Straight Up Hood Rich

Live Review: Joanna Newsom

3/19/10

The First Unitarian Church

Philadelphia, PA

It’s really kind of shocking to me that Joanna Newsom is as popular as she is. She mans a harp, writes sprawling songs whose lyrics rely heavily on intricate wordplay and sings them in an almost bird like chirp. I have to admit that it took me some time to warm up to her sound but, once I did, I was able to pick up on the interesting storytelling she was doing with her music.

And, just as shocking to me, I found that her songs translate pretty well live.

Continue reading…

Live Review: Alkaline Trio/Cursive

The Trocadero Theatre

Philadelphia, PA

3/11/10

This is not the Alkaline Trio I remember. And I’m pretty sure that’s not a good thing.

The boozy, Chicago skater punks of old are gone, replaced by black clad, tightly fitted skinny boys who play anthems to tweens and over-privileged emo kids (seriously, if I see one more 15 year old with a Blackberry Curve I’m going to punch them in the soul). The band’s gear is massive and towering, covered in strange “7” logos and their trademark “skull-heart” symbols. Drummer Derek Grant’s kit is now a grotesque, silver trimmed monstrosity; something fit more for an 80s glam-rock band like Poison or Quiet Riot.

But they still sound pretty good. When they play the “old stuff”, that is.

This Addiction, their latest album, is their first for Epitaph Records, following a pair of major label duds that consisted of slickly produced “pop” songs. The rumor has been that This Addiction and the tour to supporting it are an attempt to reconnect with their die-hard fan base, of which there were many at the Troc. In fact, the late twenties, early thirties punks who had rabidly followed the band’s long, underground career could be found in the upper balcony and on the edge of the dance floor, warily eyeing the high school crowd who had latched on during the “bad years”. I have a feeling that this was not the Alkaline Trio they remembered either.

Surprisingly, This Addiction did not dominate the set list that night. The band played a varied collection of old favorites and cuts from their major label offerings, as if trying to appease both crowds who were in attendance. And it was funny to watch the reactions of each when the band would jump back and forth. The die hards would know every word to such Matt Skiba classics as “Radio”, “Fuck You Aurora” and “Mr. Chainsaw” while the tweens were confounded by the sound. Punk rock? No American Idiot style stadium rock? What the hell was this? And vice versa. Looks of pained disinterest painted the old punks’ faces as such drivel as “Armageddon” and “Time to Waste” was blared into their faces.

The tracks off of This Addiction actually seem to try and blend the two styles, and do so to mixed results. The band used the title track single to open the show and the response was mixed, while a Dan Andriano sung “Dine, Dine My Darling” received a raucous reception. I’m not a fan of the album itself, however the live renditions were solid enough to not make me want to lump them in with the Epic dreck.

Continue reading…

New Music: Titus Andronicus

A preemptive apology: I had a full review written up for this record last Thursday. But due to circumstances beyond my control I wasn’t able to post it last week. Pitchfork beat me to the punch Friday and, upon comparing the two, I found my review not only to sound redundant but almost spot-on the same.

Pricks.

But I would even take their review one step further. The Monitor, Titus Andronicus’ sophomore record, is that “special” record of the year for me. Like Merriweather Post Pavilion or Boys and Girls In America before it, it’s the album that you sit down and, even with one listening, you know its something unique, wonderful and that is going to stick with you way past its initial release week (unlike so many other pieces of “Best New Music”).

Sprawling, ambitious, angry and nearly drowning in its sonic force, The Monitor retains Titus Andronicus’ piss and vinegar punk rock but fuses it with classic rock pianos, irish jigs and near stadium level anthems. While its usage of the Civil War as a metaphor for our conflicts both interpersonal and internal might seem lunk-headed on paper, the young band transforms it into brilliant rock theatrics.

The clinching track for me was “To Old Friends and New”, a boozy, Elton John piano infused duet that front man Patrick Stickles shares with Vivian Girls’ Cassie Ramone. While her sweet murmur plays off of his Oberstian growl, a piano riff ripper straight from Franz Nicolay drunkenly sways around the two’s voices building toward a group sing-along. “It’s all right, the way that you live…” they tell us, a rare moment of acceptance and forgiveness shining through on a record that could double as a call to war.

And, my God, that guitar breakdown in the middle. They try and make every spacey note reach the cheap seats and beyond.

This is only one of the album’s many stunning moments. And while some might dismiss the band’s heart-on-sleeve songwriting as affectations, you can’t deny the feeling behind all. This might sound like hype, but it’s not. The album’s just that fucking good. 

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Live Review: Man Man

3/5/10

The Trocadero Theatre

Philadelphia, PA

“Brace yourself. Your shit’s about to get rocked.”

These were my words of warning to the nice young lady who chose to stand next to me on the dance hall floor. The night’s second opener (Javelin, who we’ll get to in a bit) had just finished their quick set and now waiting for the night’s hotly anticipated headliner, Man Man, had begun.

“I mostly just listen to their music when I chill out,” she told me as she pulled a small tin of pot from her purse and began to load up her glass one-hitter. “Do they really get that wild?”

Story time commenced. I took her back two Halloweens (that of ’08 to be exact) when my wife, Sarah, and I had attended their last Philly show at the luxurious Starlight Ballroom (and by luxurious I mean Mexican bar/roller-rink converted to an indie music venue). I was dressed as an “Average Joe” from the movie Dodge Ball. My wife was Little Red Riding Hood. We had made the same assumption about Man Man that my newly acquired friend had.

Fuck, were we wrong.

Continue reading…

tUnE-yArDs

After seeing that tUnE-yArDs had sold-out one of my favorite venues in Brooklyn, the Bellhouse, I was curious what they sounded like. After a short trip to You Tube, any fears I had of the “experimental folk” genre were quickly quieted.  On her debut album bIrD-BrAiNs, lone member Merrill Garbus anchors absurd and wonderful samples with a truly impressive vocal range.  From the muddy and muted bass drum of “Jamaican” to your kid sisters Casio keyboard beat of “Little Tiger”, it’s the instrumentation that really sets Garbus apart from her indie rock contemporaries.   Included in that is the choppy, dirty editing of her samples, which I find satisfying in the same way as if I were listening to a dance track.  Unfortunately my favorite song of hers isn’t even on the album, but on the companion EP BiRd-DrOpPiNgS. That  song “Real Live Flesh” is sexy, funky, and buttery smooth, check out the video below.  Thankfullky she’ll be playing the Bowery Ballroom  (NYC) on April 9th, so I won’t be mad that I missed seeing her live.  But if you live in Pittsburgh she will be playing in Cleveland on April 7th at The Spot, for free!

Review: “IRM”

The last time I saw Charlotte Gainsbourg, she cut off her clit. It was the end of the latest difficult yet beautiful  mindfuck by Danish auteur Lars Von Trier, Antichrist, and I had just witnessed this woman give one of the more daring performances I had seen from an actress in quite a while. And it made me admire a woman who, during the course of her acting career, had made the concious decision to work with fascinating and, often-times, brilliant collaborators, ending in films ranging the spectrum ofmediocre (Michel Gondry’s massively overrated and plodding The Science of Sleep) to the downright transcendant (Antichrist). So, it would make sense that this sensibility would carry over into her musical carrer.

But what would the results be?

Written, arranged, produced, and almost played entirely by Beck, Gainsbourg’s IRM is an unbelievably accesible and great album. And, instead of the meandering, trite love songs that dominated her first work (2006’s 5:55, produced by French “artistes” Air and written primarily by ex-Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker), we are treated to a paranoid, almost frightful mediatation on mortality. I know that “accesible” and what I have just described usually do not go hand-in-hand but, because of the unbelievable focus both artists have put into this record, it creates a poppy yet kind-of-depressing synergy. Continue reading…

Review: Moonface

There’s a fine line between ambition and pretension. And Spencer Krug is an artist who often times walks this line.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like, sitting next to the little Canadian in some Montreal bar as we got drunk off of Molson and whiskey while listening to his wild ideas. Ideas that range from sprawling synth-driven concept records or forming Swan Lake, the super group that I now lovingly refer to as “the indie music equivalent of the joke Seth Rogen tells in the film Funny People where Tom Cruise, Will Smith and David Beckham smush their penis heads together”. And I know my reaction would probably be about the same each time he pitched to me:

“Dude, you might wanna reel it in a bit.”

And if he were to pitch to me the Dreamland EP: Marimbas and Shit Drums, the latest output from his solo Moonface project, I would respond to him by quoting the great philosopher Dennis Reynolds. “Dreams are like a stack of photographs, unless I’m in them or people are having sex, I just don’t care”. Continue reading…

Four Tet – There Is Love in You

Four Tet has a new album coming out today, and its amazing. Get it.

He has also recently put out an Essential Mix which is delightful as well.

For those of you who cant afford this album right now, you can stream it for free.

Update: Looks like the album has been removed.

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Review: Surfer Blood

Surfer Blood: Astro Coast

Weezer sucks.

I mean, really, it’s pretty much a scientific fact at this point. Rivers Cuomo has essentially become the Eddie Murphy of the modern rock scene. Take a second to think about it for me. Both artists became huge stars at a young age by riffing on tropes perfected by legends that came before them (while Murphy was making racial observations perfected by Richard Pryor, Cuomo constructed tight garage rock tunes inspired by the Pixies, Wax and Sonic Youth). And both artists have, in the “later stages” of their careers, decided to ditch the fan bases that made them wildly successful in favor of catering to the under twelve crowd. It’s not that I don’t understand their decisions (hell, I’m pretty sure a “comparative bank statement analysis” can prove neither Murphy nor Cuomo are insane), it’s just that both artists’ “later years” have tainted their supposed “classics”.  In short, I can’t watch Delirious without seeing the star of Daddy Daycare and I can’t listen to The Blue Album without hearing “Beverly Hills”.

So, needless to say, I was a bit skeptical about giving Astro Coast, the debut album from  Florida’s Surfer Blood, a listen when the only bit of buzz I’d read about it was summed up with “very similar to Blue Album Weezer”. But, upon first spin, what I found instead was an incredibly tight set of songs that made me want to shout along at the top of my lungs. Continue reading…

Spoon…doing a piano ballad?

I’m going to be writing about the whole album sometime in the next couple weeks. Long story short: new Spoon album is about as good as you’d expect a new Spoon album to be. And if you don’t know how good that is, then I feel sorry for you.

Right now, though, I’m loving this piano track called Goodnight Laura. Slow, sweet song that kicks off the album’s final third. An interesting pacing decision similar to Faust Arp on In Rainbows. Listen and enjoy.

Goodnight Laura

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