Posted by Leilani Polk on Jul. 28, 2009, at 1:14 pm
Pennsylvania experimental rock ensemble Black Moth Super Rainbow (pictured, photo by Jae Rumberto) hit retro and modern notes all at once with their day-glo vibrant electro-dance melodies, fizzadelic folk shambles and made-for-space jams. It’s some of the headiest music you’ll find out there right now, but songwriter/frontman/creative conscience Tobacco (real name Tom Fec) doesn’t consider his music psychedelic at all.
“I think everything I do is pop,” he told me a few weeks ago during a phone interview before the second leg of the band’s two-part tour. “I don’t like psychedelic music and I never set out to do it. It just sort of comes out that way. I might be the only person who thinks this, but Eating Us … it seems like a pop album to me.”
Eating Us, his band’s fourth and latest full-length, is not the sort of name that makes me think pop. The black-and-white album cover, with its smeary sad face superimposed onto the back of a hand, doesn’t make me think of pop music, either. And the limited edition “hairy” version of Eating Us (with synthetic hair in its inner sleeve) is probably as far from pop packaging as you can feasibly get. (VIDEOS AFTER THE JUMP) Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Leilani Polk on Jul. 21, 2009, at 12:45 pm
Google “gypsy punk” and most of the dozen or so results relate back to Gogol Bordello. Search the band specifically and you’ll find more than a million pages that mention it. While Gogol’s Ukraine-born visionary/composer Eugene Hütz isn’t interested in taking credit for spearheading a whole new movement in American music, his band’s influence is undeniable.
Gogol grew from NYC’s underground music scene, just as much a melting pot as the city itself. Hütz immersed himself in it and assembled a motley crew of talented, multi-ethnic musicians to create his gypsy punk orchestra and make his vision of infusing East-European culture into Western music a reality.
The nine-member band represents seven nationalities all told. Their sound combines gypsy and Slavic music traditions with punk rock, dub reggae, metal, rap and even some funk and grooves, and the lyrics are delivered in English sprinkled with Spanish, Ukrainian and Italian verses. Since 1999, they have released four LPs; the most recent, 2007’s critically acclaimed Super Taranta!, fully launched Gogol into the international spotlight.
Many of Gogol’s songs (including “Wonderlust King, below”) are about living a roving, responsibility-free lifestyle, though various other topics are touched upon, from the absurdly catchy “Start Wearing Purple,” about letting loose and being silly, to “American Wedding,” which pokes fun at our country’s stuffy wedding traditions (“Where is the vodka, where’s marinated herring? / Where is the supply that gonna last three days?”), to the hilarious God vs. Science debate in “Supertheory of Supereverything.”
Everyone contributes vocals to the boisterous, colorful music, like violin virtuoso Sergey Ryabtsev, capable of some of the fastest and most furious fiddle playing I’ve ever witnessed; accordion player Yuri Lemeshev, who also moonlights with the studio band on Late Night with Conan O’Brien; and attractive lady entertainers and pandemonium makers Pamela Jintana Racine and Elizabeth Sun, who alternately sing, dance, and play marching band-style percussion throughout the live shows.
Hütz is the captivating and unpredictable center of it all. He sings lead, plays forceful acoustic guitar, and, usually shirtless with sweat dripping from his thick handlebar mustache, marches back and forth encouraging playful unruliness and leading spirited singalongs. He pilots the vigorous musical spectacle and keeps both his band and the audience as amped-up as he is.
Leilani: So, tell me about the role you play in the band as ringleader. How much of your songwriting goes into what happens on stage?
Eugene: I think it’s quite obvious (laughs robustly) that I write all the songs. (VIDEOS AFTER THE JUMP) Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Jul. 16, 2009, at 12:39 pm
For years, the annual Warped Tour has been more or less a knucklehead boys club on wheels — with music in between — but in recent years more female-dominated bands have been cracking the lineup. Count among them Meg & Dia, the two easy-on-the-eyes, Utah-bred sisters Frampton (no relation to Peter) — Meg, 23, and Dia, 21 — and their three male bandmates.
The group has been on three Warped jaunts, including this year’s.
Meg & Dia is supporting its first major label release, Here, Here and Here (released April 21 on Sire), an accomplished collection of confessional and sometimes confrontational (and irrepressibly catchy) modern rock that takes more stylistic liberties than most bands in the pop-punk/emo realm.
Dia (foreground in photo), who sings lead and splits songwriting duties with Meg and the other band members, called from the tour bus and proved to be a lively, open interviewee. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.
What are the good parts and the bad parts about Warped?
(Coughs) Well one of the bad parts is getting sick and not being able to get better. We don’t have a hotel, a place to take a hot bath. I’ve been cleaning out my nose with a netti pot. I’d give anything for a hotel right now, a quiet room. Yesterday I had a crazy fever.
Posted by Leilani Polk on Jul. 10, 2009, at 2:04 pm
You’d imagine Dignan’s music is conceived somewhere cold and snowy grey and stunning in its starkness, a place for thinking meaningful thoughts and contemplating life’s everlasting mysteries.
Not a Texas town located a mere five miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border and boasting a significant Hispanic community. (Dignan photo by Taylor Pool)
“There’s not much of that in the music,” bassist and Dignan co-founder Devin Garcia tells me via phone a few weeks ago while the band was enjoying some down time in Cincinnati before a show later that night. “A lot of times, people are almost surprised about that.”
The atmospheric chamber pop has a distinctive psyche-folk feel in the same vein as Grizzly Bear. The multi-layered vocals are delivered in gentle and mellifluous intones or passionate cries, and are backed by wordless chorales and tasteful washes of sound with small textural details added for affect — glock chimes, guitar reverb, tambourine jingles, hand-claps, accordion notes, whistling.
Dignan is named after the charming ne’er-do-well in Wes Anderson’s first film, Bottle Rocket, and had its start when high school-aged Andy Pena met Garcia in church and became fast friends while tooling around in the church’s music room, where they spent many a late night experimenting with various instruments and taking full advantage of the empty performance space. Soon enough, Pena was playing guitar, Garcia electric bass and the duo were recruiting other young musicians to join them. Eventually, they settled into the current lineup with keyboardist and harmonizing vocalist Heidi Plueger, drummer Trey Perez, and David Palomo, who sings and plays accordion, glock and keys. Read the rest of this entry »
Five years ago, any music industry conference would feature hours of discussion about how to get your compact disc into the hands of DJs on FM radio, or tips on how to press and package a CD that wouldn’t get buried on the desk of an A&R executive at some major label. A lot has happened in five years. On Saturday, June 13 and 14, Hillsborough Community College and The Artist and Writers Group hosted the Second Annual Homemade Music Symposium in Ybor City, and in the combined 18-plus hours of discussion, commercial FM radio was not mentioned one time.
Instead, Saturday’s daytime programming included panels and workshops like “Alternative Media Promotion,” “Marketing, Touring and Band Management” and “How to Get the Most Out of a Studio Session.” Panelists included bloggers (Bryan Childs,Ninebullets.net), social networking specialists (Julia Gorzka, Brand Tampa) and local media (Lee Courtney, WMNF; Curtis Ross, Tampa Tribune; Julie Garisto, St. Pete Times as well as Creative Loafing’s Leilani Polk). Mr. Courtney was the only radio personality in attendance. (Tampa’s 88.5 FM is a community station that still allows their DJs to play CDs – they even sometimes play records.).
The Homemade Music Symposium’s goal is to educate nascent and struggling musicians in the ways and means of the music business and industry trends. It also included out-of-town industry folk and special keynote speakers – this year, it was Tunecore’s Peter Wells and Tony Michaelides, a local author from Manchester, UK, who’s colleagues and contemporaries include Factory Records’ Tony Wilson, David Bowie, U2 and The Stone Roses.
Conference attendees were mostly solo singer-songwriter types, with a sprinkling of MCs, publishers and managers as well as other local bloggers and marketers looking to get involved in the music scene or learn about new media. There was a lot of talk (maybe too much) about Twitter and Facebook, and of course the familiar geographical gripe of how Florida is difficult to tour/break out of, because there are no surrounding states (The closest top 10 market is Atlanta). A good portion of the crowd was visibly older, some dressed in flowery shirts and flip flops, and plenty of eyes glazed over when the topics inevitably circled back to “Tweeting” and social networks.
Sorely missing from the panel of experts, especially on the panel labeled “Area Record Labels and Artist Managers,” were representatives from the handful of local Tampa imprints, namely ADD, New Granada and 24 Hour Service Station (Geri X, Win Win Winter and The Beauvilles). 24 Hour owner Marshall Dickson stated that he would definitely be involved next year, but that this time around he just had “too much on his plate.” The only current label owner in attendance was Ivan Pena, who runs Mohawk Bomb Records (Soulfound, Ascending to Avalon and Rise of Saturn). Pena seemed optimistic about the Tampa Bay music scene, and about the fast-changing online industry, but insisted that artists need to tour incessantly and start treating their band like a business or risk failure.
The “Music Critics” panel, unfortunately the last session of the day, seemed to be the most pessimistic. One girl in the crowd asked for suggestions on how to become a music writer. The entire panel discouraged her. It may be in fashion for music writers to be moody and begrudging, but one would think their passion for music could somehow keep their chins up, not to mention grateful that they still have jobs in the age of Rotten Tomatoes and aggregated, user-generated reviews at Amazon.com.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 26, 2009, at 12:55 pm
Two years ago, Jonathan Berlin was in a bad place. He was the lead singer and songwriter for a band called Bernard that had a distribution deal through East/West, a division of Warner Bros. The trio, whose drummer was his longtime collaborator and best friend Jared Bowser, had played 300 shows on tour.
Photo: Ian Witlen
So what exactly was the problem, you might wonder?
“With Bernard, we worked our asses off to make it happen,” Berlin, 25 (at right in photo), says in a phone interview. “As it turned out, it just wasn’t fun. I always loved writing songs, but after we got hooked up with Warner Bros, I started writing and I couldn’t do it. It was like, ‘I’m writing a record for Warner Bros. This has to be good.’ The whole thing wasn’t really awesome.”
Given those circumstances, a lot of artists would’ve continued to flog it, but Berlin decided to walk away. The Bernard split led in part to a four-month rift between him and Bowser, 23.
Berlin decided to rethink this whole music career thing. And he came up with something of a novel solution: He had to basically stop trying. So Berlin retreated to his loft in downtown Jacksonville and started making music for himself.
Posted by Leilani Polk on Jun. 24, 2009, at 4:20 am
Musicians tend to disparage their local music scenes, but when it comes to Florida, neo-folk troubadour Lauris Vidal (pictured, photo by Charles Brewer III) says they likely don’t know how good they’ve got it. He didn’t. The 31-year-old Daytona-based musician (who plays guitar, tenor banjo, lap steel and a ukulele he crafted from a banjo neck and cigar box) grew up here, but spent five years performing for DC’s thankless audiences. “It was so cold and closed in DC, and you had to work so hard for no appreciation at all,” he told me during a recent phone coversation.
While the Sunshine State may seem like a cultural dead end, Vidal says Floridians are generally open to original music, including his own brand of shambling, Southern gothic-tinged roots. “Coming back here and playing and having people of all ages really appreciate it, and show it, felt amazing. It’s one of the reasons why I want to work so hard in Florida and help Florida’s national reputation.” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 23, 2009, at 12:53 pm
The crowd cheers as a tattooed man with shaggy hair and a British accent belts out Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath tunes. An hour later, a blonde singer tears through a set of Motley Crue classics while his bandmates pound their instruments into submission. An hour after that, a grown man in a schoolboy outfit duck-walks across the stage and his cohort growls from under his cap while AC/DC riffs blast through the speakers.
Is this a dream team concert lineup of rock ‘n’ roll legends? Not quite, but the crowd is enthusiastic and it sounds pretty close to the real thing. In fact, the only part that’s completely unrealistic is the price, since admission to see all the bands ($10) cost less than parking at major rock concerts.
On June 30, three tribute acts performed at Jannus Landing at the Monsters of Mock show while fans sang along to the familiar sights and sounds. It’s not the real thing, but according to Martyn Jenkins, frontman for AC/DC tribute act Highway to Hell (and the evening’s headliners), the next best thing is pretty satisfying in its own right.
Posted by Eric Snider on Jun. 22, 2009, at 11:45 am
Boz Scaggs performs at Ruth Eckerd Hall Thurs., July 2
To casual music fans, Boz Scaggs is that smooth dude from the ’70s with those disco-ey hits “Lowdown” and “Lido Shuffle.” They might even know about his 1976 smash album Silk Degrees, which included those tunes as well as “Georgia,” “What Can I Say” and “Harbor Lights.”
Although Scaggs’ days as a major hitmaker ended in the early 1980s — in large part because he took a self-imposed hiatus for most of the decade — he has made estimable music in the 1990s and, especially, this decade. And he’s done so by turning to a familiar riff for recovering rock stars: singing old standards.
That news might cause eyes to roll — especially if you think Rod Stewart — but it would absolutely not apply in the case of Boz Scaggs. His But Beautiful (2003) and last year’s Speak Low are among the best examples of a veteran pop star delving into such old chestnuts as “What’s New?” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Easy Living,” “I’ll Remember April” and “Speak Low.”
He sings the material in a supple, torchy style, burrowing into the lyrics, caressing phrases with his round, throaty tenor. Scaggs has a natural knack for seducing you into these literate, urbane numbers culled from the legendary writers of the American Songbook. Read the rest of this entry »
Perhaps I was just young, but there seemingly was a time when Tori Amos felt edgy and just a little brash. Over the years, though, she has mellowed considerably and I’ve filed her in the “artists I used to like whose new albums I check out out of politeness only but I doubt I’ll ever actually like anything they ever do again” folder.
Enter KRISTEENYOUNG.
I think the opening paragraph of their bio tells you everything you need to know about this band:
“What’s black and white and can crush you like a bug? A piano. These monsters weigh anywhere from 300 lbs for a small upright, to four or even five times that for a concert grand. So why do artists let them sound so wimpy? KRISTEENYOUNG wants the piano to kick your ass. Their new album, Music for Strippers, Hookers, and the Odd On-Looker, feels like it was born in the boxing ring, not some sun-dappled Laurel Canyon living room.”
Posted by Leilani Polk on Jun. 15, 2009, at 1:46 pm
It’s midnight at a hole-in-the-wall club in the heart of Little Havana, Miami. The place is pumpin’, the dance floor jammed with a multicultural mass of bodies writhing and grooving and ducking and swaying and shaking asses to the pulsing beats. The music is a breathing, heaving, horn-saturated slice of Miami fusion, the native flavors of Cuba — salsa, charanga, rumba and the like — mixed with ’70s-style funk, hip-hop turntablism, free jazz, dub reggae, Afro-beat and electronica.
The band responsible, Spam Allstars, calls its Pan-American dance music “electronic descarga” and the man in charge is DJ Le Spam, though he’s not a frontman in the traditional sense. The youthful Miami musician/producer (real name: Andrew Yeomanson) doesn’t sing or play instruments or tell his bandmates what to play. But he crafts the foundation of the band’s music, shaping the mood with basslines and electronic beats. The resulting samplers are triggered throughout the band’s live performances, and Yeomanson uses turntables to add improvised sounds, words and textures to what his all-star group of musicians produce, all while mixing the entire thing via his post behind the soundboard at the back of the stage. (Audio and video after the jump.) Read the rest of this entry »
Imagine you’re one of three brothers four years apart who ride around the country in a van that’s tricked out with a sleeping loft. You stay at campgrounds and cook out most nights. You pull the van over on a whim for a hike or to check out whatever catches your attention, be it the Grand Canyon or a roadside taco stand. Now imagine that most nights you get to turn your instruments up real loud and play your own heavy music in front of people who paid to see you.
That’s touring the Pontiak way, and doesn’t it sound like a pretty good time?
Pontiak @ New World Brewery, Thurs., June 11. $7
Somehow van tours have become synonymous with misery, but the three Carney brothers — drummer Lane, 26, aptly named guitarist Van, 29, and bassist Jennings, 30 — see it more as a chance for nonstop discovery. And fun.
“We get along really well,” says Lain by cell phone while driving the van. “There’s the usual bickering. Any time you get three men in a moving capsule, you might fight over the last four Cheetos. But we get on real well. And we smell pretty good.”
Rock history is rife with bands whose legendary status is all out of proportion with the amount of tangible success they had in their heyday.
New York Dolls @ State Theatre, Tues., July 9. $25.
There is no better example of this trope than the New York Dolls. They are revered as proto-punks, early players on the lower Manhattan scene that produced The Ramones, Television, Talking Heads et al. Their look fell somewhere between androgynous and full-out drag, and for that they are credited as a major influence on glam-metal.
The Dolls released only two albums during their initial run: 1973’s self-titled LP and the following year’s Too Much Too Soon. Both were critical darlings and commercial stiffs. The band broke up in ’75.
The original Dolls were plagued by abject drug abuse — the late guitarist Johnny Thunders was a classic junkie — and dysfunction, but, according to frontman David Johansen, the main reason the Dolls packed it in was that they were broke and hungry. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Nick Truden on May. 30, 2009, at 12:17 pm
I’ve come to terms recently that I like to be rushed when I write. I usually wait till the very last moment to start doing all my writing. Drafts? Pfft. Who needs those? I shoot from the hip. When my iPod plays the five songs that are to be used for an issue I immediately try to tie them all together in some kind of basic theme or idea.
Something to make it interesting and make you, the reader, keep reading. For this issue however, a lightning storm went off over my head. I guess it was only a matter of time considering the incessant rain we’ve been getting here in ol’ sunny Florida. Sunshine State my ass. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 26, 2009, at 3:09 pm
Now that the first wave of rock legends has passed that used-to-be retirement age of 65, a new crop of important artists is closing in on 60. Over the last few months, it surprised me to discover just how many prominent rockers were 59. Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Tom Waits, Stevie Wonder, to name a handful.
I got curious if this was a particularly good age for rockers. Rather than telling you how many rock artists are 59 at this very moment, I did a search and unearthed which ones were born in 1950, the height of the post-WWII baby boom. Quite a few, as it turns out. Here’s a chronological list of pop artists born in 1950. A pretty good year. The list is extensive but not all-inclusive:
January 9, 1950, David Johanson (New York Dolls, Buster Poindexter)
January 5, 1950, Chris Stein, (Blondie)
January 21, 1950, Billy Ocean
January 23, 1950, Danny Federici (E Street Band)
January 23, 1950, Pat Simmons (Doobie Brothers)
February 6, 1950, Natalie Cole
February 12, 1950, Steve Hackett (Genesis)
February 20, 1950, Walter Becker (Steely Dan)
March 2, 1950, Karen Carpenter (The Carpenters)
March 4, 1950, Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top)
March 21, 1950, Roger Hodgson (Supertramp)
March 26, 1950, Teddy Pendergrass
March 27, 1950, Tony Banks (Genesis) Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Van McCourt on May. 22, 2009, at 10:57 am
Willie Heath Neal plays country music. That’s what I’d call it, that’s what he calls it. But if you listen to popular country radio, you’d disagree. You’d call his songs “alt-country rockabilly” or “cowpunk” or “outlaw country” or “hillbilly” or “psychobilly.” Really, there seem to be endless ways to describe the man’s music by tacking “billy” onto the end of a word. But what really matters as we hash it all out is that he knows how to write a good song. That’s all I care about, and that is exactly what matters when you’re in Ybor City on a rainy Tuesday night at Crowbar to see Willie and his gang play. I don’t ordinarily listen to country music (I adore The Old 97’s, but here again, they don’t seem to count), so I had no idea what I was getting into, but I loved every minute of it. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Leilani Polk on May. 20, 2009, at 1:35 pm
For more Summer Guide stories about how to spend your summer vacation (or to read about the memorable summer-related experiences of other CL staffers, freelancers and interns), click here; to check out some travel-worthy events taking place this summer, click here; picture below of me by Phil Bardi, taken at Langerado 2008.
My first time traveling to see music was February 2001, when A Perfect Circle’s Mer de Noms tour came to Florida and the easier access Orlando show sold out before I got tickets. At the time, I was barely three months into my 21st year, recently single, and so fiercely infatuated with APC that I went ahead and planned a road trip to see them in Ft. Lauderdale, convinced I could talk a few other adventurous friends into making the overnight jaunt with me.
Problem was, the three who joined me — two of my girlfriends and a hottie musician I was unsuccessfully courting — were unemployed, so the jaunt ended up being a 100-percent Leilani-sponsored affair. Worst of all, my crush turned out to be prudish, petulant and overall, a royal pain in the ass who, in less than 24 hours, had not only managed to alienate me, but made me lose interest in even continuing our friendship because I could no longer stand the sound of his voice.
Luckily, my feelings about music-motivated traveling weren’t affected since both the music and vacation parts were fabulous. But I learned much from the experience and the numerous experiences that followed. Here’s some wisdom I’ve gained over the years. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 19, 2009, at 4:23 pm
He was the bespectacled white kid from the suburbs trying to sit in with musical legends in New Orleans. But instead of getting the cold shoulder, drummer Stanton Moore was welcomed on the bandstand by any number of prominent players. And the crowd dug him, too.
Stanton Moore Trio, Thurs., May 28, 8 p.m., Crowbar, Ybor City. $10.
“To tell you the truth, when I was coming up and they’d let me sit in, the regulars at the bar would be, ‘Listen to the white kid,’” Moore says by cell phone on his way to a recording session in the Crescent City. “They’d be dancing and egging me on. They were real supportive.”
It probably wouldn’t have gone quite so well if young Stanton had sucked. But from an early age, he committed to learning the distinctive, tricky and at times peculiar nuances of the New Orleans drumming style. (See his video demonstrations at the bottom of this post.)
“I had a great guy who taught me the basic rudiments,” Moore says. “But it was a real challenge to go from that to learning from [storied NOLA drummer Johnny Vidacovich] to loosen up. But I was determined. I really worked on how to loosen it up and apply it to my drum set.” Read the rest of this entry »
@autopsy4:Made it to Ybor. Have I mentioned how much I hate driving to Tampa?
I arrived to Ybor late and famished due to the traffic jam the rest of the world refers to as Tampa. After getting my access secured and a whiskey inside of me I started to settle down and headed to the Cantina for some of the Southern rock sounds of Mojo Gurus. I only managed to catch their last 3 songs but that was all I needed. The blistering rock mixed with the whiskey were getting me where I need it to be and all I needed at this point was a hot dog and I was gonna be fixed.
@autopsy4: Mojo Gurus crushed. Thomas Wynn next.
On my way out of the Cantina I bumped into some old friends and decided a double whiskey and catching up was gonna have to suffice as food. While the double put a beating on my wallet, it was exactly what the head was wanting and I was exactly where I needed to be as Thomas Wynn & The Believers took the stage. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 15, 2009, at 9:04 am
My sleeper concert of the weekend is War, the Southern California band, formed in the late 1960s that blends flowing funk, Latin, Afrobeat and rock into a sound that has held up extremely well over the years. Case in point: Who doesn’t get a little kick in their step when they hear “Low Rider.”
Cuban Club Bandshell on the Patio
This is the hallowed stage where so much Heatwave history has been made — including the mammoth Sun Ra orchestra’s landmark set in the late ’80s. I think of singer/songwriter Chuck Prophet (10:05), a WMNF and Heatwave (this is his fourth appearance) favorite, as making avant-roots music — he injects agreeable amounts of weirdness and wry humor into his grabby tunes.
Also rootsy, but more poppy, is Boston-based Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles(video below) (6:35). Her best stuff reminds me of Joan Jett with the slightest touch of twang. And if her photos are any indication, she’s easy on the eyes. Bluesman Michael Burks (8:10) hails from Little Rock and brings plenty of muscle and a wild hair. The bandshell is bookended by a couple of reggae/ska/Caribbean-style acts from Tampa Bay: Johukames Posse (5:10) and Magadog (11:55), which reconstituted not all that long ago and has greeted with open arms by the locals. —Eric Snider Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 11, 2009, at 10:24 am
As elusive as the concept of African unity may be, Kinobe Herbert is doing his part to realize it. The 25-year-old singer/multi-instrumentalist from Uganda rejects the fragmentation of the continent’s often tradition-bound musical landscape, and instead actively seeks to incorporate influences and instruments from throughout Africa and beyond. Kinobe his band, Soul Beat Africa, play the Cuban Club Cantina Stage at Tropical Heatwave, 9:05 p.m., Saturday.(Video clips below)
“Most people in Uganda know more about America than even countries next door to them in Africa,” Kinobe (pronounced Chi-no-BAY) says by phone from a tour stop in North Carolina. “It’s because that’s what they see on TV. Ugandan education does not teach about other African cultures. And not many of the musicians are into the pan-African thing.”
Uganda is a smallish, landlocked country in east central Africa probably best known to Westerners as the one time killing grounds for dictator Idi Amin, whose brutal regime lasted most of the 1970s. The country has been relatively stable since the mid ’80s, but has not established the musical identity of countries like Nigeria, Kenya and Mali. While Kinobe employs the traditional styles of his homeland, he is by no means a nationalist. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 5, 2009, at 12:49 pm
Three boys travel around the South with their itinerant preacher father and a mother who home-schools them. They sneak in as much secular rock music as they can, learn to play instruments, occasionally back up Dad at the altar.
They write songs. Then they write better songs and, as if from nowhere, land a record deal with a major label, RCA. They call their cousin to join the band as a lead guitarist. They adjourn to Nashville and begin a career that follows a steadily upward trajectory.
It’s the kind of narrative that record companies love — and, near as anyone can tell, it’s pretty much true. Kings of Leon’s first album, 2003’s Youth and Young Manhood, was garage-y and rambunctious, and earned them the sobriquet “the Southern Strokes.”
In the three albums since, KoL has consistently expanded its palette; its current disc, last year’s Only by the Night, is far more stylistic far-reaching, sonically polished and slotted more toward the rock mainstream. The single “Sex on Fire” might be described as Southern U2. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on May. 4, 2009, at 10:42 am
Talk about a homecoming.
Drummer Jonathan Priest visits Tampa bay this weekend, but it’s not just to drop in on Pop and catch up with pals at The Hub. He has three gigs on Friday night and one on Saturday — all of them, thankfully, under the same roof at Yeoman’s Road Pub on Davis Islands.
The big night is Friday (starting at 9 p.m.), when he mans the kit with three bands he helped found or establish in the Bay area: the ska/reggae ensemble Rocksteady@8; Infinite Groove Orchestra, a space-funk jazz outfit; and the marquee event, the reunion of Ghetto Love Sugar, a jam-jazz quartet that burned brightly for less than two years in the early 2000s. Bassist Philip Booth, keyboardist/EFX guy Raulton Reichel and guitarist Joel Lisi round out the unit.
It should be a freewheeling night with lots of movable parts, as the musicians in each of the bands are friends and collaborators. Expect robust jamming. For the capper on Saturday, Priest will join in on the CD Release Party for singer/songwriter Dan Kincaid’s The Walk Within.
Posted by Leilani Polk on Apr. 28, 2009, at 12:00 am
When guitarist/singer/songwriter Jason Isbell put together his solo debut, Sirens of the Ditch, it was a prolonged process carried out over several years while he was a fulltime member of Drive-By Truckers, those purveyors of raucously rockin’, whiskey-drinkin’ alt-country music.
“I only had a day or two to record it at a time,” Isbell told me during a phone interview a few days before kicking off the second leg of his spring tour with his band The 400 Unit (pictured).
Squeezing solo studio time into an already jam-packed gigging schedule might’ve been easy for your standard hired hand, but Isbell made up a third of DBT’s triple axe attack and was a productive songwriter throughout his six-year tenure with the band. He’d always brought his own distinctive flavor to the Truckers’ sound and as he drew closer to finishing his record, it became clear he was headed down a different path than the rest of his bandmates, both musically and personally. The dissolution of his marriage to DBT bassist Shonna Tucker didn’t make things any easier, so three months before he released Sirens in 2007, Isbell made his amicable exit.
Sirens sounded a lot like a DBT record, and though it was well received by critics and fans alike, there was a lingering curiosity about the direction he’d take with his follow-up. Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit, recorded in Muscle Shoals and released on Lightning Rod Records in February, is a clear departure from the Truckers sound. It’s also more cohesive than his solo debut. Isbell’s pleasantly husky drawl is set against rootsy, Southern-fried rock ’n’ roll with countrified pop melodies and the soulful, gospel-tinged Muscle Shoals sound: tough, passionate, unflinching, melancholy, and sincere. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Eric Snider on Apr. 20, 2009, at 8:35 am
He’s been called introverted, intensely private, interview-shy, even reclusive, yet here is singer/songwriter Ray LaMontagne talking to me by phone from a Cleveland hotel room. I’m asking questions, he’s answering. With pauses. He speaks just above a whisper, a sort of gentle murmur that belies the raspy bite in his singing voice.
LaMontagne, who plays Tampa Theatre on Wed., April 29, attributes much of his social awkwardness to a childhood that was transient and impoverished. His mother, he says, “had a really, really, really, really difficult childhood — horrific, really. She was completely unprepared for life.”
She regularly moved Ray and his sisters to new towns, to Tennessee, Utah, Minnesota, New York, Nebraska, New Hampshire and elsewhere. His father, a musician with a tendency toward violence, left the picture when Ray was very young.
As a result, he was the perpetual new kid, bashful and reluctant. “It was hard,” he says. “I think you just become an observer, always stay on the outside of things. It’s funny how that stuff sticks with you. I don’t like to go to shows ’cause I don’t like crowds. I don’t like festivals. They bring something up. I don’t know exactly what it is, maybe the fact that I’m not the one dancing in the sprinklers with my shirt off. Funny how that stuff stays with you.”
The solitary child did not seek solace and meaning in music. “I was more of a reader,” he says. “I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but we moved so much that we didn’t have a stereo. We didn’t have anything as far as those kinds of possessions go. I was sort of in my own world.”
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 20, 2009, at 8:23 am
Black Lips play Orpheum in Ybor City next Thursday, March 26. Here’s my feature/interview with the band:
“I want other bands like us to become as successful as we are so they can stay as shitty as we are,” says Jared Swilley, bass player for Black Lips, talking on a cell phone as the band rolls out of Omaha in a van.
So why is Swilley standing up for shitty music? You have to understand his definition of such: music that comes from a raw, unfiltered place, that’s not recorded using the latest computer technology, that doesn’t concern itself with whether the vocals and guitars are exactly in tune or the rhythms are perfectly in time.
“I like the human side of music,” he says. “I love imperfections and mistakes. Otherwise the cyborgs win. Look at ‘Louie Louie.’ It was No. 1 hit [actually a No. 2 in 1963] and it was sloppy and had the biggest vocal flub.”
“Louie Louie” would be a fair reference point for the music of Black Lips, an Atlanta quartet that’s been together since the early part of this decade. It sounds like the stuff made in basements and garages by self-taught kids in the 1960s, recorded off-the-cuff with lots of reverb and little regard for squeaky-clean sonics. Black Lips have dubbed their music “flower punk.”
“When me and [guitarist] Cole [Alexander] were pretending to be in a band early on, we listened to The Germs and they couldn’t play their instruments at all,” Swilley says. “When we really started playing guitar, we emulated Link Wray. He had these guitar riffs that were cool and tough and easy to play. We were into the punk stuff, but we were always into the ’60s stuff.”
Posted by Eric Snider on Mar. 17, 2009, at 9:04 am
Gonna be bendin’ an elbow, turnin’ a few up for St. Patty’s Day tonight? (Don’t drink the green beer, pleeeze.)
To get yourself in the proper mood, have a look at a couple of videos by THE BEST Irish rock band ever, the standard-bearer, a group not from Boston or Chicago, but Ahhr-land: The Pogues.
Rare is the musician who can record an album of avant-garde solo piano, then turn around and write, sing and perform a simple, confectionary pop song called “My Girl My Girl,” which begins with the lines, “Just can’t find one better lookin’/ There ain’t no one that’s got more cookin’.”
Perhaps that’s why more people haven’t heard of Terry Adams. His brand of bold, unrepentant eclecticism does not usually make for a star career. More folks know Adams as the wild man behind the keyboards in the long-beloved and now-defunct cult band NRBQ. That outfit was about as stylistically free-spirited and far-reaching as any that’s fallen under the general rubric of rock ’n’ roll. Adams, who formed the band, and the various musicians who came through it, had an exquisite case of musical ADD.
Terry Adams plays Skipper's March 15
NRBQ used to bounce from honey-coated, post-Beatles pop to jagged jazz a la Thelonious Monk to silly country tunes to jaunty blues. And more, lots more. They weren’t genre slumming, either; the group played everything convincingly, albeit with a healthy dollop of quirkiness. At the height of their powers, the quartet would even take random requests from the audience and perform (sometimes attempt to perform) songs that they had never played together before.
In the five years since NRBQ’s breakup, Adams’ has forged on with a similarly fearless aesthetic. The central characteristic of his music, from its beginnings in the mid 1960s until now, is a sense of wonder, an almost childlike yen for constant discovery. And when he gets there, he shares his delight with the audience. Along the way, he’s shown a knack for making the complex seem carefree and the simple seem somehow profound.
After a half-hour phone conversation with Adams — not to mention several quickie calls to set up an interview — I feel qualified to say that he’s a one-of-a-kind cat, an eccentric (but not strange) fellow not given to linear thinking.
I ask him why he doesn’t use the NRBQ moniker as a branding device — to, at the very least, pull more folks out to his shows. Adams pauses, seeming to genuinely ponder the option. “I didn’t wanna keep draggin’ the name on,” he replies in a slight drawl reminiscent of his native Louisville. “I dunno, maybe I should.”
Tom Staley, an early NRBQ drummer who’s joining the keyboardist for a few Florida dates as a member of the Terry Adams Crazy Trio, has a more pithy take: “He has more integrity than to call something he’s doing NRBQ,” says the St. Pete resident, who also drums for The Vodkanauts. “He knows people would take offense at that.”
There’s been this new sound swirling around; it sounds like hip hop but with an electro beat … I’m no music critic and my vocabulary to breakdown the proper terminology is laughable. All I know is this sound is propped up by new female “alternative” artists, and they all have a killer style.
In our first Fusionistas podcast (embedded below, check it) my guest is Shunda K, creator of the group Yo! Majesty. We have a candid conversation about where she’s been and where shes going, and how she was a forerunner of this new sound. Shunda has been collaborating with many artists on different tracks and we’ll link you some so you can hear for yourself. (check ‘em down below)
Ultimately, Case says, the songs on Middle Cyclone are more about the universal need for love, regardless of what form it may take.
“What other people might call ‘love songs,’ I think of as homages,” she says. “They can be to a person, a region, a feeling, even sad feelings.”
In addition to 12 new tracks, Case also covers two songs on Middle Cyclone: “Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth” by Sparks, and “Don’t Forget Me” by Harry Nilsson.
Middle Cyclone was produced by Case, with Darryl Neudorf, and recorded in Tucson, Brooklyn, Toronto and Vermont. It features Case, backed by her core band: guitarist Paul Rigby, bassist Tom V. Ray, backing vocalist Kelly Hogan, multi-instrumentalist Jon Rauhouse, and drummer Barry Mirochnick. She’s also joined by a number of guests, including M. Ward, Garth Hudson, Sarah Harmer and members of The New Pornographers, Los Lobos, Calexico, The Sadies, Visqueen, The Lilys and Giant Sand.
Posted by Eric Snider on Feb. 13, 2009, at 1:24 pm
At straight-up 3 p.m., the appointed hour, a man on the other end of the line announces himself: “Heyyyyy, it’s Southside!”
And so begins a spirited 40-minute conversation with one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most undervalued artists, Southside Johnny Lyon, who has fronted a horn-heavy R&B band called the Asbury Jukes for more than three decades. After his first troika of LPs, released in the latter ‘70s on Columbia, fell short of commercial expectations — especially in light of the concurrent rise of his Jersey shore compadre Bruce Springsteen — Southside and company focused mostly on touring.
They don’t do the road-dog slog of the old days, when 250 dates a year was the norm, but the Jukes still cover plenty of turf. And they try their level best not to let performing get stale. “I’ve never wanted to just go out and play the songs,” Southside says. “I need to find that nugget in the middle of the night, where the audience clicks and is really there, and we’re all in that night, in that moment.”
With an eight-piece backing band (including four horns), Southside, 60, shouts and wails and dances and sweats and jokes his way through sets that put a premium on spontaneity — sometimes taken to extremes. “I was drivin’ to a gig one time and I heard ‘Walk Away Renee’ on the radio, the Four Tops version,” Southside recalls. “So on stage that night I just started singing it. [Guitarist] Bobby [Bandiera] started playing it and we did it as a duet. A couple nights later, the drums and bass came in — they’d gone over it a little bit — and we added it to the set; ended up putting it on a record. When it works, it really works — but it doesn’t always work.”
Southside Johnny is a gifted singer, with a natural soul moan, an extra gear that brings out the grit, and a knack for calibrating his voice to fit the song, be it a jazzy ballad, a Stax-styled stomper like “Talk to Me” or Sam Cooke’s good-times anthem “Having a Party.”
For those other than his devoted cult of fans, Southside is perhaps best known as the guy who got left in Springsteen’s dust.
Posted by Eric Snider on Feb. 6, 2009, at 12:22 pm
John Wesley darts into his rehearsal room at a warehouse in an industrial section of Ybor City hunting for one of his $3,000 Paul Reed Smith guitars. “Ugh,” he groans. “I thought it was in here. I guess it must be at home.”
Most guitarists fortunate enough to own a PRS might be panicked if it wasn’t within arm’s length, but not Wesley — he has eight of them, courtesy of an endorsement deal with the manufacturer.
Nice perk if you can get it.
John Wesley on stage with Porcupine Tree
John Wesley is not a rock star, but he’s one of the more successful musicians that Tampa Bay has produced. The 46-year-old guitarist/singer/songwriter flies under the local radar for the most part. That’s because his main gig — the one that affords him those gaudy axes and a salary that provides a comfortable living — is as a hired-gun guitarist for the British art-rock band Porcupine Tree.
In seven years with the group, Wesley has toured all over the U.S., Europe, Mexico, Australia and Japan. Porcupine Tree routinely plays shows to crowds in excess of 2,000 — more overseas. Wesley performs out front, stage right, covering intricate guitar parts, background vocals and a handful of solos during the band’s two-hour sets. With a split signal and special pickup, he uses his Paul Reed Smiths to play both acoustic and electric parts.
But Wesley also has other musical outlets beyond his role as sideman. “I remember we closed a tour at the Millennium Dome in London in front of several thousand people and three days later I was playing solo in a [local] restaurant in front of three people who weren’t sure they wanted me there,” he says with a chuckle. “So, it can be humbling.”
Posted by Eric Snider on Jan. 30, 2009, at 1:34 pm
A few days before Damon Fowler’s new, nationally released CD, Sugar Shack, came out on Jan. 27, I sat with him in the CL studio for a lengthy conversation. The 29-year-old Tampa native was enthusiastic, but realistic, about the CD, released on the San Francisco blues label Blind Pig. He also knows he has some stereotypes to overcome. Here’s a portion of the feature story that will run in next week’s issue and be up online soon:
Damon Fowler knows what you’re thinking, some of you at least:
Here comes another fresh-faced, guitar-slingin’ white boy with a new album out on a national blues label, further populating the already crowded ranks of guitar-slingin’ white boys who play real fast and real long and can’t sing worth a damn but think of themselves as real bluesmen.
Damon Fowler doesn’t blame you for thinking this, but he wants you to know: It’s not true.
“It is a trap — a white boy with a guitar,” Fowler says. “It’s terrible for me. I mean, I like some of those blues hotshot guys like Stevie Ray Vaughan, but there was only one Stevie Ray Vaughan, and now you got all these guys in ponchos boot-scootin’ and playing [Stratoscasters] and it’s all so contrived. It’s what’s wrong with the blues — that and harmonica players in purple suits who try to sing like something they’re not.”
No, really, Damon, don’t hold back.
“A lot of times that shit’s just an excuse for playing guitar. Put together a little song like “I’m lonely for my baby, I’m lonely for my baby, oh yeah. She don’t come to see me” — and then you wail [on guitar] for 10 minutes.”
“It’s not a blues record.”
That’s how Fowler, 29, succinctly describes Sugar Shack.
Click here for the full story, along with video and audio.
Damon Fowler’s CD Release show is tonight at Skipper’s Smokehouse, 8 p.m., presented by WMNF. $10 advance, $15 at the door.
Check out audio and video of Damon talking and performing on CL Sessions.
Five years ago, any music industry conference would feature hours of discussion about how to get your compact disc into the hands of DJs on FM radio, or tips on how to press and package a CD that wouldn’t get buried on the desk of an A&R executive at some major label. A lot has happened in five years. On Saturday, June 13 and 14, 
Perhaps I was just young, but there seemingly was a time when 
@autopsy4: 
