Crib Notes

The epitome of ‘Hot Buttered Soul’

Cee-Lo and DangerMouse certainly proved to be The Odd Couple last night on Gnarls Barkley’s return home to Atlanta for a performance at the Variety Playhouse.

For most of the show, Cee-Lo resembled a fired-up storefront preacher mixed with a little bit of a Hell’s Angel as he quickly peeled out of his shiny turquoise tuxedo jacket and black shirt to reveal a black wife-beater, tattooed arms and chest, and a thick gold chain with a cross that dangled down to his pot belly — to which I overheard Jodine of Jodine’s Corner respond, “Big Sexy’s in the building!”

Though he didn’t dance (”This floor is slippery — I was going to show y’all some of my moves.”), he’d half do a little herky jerky thing with his arms every once in awhile then throw them up in the air in a way that reminded me of the little church lady who used to catch the Holy Ghost on the front pew every Sunday.

Meanwhile, Danger Mouse looked like some crazed but concentrated concert pianist as he hunched his back over the keyboard and played ever so slightly. The only thing missing was a candelabra and a black cat.

For the encore, Cee-Lo returned to the stage wearing black shades and smoking a cigarette. Paired with his bald head and gold chain, it immediately conjured up the image of Isaac Hayes, circa his Hot Buttered Soul era. And when DangerMouse sat down at the synthesizer, he began to play two notes in a fashion that almost mimicked Hayes’ classic eight-minute monologue on his remake of “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.”

Instead, Gnarls Barkley launched into “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul” — a song Cee-Lo told CL in last week’s feature that he originally wrote to mourn James Brown’s death. The lyrics were a perfect ode to the recently deceased Isaac Hayes last night.

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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.

Read the rest of this article here.

(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.”

Read the rest of this story here.

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

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KRISHNA DAS’ FIRST PERFORMANCE IN ATLANTA: “If I knew this many people would be here I would have been here sooner,” he said at last night’s Variety Playhouse performance. (Photos by Perry Julien)

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IRIE VARIETY: Erica Newell performs with DubConscious Friday at Variety Playhouse.

(Photos by Perry Julien)

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SANCTIFIED SOUL: Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings melted the crowd at Saturday night’s Variety Playhouse show.

(All photos by Alex Gibbs)

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I don’t want to be a snitch, so I won’t name any names, but it requires no stretch of the imagination to figure who the guilty party is here.

For at least two weeks, talk has spread through text messages, MySpace, e-mails and word of mouth. Atlanta magazine is going to run a story about Atlanta’s music scene, and the unofficial sequel to Tony Gayton’s 1987 documentary Athens, Ga.: Inside/Out, titled We Fun. The film examines the present-day Atlanta rock scene and the various enclaves of debauchery and society that bind the many scenes of the city where every day is opening day.

Time and place: 2:30 p.m. at Variety Playhouse. Come one, come all. Alcohol and food will be provided.

Being the punctual journalist, I was there at 2:15; fashionably early right alongside Tommy Chung of the Selmanaires. First words upon entry, “Sorry guys, no alcohol.”

It didn’t seem like a big deal at first. There were easily 20 pizzas from Savage lined up next to a cooler of Coca-Cola and water. But as the scattered trickle of musicians began to arrive, the absence of alcohol sent a hushed echo of disappointment around the room. These are musicians we are dealing with here, so no one really showed up until after 3 p.m., and with a lack of any official intoxicants in the room, one should have expected the worst. After all, this is an open invitation to Atlanta’s rock scene. These people need to be sedated — which we all learned the hard way.

Everyone was there: the Coathangers, the Baby Shakes, the Carbonas, Knife and the Fourth Ward Daggers, the Black Lips, some folks from Chopper, Deerhunter, One Hand Loves the Other, Snowden, Beat Beat Beat, West End Motel, Gringo Star, All Night Drug Prowling Wolves, the Gaye Blades, the Selmanaires. Representatives from Rob’s House Records, Douche Master and Die Slaughterhouse were also on hand, along with the Nashville-based We Fun documentary filmmakers Christopher Dortch, Matt Robison and producer Bill Cody.

The call came and everyone crowded onto the stage for the shoot. The rig was impressive and a pasty photographer climbed to the top of a tall ladder and began yelling at everyone to move forward. It was an impressive endeavor, but the camera clicked maybe three times before an alarming hiss sounded and the entire mob was engulfed in a cloud of white carcinogenic fog. Someone — I won’t say who — unleashed a fire extinguisher and turned the entire scene into a clusterfuck. At first people laughed, then they realized that they couldn’t breath. A film of white dust coated everyone and the taste of salt and latex was on everyone’s tongue.

The Atlanta magazine photographers and the Variety Playhouse staff were not pleased, to say the least. Someone who looked exceptionally pissed off demanded to know who was taking responsibility for the fiasco.

This is all part of the Faulknerian dilemma I was talking about when I wrote the year-end piece about Atlanta’s music scene. Everyone who mattered was there. The folks from Gringo Star were dressed up in bandito costumes, and Tommy Chung looked like a red army expatriate. Not to mention that it is quite an ambitious task to wrangle so many hell-raisers under the same roof during daylight hours. But the efforts were all for naught because of one moment of chaos, buffoonery and a fire extinguisher.

Alas, there was solidarity in the music scene here in Atlanta. No one was talking. The crowd congregated outside in hopes of maybe snapping some pictures, but the joy was gone. Inside, tension filled the air as the photographers broke down their equipment and bitched about the thousands of dollars they just lost. Outside a new plan was circulating, “Let’s go next door to El Myr and gets some drinks!”

Which was what these people needed and were denied in the first place.

Read more Chad Radford blogs at chadrad.blogspot.com.

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Remember when I wrote that Jan. 22 belonged to International Hits stars the Selmanaires and Anna Kramer & the Lost Cause? Well, make room in your spending budget for the Whigs. On Jan. 22, 2008, the Athens band will drop Mission Control, its second album and first since 2005’s Give ‘Em All a Big Fat Lip. Produced by Rob Schnapf (who produced Elliott Smith’s Either/Or and Beck’s Mellow Gold), it’s the Whigs’ major-label bow for ATO Records.

Expect more details on Mission Control soon. In the meantime, read Nikhil Swaminathan’s Nov. 16, 2005, review of their debut here, and buy a ticket to their Saturday, Oct. 20, co-headlining show with Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit.

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