Velocity has done it again. Last year, the local indie weekly wrote up their 10 most unlistenable albums of the year, and now they’re back with the year’s “10 most overrated indie rockers“. Unfortunately, the list doesn’t carry the author’s name. Many of those named on the list find a likely home, but it’s many of the comments that are a little ridiculous, and I think a minimum requirement of being overrated is in being highly rated. Artists like Vampire Weekend or Black Kids might find a more appropriate home on the list than Starfucker or Ra Ra Riot who are hardly rated high enough to be overrated.
I have the argument frequently about Girl Talk, and I can understand people saying “what’s up with Girl Talk’s concerts?”, but to make a statement as the author does below that he could put together a better mashup is absurd. Apart from maybe Z-Trip, there is hardly another person in the world who can put the beats together the way Greg can. Comparing Bon Iver to John Mayer…really? Santogold and MGMT I second because the days have passed where you get to make a career off of one or two solid tracks. Lykke Li might have been on this list months ago, but she didn’t stay in the limelight for too long. No Age made the list because it’d annoy your parents? I assume it’s saying that if you listen to them, you’re probably still living at home, but I hardly think that’s the case.
Regardless, below is the list…we’d love to hear your comments below and thoughts about Velocity’s most overrated artists…
Girl Talk – I used to make better mashups with the radio, a cassette deck, and masterful use of the record/play button.
Bon Iver – Once upon a time, we simply called this guy John Mayer. Before that, James Taylor.
Santogold – So you’re too cool for M.I.A., but not too cool to listen to a subpar M.I.A.?
MGMT – To words. Hipster Roxette.
No Age – Bet that album really annoys your parents when you blast it from your old bedroom.
Hot Chip – Devo + Beach Boys = Dull
Lykke Li – She doesn’t want to be Nico. She wants to be Feist. Or Pink.
Deerhunter – Yes, you’re right! Listening to this overwrought crap really does make you better than everyone else. We just don’t get it!
Starfucker – One Animal Collective is one too many.
Ra Ra Riot – Mix Arcade Fire and Vampire Weekend. Then again, don’t.
One of the greatest poets of our time, and one of my personal inspirations, Saul Williams is coming back to Kentucky to perform at Berea College on Friday, February 20th. I saw Saul Williams at Univ. of Kentucky back on Feb 19, 2007 and it was religious.
My story with Saul starts with me being in High School at the Kroger next door to my parents sports shop and being sick. I was looking for a movie and saw this film called Slam and I was wanting something mindless and I figured it was probably a sports movie or something. I rented it without reading the synopsis on the back of the video, took it home and my life changed forever. Before that time, poetry meant Edgar Allen Poe, Shakespeare or Frost. Saul made me realize that there is as much poetry in hip hop as in any of Poe or any other poet’s finest works as he ripped through lines like “never question who i am/god knows/and i know god personally / in fact, he lets me call him me“, “they’re tryin’ to imprison my astrology/to put my stars behind bars/my stars in stripes/using blood spattered banners as nationalist kites” and “if i could find the spot where truth echoes/i would stand there and whisper memories of my children’s future“. I was writing a lot at that time and all of my attention was redirected towards slam poetry but found poetry everywhere. I didn’t have much access to the internets in the late 90s, so it was virtually impossible for me to find anything out about him. Fast forward to college and the internets brings me his first two books “The Seventh Octave” and “S√he” and several audio tracks including “1987“, “Twice the First Time” and “Ohm” as well as the recorded version of his reading several poems that came with “S√he” which is when I learned that Ginsberg wasn’t the only one writing truly epic poems because now we had Gypsy Girl and Coded Language…two poems I know by heart to this day and will probably never forget. Combining this flood of inspiration with a recently broken heart, I pumped Saul’s words into the Station House courtyard and wrote a lot while sitting in the small quasi-garden. Years later, while in Lexington for grad school I finally took my poetry to a stage. Once I performed and left the stage, Jai Hamilton from the Dialectics gave me one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received…something along the lines of that it sounded like it could have been written by Saul Williams (without sounding like a knock-off).
Months later I had the opportunity to see Saul Williams do his spoken word and he killed the crowd. People were crying. He stood at the front of the crowd like a prophet preaching his word and hosting a Q&A between pieces explaining everything from the way the Beastie Boys embrace of breakbeats changed the way hip hop was viewed from then on, downplayed the fact his books are being taught in college courses and explained the role of fashion early in the genre.
I may have set your expectations too high. Many of you may have checked into Saul when he released his album last year under the Pay What You Want model and you might have hated it. Musically, Saul can be a little abrasive, although I like most of what he has done largely due to my fandom, but you need to know that his spoken word stuff varies significantly from his trip hop musical endeavors which aren’t for everyone, and you really should plan on jumping in the car with me and heading to Berea on February 20th.
I haven’t heard back whether this is limited to Berea students or what the cost is if it is open to the public, but my guess is we can get in regardless…
UPDATE: The performance is going to be open to the public and what’s more…it’s free! I have a few people already asking to go watch him with me…it’s going to be a great show & I highly encourage going if you can.
UPDATE 2: Still open to public, but now I’ve gotten word now that the show is actually $10, so bring your wallet. Show is at the Phelps Stokes building and begins at 8pm. Still VERY MUCH worth it…
Son Volt are coming back to Headliners on February 13th just shy of a year since their last performance on a seemingly endless tour for 2007′s The Search. Jay Farrar has amassed a sizable and distinctive body of work since coming on the radar with Uncle Tupelo in 1989. The Search, the fifth album by the St. Louis-based artist under the Son Volt nameplate, takes Farrar’s signature juxtapositions of the arcane and the modern to provocative extremes, contrasting the blue highways of a disappearing cultural landscape with a perilous world in which the center no longer holds – a world of information overload, of clueless leaders carrying out sinister agendas, of “Hurricanes in December – earthquakes in the heartland/Bad air index on a flashing warning sign,” as the artist sings ruefully on “The Picture.”
The show is 18+ and $18 (and starts at 9pm) which you can get at Ear X-tacy or TicketWeb starting Friday, December 26th at 10pm.
Before I start this review, I have some venting to do. Okay? Here goes. SHUT UP LOUISVILLE. Seriously. Shut up. When you go to a show, shut your mouths. No one wants to hear you talk the ENTIRE time. We’ve paid money to hear music. I hate to break it to you, but your yapping isn’t music, no matter how much you may enjoy the sound of it. I might add, particularly when you’re going to see a show that has one guy and a guitar, there’s not a lot of sound coming off that stage, so you may want to, ya know, shut up and let the man or wo man play. Use your judgment. Cool? Okay, let’s try it next time.
Bon Iver’s tried to play Louisville twice and been flummoxed by snow storms and tours with Wilco, so evidently the third time is a charm. Picking up The Tallest Man on Earth to play with him was also exciting. The Tallest Man on Earth, aka Kristian Matsson, (a band name I’m convinced is a joke that allows the diminuitive singer/songwriter to proclaim every night “Hello, I am the tallest man on earth”) put out one of the better albums of 08 with his sparse, Dylan-esque, Shallow Grave LP. Unfortunately, for Matsson, the crowd didn’t seem to be into listening to him. His set was marked by attempts to get the crowd to engage, which was difficult considering the tremendous concert hub bub that I’ve already ranted about. The set blustered through most of Matsson’s album and was punctuated with him pushing downstage, raising his guitar. It was a gesture that seemed overwraught or out of place but can pretty much be written off as an attempt to push the music over the audience’s conversation. It’s difficult to fault Matsson for this. His songs thrive on silence and dissonance as much as they do on chords. You’re meant to linger on The Tallest Man on Earth’s lyrics as they pass you by. Circumstances did not allow this, and the harder Matsson pushed, the further away we became. It was a distance that seemed to mark the night. The difficult transition from album to live show would become the thing that I left this show wondering about. And Matsson, being the unknown act, couldn’t push folks to get to know him, because for the most part they weren’t listening. Still, you have to admire Matsson’s command and his half-howl half-crow vocals really shined. I’d like to see a bit of a better mix between the guitar and the vocals, but Wednesday’s show attempted, at least, to put Matsson’s vocal ability on display. I have a feeling that this may be one of these acts that concert-goers will be saying: “I remember that guy when…” tho when friends ask them for more details about the show, they won’t be able to conjure up details and will say, instead, “he played at Headliners with Bon Iver.” It’s a shame for an act that should get more of his due.
The Tallest Man on Earth Setlist:
I Won’t Be Found; Honey, Won’t You Let Me In; Shallow Grave; Pistol Dreams; Into the Stream; The Gardener; Where do My Bluebirds Fly; King of Spain; Smokes like Lightnin’ (Lightnin’ Hopkins Cover)
Towards the end of his set, Justin Vernon – aka Bon Iver – invited the audience to sing along on “Wolves Act I and Act II.” “It goes like this,” he instructed, “you sing: ‘What Might Have Been Lost.’ Once that’s over, you howl.” For once, the audience was, mostly, more than ready to get in on the show. But, the sing-along struck me as uncomfortable, awkward, and out of place. And I have to say that those string of adjectives I would apply to the entire show. It wasn’t Bon Iver’s stage presence, but the way the music felt. It’s odd, because Bon Iver’s album was my top one of the year. What made the show feel that way?
I have this theory. It’s probably wrong, but I think there’s some truth to it. Here it is: All artists are attempting to reach some form of transcendence. I’m not talking about a transcendence of happiness or anything like that, but that one moment where everything seems to fall into place. The moment where, through the work of art, real life seems realer than real or at least makes more sense than it does outside of the work of art. I offer up Radiohead’s “Nude” as an example – listen to when Yorke’s voice soars at the end of the lyric “You’ll go to hell for what your dirty little mind has been thinking” and you’ll get the picture. For Emma, Forever Ago was an album full of those moments: the yell of “I told you to be patient / I told you to be kind” on “Skinny Love,” he desperate feeling on “Re: Stacks.” Perhaps these moments shine because they were written in solitude, in Vernons now near-mythic hibernation period during which the album was concieved and recorded. You can almost hear icicles growing in between words on that album. It’s truly lovely. Lovely in the way that Cat Power’s You Are Free or Elliott Smith’s Either/Or or Iron & Wine’s debut are; haunted, skillfully produced, lonely, but somewhere hopeful – somewhere you hear Vernon asking for the snow to melt. And listening to it you know that it will. Maybe this is what people mean when they talk about the human condition or something grandiose, but the beauty of the albums I just mentioned as well as the beauty of For Emma… is it’s ability to conjure up such images in its listeners life while remaining deeply personal to the artist.
And, of course, the issue with playing a live version of an album like that is taking the album out of the hibernation and solitude, out into the world. Bon Iver has come up with a series of ways to flush out the sound. “Skinny Love” featured three drummers. That wasn’t the only tune that attempted to fill out the recording with downbeats. “Blood Bank,” the title track of Iver’s forthcoming EP, was a distortion driven, full out rock song. Something that you wouldn’t get from the recording. Other than the desire to have a bit more of a rocking song to add to the set, it baffled me why Vernon and co. would choose to rock something that isn’t rock. The live version took the warmth, the depth, from the recording in search of some sort of testosterone-driven piece. I’d apply that critique pretty much across the board to Bon Iver’s show. You can’t really say that the additional instrumentation made the tunes feel fuller, they sound great on the album. And I’m not advocating for a pure one-to-one correlation between a recording and a live show, rather that the live show should at least carry the essence of the album into a live context. There’s little of that sense in Vernon’s show. Instead, what comes across is either that Vernon is tired of playing these songs the same way (which is probably the case since the album was self-released in 07 and got a release on Jagjaguawar this year), or that Bon Iver’s sound is taking a turn for the rockier. Either way it makes the concert seem inauthentic.
Combine that with the fact that Bon Iver relied on covers instead of originals. Sure the Outfield cover is insteresting as is the Talk Talk cover, but honestly, there’s a reason we all turned out to see the show. And it wasn’t for clever covers. As a friend of mine quipped after the show regarding the Wolves sing along, what might have been lost…is this show. Or, what was lost is Bon Iver somewhere in this show.
Bon Iver Setlist:
Skinny Love, Lump Sum, Blood Bank, Beach Baby, For Emma Forever Ago, Your Love (Outfield Cover), Flume, I Believe in You (Talk Talk Cover), Wolves Act I and II, Creature Fear
PS – I was speaking to a concert promoter friend who altered me to a startling fact. We’re staring to get a reputation, Louisville. We don’t presell shows very well and given the amount of gabbing during this show, I’m sure that our talkitiveness is starting to give us not so great of a name as well. I’ve heard people complain, from time to time, about Louisville not getting the same shows that appear in Newport or even Lexington. It’s time that we stopped pointing the finger at our geographic location and started to look at how we behave during concerts. A bit of respect is due, and perhaps for a New Year’s resolution, we started to look at our own conduct and change that reputation back.
Mat at Leo just turned us on to some pretty interesting news. Dead Child‘s “Sweet Chariot” is up for Video of the Year at MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball Best of 2008 (I watched this way too much growing up). The best metal videos of the year, as voted by viewers, will be played on the last episode of Headbanger’s Ball for the year airing December 20th, 2008 from 2am-3am EST.
Only a few months after Dylan, folk legend Joan Baez will be gracing the stage at Louisville’s W.L. Lyons Brown Theatre on March 10th. Perhaps best known for her close friendship to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez was an integral part of the political folk landscape of the 60s and now in 2008, Ms. Baez has been sharing her soul with us for 50 years. Ever a musical force of nature whose influence is incalculable—marching on the front line of the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King, inspiring Vaclav Havel in his fight for a Czech Republic, singing on the first Amnesty International tour and just this year, standing alongside Nelson Mandela when the world celebrated his 90th birthday in London’s Hyde Park. This tour is in part promotion of “Day After Tomorrow”, her first release in five years, and part public service announcement to raise awareness for many public and social issues. As each of her previous albums have done, “Day After Tomorrow” acts as a barometer of the times, bundled with political speech.
The show starts at 7:30pm & ticket prices run $50 / $35 / $28. Tickets are available through Kentucky Center and are on sale immediately.
In anticipation for tonight’s Southgate House performance by The Faint, Backseat Sandbar had the opportunity to chat for about an hour with Todd Fink, lead singer of the dance-punk outfit from Omaha. Famous for being one of the leaders in a growing genre and for his on-stage antics and the “half-rave-half-gallery” visual spectacle, The Faint have an eye to the future and just might have the key to industry success packed away in their labcoats…
Tickets are $15 in advance & $18 day of show. 18+
BS: I’m going to jump right in here. You misspelled “Fascination” for the album to include an extra “i” which, as a nerd, I noticed that it happens to put ascii right in the middle of the word…that had to be intentional. How does technology/science influence you? By that I mean more than just the synthesizers you use, but more the philosophy of the album itself, including the lyrics and the way you layer your beats.
Fink: Well, actually the spelling originally was due to laptop malfunction…the “i” key was stuck and when I’d written the title for the demo it showed up. I just titled the demo as a result of that. I did notice the presence of ascii and perhaps subconsciously that is what I liked about it and why I wanted to keep it.
As for technology and its influence on our music, it’s funny because nothing has really changed much over the years, we’ve learned more about software and manipulating waves in the creation of music, but moreover the general way that music is made tends to be the same. I do hear technological overtones lyrically in some of our music, particularly on this record, but our focus tends to be more on the future. Ever sense Blank Wave Arcade we’ve been asking more and more about the future, which tends to be technologically related. In doing that, we try not to give a positive or negative view of future, but something that points out both…if I say something about it positive, I tend to say something negative as well to be objective.
What is it about the future motivates you?
I’ve been interested in the future my whole life…it’s become something of an obsession on this record. I’ve just always been curious about where we’re headed. Since then, I’ve become more obsessed over history and now I’m just trying to learn everything that I can…it’s been something of a new awakening because when I was younger I never really cared about the past and was always looking forward. Now, it’s just so interesting because its like some people are really able to know what the future holds based on the past by studying the past to predict the future, and then you’ve got the futurists, people on the cutting edge of technological discoveries as well who can see entire worlds that most people can’t even imagine. It’s really these people and the way they think that motivates us.
Several bands in the dance rock movement gives fairly readily identifiable retrospective nods, and while vague comparisons to 80s synth might be appropriate, nothing about the faint feels retro to me, but now with your new-found appreciation of the past, is there any chance of The Faint starting to look back into the past for the next album?
No, I don’t think we’ve gotten futuristic enough just yet, we’ve not gone far enough and we have a long way to go. The great thing about the future is its unending nature…I think we’ll stick to that. I look at that differently than those bands doing the retro thing though. We actually did that to a limited extent on Blank Wave Arcade, except that we were very consciousness that we didn’t want to be doing a 80s revival album, so every time we went that way, we’d throw in something that was obviously not from that time period. Nostalgic is fun, but that just isn’t what we want to do.
So what is it you started out wanting to do? I can’t imagine many electronic dance-punk bands in Nebraska? Was there an electronic scene happening at the time, and how were you received there early on?
Really, it started from us trying to escape from indie rock in 1998 when the sound changed. We just wanted out and wanted to do something different and around that time is when our sound really shifted for Blank Wave Arcade. That was really the new beginning. We put down our guitars for keyboards and decided to really head off in a totally different direction. There was a great scene happening and we were big fans of a lot of these bands from Omaha and they were all doing something different, new and interesting, but it was still mostly indie rock. When we got into it ,we just realized that we weren’t interested in doing what they were already doing, so our inspiration came from doing something new. By 98 or 99 we found what we were looking for and it didn’t sound like anything else. Once we found it, the scene was really supportive of us.
On that note, you were one of the first bands playing this kind of dance punk music. What do you think about the flurry of bands flooding the genre? Do you think that The Faint was an inspiration for them?
We were part of an inevitable movement in music with good bands involved and have been around longer than people think. It was happening for a while before it got suddenly popular. For example, ChkChkChk (!!!) and The Rapture are both bands that would probably fall into the same general classification and have been around for a really long time, only people eventually took notice and it just fell into favor at some point.
Being someone who obsesses over the future, what do you make of the future of a movement as being something that fell into favor?
I think the issue arises when people try to pin us to dance punk. I don’t see us as labeled in that genre, and while you can find a lot of it in our albums, and even more that fall into the set, the thing is that we make music that suits the times. There are lots of beats to dance to…house and dance punk forget that.
In light of the number of other dance bands these days, as someone who gained a lot of attention on the front side of that and has managed to remain at the top of the movement, what do you do to distinguish yourselves from all of the other artists playing the music for the fad?
(laughs) Honestly, that’s not our strong point – we don’t think about it much – although, having a record label now, we should be. We do the normal things like hire a press person to work the record, but beyond that, I don’t really know. We don’t really focus on publicity or promotion (magazine ads and that sort of stuff), although we’re doing that now more than in the past. I think the way that we distinguish ourselves is that we consider the live show really important. We want it to be an event every night that is different than a regular show. We want it to be an experience that people hear about and want to come to our shows. If we had a lot of money, it’d make it very different.
You’ve gained quite a reputation for your live performances. How do you go about putting together the visual aspects for a tour and coming up with your incredible costumes?
One thing usually just leads to the next. We used to wear all black in the blank wave arcade days because it was all fog machines in strobe lights and the black showed up really well. Eventually everyone was wearing them though, so we moved on.
After that, we had screens and we wanted to do video linked to the music. But before we got it together and bought the projectors and screens, it took a while to get the videos made and still some of those first videos are used run through different effects or on different surfaces to create a new way to present them. Then, we wanted to find an invisible screen, I’ve done research looking for one, but just wasn’t been able to find anything that will really work for us. We did found sheer materials to work and that’s how we eventually found a way to use them on this tour.
I was reading an interview from 2001 and it mentioned a click track in Clark’s ear to ensure precision for the set…I imagine that takes a lot of work. is the set still as structured, or have you become more spontaneous?
It’s gotten really easy for him now. He listens to the click before the set and we’ve got all the videos linked to the tracks along the click track. When he’s playing now, if he’s on time, he shouldn’t hear anything at all, and if he’s off, it allows him to catch back up. Its important to get as many things synced up as we can so that it can be a really tight set. By tight, I don’t mean better playing than other musicians, but rather that everything matches and works together perfectly.
You mentioned earlier having created your own record label, can you tell us a little bit about it, and why you decided to do this?
Yeah, we created Blank.wav to release Fasciination because, for us, a record label didn’t seem necessary anymore, not for the expectations we have these days – we don’t expect to be the Beatles. Certain type of people will relate to our music and we’re happy with that. We just decided to skip the middle man and avoid the complications of the opinions of others. It’s given us a lot of freedom to do things exactly the way that we want to do them.
As for Blank.wav, we’d like to put out other artists in the future. Everything went well on this record and we were happy with how it all came together. Releasing other artists will have to be something in the future if at all, because we spend a lot of time touring and we’re planning on starting to write our next album over the next few months.
With that in mind, what are your thoughts about the state of the music industry? Are record labels becoming irrelevant with things like YouTube, MySpace and others, as well as artists adopting the “pay what you want” model (although that seems to have quickly died out)?
It’s going to happen a whole lot more in the future. Once bands have enough of a name and a catalog of music, I just don’t see the need to deal with a record label. Just starting out, you could even take out a big loan, but it’d be very risky and wouldn’t give much leeway which artists need to build a name.
Can record labels survive being just the jump-off?
Probably not. The ones that sign good artists will develop into something else eventually rather than just traditional record labels. Their function will have to change a little to morph with times. For now, the most important are the indie labels, because they are the ones who are likely to not have the excessive expenses and can really help an artist to achieve success and by being good at what they do, they’ll be able to maintain a steady stream of artists and since it is a lot of work to go out on your own, there will always be work for the indie labels.
So, to bring it back, you mentioned you’ll be starting the next album over the next few months?
Yeah, I told the guys I’d try to have some things by January, but we recently just finished up a Europe tour that was grueling. Flying solo and not having the support of the record label, we had to do virtually everything ourselves, and since we didn’t get a lot of help, we haven’t had much time to write. Unfortunately January is getting close, so who knows if that is going to happen. Also, each time we start writing an album, it’s really hard to get back into it. You tour and tour and tour and then coming back to the studio is like trying to learn how to write music all over again. Once we get into the mode and find something we can all agree on, then it just comes out.
Speaking of finding something you can all agree upon, what are the records getting the most play time in the van between cities?
Right now, it’d have to be “Lambs Anger” by Mr. Oizo. Also Fuck Buttons – they sound pretty good. I always try to keep up with whatever Diplo is doing. Then there is Das Glow who did a remix of “Mirror” for us on Boyz Noize records, putting out 12” and that’s how I found out about him. Also, a lot of dubstep stuff.
Any plans to work with any of these artists for a remix?
Jacob & I are big Mr. Oizo fans, and we’d love to do that.
10 years in now, is performing still as fulfilling or do you look at it more like a job? I guess what I’m asking, what are your thoughts on professional musicianship?
(laughs) Not a huge fan of musicians. As far as us performing, I really think of it more like we’re throwing a party. We are just hosts trying to make sure that the party goes over well and we happen to play the music. I enjoy it now more than in years past for several reasons. The visual part of the live show is better, the set list is better and we can do things exactly how we want.
Last question…anything you want to say to the people of the Ohio Valley?
I just hope people come and have a lot of fun at our party…
Tickets are $15 in advance & $18 day of show. 18+
The Faint – Desperate Guys
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The Faint – Get Seduced
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The Faint – The Geeks were Right
[audio=http://www.aderogatoryterm.myonlineplace.org/The%20Faint%20-%2002%20-%20The%20Geeks%20Were%20Right.mp3]
Deer Meet will be playing at Pink Door tonight for free with DJ Sam Sneed and DJ Fuzz Mart from 9-2. Check out a review of Deer Meet’s newest release by Backseat Sandbar writer Hank in this week’s Leo
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They say on you’re wedding you’re supposed to wear something old and something new. IamIs’s latest release, This Life features something new and two tracks from Louisville is for Lovers: “This Life” from the forthcoming Trance Inducer LP, “Frequency of Breath” from Louisville is for Lovers Vol. 6 and “I Adore Thee (And Thy Strange Typewriter)” from Louisville is for Lovers Vol. 7.
“This Life” is a pretty straightforward sounding poppy track, one hand clap away from over-indulgence. IamIs sidesteps the gratuitus handclap pop route, thankfully, due to Shawna Dellecave’s punky delivery. Her vocals act with the melody but against the keyboard sound they grate, in the good way. And, when the tune comes to it’s expected dreamy harmony at the end, you’re pretty glad that Shawna chose the more difficult delivery, because it makes the harmony sound that much more enticing and etheral.
Given the poppyness of “This Life” the noise that starts out “Frequency of Breath” is a distinct change. The top of “Frequency of Breath” sounds like an older of Montreal song – disjointed rhythms bizarre sounds coalescing into a dirty soul/funk groove without Kevin Barnes’s ambiguously sexual vocals. The keys take centerstage here, again, but instead of following a certain path as they did in “This Life,” the sounds spiral away and reemerge. It’s a pretty hypnotic track with a nice dose of cowbell.
If IamIs has a weakness, it’s in relying too much on a particular riff to drive a song forward. Hypnosis can lead to zen states, but more often it leads to sleep. To be honest, I’m close to sleep when a minute and a half the same riff and too many moans into “I Adore Thee (And Thy Strange Typewriter)” a “Day in the Life”-type break down leads into a driving psychadelic section. But, IamIs isn’t 13th Floor Elevators, despite how hard they conjure them. On this release with a couple old and a new track, it seems that the band is moving towards a poppier sound, one that relies less on the past and more on merging styles and songwriting. For fans, this release will no doubt whet their appetite for a new album, while also providing casual listeners a chance to get to know the band’s influences and how they’re staring to break away.
IamIs plays Skull Alley with Dark Dark Dark and Pink Houses on Sunday, December 21st
Aquarium Drunkard recently posted a fine covers set from L’ville’s own Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, née Will Oldham, in 2006. Oldham’s live shows are recently getting a broader appeal after his Summer in the Southeast release from 05 and the Australian released Wilding in the West released in January this year. The covers set from 06 contains several traditional songs as well as a couple Machine Head tunes. BPB is joined by brothers Paul and Ned as well. Sorry, kids, no R. Kelly.
Winner of this year’s more interesting concert flyers? maybe Fun music? Certainly
Red Light Relay w/ KY Prophet & J. Glenn on Friday & Johnathain Terrell (from Austin) w/ Scott Mertz & Honey Highway Country & Blues Review on Saturday, Derby City Espresso is encouraging people to buck the cold and keep drinking good coffee and listening to fun music. Also, this could be a great opportunity to make it down to catch the skateboard artshow if you missed the opening…
BeJeezus is celebrating Christmas with a holiday party at The Green Building from 7-11ish on Friday, Dec. 19th and will be holding a silent auction from 7-9:30 for art by Bejeezus contributing artists as well as from donations from local businesses.
Up for auction will be items provided by Kathleen Lolley, Letitia Quesenberry, Bill Green, Skeleton Royal, Sarah Lyon, Thea Lura, James R. Southard, Julie Leidner, Ben Sears, mperfect design, Natasha Sud, Mike Andrick, Jake Heustis, Nathaniel Russell, John Clark, Logan Reulet, Patrick Jilbert and others, as well as items donated by 21c Hotel, Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, WHY Louisville, Wild and Woolly, Actors Theater, Glassworks, Jackson’s Organic Coffee, The Makery, Knit Nook, , Dot Fox, Lebowski Fest, Cherry Bomb, Carmichael’s Bookstore, Lebowski Fest, Rainbow Blossom, Basa, 732 Social, Days Coffee, The Nach Bar, KiKu Handmade, and more.
Afterwards, The Slow Break and Yardsale will be performing a set.
Tonight, Louisville Film Society presents Charlie Is My Darling, the unreleased legendary cult film that takes a look at the Rolling Stones in the period following the release of Satisfaction at 21c for FREE at 7 & again at 9. Charlie is My Darling stands alongside D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back as pioneering 60′s verite rockumentary. By turns funny, touching, exciting & revealing. Whitehead manages to create an astonishing level of intimacy with the world’s premier rock band, which would be unthinkable these days.
