Brooklyn | Tough Customer // Wire

Sean Bones

When I was studying Greek and Roman history in college I was frequently bothered by a nagging sensation that I had missed out on human civilization’s most outrageous party era. What could be better than the wine-soaked bacchanalia of ancient Rome or the ritual ecstasy of a Dionysian prayer meeting? Back then, people spent all their free time in a giant naked pile of sex, retsina, and roasted meat. The vomitoriums were always packed and you couldn’t walk 20 feet without stumbling onto an orgy. At least that’s how I understand it.

Then again, rumor has it that the Roaring ’20s were also pretty good, party-wise. America as fat with post-war optimism and a healthy economy. Jazz was booming out of every nightclub and people couldn’t stop doing the Charleston. Add to that short flapper skirts and a ready supply of opium, and you’ve got a decade-long party that begins to rival anything the ancient Greeks might have put together. However, even though it happened in the 20th century, I still missed that party by a good 80 years. The Roaring ’20s might as well have been the Roaring ’20s B.C. as far as I’m concerned.

This knowledge kept me depressed for a little while until I started listening to music and watching movies from the late ’70s and early ’80s. Holy shit! If the movies 54 and Boogie Nights are any indication, those halcyon days were filled with strong drugs and tight pants. The whole thing was set to a funky beat and all it took was some chest hair and a casual understanding of astrology to get even the homeliest guys laid. Sadly, I was born at the end of the ’70s, which makes me a product of the wanton disco era and therefore way too young to have enjoyed any of its perks.

Sigh. Yet another era of decadent, unbridled partying that cruel fate has willed me to miss.

My thinking about my own youthful epoch has gone on like this until recently when I came to a sudden realization. It’s not as though I”m living in an historically conservative or boring time. It would be one thing if I was trying to get buck wild in the Victorian Era or declare my unbridled individualism in the middle of the 1950s. But really, there’s nothing stopping me from busting loose right now – or jumping on MySpace to find 20 or 30 loose women to do it with me. We are in the middle of Spring Break after all; I could leave for Daytona Beach tomorrow morning and be doing body shots with a group of co-eds before sundown.

The fact of the matter is that’s just not my bag. The thought of partying all day on a Florida beach with a bunch of topless frat boys sounds awful. Add in the bad seafood and the inevitable Limp Bizkit CD stuck on repeat and you’re actually pretty close to describing my own personal hell. Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for nudity, loud music and wanton inebriation, but I have to do it on my terms. I would much rather drink my way through a rooftop party or bonfire on a warm beach somewhere. I would be happy to have people taking off their clothes and canoodling in the dark corners, just as long as I get to pick the music.

Assuming that’s the case, one of the things I would probably put on to set the mood is Brooklyn’s Sean Bones. Sean Bones is actually Sean Sullivan, the guitar player for Sam Champion, another fave here at TC//Wire. Under the Sean Bones moniker, Sullivan has created a laid back EP of Specials-esque ska funk. The tunes vibrate with a tropical lo-fi rhythm that works perfectly as the soundtrack to the first beer at the end of a summer day. Chances are you’ll find yourself drunk on the sound before you get drunk from the booze.

A drunken bacchanal it is not, but still a damn fine way to spend an afternoon. Perhaps future generations will look back on these casual springtime romps and envy our leisurely enjoyment of drink and sound. Who knows? Only history can judge us now.

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MP3: 'Easy Street'

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MP3: 'Sugar In My Spoon' (via RCRD LBL)

By: Editor

10-04-2009

Brooklyn, indie, lo-fi, reggae, ska

Red Wire Black Wire EP Out Today!

RWBW

We’re now staring into the gaping maw of the Christmas shopping season, which means the selling will soon begin in earnest. Already this week we’re seeing fruitcakes at Walgreens, egg nog at the corner store, and a nationwide increase in the consumption of spiral ham.

Speaking of holiday cheer, the Christmas season is one of the few remaining things that can still give the major labels half a boner. As such, we’re also seeing new albums from some blue chip artists being released today. You probably heard about Chinese Democracy (thanks Dr. Pepper!) and you know Kanye’s got another vanity project hitting the shelves. Oh, and in case anybody is gift shopping for their great-aunt Shirley, you’ll be happy to know that Tom Jones and Barry Manilow have new albums out this week as well.

But what should you get for the special people on your list this year? What about your little sister, who loves melancholy electro-pop? What about your jaded hipster friend who thinks he likes Fuck Buttons, but really just wants to dance? What about that cute chick with the Ratatat t-shirt at the coffee shop you’ve been meaning to talk to? What would make the holidays special for them?

The answer is simple: a copy of the new Compass EP from Brooklyn’s Red Wire Black Wire. It comes out today on Tough Customer Records. It is filled with thumping drum sounds pulled from hip hop’s back catalogue, synthesizers stolen from Brian Eno and enough guitars to please any indie rock fan. It is guaranteed to bring satisfaction to any music lover on your Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanza/Grand High Climax list.

So get your hands on a copy of Red Wire Black Wire’s Compass EP today and then go forth and spread good cheer unto the world.

MP3: ‘Locked Out’ (via RCRD LBL)

By: Editor

25-11-2008

Brooklyn, dance, electro-pop, indie rock, New York

Ill Ease

Elizabeth Sharp

I really like going to movies by myself, especially in the middle of the day when there’s hardly anybody else in the theater. A lot of people think this is weird, but I don’t really understand why. If you’re sitting in the dark for two hours giving your undivided attention to a giant screen, does it really matter if there’s somebody you know in the seat next to you? I can understand if you’re on a date and looking to do some serious hand-holding, but otherwise being by yourself helps you concentrate. This in turn helps you lose yourself in the story and suspend your disbelief when necessary. The latter is especially important when watching anything from the sci-fi, action or dramatic thriller genres.

Speaking of movie dates, for some people the idea of sitting in a dark theater is inextricably linked to time spent with the opposite sex. Perhaps this is a holdover from the 50s, when not everyone had a car and a movie theater was one of the few places a horny teenager could get some time alone with his date. In some cases I think it’s just sublimated fear of homosexuality.

For example, I have a group of friends – all male – who refuse to sit next to each other in the theater. They insist on sitting at least two seats apart from each other. If we go in a large enough group or to a small enough theater, this means that we can take up a whole row with just a few of us. When I first went to a movie with these guys and I tried to sit next to one of them, I was firmly rebuked. “Dude,” I was told, “don’t sit there. Slide over one.” When I asked why it was revealed to me that sitting next to another guy at a movie is “totally gay.”

I wonder if Elizabeth Sharp ran up against this kind of resistance when she started her one-woman band Ill Ease. Did anybody look at her funny when she insisted on playing all the instruments herself? Did they label her an outcast when they heard her symphony of overdubbed tambourines and hand claps? Perhaps they declared “Jangly lo-fi bedroom pop is group activity! You can’t make songs that are catchy and broken in all the right places by yourself!”

I for one don’t think it’s weird at all. Hey – I listen to music by myself all the time. In fact, I often do so when I’m waiting for a movie to start. And if anyone can ever lower their inhibitions enough to sit next to me, I might just tell them all about this great one woman band I just discovered. That’s not so weird is it?

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MP3: 'Here Comes Trouble'

By: Editor

21-11-2008

Brooklyn, indie, lo-fi, New York, pop

Hot Seconds

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.

Sigh. Such is life – and the life of a pop song.

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MP3: 'Holy Moly'

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MP3: 'Went To India'

By: Editor

11-09-2008

Brooklyn, electro rock, New York, pop

Falcon

photo by Chris Davies

Today was unofficial crazy day in San Francisco. Actually, almost any day in San Francisco might be considered crazy if you don’t live here and see all the weirdos on a daily basis. But even for somebody accustomed to all the fruitcakes, I’m telling you today was nuts (pun intended). In the two blocks between the train station and our office I saw the following:

- A woman staggering down the sidewalk chanting, “Snakes! Snakes are falling from the sky!”

- A man stopping traffic in the middle of street and then dry humping the bumper of one of the cars that tried to drive around him.

- And a another man just doing the generic crazy – i.e. running down the street, slobbering and wild-eyed, going, “Blah bloo wah bla arrrgh!”

Many of you who live in other cities might wonder why we let our crazy homeless people roam the streets instead of giving them shelter, medical attention, and lessons in personal hygiene. The short answer is that we are a bunch bleeding-heart liberal cupcakes whose good intentions cloud our ability to make rational decisions. Each time a new mayor gets up at city hall and lays out a plan to handle the crazy, drug addled homeless population of San Francisco, an outcry goes up among those vocal groups of people prone to outcries. They insist that the mayor has no right to infringe upon anybody’s personal freedom. Being crazy and homeless is not a crime, they contend. If crazy homeless people want help, they will seek it out. If they don’t want help, they will let you know by exposing an open sore, eating from the garbage can, and asking you for a dollar.

Perhaps the biggest tragedy in all of this is that being crazy doesn’t necessarily mean being a menace to society. In fact, crazy often equals brilliance in musicians and artists. Take, for example, Jared Falcon. From 1986 to 1988, Jared Falcon attended Petaluma Junior High in Northern California. He played baritone sax in the orchestra and did not do particularly well in school. However, he was a songwriting prodigy. Falcon wrote almost a song a day and recorded each and every one onto a Fisher Price tape recorder. This practice started in January 1987 and ended, 336 songs later, in February 1988, when Jared was institutionalized.

The tapes lay in a dusty pile in his mother’s attic for years until they were discovered by Shannon Ferguson, an old classmate of Falcon’s. Ferguson was helping Jared’s mother clean house when he found the tapes, and he knew right away that he had stumbled onto a gold mine. He returned to New York and started a band with a singular vision: Take the tapes born of Jared Falcon’s confused teenage brain and turn them into the songbook of a Brooklyn indie rock band.

And thus the band Falcon was born. Playing only reworked versions of the original songs found on those early Fisher Price recordings, Falcon has built up a repertoire of about 20 songs and has just released an EP. The songs feature soaring guitars and wander from dreamy psyche rock to rhythmic pop in a way that sort of illustrates the open freedom of a broken mind – it goes where it wants to. With these songs, Falcon shows that crazy people can sometimes lead us to beautiful places. Now if only we could lead the crazy people off the streets of San Francisco and into an institution, who knows what kind of hidden genius we might find.

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MP3: 'The Sandfighter'

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MP3: 'Q of T'

By: Editor

24-07-2008

Brooklyn, indie rock, New York, San Francisco

Salt & Samovar

Despite the universally acknowledged differences between city dwellers and country folk, there is a movement brewing that might just help to bridge that gap. It is a movement that seems to be coming in from two different sides toward a mutually recognized center. Whether that meeting proves to be harmonious or cacophonous remains to be seen. In order to make any kind of educated guess though, we need to take a closer look at both factions.

On the one side we have rural youth becoming increasingly fascinated with urban culture. This has actually been going on for a while, and we mostly have MTV to thank for it. Countless rap videos and witless reality shows have brought images of black and brown people streaming into the living rooms of kids who would otherwise have lived a lily white existence. Now whether or not you think Lil’ Jon or Flavor Of Love are suitable ambassadors of African-American culture is an argument for another day. The fact remains that millions of goofy little cracker children are being entertained by and, as a result looking up to, people of color. In a country where some still fly the confederate flag and others can’t fathom electing a black president, this is a huge step forward. It would appear that a little bit of urban culture is doing more for backwoods race relations than any amount of schooling ever could.

On the other side we have all these hipster kids in Brooklyn. It’s hard to say what their motive is, but for whatever reason many of them are getting into country and bluegrass music. Is it an attempt to colonize a scene that hasn’t yet been blown open by a hipster bomb? Or is it just that flannel clothing is often the cheapest, most abundant stuff at the thrift store? Dunno. Maybe we should ask O’Death or Langhorne Slim.

Better yet, let’s ask Salt & Samovar. They’ve crafted a swampy indie country sound that is perhaps better than any other. This can largely be attributed to the equal parts hipster sensibility and low country twang they put into their music. It’s country, but not too country. It’s hip, but not so hip that it hurts. Their record “Old Joy, New Joy” would be equally at home on the back porch in the Ozarks or a rooftop in DUMBO.

Sooner or later this whole thing will come full circle, sides will meet and the melting pot stew will finally be ready to serve. Until then, let’s think of funny names for this newish musical movement. How about Cosmo Country? Or Brooklyn Bluegrass? Blogger Blues? Yeah…I got nothin.

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MP3: '(Soon To Be) The Dust'

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MP3: 'Swallowed A Pill'

By: Editor

22-02-2008

acoustic, alt-country, Brooklyn, cabaret, indie rock, New York

The Epochs

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.

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Download 'Opposite Sides'

Download 'Mouths To Feed'

By: Editor

30-10-2007

Brooklyn, electro rock, New York, pop, Seattle

Sigmund Droid

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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Download 'Liverpool Sluts'

Download 'Sigmund Droid'

By: Editor

29-10-2007

Brooklyn, dance punk, electro rock

Tough Customer // Wire

Sean Bones

Red Wire Black Wire EP Out Today!

Ill Ease

Hot Seconds

Falcon

Salt & Samovar

The Epochs

Sigmund Droid

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