotionally raw vocalizing to vindicate the hubbub from the expected accusations of hype.
While Girls first hit the radar screens with the “Lust for Life” b/w “Morning Light” single for the True Panther Sounds label in 2008, the stir over the band, which was mainly comprised of Owens, bassist/producer Chet “J.R.” White, and a revolving door of other members really began in earnest with the release of Album in the autumn of the following year. That record stood up as quite the debut for the group, and the lively and assured guitar-pop strains it presented brought a high benchmark for their subsequent activity.
It was an obstacle that Girls largely licked, first with the “Broken Dreams Club” EP from 2010, a collection of six songs that displayed substantial songwriting growth and frequent use of horns and pedal steel, additives that found the group coming off at times like a cross between a less ethnic-music themed Beirut and the later, less ragged material from Bright Eyes.
Matt and Kim have been steadily gaining an audience since their formation in 2005. With four albums under their belt, the duo’s energetic performances have crowds moving, and their witty banter creates an atmosphere of pure joy.
And yeah, they’re in love, too. You get that vibe from the way they catch each other’s eye on stage, Matt’s references to Kim’s sex appeal, and the way they find an opportunity to grind on each other mid-set. The point is, Matt and Kim are true performers. Live, you won’t know what to expect and honestly, isn’t that the best part of a show?
Matt was kind enough to field some questions for us via email.
How do you challenge each other to continue to grow and evolve your sound?
I don’t know if we challenge each other. I will say, when starting this band, we were just learning to play our instruments, so for many years it was evolving because we were actually figuring out how to play.
