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Jones Street Station...Next Stop: Home
The Midwest has relocated to New York City. Or, at least, a few of its native musicians have. In October of 2007, Jones Street Station - a band of cornstalk state transplants -released their debut album, Overcome, full of rootsy (if not downright 'roots')-style songs, and are primed to release their sophomore effort early this year. Right now they're circling back across the country on tour, and will soon hook up with Ben Kweller for a run of shows. Tomorrow night they'll be playing The Nomad.
Fans of Dan Wilson's 2007 album Free Life (see: Semisonic) and other incarnations of Minnesota rock will be drawn to JSS's Overcome. The lyrics are slightly separated from the mundane details that constitute Real Life - these are not, for the most part, songs about evocative stains on your ex-girlfriend's turquoise turtleneck sweater or cracks in the walls of cheaply sheet-rocked apartments. Rather, Jones Street Station tackles the slightly bigger, slightly more ethereal subjects of love, loneliness, and home.
But the music isn't pared-down enough to constitute being called 'roots,' I don't think. It's a little bit cleaner-sounding, with a little studio gloss making for some very pretty vocals, especially on songs like "Tall Buildings," which deconstructs into an unexpected a cappella. Maybe this mixture of simplicity with sheen is just what happens when Midwesterners move to New York.
Vocalists Danny Erker and Jonathan Hull - from St. Louis and Chicago, respectively - met in the city in 2002, and quickly set about forming a bluegrass group. And while Jones Street Station (their second project) doesn't always twang, certainly the music retains a high level of folksiness (perhaps, in this instance, a form of acoustic homesickness). On "Evergreen" the group sings in rounds, turning the line 'walk with me beneath the pine trees' from simple and sweet into something almost angry, as if the invitation is actually an imperative for survival. "Flyover State" in particular, with its rollicking banjo melody and invocations of 'back yards and great lakes,' seems to draw from distinctly midwestern influences.
And in fact, four of the five band members are defined by their native flyover states (Jonathan Benedict on keys is the only native coaster, from Princeton, NJ). This includes local, or formerly local, percussionist Sam Rockwell, who spent a good amount of time in Minneapolis' music and dance scene(s), tutored along the way by JT Bates (Fat Kid Wednesdays). Rockwell's been back in Minneapolis a couple times in the last year with his other band, The XYZ Affair, who recently headlined the Clapperclaw festival. As drummers are wont to do, for Jones Street Station he provides the steadying hand, keeping the songs from flying away amid of airy synth and vocals.
Check 'em out, Saturday night.
$5 Show starts at 8pm.
Playing with A Mighty Fairly, The Feed, and Mouth Babies.
A Paper Cup Band
Probably this is a reaction leftover from my childhood years, when after brushing my teeth I rinsed out my mouth with water imbibed from a certain papery/waxy vessel, but my first association when I heard the name A Paper Cup Band was: Dixie.
And certainly there's an underlying twang Detroit Vs. Farming, A Paper Cup Band's new album, which will be officially released tomorrow at the Hexagon Bar. But there are a lot of other sounds going on, too. On their MySpace page they list their genre as Folk/Breakbeat/Punk, and that amalgamation is precise as anything I could come up with on my own. (It also says the music sounds like "two guys kissing.")
So while songs like "Drunks and Poets" are fairly folksy old-school, with syncopated rhythms and lyrics about loss of love, one can't help but notice that the acoustic guitars at the beginning of the track have turned electric by the end. Lyrics about loss of love - APCB nails it down pretty hard with incisive originality. Check this out: "If I would've known he would take you away/I'd put mortar in your shoes and I'd punch you in the face." Yeah, it might seem harsh, but isn't it kind of a true sentiment, too?
Meanwhile APCB clearly is not afraid of blowing fuses. "Dead Woman Country" is a computer-y ballad, with static-heavy vocals and fuzzy guitar distortion (though certainly retaining a country aesthetic, somehow). Most of the songs assume a perfect balance between the future (electric) and the past (acoustic). The simplicity persists, so no track is overwhelmed by noise for noise's sake. But every once in a while there will be a lengthy blast of synthesized organ. Or, as on "The Passion/Bitters" (my favorite track), they'll throw in a prolonged silence that allows one to notice just how many sounds have been swirling.
Unifying the songs are Andrew Jensen's lyrics. Somewhat Beck-like in content, the stanzas are full of clever non-sequiturs. Some fall a bit flat - I still can't figure out what "Chicago has the tightest pants" is actually supposed to mean, and in what context - but I'm willing to swallow most of the lines, as they come bottled (cupped?) in upbeat, toe-tap riffs. Maybe the best testimony to the allure of these songs: I had a High Fidelity moment with my roommate when I was playing Detroit vs. Farming in our house.
He'd just come in from outside and was still wearing his winter jacket.
"What is this?" he asked.
"A Paper Cup Band," I said.
He nodded his head a couple times and listened quietly for a minute.
"It's good," he said.
"I know."
Check out A Paper Cup Band at The Hexagon Bar tomorrow, January 9th, at 9pm.
2600 27th Ave S/Minneapolis, MN/55406
Elegant Tinkerers
I’m onstage fellating the giant red nose of a woman in a six-foot tall hot dog suit. At most shows, this would seem pretty bizarre, but tonight at First Avenue it feels like a natural progression of events. Philadelphia Dj-ing phenom Diplo is well worn into his post behind his turntables. The throng of dancers in the audience have long since checked their coats and wiped the first layers of sweat from their foreheads. With Diplo and his frenetic light show of a Dj booth thrust into the crowd in front of the main stage, the most star struck techno fans are carnivorously clawing their way to the edge of his oasis, screaming like they need lung surgery and dripping beats from their fangs.
The night evenly mixed traditional club music with forays into experimentalism. The Brooklyn duo Telepathe heated up this explosion. If this is dance music they play, it’s club bangers for the weirdos, those serious audiophiles who own every Brian Eno album and whose favorite Gary Numan song is definitely not “Cars.” And, if anything, Telepathe are serious audiophiles.
Melissa Livaudais needs no encouragement to launch into in-depth conversations about her craft. She talks with relentless passion about her music: how she and partner Busy Ganges sometimes layer 100 tracks into a single song, the evolution of their atmospherics, and the hours spent every day noodling on their laptop until they create such thickly blossoming compositions that the resulting sound is as expansive as it is explosive. Think Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound updated for the technological age. But, instead of saccharine-sweet Motown harmonies, Telepathe’s songs are capped off with Livaudais’ ethereal howls. These are elegant tinkerers. These are pop-hound masterminds who play music not for the lights, not for the glossy headlines, but because they simply cannot fathom doing anything else.
“Busy and I, we’re the biggest music nerds,” Livaudais says. “And we have gotten fired from every kind of service industry job in New York. There were just no more jobs for us. We can’t even go eat in places.”
Perhaps it’s fate they find themselves lumbering coast to coast this fall, working up their chops in time for their full-length debut in February. One thing is certain, they will be a different band the next trip around. The duo is constantly progressing and changing, due in part to the challenges with translating their heavily orchestrated music into a stage performance.
“It used to have a really organic live feel because we played all the songs in real time,” Livaudais says. “We worked out the songs in a rehearsal space and recorded them after they were worked out. Now our process has completely flip-flopped. We spend hours and hours sitting in front of the computer, layering and arranging and composing the song without having an idea of how to play it live. It’s been trial and error. We’re this close now to having it actually make people’s heads explode.”
Where Telepathe is tightly choreographed, Abe Vigoda puts on airs of fly-by-the-cuff insanity. Merging two guitarists, a bassist and drummer with math rock and noise, the band creates an atonal soup built upon some hidden logic only music majors understand. The result is a mythic beast that must suck its nutrients from the basement clubs of their Los Angeles home. Tonight, Minneapolis is clamoring for infection.
Abe Vigoda hash out trance-inducing psychedelic sludge. But for these art-rockers, pop chords simply don’t exist. Those frets have been lost in the black hole of Top 40 radio. Instead, the band spends their time day dreaming around the lower frets, throwing their heads back and shaking so violently it seems as if electricity is running straight from their strings through their veins.
This isn’t music you dance to. You just awkwardly flail. But the art of the flail is a wonder in its own right. The 4/4 stomping and the manic hip gyrations, you can do that any day.
Gwar Gets Political
Compared to the decapitations and the torn-open torsos, compared to the infant that was cut in half and then each half impaled upon a sword, to the geysers of blood that shot out at least thirty feet from severed limbs - compared to the general carnage, the music seemed pretty extraneous. How seriously are you supposed to take guitar riffs and drum beats at an event billed as the Intergalactic Wrestling Championship?
Very seriously, if you're a true fan of Gwar, and you adhere to their semi-nihilistic, semi-totalitarian politics that make up the content of their songs. In which case you were probably one of the several audience members in a trance last night at First Ave, mouthing obediently along to indecipherable lyrics. (And it's not unlikely you were at the Ron Paul rally a couple months ago, too.)
But if you were attending the show ironically (yeah, you, with the mustache and the tight vintage t-shirt), or because you'd heard that everyone should see Gwar once - and only once - before dying (hi), you were probably there for the theatrics, and were disappointed to find that the novelty wore off about three songs into the set.
On stage, Gwar's appearance fell somewhere between Kiss and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. There were ridiculous, oversized costumes - the MC, Sleazy P. Martini, had something that might be described as a pompadour cubed - and there was clearly a lot of money put into fleshy-looking props, but I guess the acting was just poor. My comrade remarked that the concert was akin to a "Sci-Fi channel original." Really, the band seemed uninterested in what they were doing, chopping off all those synthetic limbs with something less than enthusiasm. I will say, though, that each musician has impeccable buttocks, an opinion afforded me by the fact that they all wore thongs.
The show's conceit was that it was a wrestling championship. I'm pretty sure that Gwar was supposedly the reigning champion, because all night long they kept talking about how "No one has belts like these," meaning their IWC title belts that proved they were the hardest rockers in the universe or something. Between songs, they staged mini-bouts. First they paraded out John McCain, who fought against an apparent alien named Bone Crusher who was fighting on behalf of the band. It was funny at first, but the verisimilitude of it was ruined when the guy playing McCain kept raising his arms above his head. Is this too nit-picky? It just seems to me that if you're going to make fun of McCain, his arm movements are the most basic gesticulations to perfect. Nevertheless, it was kind of cool when Bone Crusher shredded open the senator's stomach and blood sprayed out all over everywhere.
The next round featured Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama pitted against Bone Crusher and some other identical-looking alien. (It should be noted at this point that this is the "Electile Dysfunction Tour.") Obama tickled the extra-terrestrial and then got his head chopped off. At some point Clinton was given a double mastectomy, spraying blood, yes, out of her nipples. The law of diminishing returns was very much in effect at this point.
So the Main Event was a veritable anti-climax. It involved two aliens that had stolen Gwar's title belts during one of their songs going against Bone Crusher and Bone Crusher's twin. Surprise of surprises, the Bone Crusher team won, and restored Gwar's belts back to the band members. In the name of continuity, why would you follow up McCain, Obama, and Clinton with anonymous aliens? Wouldn't it be more natural, if you're going to make overt political statements in the first place, to have Bush and Cheney in the title bout? Or George Washington and Abe Lincoln? I understand that anarchy is probably a foundation of Gwar's appeal, but this spectacle falls into the unfortunate subset of over-contrived anarchy, an oxymoron in definition.
During all this, there was music going on. But to a casual fan, the songs were effectively indistinguishable - a collage of super-fast guitar progressions, rumbling drums, and sub-acoustic vocals. Once in a while there was an audible ‘Fuck yeah!' or ‘Gwar!' but aside from that it was kind of smeared. Now, I understand that I may not be the top pick to critique their show, as it's highly unlikely that I'd ever play a Gwar album on my stereo at home. Death metal is not my chosen genre of music, but of course that doesn't mean it's necessarily bad; it's just not for me.
However, I can say that the members of Gwar - the ones who played instruments - seemed a little lifeless on stage, rarely moving from their spots (albeit understandably hampered by their wardrobe). Even the crowd, though, became a little disenchanted by the end of the show. During the first few songs there was crowdsurfing and ecstatic screaming, but toward the end even the front rows were filled with quiet standers.
Still, watching the audience file out of First Avenue was surreal - a bunch of exhausted, bloodstained fans wandering slowly through the streets of downtown like so many zombies. If theater is supposed to, at times, provide a respite from our real lives, then this show was successful. At the very least, no one seemed to care that this year's presidential candidates had just been dismembered on stage.
TV on the Radio's 2-night stand
Has anyone seen the movie Diva recently? It's this 1981 French film my dad really likes, and that, by extension, I pretended to like when I was young, and now have grown to like genuinely (I think). The plot centers around an American opera singer - Cynthia Hawkins - and a young courier who's obsessed with her. Her voice has never been recorded before and she's adamantly against signing a record deal; opera, she contends, is a living thing, and can't be captured on vinyl with anything approaching the energy and exuberance that she can put forth in a live performance. Recording techniques have evolved a bit since the era of this film - we've gone from vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to mp3 to mp4 - but I think Ms. Hawkins' beliefs are still valid. And while no doubt some groups strive to make music in the studio that's difficult to replicate on stage (meaning, their songs are meant for albums, not for concerts), for the most part music is in its purest form when heard live.
It's hard for me to sit down and listen to any of TV on the Radio's albums. For the most part, their music isn't pretty-sounding stuff (nor is it supposed to be). The tracks on Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, Return to Cookie Mountain, and their most recent Dear Science are full of distortion, ambient feedback, and even Tunde Adebimpe's high-register vocals sometimes test the ears. A couple of their songs are magnificent - I've had "Dreams" stuck in my head for about eighteen months now, in a good way - but on the whole there's something a little disturbing about it.
Dear Science is maybe a bit more coherent than their previous stuff, but the group hasn't vastly changed its aesthetic or anything. It should be noted that Fela Kuti - whose informed performers from James Brown to the Talking Heads to Vampire Weekend - is haunting a bunch of these tracks. For the sake of comparisons, one might say TVOTR is like a less dour version of Radiohead, or even an updated Pink Floyd. (They can pull off hip-hop, too - Adebimpe made a guest appearance on Atmosphere's latest album.) But I haven't listened to enough of their music, or to enough music in general, to dissect it properly. That doesn't matter, though, which is kind of my point. (Here's a proper review from someone else, however.)
Because in concert TV on the Radio is simply amazing. Or, at least, such was the case last time they were in Minneapolis. The comparisons and references become meaningless in performances like the one they manifested in the spring of 2007. Something else was going on beyond the music - one of those ineffably captivating atmospheres was created, in which every member of the audience was somehow synced together, united in thought and sentiment by the band on stage.
The effect is indescribable except in vague terms, but I'll try to put down a couple details anyway, and hopefully they're the convincing ones. Adebimpe is himself a Diva. He's like Miles Davis, except that he faces the crowd - one senses something extremely internal, and yet extremely relatable when he sings. His face is a plane of expression and it's probably a good thing that he keeps his eyes closed most of the time, lest we should read too much into his mind. And he has this effeminate way of dancing that's absolutely impossible to stop watching, waving his hand above his head in a wrist-only movement, as if swatting away applause.
The music played behind him seems to amass and collect in large balls of noise, which Adebimpe disperses at will, so that bursts of guitars or drums will suddenly rush out over the crowd and then just as suddenly stop. If I remember correctly, they all wear tight jeans, but move as if they're wearing gauchos. Does that make sense?
The main thing being, they're playing a two-night set at First Ave this week. So if you haven't been to a concert in a while, and are looking for something new and unforgettable, I highly recommend picking up a ticket. I'll update this post tomorrow in hopes of being able to more ably define their allure (hopefully it's still in tact).
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