Just back from a US tour in support of their Kim Fowley produced debut full-length, Trippin’ with the Howlies, the Howlies are playing a homecoming show at the Fringe Factory this Saturday night (April 25).
Resident DJs Vikki V & Suzy Q , as well Justin Brooke from the Howlies will be spinning a ’60s psych, garage, soul and freakbeat records before and after the show.
$7. 9 p.m. The Highland Inn Ballroom Lounge.
Xiu Xiu frontman Jamie Stewart has canceled his solo appearance at WonderRoot this Saturday night (April 25) due to a family related matter. A new date is being scheduled sometime in July. In the meantime the show on Saturday night is still happening with opening bands Imagination Head, Green Monsters and Nerdkween. $5. 8 p.m. WonderRoot. 404-254-5955.
The Coathangers – Stop Stomp Stompin from Extra Zero Media on Vimeo.
Earlier this week the Coathangers unveiled the video for “Stop Stomp Stompin’” from their sophomore album, Scramble on Suicide Squeeze Records.
CL’s Chanté LaGon and Chad Radford chat about upcoming shows for the weekend, including Tealights at the Drunken Unicorn (Sat., April 25), Jamie Stewart from Xiu Xiu at Wonderroot (Sat., April 25), and Richard Lloyd at the Earl (Sun., April 26).
Check out this week’s Sound Menu for a more comprehensive list of upcoming shows.
Air Loaf is broadcast weekdays on 1690 WMLB-AM at approximately 8:10 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 6:20 p.m.
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Who are you?
We are Peelander-Z from Z area of Peelander-Planet. We eat smiles that’s why we make you smile at our show.
Describe yourself in three words.
Yellow, Red & Green.
Who — dead or alive — would you most like to meet?
I want to see my mother in Kobe, Japan. I miss her cooked Okonomiyaki (Japanese pizza).
Who would you most like to slap in the face?
I want Bruce Lee to slap my face to wake me up every morning. Please Mr. Kung-Fu!!!!
What song do you wish you had written?
Thriller of MJ!!!!! Also that choreography!!!!!! We want to make this song’s PV of Peelander-Z.
Elvis Costello or Elvis Presley?
Daughter of Elvis. Hahaha~~~
Actually, we have a secret charactor on this tour. His name is Peelander-Elvis. He is a cool-Tokyo-City-Cowboy!!!! Don’t miss him and kiss him at the show.
LP, CD or MP3?
No!!! Cassette tape is the best!!!! I’m writing songs with a cassette recorder!!!!
If you could start one trend, what would it be?
Okonomiyaki (Japnese pizza) party~~~~
I miss my mom~~~
If you could end one trend, what would it be?
Cell phone~~!!!!
Don’t look for me~~~~~!!!!
With whom would you most like to play a game of spin the bottle?
We want to do with all of horror move characters. Best one is Chucky of CHILD PLAY!!!!!! He may bite me, but I want to bite his tongue, too. Yes, we know crazy horror kisses.
Peelander-Z plays the Earl with Attractive Eighties Women and Excalibrah. $8 (adv). $10 (door). 488 Flat Shoals Rd. 404-522-3950.
(Photo by Miyuki Samata)
Under his various monikers (Foetus, Steroid Maximus, Wiseblood et. al.) J.G. Thirlwell has long fostered a cinematic quality with his recordings. His latest release, the soundtrack to seasons 1-3 of Cartoon Network’s animated series “The Venture Bros.” finds a home for the visual aspects of his music. But whereas much of the score is drastically diminished throughout the show, removing it from the television screen gives the music a life of its own.
When the Australian-born New Yorker came stateside in the early ‘80s he was playing in a little known band called the Immaculate Consumptive alongside fellow Aussie Nick Cave. According to legend the band split up soon after Thirlwell ruined their piano by playing it with his feet. The story may or may not be true, but it illustrates the off-kilter composer’s sense of humor and awkward modes of expression.
Though he’s often associated with industrial music luminaries Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten and Cabaret Voltaire, Thirlwell is cut from a different cloth. His records straddle numerous avenues of music, careening from symphonic clatter, atmospheric drones, punk, jazz, metal and big band explosions. On “The Venture Bros.” “Tuff” lays the groundwork for fast-paced thrills that snake through a maze of horns, staccato drumming and electronic rhythms in “Node Wrestling.” “Mississippi Noir” switches gears with a sparse round of banjo, and “No Vacancy” erupts with a finale of piano, horn and bass clusters that are seething with high-drama and intrigue. Taken in all at once, it can be a challenge to the attention span. But from beginning to end “The Venture Bros.” soundtrack roars with the same teeth-gnashing rush that has come to characterize Thirwell’s sound.
Chad Radford: How long ago were you approached for The Venture Bros. Soundtrack?
J.G. Thirlwell: Oh I think we first started talking about it in like 2002 or 2003. Right now I’m working on the score for the fourth season. The soundtrack comprises scenes that were drawn from the first three seasons, but there is a lot more music that’s on the score.
The show’s creator Jasckson Publick first approached me when they were working on the pilot. He heard a Steroid Maximus album, called ¡Quilombo! that had crystallized the idea for “The Venture Bros.” in his head. He approached me about it and I wasn’t in a position where I really wanted to score it at that time. I had been working on Steroid Maximus and Manorexia tracks that eventually became the score. I edited it together and submitted it to the Cartoon Network. They picked it up and came back to me again and I thought that it could be an opportunity to stretch out into another field and do something that I hadn’t done before.
The Contamination Tour is a rite of passage for burgeoning metal bands. Neurosis, Mastodon, the Dillinger Escape Plan, Nile, High On Fire, Cephalic Carnage and dozens of other acts have all appeared on past line-ups. The Contamination Tour 2009 continues the legacy as German headliners Obscura make their American debut in support of a new full-length for Relapse due out in February.
Fellow new Relapse signees, South Carolina’s Graves of Valor and Abysmal Dawn from Los Angeles, round-out the bill.
Tickets to the show are $12, BUT!!! If you send an e-mail to Crib Notes with “Contamination 2009″ in the subject line, you will be entered into a drawing to win a pair of tickets to the show at the Masquerade on Wed., April 29. Winners will be picked at random.
Mitchell Powers who directed I’m Like This Every Day, the documentary film about the Dalton, GA-based schizophrenic folk/punk singer/songwriter Peter Stubb, caught these photos at Stubb’s performance at Reactionary Records on Sat., April 18. Click below to see more.
Who are you?
Laura Anne Gibson.
Describe yourself in three words.
Bread and butter.
Who — dead or alive — would you most like to meet?
Elizabeth Cotten, Saint Francis, Oprah.
Who would you most like to slap in the face?
I could not slap a face.
What song do you wish you had written?
“Eidelweiss” (by Rogers and Hammerstein).
Elvis Costello or Elvis Presley?
Emily Dickinson.
LP, CD or MP3?
LP, Hands down. CDs and Mp3s will never feel as precious.
If you could start one trend, what would it be?
Kill ‘em with kindness.
If you could end one trend, what would it be?
Kill ‘em with attitude.
With whom would you most like to play a game of spin the bottle?
Leonard Cohen.
Laura Gibson plays the Earl with Damien Jurado and Ben Trickey on Thurs., April 23. 8:30 p.m. $10. 488 Flat Shoals Rd. 404-522-3950.
(Photo by C. Charles Bowden)
In an ad for Chicago’s long-standing record shopping institution, Reckless Records, that appeared in last week’s issue of the Chicago Reader, veteran musician / producer / philosopher and Touch & Go Records icon Steve Albini (Shellac, Big Black, Rapeman) weighed-in with a heartfelt essay on Record Store Day.
In his essay, titled Tomatillos, “pop” & Neil Young, Albini likens honest-to-goodness record stores to farmers’ markets, and explains just what it is that makes them so much cooler and culturally relevant than the Best Buys and Barnes & Nobles that dot the landscape.
Click below to read the essay as it appeared in the Reader.
(Photo by Chad Radford)
I’m a little late on this, but it looks like DOOM has finally, unequivocally, admitted that other people have performed for him at his shows.
HipHopDX: So just to get it out of the way, can you address the recent scandal where you were allegedly sending an impostor to perform in your mask at DOOM concerts?
DOOM: [Laughs] Alright. Here’s how I look at it, because the wording in there is kinda funny. “Impostor.” Impostor would imply that the character. I liken it to this: I’m a director as well as a writer. I choose different characters, I choose their direction and where I want to put them. So who I choose to put as the character is up to me. The character that I hired, he got paid for it. There’s no impostor.
Baltimore-based noise duo Abiku plays Eyedrum tonight. According to their Myspace page, the best comparison they have ever received is that they sound like “the Locust dryhumping Controlled Bleeding.” So if that even makes sense to you, you will love it if for no other reason then they dropped Controlled Bleeding’s name which actually does say a lot about them.
The music lurches from a melodic-to-ambient simmer, to an off-kilter electro/avant-garde grind in a hazy mashup of ’80s industrial beats and manic female vocals.
Likeminded local surf/thrash/noise metal acts El Fosil and Chapel Hill, N.C., noisemaker Gray Young also perform.
$?. 9 p.m. Eyedrum. 290 MLK Jr. Drive SE. 404-522-0655.
(Photo courtesy Abiku)
This Saturday turned out to be a monumental day for music in Atlanta.
I hit Record Store Day at Criminal Records around 10 a.m. and was lucky enough to score everything I wanted: Jesus Lizard 7-inch shower curtain pack, check. Slayer 7-inch, Tom Waits live at the Fox Theater 7-inch, Jay Reatard/Sonic Youth 7-inch, Sonic Youth/Beck 7-inch, reissue of the the first Bad Religion EP, reissue of Queen’s first EP, a 180 gram LP reissue of Walk Among Us by the Misfits… check, check, check.
When it came time for the moment of truth the man at the cash register asked for two Benjamins to cover my purchases, but it was worth it. Record Store Day comes but once a year, and I had been saving money for weeks in preparation for this. And besides, judging by the high prices that I’m seeing many of these things fetch on e-Bay this morning I think I did the right thing… Just no more record shopping for like a month. Maybe two months.
After performances from Death on Two Wheels and Thy Mighty Contract, the hangover lingering from the All Night Drug Prowling Wolves’ show the night before was catching up with me. After eating a life-replenishing burrito from a gigantic box of wrapped, silver burritos from El Myr that had surfaced in the store, it was time to take a nap before getting the party restarted for the screening of I’m Like This Everyday, Mitchell Powers’ documentary film about Dalton, GA songwriter Peter Stubb, followed by the premiere of We Fun at the Atlanta Film Festival. The screening was sparsely attended, which could be attributed to several factors. The Dogwood Festival was going at Piedmont Park, which meant that barbarian hordes had descended upon the area and had taken up every parking space within a three mile radius. Record Store Day was still going strong and pulling big crowds, and across town at the Earl Customers, NOBUNNY and Gentleman Jesse were setting up to play. The people of Atlanta were spread very thinly across the city, but mostly I think the real party was at Record Store Day where a lot of folks were drinking during the daylight hours and buying records, thus taking the wind out of their sales for later in the evening and keeping them at home. Or maybe people just don’t care about the movie…
After the screening of We Fun it was time to hightail it to East Atlanta to catch a free in-store from Peter Stubb. The crowd was about 20 deep, which felt pretty solid, considering the size of the store. Most of the people in attendance had driven down from the Dalton/Chattanooga area and kind of dominated the scene.
Stubb played an electric guitar and belted out raspy, folkie punk-strummed songs about his ex wife and oral sex and being institutionalized at Atlanta Medical Center, while deflecting a barrage of requests from the crowd. Several of Stubb’s people from Dalton were sharing shoebox detail, out of which they were selling homemade dubbed cassettes of Stubb’s songs with album titles like Ol’ St. Nick, Cutting My Flesh and Worshiping Darlene and From Hell to Victory. Earlier Stubb explained to me that he had spent a few days with his son preparing the tapes to sell them the show for $2 apiece. Each one had a separate but very distinct cut out from a porno magazine of a phone sex line ad glued to the tape cover, which was almost as unsettling as the hot dog tattoo that now adorns Stubb’s face.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. $69-$99. 7:30 p.m. Sun., April 26. Philips Arena, 1 Philips Drive. 404-878-3000. www.philipsarena.com.
What do the biggest solo icons in music history have in common?
Elvis, Prince, Bob Dylan, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen all have a guaranteed place in the pop pantheon. They’ve also had penchants for odd behavior. Religious conversions, zoological fascinations, bizarre health regiments and sexual perversions color their biographies.
All of them, that is, except the Boss.
About the most bizarre thing you can accuse Springsteen of doing is sticking his crotch into the camera at the Super Bowl XLIII halftime show. And, let’s be honest, most of us liked that. Sure, a New Jersey man recently claimed that his soon-to-be ex-wife had an affair with Springsteen, but even if it’s true the allegation would only serve as further proof that Bruce is, at heart, one of those regular guys that he sings about.
The well-grounded, nonindicted, commercially viable Springsteen is clearly sane and maddeningly well-adjusted. And the older he gets, the more down to earth he seems to become. Plastic surgery? Negative. Weird pets? Not really; he likes horses. Strange causes? Not so much. He’s become active in politics over the last two presidential elections, and shows no signs of letting up on the liberal fundraisers, benefit concerts and cocktail parties. Snooze.
At this point, Springsteen has less in common with the aforementioned pop icons and more in common with boring rock stars like Tom Petty. In fact, Petty is exactly the kind of guy Springsteen threatens to turn into, someone whose back catalog is still respected but who threatens to become a subject of one of those “Dead or Alive?” trivia games before much longer. (Go ahead and add John Mellencamp and Bob Seger to that list as well.)
While Springsteen’s normalness may be depressing to a country that prefers celebrity nut jobs, what’s even worse is how his late-career sanity seems to have negatively impacted his musical output.
Continue reading “Farewell Boss: It’s the end of Bruce Springsteen as we know him”
Judi Chicagos’ Ben Coleman breaks out in a hot sweat over James Brown’s 1967 LP Cold Sweat while performing at Criminal Records for Record Store Day on Sat., April 18.
(Photo by Joe Choy)
Crippled Black Phoenix is the brainchild of frontman Justin Greaves (Electric Wizard / Iron Monkey / Teeth Of Lions Rule Devine).
The group’s latest offering, 200 Tons of Bad Luck is a collection of songs that were crafted at Geoff Barrow of Portishead’s studio, and released via Barrow’s Invada Records imprint. The band for this go-around is made up of Joe Volk, Dominic Aitchison (Mogwai), Kostas Panagiotou (Pantheist) & Charlotte Nicholls. Joining the group on all live dates will be Joe Allen and John Langley of Saturation Point.
Chad Radford: Tell me about the line-up that you’re bringing with you on the road for this tour.
Justin Greaves: Well, we have the usual line-up we take on tour. It’ll be consisting of guitars, bass, cello, drums, moog/synths etc, we got a couple of new players for this one also, Mark Ophidian and Baz Barrett, Baz just jumped on at the last minute so the tour has been one long rehearsal for him! Amazing really.
Can you tell me about some of the ideas that went into 200 Tons of Bad Luck? I don’t think of it as a concept album per say, but are some recurring, though vague themes, as well as some very evocative imagery running through the record.
That’s right, it’s not a concept album in the usual way, but the themes run throughout and there’s very definite reasons why the songs are on there, but the 200 Tons album is a compilation of songs from the two (2) full albums, it’s a record business compromise and it just don’t make sense to me. To get the full effect I think people need to hear The Resurrecionists & Night Raider albums. It may take some patience but the effect will be worth it. So, all the imagery will make so much more sense too, there’s things that are quite subliminal and some things that are blatantly obvious, it’s really up to the listener to take what they will from the prompts.
Crippled Black Phoenix and Ascent Everest play 529 tonight (Sat., April 18). $8. 9 p.m.
Savannah director Mitchell Powers’ film I’m Like This Every Day focus on the life and songs of the mentally disturbed but lovable folk-punk crooner Peter Stubb. Despite his past flirtations with Nazism, cutting himself to release his inner demons, a Santa Claus obsession, and grappling with the possibility that he may or may not be a werewolf, Stubb is an endearing character.
Through lo-fi recordings, home videos and testimonials from Stubb’s friends and family, many of whom look like a cast of extras from the set of Gummo, I’m Like This Every Day paints a portrait of the Dalton, Ga., artist as a paranoid schizophrenic. But his sometimes filthy folk tales, weighed against the balance of melodic, acoustic punk strumming, are bound by the timeless tussle between warped, automatic self-destruction and redemption.
As a singer, his voice conveys a sense of innocence and honesty that belies his tattooed exterior. The film’s fast, matter-of-fact pacing feels like a shotgun blast into Stubb’s world. “He never lost that kind of childhood enthusiasm for an erotic tune,” says Powers. “He still writes sex songs, and he really does have that sense of innocence, like a lonely 13-year-old kid locked in his bedroom singing into a tape recorder.”
Stubbs plays a free in-store at Reactionary Records in East Atlanta at 9 p.m. on Sat. April 18 after the 7 p.m. screening of I’m Like This Everyday at the Midtown Art Cinema.
(Photo by Mitchell Powers)
Nashville-based film maker Matthew Robison’s (Silver Jew) much ballyhooed, but yet to be released Atlanta rock documentary We Fun premieres at the Atlanta Film Festival this Saturday night (April 18.)
The film is showing on screen no. 4 at the Midtown Art Cinema on Sat., April 18 and again at 2:05 p.m. on screen no. 6 on Wed., April 22.
Earlier this week Bow Wow announced his retirement, making him the only 22-year-old American confident enough to hang it up during these recessionary times.
His recently-released New Jack City II was his last album with Sony, and he’s hinted at retirement for a while, including during this interview during the promotion of his ill-fated 2007 collaboration with Omarion, Face Off.
Still, what’s strange about the declaration is that he made it after his new album flopped. It debuted at number 16 on Billboard, moving just over 30,000 units, which puts it on track to be the worst-selling CD of the seven he’s released. Everyone knows you’re supposed to announce your retirement before your album comes out, so you can pump up sales. Announcing it afterward is basically admitting you can’t hang anymore.
