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Saturday, June 14th, Woodruff Park
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Today’s Air Loaf features CL’s Rodney Carmichael and WMLB-AM’s Max Arbes discussing this year’s music issue — dropping today!
Air Loaf is broadcast weekdays on 1690 WMLB-AM at approximately 8:10 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 6:20 p.m.
TIMES NEW VIKING: Who needs a keyboard stand when you’ve got a bucket of paint and a box of vinyl records? (All photos by Chad Radford.)
From the days of Pere Ubu and Devo on through Brainiac and Guided By Voices, middle Ohio has long been a fertile breeding ground for skewed hybrids of art-damaged punk and pop sounds.
Two trios from Columbus, Oh., Psychedelic Horseshit and Times New Viking passed through town last night to uphold the Buckeye state’s tradition at Eyedrum. After opening sets from Atlanta acts Tree Creature and Gold Painted Nails, as well as Sydney, Australia-based duo Naked On the Vague, Psychedelic Horseshit played a ramshackle set with drums and keyboards balanced on paint-splattered buckets.
On record, both Psychedelic Horseshit and Times New Viking shroud their respectively short, lobbed songwriting in a haze of lo-fi fuzz. At Eyedrum, the noise factor was an equalizer that served as a booster for both bands’ secretly catchy melodies.
Most notable was the transformation that came over TNV. The group’s recently released third full-length (and first for Matador Records), titled Rip It Off, sounds like it was recorded on a boom box. But when played live, the scratchy fidelity of each song melts away to reveal a wealth of rapid fire drumming and immediately catchy hooks.
The album is by no means a hard sell, but live the songs are propulsive, fun and much more compelling.
PSYCHEDELIC HORSESHIT
(Ryan Androus)
Record sleeves aren’t just about packaging, but impact. When done right, they can propel a band to another level. Mark Naumann, who has run local DIY output Die Slaughterhaus Records since 2001, shares his top five DSH record sleeves.
Thank you to everyone who participated in our first and last annual Gordon Lightfoot Singing Contest.
The response was overwhelming.
OK, maybe overwhelming isn’t the word. It was whelming. Six people participating — seven if you count the backing vocalist on the last call.
Click here to listen to five CL readers and two CL staffers singing the songs of Gordon Lightfoot.
I’m not sure who’s getting the tickets. I called three winners, but none have called me back yet. My great-grandfather used to tell me, “Andisheh, never trust a fan of Canadian folk-rock.” I finally know what he meant.
It’s no huge secret that the best jazz is usually found in intimate settings.
The romantic ideal — finding a burning tenor player at 2 in the morning in a smoky, hole-in-the-wall jazz club, whose playing transcends mere notes and rhythms — may well be the best way to hear jazz, but the music has also flourished in concert halls, university venues and outdoor festivals. Plenty of inspired moments have been heard in these larger arenas, and pianist Benny Green and saxophonist James Moody have both been awe-inspiring when performing in a football stadium in Idaho.
The musicians were joined by singer Nnenna Freelon, trumpeter Terence Blanchard, bass player Derrick Hodge and drummer Kendrick Scott Friday at Symphony Hall for a tour celebrating 50 years of the Monterey Jazz Festival.
Unfortunately for the musicians, something seemed cold about the room, and none of them were quite able to piece together snippets of inspiration into a cohesive set.
The octogenarian Moody, with ample comic support from Green, launched into his puckish singing routine “Benny’s From Heaven,” to uproarious applause. And Hodge joined Freelon for a delicate and swinging duet on “Skylark,” but these moments were too few. Blanchard closed the concert with readings from his Grammy-winning rumination on New Orleans.
(Photos by Hannibal M.)
“We on some black hipster shit in here!” announced Wil May, host for the hip-hop showcase “Perfect Attendance.” Yes, it’s true: Atlanta’s black hipsters are back and in full force. For the past several months, they’ve been organizing concerts and parties with the fervor of punk rock bands. Rarely a week goes by without a show featuring either Proton, Gripplyaz or Hollyweerd. Typically, all three were on the Perfect Attendance lineup.
Perfect Attendance was held at the Drunken Unicorn Friday, Feb. 8. It was presented by Fadia Kader’s Come Up Kids crew, and much of the two-hour showcase featured Jaspects as both lead performer and backing band. Several of the scene’s players were either performing or were in the audience, including Battery 5, Kid Kaos and others. Perfect Attendance was just the latest of dozens of events seeking to inflate the ATL hip-hop buzz to record levels, but it was as good an opportunity as any to see what the hype was all about.
DJ KLEVER (LEFT) AND TITTSWORTH: Don’t stop believin’.
(photos copyright the Midnight Socialite)
After turning the Royal from a second-string contestant for celebrity photo-ops into a favored hangout for Atlanta’s ’80s babies, Sloppy Seconds has moved to MJQ, and will now happen there the second Saturday of every month. Last Saturday, Dec. 8, event svengali Caleb Gauge brought his star client, DJ Klever (whom he manages), and Washington, D.C.’s Tittsworth for the first installment. The two turntablists party rocked on four Serato-powered turntables, and flew from Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” to Three 6 Mafia’s “Stay Fly.”
Freelance party photographer the Midnight Socialite, whom Rodney Carmichael spoke to for CL’s Oct. 4 issue, took a few photos of the party. Check out the flicks below, and then visit the Midnight Socialite’s website for an extended look at his work.
(photo by Todd Cole)
Joanna Newsom’s concert with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra last Saturday, Nov. 17, felt slightly anti-climatic. Not that it wasn’t brilliant, mind you. It took place more than a year after the rapturous acclaim that greeted her second album, Ys. (You can read my review of Ys here.) Its release and the near-universal appreciation that immediately followed it was so memorable that it seemed not only a response to a masterpiece, but a moment in time, a swell of hype unto itself.
Newsom’s accompaniment was a drummer, guitarist and backing vocalist — members of the Ys Street Band, I assumed — and the ASO. The ASO organizes a few pop concerts a year, but this concert seemed to make more sense than its other collaborations. (Admittedly, I had never seen the ASO before.) Instead of playing Benny Goodman to Queen Latifah, it lent texture and sweep to Newsom’s long story-songs about growing up in rural California and fictive explorations of 19th century America. Her rapturous harp playing and the ASO’s interpolations made for a wonderful combination.
After a warm-up date in nearby Columbus, R. Kelly kicked off the first date of his national tour at Philips Arena last night. An anonymous singer performed the national anthem, and then R. Kelly was led through the crowd, like a prize-winning boxer, to a stage that was temporarily set up as a boxing ring. “The champ is here!” screamed a voice over the loudspeakers as all the girls in the audience squealed.
R. Kelly performed most of his radio hits, remixes and guest spots for other artists, from Jay-Z’s “Fiesta” to Bow Wow’s “I’m a Flirt.” But what the ladies wanted to hear were the baby-making songs. He got the biggest response for “Your Body’s Calling” from his classic second album 12 Play, and you could hear the nearly sell-out audience singing along to every word. Then he flipped it, and began riffing angrily, “After all of these years, these motherfuckers still calling on me,” apparently alluding to his ongoing court case for allegedly having sex with underage girls. Then he twisted that line, too, and sang sweetly, “Don’t it feel good, yeah, when motherfuckers still calling on you,” referring to the way his fans still support him regardless of those legal problems.
At one point, Kells announced, “I’m going to sing a song … it’s something I just wrote two weeks ago before I went out on tour.” He dedicated it to all the big-booty girls in the audience. “I’ll do something for the small-booty girls next time.” He proceeded to sing this ridiculously pompous number about a woman’s gluteus maximus. “All right, I’ll stop playing with them,” he said, and went into “Feelin’ On You Booty.”
Needless to say, R. Kelly is something of a freak, but he’s also a great performer, and his two-hour show entertainingly switched moods throughout, from overtly sexual to jokey and familial. There were still a lot of dumbasses who bolted after the first hour and a half — probably so they could get to the “official afterparty” (at Compound, Opera, E.S.S.O. or some other lame superclub). But that said much more about his fans than it did about him.
MMMBOY: Hanson post-puberty
(photo by Vonnie Lee)
I have no problem admitting it: I love Hanson.
I’m not sure if it was the long hair, or the cheesy, catchy lyrics, but 10 years ago, when Middle of Nowhere hit stores and made the No. 1 slot on MTV’s original version of “TRL,” I fell head over heels for the family boy band, plastering my bedroom with posters of Isaac, Taylor and Zac. I have since lost my copy of the album (the liner notes were cut up to make collages), but I never fully got over my first band crush.
Which is why I was unabashedly excited to find out Hanson was playing in Atlanta last week.
Hundreds of girls and a few reluctant boys crowded into the Roxy last Tuesday night for Hanson’s concert, a stop on The Walk Tour, promoting their latest album of the same name. The crowd, which ranged in age from a whopping 20 to 24, felt like a middle school reunion, all of us having had the same phenomenal Hanson experience. The room smelled strongly of incense wafting from the overcrowded bathrooms to the main floor. If I closed my eyes long enough, I was sure I had never left my poster-filled room.
“We’re going to take you back a few years,†said Isaac Hanson, the oldest of the brothers, receiving a round of ear-curdling shrieks. “Back to 1997 when we first met you.†(more…)
