Here's a selection of the best of last week's music blogging from around the Village Voice chain:
So, the Rutles, a Beatles parody/tribute from years ago, are revived to hop on the bandwagon pioneered by Spamalot. It's produced by Eric Idle and Lorne Michaels, stars a real-life Beatles tribute band pretending to be a fictional band that parodies the band they pay tribute to, and for some reason Jewel is involved. Welcome to the future, where even our schlocky nostalgia is disorientingly post-modern.
In 2006 The Pirate Signal, consisting of rapper-producer Yonnas and DJ A-What, released a self-titled EP that brought a breath of fresh air to the Colorado hip-hop scene. But because the stagnation most hip-hop artists face here in the Mile High, Yonnas moved to Brooklyn, New York, with hopes the The Pirate Signal would breakthrough and bring some attention to the local scene here.
An out-of-state friend of mine just asked me to pull together some recommendations of good music that has emerged from colorful Colorado in recent years. I’m looking at the playlist in iTunes right now and can’t believe my eyes.
Slide Show X
Tuesday, March 25
Bluebird Theater
Better Than: Seeing X two decades ago.
An hour before heading to the Bluebird I met a friend of mine who saw X in East St. Louis a few weeks ago. He said it was a great show, but he also mentioned that guitarist Billy Zoom, who was looking a hell of a lot like Broncos owner Pat Bowlen these days, was ogling some really hot Latina in the crowd throughout most of the show.
01:15-02:00 of “Pump”
What the heck? Um, no seriously, what the heck? What made the B-52’s decide to release a record and, more importantly, why did they decide on the absolute stupidest album cover? You know, “Rock Lobster” is a great song that totally appeals to both my lobster-loving and rock-loving sides – but I don’t know what the heck “Pump” is about. Funplex my ass.
Here's a selection of the best of last week's music blogging from around the Village Voice chain:
Sate your nostalgia for the Aquanet-fueled halcyon days of hair metal with a look at this collection of vintage show ads from Minneapolis. My favorites are the many appearances by the oafishly named Dare Force. That name should have an exclamation point or two, I think.
Diplo and Justice
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Ogden Theatre
Pulling off electronic music live is very tricky. The same tracks that can absolutely rock a dancefloor, a party or your headphones can fall completely flat when all there is to watch is a nerdy dude lit by his laptop. You can try a hype man, a bitchin' light show, trippy projections or burlesque dancers, but there’s still no guarantee you’re going to leverage these gimmicks to turn your bangin' beats into an entertaining live performance.
Beach House, Papercuts, Future of the Ghost, Bad Weather California
Saturday, March 22, 2008, Hi-Dive
Better than: not much.
On the frigid, sloppy walk to the Hi-Dive, my friend John asked a question that had been renting some space in my mind of late. “When was the last time you saw a show that blew you away?” A good question, and not one that I thought would be answered as soon as I walked through the door on Saturday night.
De Novo Dahl, the Jimi Austin and Vanessa Peters & Ice Cream On Mondays
Thursday, March 20
Hi-Dive
Better than: Watching the Grand Ole Opry on TV
I was floored by De Novo Dahl’s set at Monolith last year, especially the Nashville-based band’s closer “Shout,” which I’m still convinced should be burning up the charts. But the group’s Hi-Dive set fell short of last’s year’s show, which might’ve been due to sparse Thursday night turnout. Before jumping into the first track, singer and guitarist Joel Dahl proclaimed, “We’ve come to exorcize the demons of lethargy,” but keyboardist Matthew Hungate proved to be the band’s chief cheerleader. After the first song, Hungate jumped off the stage and dragged people closer to the band.
Dent has been putting in work in the Denver scene for close to a decade. He’s been a freestyle battle champ, he’s appeared on a variety of local albums, and has put together a compilation album featuring some of Denver’s finest hip-hop artists. He released six-track EP called Platinum in the Shower a couple of years ago, but has yet to release a full album, until now.
“This rap game is cutthroat,” Dent said in regards to why it took so long to drop his debut, ConfiDENT. “I’ve been uninspired because of this industry. But now that hip-hop has no essence, I got tired of setting on all this fresh music I’ve been making and wanted to put it out there. I want people to get a good dose of hip-hop and bring it back to essence.”
He worked on ConfiDENT – which drops locally today, March 21 -- in between working as a video editor for Comcast and event coordinator for The Roxy. For now, here’s a taste of what’s to come in this commercial:
Sometimes, things happen that make you question all of your assumptions. We all operate within a framework of misunderstood half-truths and well-understood falsehoods. We know what we know, and we can extrapolate from what we know to understand things we don’t really know, if only within the limited confines of our own experience and knowledge.
Having once played together in a short-lived punk band called London SS, Mick Jones and Tony James have been friends for thirty years. After embarking on successful careers with the Clash, as well as Generation X and Sigue Sigue Sputnik, respectively, pair reconvened in 2002 to form a new project called Carbon/Silicon. The two gave away three albums worth of material online before issuing The Last Poet, their first official release this past October. We recently caught up with James at his home in Glastonbury, England, and asked him about working with Jones, the history of Carbon/Silicon and the story behind its name and more.
Right now, the most talked-about band on the rise among the nation's critical taste-makers is Vampire Weekend. But in Westword’s March 20 profile of the New York-based group, and in the following Q&A, lead singer/guitarist Ezra Koenig talks for himself.
Koenig begins by sketching in details about his background, including his mom’s efforts as a family therapist and his father’s career in the technical end of filmmaking, complete with a Spike Lee reference and a lousy review for one of the biggest budget productions on which he’s had the opportunity to work. That’s followed by memories of his first original composition and the seventh-grade graduation Koenig played alongside Wes Miles, a childhood pal now fronting Ra Ra Riot; details about L’Homme Run, a sorta hip-hop project that preceded Vampire Weekend; the set of guidelines Koenig and company tried to follow when establishing the VW style; the ease, or lack thereof, with which the band became a press darling; repetitious comparisons of the Weekenders’ self-titled debut album to previous recordings by Talking Heads and Paul Simon, referred to below as They Who Shall Not Be Named; and the plusses and minuses of being named MTV’s artist of the week.
Which lasts longer than the typical fifteen minutes of fame.
These days, performers often prefer to conduct interviews via e-mail instead of taking part in a telephone chat. There are plenty of good reasons for this switch from their perspective, even if we assume that the individual in question is actually the one sitting at the keyboard (as opposed to a lowly assistant armed with a sheaf of canned answers). Subjects can respond at their leisure, and on their own time, and they don’t have to worry about a slip of the tongue, since they can carefully read over their responses before they press the “send” key. Too bad e-mail Q&As tend to lack spontaneity and the give-and-take that comes from actual lively conversation instead of an approximation of one.
Fortunately, the following cyber-exchange with veteran System of a Down singer Serj Tankian, staged for a March 20 Westword profile, is far better than average. Although his handlers limited the number of inquiries to a mere ten, Tankian tackled each topic floated his way in unexpected detail, exhibiting a depth, thoughtfulness and passion that leap off the screen. Along the way, he dissects a line about democracy from “Unthinking Majority,” a tune from his latest solo recording, Elect the Dead; discusses his juxtaposition of political themes with more personal lyrics; defends the use of a certain c-word in a surprising way; extemporizes about System’s post-9/11 airplay banning by Clear Channel-owned stations; defends the stylistic similarity between Dead and SOAD’s oeuvre; and draws a distinction between “musicians” and “artists.”
So, the Rutles, a Beatles parody/tribute from years ago, are revived to hop on the bandwagon pioneered by Spamalot. It's produced by Eric Idle and Lorne Michaels, stars a real-life Beatles tribute band pretending to be a fictional band that parodies the band they pay tribute to, and for some reason Jewel is involved. Welcome to the future, where even our schlocky nostalgia is disorientingly post-modern.
