Blogs

Since opening in October 2006, Twist & Shout's Lowenstein Center HQ, at 2508 East Colfax, has earned loads of praise from locals like us. Now, folks well beyond the metro area will begin to learn the store's name thanks to a pair of high-profile releases recorded live in Twist's terrific performance space -- a CD by Australian singer/guitarist John Butler and a CD/DVD starring Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals.

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The Pirate Signal
November 29, 2007
The Hi-Dive

Better Than: watching reruns during the writer’s strike

One thing that’s guaranteed at a Pirate Signal show is passion. No matter how many people are in the crowd, no matter how they’re responding to the music, DJ A-What and Yonnas deliver a high-energy show that’ll leave you wondering how come more people don’t know about these cats?

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Brian Malone is a local documentarian who's taken on subjects as varied as Blinky the Clown and the vagaries of the broadcast-news business. On Sunday, December 2, however, he gets musical with a little help from an in-family pro.

Beth Malone, Brian's sister, built up a reputation among local theater-goers before heading to Broadway; she starred on the Great White Way last year as June Carter Cash in the musical Ring of Fire. She also completed a recording called The Lunch Shift in conjunction with her bro, and they'll share some of the material from that disc at Nissi's, 2675 North Park Drive, in Lafayette, during an opening set for singer-songwriter George Inai.

Don't worry: Malone, the guy standing in the background on the accompanying CD image, isn't quitting his day job. In fact, he notes via e-mail that "we are videotaping the show, so we need to have a big and enthusiastic crowd."

Get ready for your closeup. -- Michael Roberts

Foxy Brown out of the hole

When you get locked up, no matter how much of a cool cat you are, you have to show the other inmates you’re not the one to be messed with. Foxy Brown, who is serving a year at Rikers Island for violating her probation, went a little overboard and tried to show and prove last month by getting into a shoving match with another inmate (along with various other infractions) and got 76 days in solitary confinement. But she was let out of the hole this week after only 40 days for her good behavior. Her manager told Billboard she spent those 23 hour days answering “each and every fan letter. She also told me she wrote some pretty hot songs while there.”

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Huh. What do you know? Looks like this may truly be the season to be jolly after all. Just received word that one of my all-time favorite hometown bands is getting back together. Sure, it's just for a few nights, but, hey, I'll take whatever I can get.

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Ron Miles and Bill Frisell
November 27, 2007
Old Main Theater, CU-Boulder

Better than: Seeing these guys in New York

There was a guy sitting behind me who’d just come in after the first set was over, and he was on his cell phone trying to convince his buddy to come and see guitarist Bill Frisell and trumpeter Ron Miles.

“Dude, you’re gonna miss out,” he said. “I mean, this is chance to see Frisell in a space that’s, like, smaller than my living room.”

A few minutes later, he’s trying to explain where the show was.

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With a Chino Moreno interview, readers get two for the price of one. In the Q&A below, Moreno talks extensively about his side project, Team Sleep (an act profiled in the November 29 Westword), and draws the curtain back on his best known band, the Deftones, who are in the midst of readying an album due next year. Better yet, he goes into the sort of detail that’s rare for any performer, let alone one as prominent as he is.

Moreno begins by discussing the way he hopes to balance the demands on both his groups, including delaying the release of the next Team Sleep studio CD until (believe it or don’t) 2010. From there, he touches upon the changes in the record business from the early years of the century, when Team Sleep’s debut was delayed because of leaked demos, to the present day, when he plans to make several EPs’ worth of Team demos available online for free; the difficulties of making material created in piecemeal fashion on ProTools work in a live setting; his relationship with Team Sleep member Tom Wilkinson, who’s among the most eclectic personalities in current rock; the ways record companies trying to fix something that’s not broken can make difficult situations worse; the manner in which Team Sleep’s first album nearly broke up the Deftones, only to eventually bring the players closer together; a few words about drugs and alcohol; the Deftones’ casual approach to cutting their next CD; and a comparison between performing with Team Sleep and shopping while stoned.

Would you prefer paper or plastic?

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Why be fair and actually listen to five albums when you can be an ADHD smartass?

Burial
Untrue
Hyperdub

00:48-1:32 of “Untrue”

Boy was my assumption about this one wrong. I was positive I was going to get a Buck 65 style hip-hop deal but no, Burial had to go ahead and make me look stupid by releasing this weird dub electronic record that sounds like haunted Jamaican monks being eaten by cannibalistic Boards of Canada fans.

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This past July, when Anti- Records announced it would be issuing DeVotchKa's How It Ends in Europe, it almost seemed like a forgone conclusion that the imprint would also end up working with the outfit here in the States. (Uh, let's see... DeVotchKa... Grammy-nominated, universally lauded by fans and critically acclaimed by pundits for its work on the Little Miss Sunshine soundtrack ... yep, seemed like a no brainer.)

Well, here we are just four months later and guess which label just announced a new addition to its roster and, for ten bonus points, guess which act it is. If you answered, "I'll take obvious crap for $300, Alex," well, then you're a smart ass just like me (nice work), and chances are, you already know, ahem, how this ends.

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Sigur Rós
Hvarf/Heim
(XL Recordings)

In some ways, the new Sigur Rós CD isn’t all that new. Hvarf/Heim conflates a pair of EPs, with the first consisting of three previously unreleased tracks plus reworkings of two early numbers and the second spotlighting six live acoustic renderings of numbers familiar to fans of these idiosyncratic Icelanders. Yet the combined impact of the recordings is considerable, making the disc a worthy addition to the act’s discography. The first three cuts are uniformly striking – especially “Í Gær,” an exercise in dynamics that features childlike chimes, keening vocals, a moody melody and epic guitar that brings the song to near-celestial heights. The reimagining of “Hafsol,” originally on the group’s first album, is just as effecting, creating the sort of widescreen effect capable of conjuring a National Geographic special’s worth of outdoor imagery. As for the Heim material, it’s necessarily lower key. Nonetheless, ditties such as the beautifully fragile “Vaka” exert a fascination of their own, even though only onetime residents of Reykjavik will have the slightest notion what lead singer Jonsi Birgisson is going on about. When it comes to Sigur Rós, fortunately, sounds create their own meanings. -- Michael Roberts

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Slide show

Primasonic, Get Three Coffins Ready, Jett Black
Larimer Lounge
November 23, 2007

Summation: In baseball, one for three is actually pretty good.

An empty bar can be a double-edged sword. You don't have to fight for elbow room when you belly up. But when it's Friday night on Thanksgiving weekend, and you're at a local music venue that's known to pack shows with six bands on the bill just to bring as many friends of the band as possible, you have to take stock of your surroundings and wonder why the place is so dead.

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Here's a selection of the best of last week's music blogging from around the Village Voice chain:
The clubs editor for one of our papers runs into an occupational hazard and thereafter has trouble exercising her critical faculty enough to muster a proper review of a DJ competition.

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Hope the November 22 Evanescence profile or this extended Q&A with lead singer Amy Lee didn't get you too revved up to see the combo in concert. Turns out that the show, scheduled to take place on November 25 at Magness Arena, was canceled at the last minute.

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The members of Fall Out Boy, who headline the Young Wild Things tour that stopped at DU's Magness Arena on November 23, are new millennium anachronisms: musicians who became famous thanks to MTV video airplay. Of course, the video medium is currently the province of YouTube, while MTV prefers to devote its resources to "original" programs such as Tila Tequila's self-satirizing bisexual skankfest, not to mention endless marathons of America's Next Top Model. But head Boy Pete Wentz and his support crew owe their U.S. success to the venerable music net every bit as much as Duran Duran and Madonna do. This fact colored their crowd-pleasing but highly erratic performance at Magness, where they were outshone by another MTV video band they helped boost to prominence.

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The Evanescence profile in the November 22 edition of Westword stems from the following Q&A, a conversation with group leader Amy Lee that's lively and notably frank.

Lee begins by talking about the group's current tour, including a side trip into Mexico, where aficionados are at their most rabid, before discussing her recent wedding, and the benefits of having married a professional therapist, Josh Hartzler; misconceptions about her work, including her insistence that the darkness of her lyrics always masked a core of optimism; her currently more upbeat frame of mind, and the reactions of fans who've always loved her dour takes; her love of classical music and movie scores, linked to the prospect that she might someday compose for Broadway or Hollywood; the reasons why a song she wrote for The Chronicles of Narnia didn't fit the film; the ways in which Evanescence's assorted lineup changes have contributed to her being branded as something of a diva; the contrast between her work with current guitarist Terry Balsamo and departed co-writer Ben Moody; and the pressures inherent in being female in a musical genre overrun by men.

She is woman. Hear her roar:

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