Daily Loaf

This weekend proved to me once again that I am getting too old to party like a rock star two nights in a row. [All photos by Nicole Kibert.]

The self-abuse began this past Friday night, when I set out to, and I quote myself here, “get Lucero drunk.” [Frontman Ben Nichols pictured at left.] I am happy to report that my mission was a complete success. The trade off, though, is that my recollection of the show is slightly hazy. A lot of the reviews I read leading up to Lucero’s Tampa show were about the crowd, that the frat boy concentration levels were reportedly getting dangerously high. I didn’t really notice it being a problem here, though my only complaint about the show was the crowd — a completely expected complaint all things considered. See, as a band’s popularity and attending crowds grow, the devotion level of the crowd begins to get diluted. While there was no shortage of people at Czar who where there to be seen rather than to see Lucero, they didn’t hurt the quality of what was happening on the stage, so let’s talk about that … and the horns. Read the rest of this entry »

Sure, plenty of shows come to town and there are plenty of reasons to be excited about each and every one of them. But, unlike people, all shows are not created equal. Some shows are just more worthy of your unbridled enthusiasm. Scott H. Biram falls into that category. When Scott comes to your town, you need to lock up the womenfolk, drink a few whiskey shots and get your ass to the show. I think my card carrying status in Scott’s Church of the Ultimate Fanaticism Fan Club is well documented on ninebullets, so I am gonna quote a Biram show review a friend of mine wrote after hearing/seeing Scott for the first time ever a few years ago:

“Finally it was time for Scott Biram. I had heard him earlier when he was doing his sound check and the amount of music he can generate all by himself is really staggering. He was really a great performer and musician. He was able to banter with the audience, tune his guitar, work a bass pedal to keep the beat, blow on the harmonica, and growl into his mic/bullhorn. You don’t really know what to expect when the little guy in the green trucker cap sits down on the stage. Biram looks like a guy you’d pass coming out of the bathroom at a Flying J truckstop on I-10. However he attacks honky tonk and blues with a vicious growl and doesn’t let you go until you are stomping your feet and screaming “Whiskey!” Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes you have your blogging day all mapped out and a news blip makes you scrap everything and bang out a post on the fly. That’s the case today, so if the thought processes feel disjointed, I apologize … we’re going 100% stream-of-consciousness with this one.

Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails debut, Pretty Hate Machine, turned 20 years old today. In lieu of typing out a bunch of historical facts and boilerplate bullshit you can easily find on Wikipedia, I thought I’d actually talk about the album and it’s relationship to myself.

As I’ve mentioned before, a large chunk of my formative “young adult” years were spent skulking the dance floors and hallways of the gothic/industrial clubs in my home state. While it has become increasingly popular within that scene to pan Trent Reznor over the years (I’m as guilty as anyone else), the fact remains that everyone one of us owned and loved Pretty Hate Machine and most of us probably still do. Personally, I’ve long gotten rid of my entire industrial music collection but PHM was one of the albums I elected to keep. Read the rest of this entry »

Some reviews are tough to write because you like the record but seriously dislike the people in the band; others are tough to write because you love the album but just can’t think of anything to say about it beyond the simple fact that you love it. And then there are reviews such as this one…

Full disclosure: I like Truckstop Coffee as people. I sent the CD to other blogs in the hopes they’d get some more press and I’ve even helped hook them up with a booking agent. If those facts make reading this a problem for you, skip to the bottom, listen to the songs and to hell with my typing about it.

For the remaining folks, yes, I consider Pete, Caleb and Larry friends, but I also consider them a terrific band. I first heard of them play back in 2006 in the infancy of Ninebullets. At the time they were doing a pretty good Lucero-meets-Drive-By Trucker’s impression in support of their debut, One Damn Thing To Redeem. Throughout the years, they’ve made it up to Tampa a couple or four times, but rarely have they strayed from the tracklisting of that first album. There were rumors of a new album one day, but, as any struggling musician knows, recording, mixing and mastering an album requires money and there ain’t much of that coming in from playing little bars and backyard parties. Eventually, Pete self-recorded a solo acoustic album and I just assumed the eventual next release, For Dear Life, would just be full band arrangements of some of the songs from that release.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, after all the talk, all the speculation and all the handwringing over majors and horns, Lucero’s sixth studio album, 1372 Overton Park, is out! It seems near impossible to write about this album without mentioning the doubts of long-time Lucero followers. At the same time, it almost feels selfish to rehash them over and over again. Is Lucero required to stay within their fans’ safe zones? If that’s the case, is it really fair to the band? Simple fact is, fair or not, the words “major label debut” and “horns” have made a lot of us more than a little nervous about the future of this beloved rambling crew from Memphis. And the nervousness was topped by Ben’s (and to a lesser sense, the band’s) appearance on the MTV faux-reality series, $5 Dollar Cover, which prompted much discussion about Lucero selling out from many of the band’s longtime fans. If any of these concerns even registered with the band, they’ve handled it in pretty typical Lucero fashion — by forging ahead making their music the way they want it made. With the official release date upon us, the only question that matters is whether you like it, or whether you don’t.

Read the rest of this entry »

After months of talk, 1372 Overton Park has finally been released. To mark the occasion, the Lucero Social Club is holding listening parties across the United States and Tampa’s own event takes place at Vinyl Fever. There will be free beer, free pizza (courtesy of ninebullets) and some like-minded folks hanging out drinking beer and listening to the album. So, come join us and we can talk about major labels and horns.

Lucero – Hey Darlin’, Do You Gamble

This month’s podcast has a good chunk of unreleased material on it. We’ve got tracks from upcoming releases by Lucero, Strawfoot and Micah Schnabel (Two Cow Garage) as well as new material from brand new albums by Drivin’ & Cryin’ and Chuck Ragan. The new Lucero album is duo out October 6 and if you live in the Tampa/St. Pete area, there’ll be a listening party at Vinyl Fever with pizza courtesy of yours truly — but more on that later. I dunno why, but for some reason in the middle of this podcast, I got a hair up my ass and decided to feature nothing but female-fronted bands. Why I did it aside, there is some awesome material included on the back half of the podcast, like a track from Betty-Soo, an artist I was introduced to via the excellent blog, A Truer Sound.

Read the rest of this entry »

Monday night, the wife and I ventured across the bridge to see one of my wife’s favorite bands from the ’80’s: The Psychedelic Furs. This show also marked my second trip to the refurbished (and beautiful) Ritz Theater. The Ritz is quickly becoming one of my favorite places to catch a show. (Pictured below: The Furs’ Richard Butler in Albuquerque, photo by John Kloepper courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Touring support act, The Happy Mondays, did The Furs no favors, acting disinterested for the bulk of their set, requiring a teleprompter for their lyrics and offering little or no stage presence. It was so bad that I actually contemplated booing and heckling them in between songs. Yup, I was seriously on the edge of being the “Freebird” guy. By the end of their set the crowd had had enough and started paying the bar and their friends more attention than the band. I don’t even remember the exact moment they left the stage. I just suddenly stopped needing to yell. In a sentence, the Happy Monday’s sucked out loud and I hope they never return to Tampa again.

Needless to say, the Mondays utterly failed in getting the crowd primed and pumped for the Furs, and the Furs were gonna need to bring something special to win them over. I guess the veteran New Wave band knew it as well ’cause they opened the show with (arguably) their biggest hit, “Love My Way.”

Mission Accomplished. Read the rest of this entry »

Honestly, this probably wasn’t what Truckstop Coffee envisioned when they booked a small tour through the Southeast in support of their new album, For Dear Life, but the road can be a cruel mistress and she decided to slap the band around pretty hard this time around. Larry, the drummer, fell head-first into a campfire, resulting in a couple of nights in a Georgia burn unit (for his hand, not his head). Then, Bob the bassist somehow managed to break a rib. Caleb and Pete made it back to Florida in one piece but this past Saturday night’s show at New World was just Pete performing solo, thus turning a rock show into a singer/songwriter set. [photo by Nicole Kibert] Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, Tampa/St. Pete. Please, please, please don’t let me down. The DJ and his records and that theme night at [insert club here] will all be there next weekend, and every monotonous weekend thereafter, but Truckstop Coffee and Joe Buck are only gonna be here this weekend. Get out and see a show…

TRUCKSTOP COFFEE @ NEW WORLD BREWERY, YBOR CITY

One of the bands routinely championed on ninebullets.net and on the podcast is Lake Worth’s Truckstop Coffee (pictured above, photo by elawgrrl). Saturday night they’ll be at New World Brewery celebrating the release of their excellent new CD, For Dear Life. The album has been out for a couple of weeks now, and if I hadn’t been such a lazy bastard lately, there would already be a glowing review of it posted here for me to link to, but if you like your rock ‘n’ roll in the vein of Two Cow Garage and Lucero, you’ll dig the band.  If you wanna maximize your drunken sing-along opportunities, then head on over to their site, buy a digital copy of the album and listen to it nonstop from now until Saturday night (it’s offered on a pay-what-you-want basis). Then we’ll all raise a glass and sing them old sad songs together whilst buying lots of merchandise and supporting our Florida-grown talents. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, Yonder Mountain Stringband released, The Show, their 10th studio album and the first on their own Frog Pad label. Normally I don’t write bad reviews, but when you take on an assignment for Creative Loafing, they expect you to write about the album regardless of whether you like it or not and the truth is, I don’t.

To me, The Show comes off as generic and so utterly palatable that I’d believe it if you told me it was engineered in some back office at Clear Channel to achieve maximum appeal (read: maximum sales). Don’t get me wrong. If you’re a fan of Kenny Chesney , this is probably your sort of bluegrass … err … newgrass. But if you prefer your ‘grass with passion, emotion and a little magic, then The Show will likely leave you wanting. Read the rest of this entry »

In a way, The Fine Print (A Collection Of Oddities and Rarities 2003-2008), perfectly encompasses the “duality” the Drive-By Truckers have made a career of writing about. On one hand, it’s the best album they’ve released in years. On the other, the bulk was recorded years ago. The Fine Print features that classic sound DBT fans grew to love. But most of the album is played by a lineup long gone. That said, The Fine Print is also the last album DBT was required to produce for New West Records, a label the band had grown increasingly un-infatuated with over the years. Its release finally enables DBT to move forward on their own label, Ruth Street Records.

The Fine Print is largely culled from sessions that gave birth to DBT’s 2004 album, The Dirty South. None of the tracks are especially new to any DBT enthusiast — two are by ex-Trucker Jason Isbell and surprisingly none are Shonna-fronted. (I say “surprisingly” because she’s currently a “singer” in the band.) Read the rest of this entry »

As any regular reader here knows, there are certain bands I champion on ninebullets.net. Long before I knew the guys in Truckstop Coffee personally, they were one of said bands … and they still are.

Admittedly, I have not heard the whole album yet (I’m playing it right now) but from what I’ve heard/seen of the new album at their live shows, they’ve started to move away from the Lucero-esqe country sound of their previous album and towards more twang-tinged straightforward rock ‘n’ roll ala Two Cow Garage.

Anyhow, Truckstop Coffee officially released their new album, For Dear Life, today. In an effort to get the album heard by as many folks as possible, the band’s offering an .mp3 download of the album on the pay-what-you-want platform. I paid $10 for it and so far, I’d say it’s money well spent.

Check it out. Buy it. Tell me what you think of it.

Truckstop Coffee – Ghost or an Angel (from the new album, For Dear Life)

In celebration of the album release Truckstop Coffee will be embarking on a small tour. Here are the dates: Read the rest of this entry »

Hey everyone! It’s your trusty drunk from ninebullets, Autopsy IV, checking in with another podcast chock full of alt.country/Americana/rock ‘n’ roll goodness. Give it a listen and have a drink on me.

The moment I sat down and started mapping out what songs I wanted to play this month I started getting excited. It quickly became obvious that this month’s song selection was gonna be the bomb. We got unreleased tracks from The Fox Hunt, Left Lane Cruiser, Carolyn Mark, Malcolm Holcombe, Pete Bernhard (Devil Makes Three) and Chuck Ragan, as well as newborn songs from Chad Price (Drag The River), Mat d. and the Profane Saints, The Builders and The Butchers, The Takers and Lonesome Wyatt (Those Poor Bastards) w/Rachel Brooke.

In the middle of the show I decided to do a set featuring bands who will be performing at Suburban Home’s 14th Anniversary Weekend Party, which I’ll be attending in 15 days. Hopefully I’ll come back from it with some good stories, good pictures and a few interviews.

And that does it. I’m really happy with this month’s podcast and I think y’all will like it. Do me a favor, though. If you listen and you enjoy the show, please tell other people about it!

Thanks, everyone. Autopsy IV (twitter: @autopsy4)

TRACKLISTING AND PODCAST AFTER THE JUMP
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If my September wasn’t already booked up, there is no doubt I’d drive up to Atlanta for Goodie Mob’s Sept. 19 reunion show. Hopefully a new album will follow.

Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz; all photos by Tracy May.

As much as the Violent Femmes spoke to me as an angst/hormone riddled teenager, August And Everything After spoke to me as a 20-year-old manchild struggling to find my way in an adult’s world. Over the years, Counting Crows and I have grown and matured together, and as a result I’ve never been ashamed to admit that I am, indeed, a Counting Crows fan. That said, until Monday night, I’d never seen the band live, so when Creative Loafing needed someone to cover the show, I jumped at the opportunity.

The warnings were sent out weeks in advance: this show was structured differently and you needed to be in your seat by 7 p.m., else you’d be missing the show. My brother and I complied by getting there at 6:15 p.m. and pounding $6 whiskeys until the loud speakers said we had 5 minutes ’til showtime. Read the rest of this entry »

I swear to god. One of my personal missions with ninebullets.net is to make the whole world like Truckstop Coffee as much as I do. In keeping with that goal I am presenting y’all with “Laredo Skies” from their upcoming album, For Dear Life. It was recorded live at Propaganda.

Listen to it and love it or I’ll search you down and kick you in the shins.

After the break: Another track from the new CD: Read the rest of this entry »

This is a crosspost from my blog, ninebullets.net. I thought I’d post it here ’cause 95% of the folks reading ninebullets have every Lucero recording ever made, but I got to thinking that a good portion of Daily Loaf’s readership probably hasn’t even heard of them. So I present you with this Lucero crash course, Mixtape style. I hope you enjoy it and I’ll see you at the rock show when they come to Czar on Friday, November 13 (don’t worry, I’ll remind you again).

One of my favorite twitter friends, Romeosidvicous, posted a really nice four mix-tape introduction to Lucero yesterday and was kind enough to allow me to re-post it. I’ll let him explain the idea behind the tapes:

“I have made many Lucero CDs over the years to turn people on to their music. Today I decided that I would be lazy and simply make three one hour playlists and post them here. Now I can simply give people a URL instead of spending time making plastic discs that people just rip and file away somewhere. Three one-hour playlists turned into four playlists as I decided to toss in some of Ben Nichols’ solo work as well as some tracks from his prior band, Red 40. I enjoyed putting these together and I hope you will enjoy listening to them. You can get all of the music here, on the original discs, from the Lucero Store.”

Below the cut are the first two. If you enjoy them and want to check out the other two, head over to Romeo’s blog.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lucero’s new album, 1372 Overton Park, may not be getting it’s official release until October 6 but if you pre-order it today, you’ll get a six-song sampler. The tracks included on the sampler are as follows:

01. The Devil and Maggie Chascarillo
02. Sounds of the City
03. Hey Darling Do You Gamble?
04. Smoke
05. Sixes and Sevens
06. Goodbye Again

You can preorder it here.

(My song-by-song review after the Jump)
Read the rest of this entry »