I recently got rid of all my CDs. After years of buying, trading and collecting albums, after dragging them across the country, after loading most of them onto my computer and after watching them gather dust for the last two years I finally decided to get rid of them. I sold as many as I could and I gave the rest away to friends. It wasn’t easy parting ways with my collection. And at 1000+ CDs it was an actual collection, one that I had carefully cultivated and was quite proud of.
But by now you know the story about compact discs. They are outdated technology and they don’t even last as long as they’re supposed to. Not only that, but a lot of my CDs were first pressing, which is something good in the world of vinyl, but in the world of CDs it means my CDs are shitty, inferior versions of the fancy new CDs the started making in 1999 or whatever. Long story short, most of my CDs are now living out their golden years in the bargain bin at Amoeba Records.
It’s kind of funny that I feel such an attachment to these CDs. The obvious recipient of my affection and nostalgia should be the albums - i.e. the music, the cover art, the liner notes. And while the music is ultimately the most important thing to me, I still feel a real attachment to the physical CD. I liked seeing all of those CDs stacked up on the shelf. I liked looking at their spines all lined up in a row. I liked the bounty their sheer volume seemed to represent. Somehow looking at a really long playlist is just not the same to me.
What’s funny about this is that owning a physical copy of the music is a relatively recent phenomena - and it’s already dead. For most of human history, music only happened when it was played live. People only started buying vinyl in a real way after WWII. And the LP didn’t see popular use until the late 60s. Before that, you listened to live orchestras on the radio or you just bought sheet music and hoped somebody in your house learned how to play it on piano. Before that you either went to the symphony or you listened to some drunken troubadour playing lute down at ye ol’ inn.
I’m wondering if that made music more special somehow. If music was more of a rarity, something brought out for special occasions only, it stands to reason that it would be treated like a delicacy. I mean, compare that to now, where you can download pretty much any song you want whenever you want, you can see on-demand music videos and concert footage, and the most popular songs and artists end up appearing ad nauseam in commercials, movies, restaurants, bars and birthday parties. These days, silence is more of a rarity than music.
But I’m a junkie so I still crave it. Honestly, I can’t get enough. And I’ve decided that after selling all my CDs and wearing a digital hole in my iPod, I need to go back to the source for some uncut pure shit: live music. In the words of Axl Rose, I used to do a little, but a little wouldn’t do it, so now I do more and more.
That’s right, I’m putting more live music in my life and I’m starting with the Wolfmother show at The Fox next Monday. (Actually, I’m starting with the Conspiracy of Beards show tomorrow night, but that’s as much for the spectacle as it is for the music.) I’m kind of playing it safe here, since I know this will be a straight-ahead brass tacks rock show. Heartless Bastards are also on the bill which ups the ante to level 8 awesomeness. And perhaps most interestingly, thenewno2 are opening up the show.
This band features loud electric guitars, strange synthesizer noises, beautifully syncopated drums and some oddly (purposely?) amateurish drum programming, an offspring of the Beatles, wandering psychedelic flourishes and what I hope will be a whole lot of volume. This is the kind of thing you go to see live music for - a sound, a performance, an experience. Judging from what I’ve seen online (guilty!), thenewno2 definitely bring the thunder. To continue with the food metaphor, Wolfmother may be the bread and butter of this show, but I’m counting on thenewno2 to whip up something special for dessert.
thenewno2 plays The Fox Theater in Oakland on Monday 11/23/09 (with Wolfmother and Heartless Bastards)
Generally speaking, I don’t like to mix business with pleasure. This is mostly because I like to give all of my attention to the task in front of me. If it’s business time, then I make sure I handle my business. Likewise, if it’s time to party, then I want to know that all of my business has been handled so that I don’t have any responsibilities holding me back when I go on a wild, booze fueled rock n roll adventure that rages on into the early morning hours.
Of course, that is generally speaking. When we are talking specifically about CMJ, the rules about the separation of business and pleasure do not apply. CMJ is a 5 day orgy of indie music, free shwag and drink specials that goes from noon to 4am every day. There is no way that I can hope to go to that many rock shows and keep a perfectly balanced composure for all 16 hours of each day. I’m not saying that I’ll be chugging bloody marys as soon as they open the doors on the first day show, but sooner or later I’m going to have to start drinking. Combine the free alcohol with a pretty awesome roster of bands, and before you know it, it’s party time.
But you’re not here for stories about drinking. You’re here for the music - which is more interesting, honestly. Because I understand this, (and because I’m a type A personality) I committed to a close study of all CMJ shows - official or otherwise - and came up with this list of recommendations and highlights. Print it out, take it with you, get your freak on.
Tuesday 8:30pm - Free Energy @ The Studio at Webster Hall A new favorite here at Tough Customer headquarters. These kids from Philly sound like the best parts of Thin Lizzy and T.Rex as mixed by the dudes at DFA. Which is basically what it is.
10:45pm - Black Taxi @ Arlene’s Grocery An intriguing combination of indie rock, surf rock and Mark Knopfler-style riffs. New stuff sounds like cross between Kings Of Leon and Cold War Kids.
11:00pm - Saint Motel @ Kenny’s Castaways Kinda like classic rock, but more modern.
1:00am - Heavy Trash @ Santos Party House Jon Spencer’s new-ish band. Everybody likes that guy.
2:00am - Ghislain Poirier @ Glasslands “Bombastic bass lines and blazing synths dripping sizzling hot dancehall rhythms.”
Wednesday
7:00pm - The Men Who Stare At Goats @ Clearview Cinema This is actually a funny, weird-looking movie about a top-secret wing of the U.S. military. Stars George Clooney and Ewan McGregor.
8:30 - Pacific Division @ DROM New golden era hip hop from the West Coast.
9:00pm - The XX @ Mercury Lounge Might as well see what all the hype is about…
11:00pm - Ninjasonik @ Le Poisson Rouge Have you seen the video for Somebody Gonna Get Pregnant? Do you need another reason? 11:30pm - Teenage Prayers @ Southpaw This is the Futures Sounds/Rumble Party. Those guys know what they’re doing, as evidenced by the fact that they tapped this snarky faux-oldies band to play their showcase.
1:00am - Boogie Boarder @ Glasslands Gallery Loud, rhythmic garage-y rock.
Thursday
8:30pm - Bottle Up & Go @ The Studio at Webster Hall “Loud, raw, perfect bluesy mess.”
11:00pm - Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers @ Pianos Haunting murder ballads. This is what I imagine Tom Waits’ wife sounds like. 12:00am - Tanya Morgan @ Southpaw Best new hip hop group of 2009. Seriously.
12:00am - Priestess @ Arlene’s Grocery This is an arena caliber rock band playing in a room the size of my basement. Something will probably explode. 1:00am - Sean Bones @ Mercury Lounge Who knew that indie rock-steady reggae pop would sound this good? Top 10 album of the year, for sure.
2:30am - Cymbals Eat Guitars @ Public Assembly Vice Mag late night party. If you’re still up and looking for something to do, this would be a good choice.
Friday 10:30pm - Red Wire Black Wire @ The Studio at Webster Hall
CD release party/homecoming/totally awesome show from Brooklyn’s best electro-pop band.
11:30pm - Yes Giantess @ The Studio at Webster Hall So smooth. Plus, you’ll already be there for the RWBW set.Might as well stay and watch these guys. 2:00am - The Postelles @ The Pure Volume House Probably the catchiest band playing at CMJ. Prepare to spend the next week humming “123 Stop” to yourself.
Saturday
5:00pm - Red Wire Black Wire @ Braur Falls In case you missed them the night before and feel bad about it.
8:00pm - Pig Destroyer @ Rocks Off Concert Cruise Bone crunching speed metal - and it’s on a boat! 9:00pm - Rumspringa @The Studio at Webster Hall Just drums and guitar, but they manage to squeeze a lot of genres into their sound.
9:45pm - Turbo Fruits @ Union Pool This is what I wished the Black Lips sounded like.
(Highly recommended shows in bold.)
The brand new album from the NYC electro-pop phenoms comes out today on Tough Customer Records. The record is awash in gorgeous synthesizer riffs, dance floor ready drum beats and the band’s trademark cinematic production. The lyrics pay homage to young lust and city life. At times it is catchy pop music. At others it is brooding electro-rock. There are moments of psychedelic beauty and glimpses of haunting dreams.
This album is at once familiar and new. Where other records simply shout in your direction, this album speaks directly to you. This is the sound of a cool autumn wind blowing through the over-heated streets of Brooklyn at the tail end of the first decade of the new millennium. This is something you’ve been waiting to hear.
Check out the first two singles below. RWBW is on tour now. Catch them when they come through your town to drink all your liquor and steal your women.
Recently a friend sent out a group email to what must have been every person on his contact list. In this email he explained his opinions on the 2nd Amendment as well as his fear that the new administration might curtail gun rights, and then encouraged everyone to act accordingly. Needless to say, within hours this disparate group of friends, acquaintances and total strangers were at each other’s throats arguing about what is officially one of the three most controversial issues in America today. I suggested that we open up the debate to abortion and religion while we were at it, just to make sure we pissed everyone off.
My friend didn’t go for it. Instead he decided to reign the whole thing by directing all further thoughts on the subject to him individually and not to the group as a whole. Which is a bummer, cuz I sure do loves me a good argument. Speaking of which, let’s talk about religion - specifically about the Amish. Everybody knows them as the guys with funny beards who are good with carpentry. They also refuse to use modern conveniences such as electricity or gas powered vehicles, and they have a pretty strict moral code.
Which is like, big whoop, right? Show me a religion that doesn’t have a strict moral code. Or one that doesn’t have funny outfits and strange superstitions for that matter. And that is my point. All religion is basically the same; believe in something that you can’t see, hang out with other people who also believe in it, and every once in a while get together in some kind of building to sing songs and read apocryphal fairy tales dedicated to it. Also, you should restrict your behavior in some way because the invisible thing is always watching you and it totally gives a shit.
The Amish are no more or less weird than any other religious group. But they do get extra points for their variation on the initiation ceremony. Jews have bar mitzvahs, Catholics have communion, and some African religions have that crazy teenage circumcision that I don’t even want to think about. All of these are events to mark a person’s maturity, or the point at which they can understand and accept the tenets of the faith on their own. Well, the Amish have “rumspringa” and it is fucking awesome.
It works like this: the Amish know that their lifestyle is not for everyone. Living in a semi-secluded community without any of the “English” conveniences can be hard, especially when the modern world is basically rubbing it in your face all the time. The Amish parents want to make sure their offspring understand what they’re giving up and that they have accepted the culture of their own volition. So what do they do? At age 16 they cut the little fuckers loose for a two year orgy of sex, drugs, and consumer electronics. Rumspringa!
“If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was meant to be.” That’s the idea, in a nutshell. The elders figure that it’s better to show the young ones what they’re missing rather than shroud it in mystery - which we all know would only make it more tempting. During the period of rumspringa, young Amish kids are allowed to move into double-wide trailers and spend their days smoking speed, watching cable television and having awkward pre-marital sex. They can even get shitty minimum wage service jobs to finance the whole thing. Surprisingly, most of them burn out on this lifestyle pretty quickly and return to their Amish brethren after only a few months. In other words, contrary to what the other religions would have you believe, a year or two of unchecked hedonism is actually a good thing.
Ironically, the LA band that calls themselves Rumspringa have reverse engineered this process in order to arrive at their sound. “In a modern age when image, shock appeal and technology invades every nook and cranny, it’s hard and rare to find that good ol’ rock n roll sound. ‘That’s why we declared ourselves to be on our own version of Rumspringa,’ says the band. ‘To step away from all the self-serving surface of the mainstream music culture and to get back to the heart of discovering the soul of rock through the roots of its creation.’”
Rumspringa (the band) is sort of like the Amish elders, who have accepted the simple style as the path to greater happiness. Yet, they have certainly had their wild moments, which you can hear in the hip hop iconography and dancey electro rhythms that have slyly made their way into Rumspringa’s songs. Sometimes it sounds like Jimmy Reed and !!! having a party at EPMD’s house and sometimes it just sounds like some indie rock kids with the blues. It’s hard to explain, but easy to understand.
So now we’ve covered guns and we’ve talked about religion. That just leaves abortion. Excuse me while I go write a quick email…
I did not have what most people would consider a normal high school experience. And by “most people” I mean the actors I’ve seen playing high school students in big budget Hollywood films. From what I’ve seen on screen - and, by extension, what I can only assume is an accurate representation of everybody’s experience - most high schools are filled with middle class white kids who have to tackle tough decisions like what college to go to or where to park their convertible. The one exception to this rule is the occasional inner city high school filled with troubled Black/Hispanic/Asian kids who are in desperate need of an obstinate, jive-talking teacher to inspire them to greatness. But I digress.
From what I understand, in high school students separate themselves into groups or cliques, each of which has its own code of conduct. Throughout their high school career, students must navigate a complicated social maze of cool kids, jocks, and awkward sexual experiences. There are big dances, football games, and important parties that one is either invited to or not. There is one girl who is usually considered the hottest of all the girls, although her friends are likely to be almost as attractive. As a result, they wield a disproportionate amount of social power and are admired and/or feared by the other students. Also, if my facts are correct, they should all be named Heather.
Sadly, this does not even remotely describe my time in high school. My school was rough. We had race riots that twice shut the entire school down for a week. The Asian Mafia once started a war with the Samoans that ended with a S.W.A.T. team pulling a bunch of machine guns from a windowless van in the parking lot. Our first and only dance was cut short when somebody fired a gun through the roof of the gym. Our basketball team was so gangster that a rival gang once came to a game, chained the doors shut, shut off all the lights, and then beat everybody with cro-bars and baseball bats. Also, my P.E. teacher was an alcoholic, my locker frequently got set on fire, and I once saw a girl stab a guy in the neck with a pair of oversize scissors.
Needless to say, I kept a pretty low profile. I ate my lunch in the car and spent most of my free time with the jazz band. I took honors classes with more or less the same 30 kids in every class and generally kept to myself. I had a girlfriend and played in a rock band, but I never thought of myself as anything but one of the kids who went to school every day hopping that he wouldn’t get robbed or shot. Forget about parties, or cliques, or hot girls. I was just trying to survive.
So imagine my surprise when I found out that I was one of the cool kids. I recently got back in touch with an old classmate, who now works with my sister. She told my little sister that she didn’t spend much time with me in high school because I was part of the popular crowd. Really? Wow. I did not know that. Guess I misinterpreted that sense of impending dread I used to feel each day as I left for school.
Anyway, it turns out this former classmate is also a wealth of music knowledge, and she turned me onto a local band that I didn’t even know about. They rock the moniker Maus Haus and play what I would describe as freaked out electro post-rock. Pop melodies and monkish chants float around heavy synthesizers and distorted guitars. The rhythms shift from fusion-like jazz funk beats to the type of wild outsider rock that people are now stealing from Captain Beefheart. It’s the kind of music that pulls you in and then immediately spits you out when the song is over.
If you’re keeping track, that’s three more things you can add the list of things I did not know. To summarize: 1) There is an awesome post-rock band from San Francisco called Maus Haus, 2) I was, as it turns out, one of the popular kids high school, and 3) Being popular is not at all like it is in the movies.
I don’t know if it’s the proliferation of cheap recording technology or the fact that Guitar Center is always having crazy, once-in-a-lifetime blow out sales, but for some reason everybody and their mother thinks they should be in a band these days. This is all well and good when the wanna-be Coldplays and the would-be Limp Bizkits keep their ill-fated dreams locked up in a practice studio somewhere. That way the public’s ears are safe and none of us ever have to be subjected to their self delusion and extra shitty music.
The thing is, most of these bands insist on playing live. (The rest of them send me CDs). By way of either luck or tenacity they end up opening for bands that are much better than them. Allow me to address these cut rate opening bands for a moment: Do not do this. I understand you have dreams of rock stardom, but it is simply not in the cards for you. When your lame-ass, no talent band gets up on stage and sucks at full volume, it only makes you look bad. And it makes the band you’re opening for look that much better.
Case in point: I went to see We Are Wolves last night at Cafe Du Nord. There were two opening bands. One of them dressed like a group of drug-addled Burning Man cast-offs and played psychedelic electro dance rock. They were ok. At the very least they got the early crowd dancing and they seemed to be either really enjoying themselves or really high on peyote.
It was the band that came on next that was the problem. They were god awful. The drummer was off time, the guitar player just made noise, and the singer couldn’t sing - although from the look on his face you would have thought he was a finalist on American Idol. By the time they lurched into their second song the whole audience had escaped to the bar in the front room, leaving behind three people near the stage that were clearly relatives.
Why keep playing at that point? If you can’t even make music mediocre enough for people to ignore, if your music literally repels them, why not just give up? Do you think a surgeon would keep cutting people open if everyone he touched died on the operating table? Do you think a race car driver would keep getting behind the wheel if his cars blew up as soon as he crossed the starting line? No, they would not. So why do you insist on playing music when it is so clearly not meant to be?
Really the only acceptable answer is this: The incredibly terrible band whose name I didn’t even bother to look up was there just to make We Are Wolves sound awesome by contrast. If that’s the case, then congratulations on a job well done. When WAW hit the stage and began cranking out their trademark brand of electro-punk, it was like drinking a cool milkshake after 45 minutes of hot shit sandwiches. The crowd came streaming back into the room, twice as large as it was before. Everybody danced and drank. WAW didn’t waste any time with mumbled banter in between songs. They just turned their amps up and rocked like it was meant to be.
These are some assumptions about the conventional path and lifespan of the average pop song:
1) It is usually heard for the first time by listeners casually tuning into their local radio station.
2) Unless it is a song by an established artist that the record company is pushing as the next single, chances are you will only hear the song in light rotation at first - maybe once in the morning and once during the evening commute.
3) If it is a hit, then people will start to request it, it will go into heavier rotation, and soon it will be all over the dial at all times of the day. At the same time DJs and music programmers, in an effort to sate their audiences’ desire for something familiar, will start playing the song in clubs, shoe stores, and high school football games.
4) The song will eventually become ubiquitous and start to annoy even the hardcore fans. Radio stations will burn out on it and slowly pull it out of rotation. It will then sit on the shelf for a few years until nostalgia for the time period in which the song was released encourages people to dust it off for a 70s/80s/90s theme party or a CD compilation sold on late night TV.
But everybody here knows that nothing is conventional about the music industry these days. The internet can break a band just as effectively as a major market radio station. Just ask Lily Allen or The Arctic Monkeys. Also, corporate radio has pretty much made its own bed and is now being forced to lie in its noisy, soulless, advertising ridden sheets. They haven’t broken a band in several years - which translates to several lifetimes in computer years.
Because of this, the life cycle of the pop song has changed. Now, a song can make an appearance in a TV show or an iPod commercial and the band singing it can go from zero to famous in the time it takes to watch one episode of Gay’s Anatomy.
This can be either a good or bad thing, depending on your perspective. On the one hand, those commercials pay pretty well (and the ensuing album sales don’t hurt either). Tiny little indie bands can be given the opportunity to quit their day jobs and make a living playing music. If one less guitar player has to spend his days licking envelopes and doing data entry, that is definitely a good thing.
On the other hand, once you hear a song in a commercial, it kind of ruins it. And once you hear a song in a commercial a million bajillion times, it totally crushes any hope you might ever have of ever enjoying that song again without automatically associating it with whatever product it is used to sell. For example, Lyrics Born’s “Callin’ Out” used to be my go-to track when I wanted to light up the dance floor at clubs and after hours parties. Then one day I threw it on and somebody came up to me and said, “Hey! It’s that song from the Diet Coke commercial.” That night the record went back on the shelf and hasn’t come out since.
So it is with mixed feelings that I present to you Brooklyn’s Hot Seconds. Right now the band sounds great to me. The rhythm section thumps like a hired killer and each song is decorated with analogue ear candy. Synths rumble under the guitars and I think I even heard a melodica thrown in for good measure. Their songs are clean, catchy, and well-produced - which means it’s only a matter of time before you hear them pumping out the jams behind a colorful montage of the new Nano.
I once heard a crazy statistic about the difficulty of parking in San Francisco. It was something along the lines of there being five cars for every public parking space. In other words, parking is a huge bitch. Unless you have your own garage or can afford to pay $50 a day for parking, you’d better get your ass a Geo Metro or a Vespa or something else you can squeeze into that semi-legitimate half space between the bus stop and the loading zone.
A few years ago an old lady t-boned me at a stop sign and totaled my truck. I was forced to look for a new car and everybody kept reminding me about the parking situation, telling me I should get something practical. But flaunting conventional wisdom was kind of my m.o. back in those days, so I did the opposite: I bought a 1981 Cadillac Coupe De Ville with chrome rims, tinted windows, and a sub-woofer the size of a love seat. It was as long as three Geo Metros combined and got about 11 miles per gallon. But it was awesome. When I asked the guy who was selling it if it helped him get girls, he said, “Are you kidding? I just turn up the stereo and drive by the high school.”
One of my favorite things to do was to throw on a punk rock CD, put the system on blast, and drive over to Oakland for some BBQ. The car was so pimped out that people expected it to be driven by a guy wearing a fedora and a shark skin suit. When they saw a skinny white boy with a mohawk get out of the ride, they always stared. It was like they couldn’t connect the image in their head with what they were seeing. I was even profiled by the cops; I was pulled over three different times, but when I rolled down the window and they saw that I wasn’t a pimp, a thug or even a famous rapper, they’d just shake their heads and say “never mind.”
The car turned out to be a lemon and I eventually traded it for $600 cash and a digital 8-track recorder. But if I still had the Caddy, the band that I would have stuck in my stereo this week would be Tweak Bird. In fact, they might be the band that perfectly sums up the aesthetic I was going for: loud and aggressive, but with enough funk to make it nasty, and just weird enough to keep you guessing. Their new 7″ doesn’t come out until early next year, so you have enough time to go and get a record player installed in your car. That way you can listen to Tweak Bird while you drive around endlessly, looking to blow some minds - or just trying to find a parking spot.
Lead by brothers Ryan & Hays Holladay, The Epochs offer up a perfect distillation of pop, rock, and bedroom electronica. Think Radiohead meets Junior Boys meets A.C. Newman. Or think piano meets computer meets scruffy white-boy soul on a crisp Autumn day in Brooklyn. Or better yet, don’t think at all. Just listen.
Supposedly comparing one band to another is the biggest cop-out in music journalism. Even worse is saying that Band X is a cross between Band Y and Band Z. But everybody does it. Why? Because it’s the quickest, most accurate way to describe a band in universal terms that anyone even remotely familiar with that genre of music can understand. Having said that, we would like to declare the band Sigmund Droid to be a cross between Suicidal Tendencies and DFA 1979. In your face conventions of music journalism!
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