Crib Notes

TROUBLESHOOTING WITH PALM TREES
Finding perspective with the Hiss on a road trip through Florida

By J. Winter

“Life moves pretty fast. And if you don’t stop to look around every once in a while, you just might miss something.”

Palm trees.

I don’t know how they do it, but they can have an amazing effect on you.

It’s not scientifically proven, but I’m pretty sure they release some sort of chemical endorphin in your brain that makes you feel better. Gives you a careless confidence. Coupled with the right light and a nice breeze on the fringe of an afternoon buzz, they can sometimes make all your problems go away.

With the summer months wearing thin and the sight of the same city faces wearing thinner, an impromptu road trip with the boys is welcome relief from the dog days of August. In a last minute decision, I joined the Hiss in a weekend romp through the Sunshine State. It’s the same trip we made last spring in which we appointed ourselves to a fictional state department — the Department of Nightlife.

After a quick pass through Gainesville to reminisce at the University of Florida, where Todd Galpin (drums) and Adrian Barrera (lead vocals) met, we roll into Tampa for a Thursday night show. Three of the four guys in the band hail from here, so it’s a homecoming gig of sorts.

Tampa Bay is a weird town. It’s not so much the heat; it’s the chlamydia.

(more…)

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Fantasia at the Atlanta Civic Center, Sat., Aug. 23

Submitted by Mimi Truitt

The Civic Center was filled with people dressed in their Sunday best to hear Fantasia Barrino wail. Miss Barrino bounced onto the stage dressed like an around-the-way girl with a sequined tank top, painted-on jeans and an asymetrical haircut.

She kicked her heels off and began screaming — I mean singing — some random tune. Don’t get me wrong, Fantasia is certainly an engaging performer. She hops into the crowd and barely stays onstage throughout the show. Then she invites audience members onstage with her — including an old pimpish-type cat, dressed from head to toe in lime green.

Fantasia is definitely an old soul. When she talks to the audience, she reminds me of Patti Labelle or Tina Turner. She even had the crowd swaying cell phone lights from left to right as she belted out Prince’s “Purple Rain.”

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Stone Temple Pilots at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre, Sat., Aug. 23

Submitted by Wes Bingham

STP delivered a solid show at a brand new venue with great sound. Scott Weiland was unusually mellow and talked very slowly in between songs.

The real story of the night came towards the end when, in the middle of a song, Weiland turned around and flipped off drummer Eric Kretz twice. I thought they might break up right in front of us.

When they finished the song, Weiland walked back to the skin set and Kretz angrily pointed around the stage while guitarist Dean DeLeo acted as mediator.

After abruptly leaving for the encore break, they came back and it was Weiland who screwed the pooch and left out a verse during “Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart.”

After the encore, Kretz and Weiland raced to get off stage. No group bow, no waving, no drumstick throwing, no nothing. Good luck to the cities ahead on this tour, it could be a bumpy ride.

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Stone Temple Pilots at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre, Sat., Aug 23

Submitted by Tom Baker

There’s no telling what Stone Temple Pilots could’ve done if they hadn’t succumbed to their own excesses, but they’ve got hits.

“Interstate Love Song” is one of the ten best rock songs recorded in the ’90s, and the growling hooks of “Plush” sound just as good today as they did when STP were still being tagged as Pearl Jam knockoffs (a rap I never really understood, even as a PJ fan).

Tonight, lead singer Scott Weiland — whose thin frame and spidery dance moves made him look like he was about to blow away — seemed to be talking to himself half the time. “Sour Girl” was a leaden train wreck, and only the rocked-out invocation of “Redemption Song” felt anything close to spontaneous.

But STP are erstwhile metalheads with an undeniable knack for pop songcraft, and at its best, this concert allowed them to show off those skills in spades.

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By Chris Parker

Many bands settle into their suburban tracts after four albums, content to reiterate the sounds and themes explored in their first decade. Yeah, they’ll add some strings, or do an acoustic album, but generally they’re content to sit back and raise their kids.

My Morning Jacket is the exceptional act that significantly expanded its horizons just as it was emerging into the spotlight. During its first five years, the Louisville quintet recorded three albums of country rock and folk, echoing Neil Young and the Band, with a rugged jam-band boogie. Indeed, its early reputation was earned on its energetic, hard-charging live performances.

It could have settled there, content with its indie-country niche. Instead, 2005’s Z moved the band beyond that fuzzed-out, rambling-rock ghetto and stretched its muscle. A critical fave and resident of most year-end top 10 lists, the album wandered widely, invoking pop texture, art-rock grandeur, pretty piano balladry and bubbly power pop without totally abandoning their Southern-fried rustic stomp.

It set My Morning Jacket on a new shelf, and the intervening three years heightened anticipation for Evil Urges (ATO Records), released in June. It’s even more ambitious, if not nearly as felicitous stylistically. Though it’s failed to garner as much universal adoration as Z, Evil Urges pushes the band into new territory while simultaneously looking back to My Morning Jacket’s beginnings.

Read the rest of this article here.

(Photo by Autumn Dewilde)

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By Ben Westhoff

Ten years from now — or whenever it is we finally come up with a name for the decade we’re currently living in (my vote is for “the aughts”) — no musical act will better epitomize the sound of the times than Gnarls Barkley.

With the duo’s predilection for genre hopping (hip-hop, R&B, indie rock, gospel), ability to concoct a monster single (”Crazy”), and penchant for promoting itself with pop culture imagery (The Big Lebowski, Napoleon Dynamite), it’s surely the most zeitgeist-capturing act around.

Essentially composed of a rapper who sings (Atlanta native Cee-Lo Green) and a mashup specialist who makes breathtakingly original beats (Atlanta/Athens native Danger Mouse), the pair somehow creates touching, soulful music. Buried beneath their technology, gimmicks and nerdy references lie universal truths that seem to reach people in different ways.

Take “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul,” a weepy lament off the group’s sophomore album, The Odd Couple. Green says the song was written in memory of James Brown, but for the recently released video, he wanted something to convey the theme of heartache in general terms. So in the Chris Milk-directed video, a girl breaks up with her boyfriend at a diner. He then proceeds to cut open his chest with a butter knife, pull out his heart and place it on a saucer. The dripping organ then rises and begins to sing Cee-Lo’s woeful lyrics into a stalk of broccoli.

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(Photo courtesy Jeremy & Claire Weiss)

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Wolf Parade

Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, arguably the reigning prime minister of indie rock, produced most of Wolf Parade’s first album, Apologies to the Queen Mary. Though the album won a rave review from Pitchfork and catapulted the band into the, um, underground rock stratosphere, something was off.

Many noted its strong similarities to Modest Mouse’s sound, and co-frontman Spencer Krug now describes it in even harsher terms. “I listen to some of those songs off Apologies to the Queen Mary and I’m like, ‘I can’t believe I wrote them,’” he says, speaking by phone while watering his plants at his home in Montreal. “I don’t even know where I started. Some of them are so convoluted, I have no idea what I was doing.”

Although he has nothing but kind things to say about the work of Brock – who also signed the band to Sub Pop in 2004 – he opines that using an outside producer wasn’t the best strategy. “We probably just weren’t ready to work with anyone at that point,” he says, adding that other factors kept the tracks from gelling. “Apologies to the Queen Mary was made up of songs that were written over a period of two, two-and-a-half years…. It felt sort of disparate to us.”

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Wolf Parade performs with Wintersleep at the Variety Playhouse on Mon., July 28.

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(Photos by Dustin Chambers)

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by Joeff Davis 

[Show as slideshow]

Daniel Johnston performed Thursday night at the Variety Playhouse. He greeted the audience by telling a story of a dream he had about a man being sentenced to death for trying to commit suicide. “In the back of the courtroom the man was saying, ‘No, no, no,’” he said. “And that man was me.”

It seemed like a strange way to greet an audience, but it set the tone for his two sets of
depressingly uplifting and cathartic music.

“Basic purity” is how one audience member described it. But it felt terribly amateur at first. His guitar playing sounded simplistic and his singing (if you can call it that) painfully weird. But as the show progressed and his confidence grew, the lyrics he sang painted a stark truth. And the voice he sang in breathed a sincerity one rarely feels at concerts.

Johnston performed two sets. During the acoustic part of the show, he played a couple of songs alone on guitar before being joined by an acoustic guitarist. Throughout the set, his
tightly gripped fists shook at his waist as he spoke, read and sang his lyrics from a beat-up music stand. His songs were constantly punctuated by shouts of “We love you Danny!” from the audience, with members emotionally singing along.

“Where am I,” Johnston asked at one point. After being told he was in Atlanta by shouts from audience members, he replied: “Is that a state or a town?”

In the second half of the show, the opening band the Hymns joined him. The Hymns, a good looking band of hipsters who jumped around the stage with typical rock ‘n’ roll antics, formed a sharp contrast with Johnston who wore a stained gray t-shirt and black pants, and rarely opened his eyes to look at the audience.

“I love him because he has been through a lot and I can identify with that,” said one audience member during the break.

After returning for the encore, Johnston wished everybody a Merry Christmas and ended on a hopeful note singing “True Love Will Find You.”

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True Colors

(Photos by Perry Julien)

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