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)

Tobacco explains his definition of “pop”: songs that get their point across in two or three minutes, that have catchy vocals and instrumentals, that are influenced by experimental techniques used in pop music of the ’60s and ‘70s. “If everyone could just get over the fact that it’s not what they’re used to hearing…” he muses.

But while Black Moth’s music is sticky, glittery and bright like pop, it’s too off-kilter and sonically adventurous to have true mainstream appeal. And the songs have titles like “Fields Are Breathing” and “Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise,” and blotter paper lyrics (“Iron lemonade, wash my friends away / Neon lemonade, eat my face away”) delivered via whispery-warm vocoderfied vocals set against a swirling symphony of synthesized sound. It’s hard to think anything but hallucinatory thoughts when listening.

Surprisingly, Black Moth has toned down the face-melting mania and glitchy noise of their previous three albums. Eating Us is more wistful, dreamy and laid-back than Black Moth has ever sounded. Tobacco admits he made a concentrated effort to steer clear of his really gritty “coming over the speaker system at a public pool” sound. “I thought it would be better to just focus on making the songs as clear as possible, just to see if they could hold up under a more traditional type of treatment.”

The album was recorded at Tarbox Road Studios and marks the first time Black Moth has ventured into a modern recording studio and made a hi-fi album. “Everything I do is normally at home over years,” says Tobacco, who writes the music solo and brings his finished ideas to the band. Eating Us is also the first Black Moth album to feature live drumming instead of drum machine fills as well as in-studio assistance and tracking by Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann.

Bass, drums and a collection of vintage analog synthesizers and keyboards paired with Tobacco’s vocoder-processed vocals help the band achieve their distinctive antique electronica feel. “They are the sound.”

Nothing is sequenced or sampled or pre-recorded in a live setting, and Tobacco admits the band doesn’t really attempt to engage the audience. The visuals projected onto a screen behind the band are created by Tobacco himself and play throughout each performance “to entertain people, and also to distract from the fact that we are sort of just concentrating on what we are doing.”

Black Moth initially evolved from a series of musical projects by Tobacco and his bassist cousin Power Pill Fist (real name Ken Fec). The two played together for several years before teaming up with some other Pittsburgh-area musicians ­— Seven Fields of Aphelion (Maureen Boyle), Father Hummingbird (Seth Ciotti) and IFfernaut (Donna Kyler) — to form Black Moth Super Rainbow in 2003. They put out two albums before getting picked up by Graveface Records in 2005, which were re-released shortly thereafter along with a new EP, Lost, Picking Flowers in the Woods. Black Moth brewed up a fresh electro-rock record with The Octopus Project in 2006, kept the indie buzz going with a successful SXSW debut in 2007, and went on to release a much-lauded candy-coated third full-length, Dandelion Gum, also in 2007, which led to opening slots later that year for Aesop Rock and the Flaming Lips.

Black Moth was mostly quiet in 2008 while Tobacco and Power Pill Fist did the solo thing, though they satiated fans in November with The Drippers EP, a compilation of lost tracks from the Dandelion Gum era among other odds and ends. The fivesome re-converged to record Eating Us in early 2009.

Tobacco has no real plans for any future recordings with Black Moth, and says that after this tour, “I think I just want to do something else for a minute and stop thinking about all this Black Moth stuff.”

Black Moth Super Rainbow w/Serengeti and Polyphonic, Fri., July 31, 9 p.m., Crowbar, Ybor City, $10 (ages 18 & up)

Video, “Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise,” from Eating Us

BMSR

Video, “Sun Lips,” from Dandelion Gum. Out there shit, with rodents.

Black Moth Super Rainbow: Lost, Picking Flowers in the Woods during SXSW 2007 at the Graveface Records Showcase at the Ritz.

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.”

http://cltampa.com/content/Wonderlust_King.mp3

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)

Leilani: You write it and you maestro it?

Eugene: Well of course – that’s my religion. That’s what I do. Since I was 14 years old in my first band, I wrote songs and I wanted to be successful as a leader, in every band that I was ever in, starting in the Ukraine back in 1986, when I was just a crazy kid with a dream.

Leilani: You do have a super vibrant stage persona… Is that just how you always were?

Eugene: Well, what really happened is that in my childhood, I was put into very hardcore long distance running program. And parallel to that I was, of course, a musical fanatic, so when punk rock came to Ukraine, and I got into it, I simply took my abilities of marathon runner on stage, and it didn’t seem to me anything special about it, because running ten miles was quite a normal activity for me. So then, joined with loud amplifiers … (he laughs). You know it escalated a bit more, and people started coming to see it and say “Wow, what a great stage presence.” But for me it was a normal thing I’d done for years, going through adrenaline rush of running so many miles every day, or 5, 6 times a week. So it’s kind of a combination of art and…

Leilani: Endurance?

Eugene: Endurance is the word. You know stamina and endurance is a big part of the warrior mentality we were raised with.

We were obviously raised in the cold war time, and everyone who grew up then was supposed to be a great warrior and soldier, and nevermind that war never started, but the abilities are there. Even though it can be seen in a kind of a, a you know, propagandistic light, this upbringing, but in the same light it is also a profound way of seeing it, because the archetype of a warrior goes much deeper into cultures than its political meaning. It’s a very particular spiritual realm…

Leilani: And that’s the type of thing you draw on when you perform and you write your music?

Eugene: For sure. I mean, from Carl Jung to Krishna Morty to feminists to punk rock, back to Dionysus – you know, there is an archetype of a warrior, and being a warrior doesn’t mean necessarily you need to win and succeed. It’s just a spiritual condition of living a worthwhile life.

Leilani: Is there anything you do to get yourself ready and pumped up for live shows?

Eugene: In the past, yes there was a lot to prepare, because every show was about surviving. It was always so intense and breathtaking ‘til about an hour before …

You know, for years it took me to work out, what is the right mixture of athletic warm-up and alcohol dosage to kind of get into that right frame of mind, but now, after doing some 200 shows a year, I just kind of became professional enough where I don’t need any preparations. Just give me the fucking microphone and I’m ready to go. Like now, I’m ready, where’s this fucking thing, let’s do it, I’m here for rock and roll.

Leilani: I know when I saw you guys at the State Theater [last June] there was one girl in particular who jumped on stage, and you guys had a funny little flirtation going on. Usually people tend to get thrown off stage immediately, but you seem to incorporate it into the show, and you don’t usually see stuff like that.

Eugene: For me, music is a way to feel brotherhood and closeness, so anything that has to do with any kind of social model of behavior that is dragging us down on a daily basis can basically fuck off, in that magical time on stage. And I love building all possible bridges and giving people opportunities to flip out. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I mean, one of my favorite things to do is to craft and to write songs and tell stories, and another thing is to really just flip out basically, and release kind of my unruly energies. But that girl was obviously having a great time, and as much as I can I never let security or somebody ruin it for them.

That’s what music is really all about. Music is a uniter, so anything that has to do with VIP and ropes and barriers is not my way. Sometimes I have to deal with it, and sometimes I’m put behind those barriers, but I do all I can to bring it down.

Leilani: Do you take credit for bringing gypsy punk to a wider audience?

Eugene: I don’t really care about things like that. I’m not from hip-hop world, and I don’t need to beat myself in the chest and say that I invented the fucking hip-hop, or I invented this or that. It’s for me great enough to know that I wrote my own songs, and that those melodies found ways into people’s hearts. So, I know what we did, and I was there when it was happening, and that’s beautiful enough for me. And yes I know that there are kids in San Francisco and skate punk kids down in California who are now listening to gypsy music from Romania, and I know how they got into it, but it’s not really about taking credit for it, it’s just the beauty of it, that it happens.

I don’t really believe in any isolated powers of the individual. I think that cultural tendencies for that were there already just like they were there in the ’60s for the Beatles and for Dylan, and just like they were there in ’70s for punk rock, you know?

It’s just culture, like anything else, goes in certain ways, and it reaches a new plateau were a new injection is necessary, and it usually comes from the outside, and in the late ’90s, it was very obvious that the U.S. was in a musical crisis, big time, and it had to take influences from outside because it was a real, you know, regurgitation bonanza.

Leilani: Do you find that all the travelling you do has helped you to incorporate different cultures and different styles of music into your own? And fueled your creativity?

Eugene: It’s a direct reflection of it. You’re not going to walk out unaffected and I welcome those things. But for me, it’s never about directly kind of taking on the so-called fucking flavor. I don’t care about that. It’s more about like, about actually spending time and becoming part of that culture, and more like telling their stories through your filter, and so of course, all the influence that we take is layered and textured in, but essentially it’s really about just writing your own songs, there is really nothing more vital than that, you know?

Leilani: Are you guys working on a new album right now?

Eugene: Yeah, we just finished a record with Rick Rubin. We’re very excited; it’s going to be fucking bombastic! It’s a very, very energetic record.

Wait ‘til you fucking hear it. It’s going to be exactly what it needs to be.

Leilani: Was Rubin more hands-on than other producers you’ve worked with?

Eugene: We had the most creative time, and a fucking great time, you know what I mean? The studio is a very complicated thing for any band, but really, it was just like our beings opened up to everything that we ever wanted to say.

Leilani: You have a pretty notorious mustache – I’m a mustache connoisseur and I’ve got to say it’s a pretty fantastic mustache. Any plans on ever shaving it, or…

Eugene: See, that’s like the last thing that I ever thought about or cared about … It’s always amazed me that it has any kind of notice whatsoever, or it’s considered to be some kind of fashion statement or anything…

Leilani: Well, it’s just so fabulous!

Eugene: Well … thank you very much, but I’m still going to withdraw back from backing it up by any statements. It’s as simple as like, my father had it, and my grandfather had it, and my great-great-grandfather had it, and I just came back from Ukraine where we headlined a festival, and everybody there had it, as simple as that, the roots.

But, well, you know, if it helps to kill fascism, I’m not going to get in the way of that.

Gogol Bordello plays The Ritz Ybor Monday, July 27, at 7 p.m.; tickets are $23 and are worth every penny.

Gogol Bordello with Madonna at Live Earth, 2007, performing “La Isla Bonita.”

Gogol Bordello performing Not a Crime live on Later with Jools Holland

GOGOL BORDELLO NON STOP FILM TRAILER

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.

Video after the jump.

Meg & Dia play the Warped Tour on Sun. July 26 at Vinoy Park, St. Petersburg.

You’re at least in a tour bus, right?

We have a bus, thank goodness. I can’t see how people do it in vans.

So the good stuff about Warped …

We get to see a lot of good bands. We were on the tour in ’06 and ’07, and it’s like a family reunion. The crew, the stagehands, everyone is really nice here. We’re hanging out with them more than anyone. Warped is real earth-friendly, too. Kids are easily influenced, so they can walk by charities and maybe stop in.

But I see 12-year-olds on their way to the Trojan condom tent. I mean, it’s good to be safe, but when you’re 11? “But it’s safe.” I wanna say, “No it’s not!” I guess I’m somewhat conservative, but that’s too young. There’ll be a punk rock band telling the crowd to put their middle finger in the air, and I’m like, “Cool — punk rock.” And then I look around and there’s little kids watching. It’s like, “Oh no.”

I always think of Warped as a boys club. How are you relating to all the guys?

Well, I met this guy in a band the other day, and he was like, “You should come by; I make these awesome whiskey and ginger ale drinks. So I was like, “Sounds good.” And then he looks at me real serious and says, “I have a girlfriend. I just wanna be friends. Just so you know that.”

That’s a strange kind of role reversal. You tend to think of the guys as predators. Here’s a guy who wants to make sure you’re not a predator.

There are all these guys bro’in’ down, gambling, smoking. When I sit down I feel weird. It’s a little hard for me to make friends in that scene when if I talk to anybody they think I’m hitting on them. I have made some cool friends, though. This one guy and I started exchanging books. I gave him a Buddhist book — I’m not a Buddhist, but I’m interested — and he gave me a Kurt Vonnegut book. We’ve started a little book club. We’re the nerds on the tour.

You’re singing on Here, Here and Here has a real edge. There’s an element of confrontation and anger there. Where does that come from?

I think the spirit of my vocals comes out most heavily because I wrote a lot of the lyrics on the record. And the lyrics really meant something to me. On the previous albums, the lyrics came from a lot of literature and books. This one was more about my personal life, and what I was going through at the time. I was still really bitter, and you can hear that some times [in the singing]. I didn’t feel I had to make the vocals nice, like pretty girls have to sound pretty.

What were you bitter about?

I was going through a very bad breakup. It was the first time I’d been alone since I was 15. Ever since I was 15, I always had a boyfriend. I’d break up with a boyfriend and find another one instantly, just because I would go hunting for it. Sometimes I wouldn’t even like them very much. But we could at least lean on each other.

It was the first time I had been alone for a long time — not having anyone to call, eating by yourself, people staring at you. Before, the band would say, “Why don’t you just be single for a while, relax.” In just about the last month, I’m become happy being alone.

You know what’s going to happen, right? You’ll find a new boyfriend, probably tonight.

Thanks for the jinx.

How does the creative dynamic work with Meg? She is, after all, the older sister.

I think whatever animosity there was has been ridden out. She’s been real supportive. She plays guitar and piano. She’ll add stuff to my songs to bring them to life. She’s real positive, but also critical. “What if you tried this?” Or sometimes, “You should really just get rid of that.”

Has being professional partners affected the sister bond.

We’re still very close.

So it sounds like your parents don’t have to worry themselves to death with their daughters out on the road. You seem like a level-headed pair.

They’ve always been real supportive. Meg and I are just really big nerds. It’s kind of ridiculous when people come and talk to us. We talk about books or some nerdy movie.

Have you come under pressure from the marketing people to use your sex appeal in a way that might make you uncomfortable?

We don’t wanna be like Britney Spears. We’re interested in being more — I don’t wanna say classy, because I don’t think showing skin is always a bad thing. But we’re just nerdy and kind of keep to ourselves.

Meg & Dia, “Monster”

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.

The indie quintet began nurturing a following in and around Texas, recorded and released their first EP, The Guest, in 2007 on indie label Bearded Beauty, and dove headfirst into touring on a national level. By the time 2009 rolled around, Dignan had criss-crossed the country several times, sold out the initial pressing of their EP (1,000 discs to be sure, but still impressive), digitally distributed a few thousand of their second EP, Tangled Woods Sessions, opened for the Plain White T’s, Ra Ra Riot and Color Revolt, among others, and accepted an invitation to perform at Paste Magazine’s Official 2009 SXSW Music Festival showcase. Invites from Cornerstone Festival and Pachanga Latin Music Festival followed.

But after so much touring, Dignan’s musicians needed some down time to expel all the ideas that had percolated on the road, and put to paper “different emotions we’ve felt along the way.”

So they returned to Texas, holed up for 10 days with no outside interruptions, and crafted the first six tracks of their debut LP, Cheaters & Thieves. “When we wrote these songs, we decided we needed to leave our comfort zone, not to have any restrictions,” Garcia explains. “We just took our time, locked ourselves up in a room and these are what came out.”

There was never any question of whether or not to produce it professionally — the money just wasn’t there and Pena was well-versed enough in DIY recording techniques and technology that he was able to work out what the band needed to get the job done. At some point, they tossed around the idea of bringing in a small-time producer to help push them in the right direction. But it just didn’t work out. “We decided we could do it by ourselves and that we didn’t need anyone to give us any pointers or feedback,” says Garcia. “The quality of the songs, the artistic direction, the lyrical content — we’re all very proud of the project and that we did it on our own.”

Captivating and haunting, Cheaters & Thieves touches upon love and loss, religion (“You’ll find me running / running from the Devil / but running from God / I’m running from God … And I find myself again”), the struggle between right and wrong, the search for life’s answers, the passage of time and other profound subjects. The album’s single, “Two Steps,” ponders imminent death with aching loveliness and earned enough popular votes to get onto a Paste Magazine/Heineken CD Sampler this past June.

The band recorded the album in their practice space — a garage converted into a informal sound studio — in bits and pieces and mixed it at Premium Recordings in Austin. “We’re really happy about how the recordings came out,” Garcia tells me.

Cheaters & Thieves turned out to be an almost entirely indie effort and Garcia says that Dignan is enjoying being unencumbered. “Bands think, ‘If only we could get signed by a label and get that backing and support.’ But that support doesn’t necessarily mean anything nowadays. If you go out and work for it, it will work out for you.”

So far he and his bandmates have benefited from the results of their DIY methods. “We can record ourselves and make it sound good, so why not continue to do it that way?”

Yeah, why not? The album sounds as lush and as full as it would if it were recorded in a “real” sound studio — and it cost them a grand total of $600. “We’re proud to say the record has only been out for 10 days and we’re already out of debt.”

Garcia insists that although Dignan is pleased about their rising success, the goal is not necessarily to sell their music but to spread it around and enjoy the experience. “We want to meet people, share meals with new friends, share our music. It’s a blast to travel the country with your best friends and do it for free. We just want to play music and we’re very fortunate and blessed that we’re able to do it.”

Dignan/Look Mexico/XOXO/Alexander and the Grapes, Fri., July 17, 9 p.m., Crowbar, Ybor City, $6 in advance/$8 dos (ages 18 and up).

“Tangled Woods”

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.

As with any conference, the nighttime showcases are the payoff – a chance for attendees to party and an opportunity for the out of town industry folks to see what musical talent the surrounding area has to offer.

On Saturday night, Tampa’s New World Brewery featured performances from Rebekah Pulley, Lorna Bracewell, The Skull and Bone Band and 10th Concession. Crowbar hosted a Mohawk Bomb showcase and The Roosevelt had planned a “green” concert featuring some area hip-hop favorites like Dynasty and powered by a generator that ran on vegetable oil. Early Saturday, word had gotten out that the generator had broken during a run-through and that the Roosevelt showcase was cancelled.

###

Sunday’s activities were mainly centered around The Bunker in Ybor City, which is home to the Tre Amici coffeeshop, REAX Space, a few art galleries and the neighboring Ybor City Museum.

Some of Sunday’s workshops included “DIY Sound Recording Techniques” at REAX Space as well as “Tips on Promotional Photography” (hint: no brick walls or train tracks) and “The State of The Scene” discussion at Tre Amici.

This talk was moderated by event organizer T. Hampton Dohrman and featured Courtney, Joel Cook (REAX) and yours truly. It began as a polite enough re-cap of the weekend and what could be done differently in years to come and escalated into a microphone free-for-all on how Tampa needs to publicize itself to become the next Austin or Seattle.

Singer-songwriter Emily Roff planted herself in front of the microphone and made a case for a large music festival that would draw thousands of people from all over the world. When some crowd members yelled, “What about [Tropical] Heatwave?” (referencing the annual music fest hosted by WMNF that typically features performers from the blues, folk, Americana and world beat genres), Roff shrugged. She’d never heard of it.

Beauvilles frontman Shawn Kyle made a spirited appearance at the discussion, only half-jokingly announcing his 2012 bid for city council and bemoaning the lack of attention the local media and concert promoters give to area college campuses (USF, UT, Eckerd, SPC, etc.).

What did come from the heated discussion was a summation of points that included the following:

1. The internet has replaced FM radio as a highly-coveted media outlet.

2. Musicians must treat their music as a business.

3. Musicians should treat Tampa and St. Petersburg as two separate markets to avoid saturation. (This point was argued)

4. Even though recording and distribution has become decentralized, quality recordings and the packaging and presentation of materials is still very important (maybe even more so).

5. Bands must tour out of market (once they have established themselves regionally).

6. With the decline in the sale of actual recorded music, musicians must learn to diversify their content/revenue streams to include audio, video, performances, merchandise, ringtones et. al. and utilize networks and messaging to stay in touch with fans and followers. (See the content model here).

7. Music criticism is dead. (This point was not argued).

###

Here are some photos from the weekend:
Photos by Kelly Hickman | Photos by Denis Baldwin

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.

Videos after the jump.

“I started writing, but had no particular ambition,” he says. “I was in a place where I wanted to write something that made me feel good, something that I might listen to.”

Next thing he knew he had six songs and decided to record an EP under the name Sunbears! During a Bernard tour, Berlin and Bowser had visited the Smithsonian in D.C. “There was this little replica sunbear standing upright,” he recalls fondly. “It was like, ‘Look at this little guy. It’s a sunbear.’ I think they’re indigenous to Malaysia. They might be endangered. The name just stuck in my head.”

Berlin released the first Sunbears! EP, For Everyone — which he recorded entirely on his own — independently in a download-only format. He layered gauzy, slow-moving keyboards into a lush backdrop for melancholy hooks sung in his fervent, at times pleading, tenor. All told, not bad, but the new stuff retained vestiges of Bernard’s Radiohead fetish.

Then Berlin and Bowser patched things up. He hesitated to ask the drummer to work with him again, but finally summoned the resolve and Bowser readily accepted. They jumped right into recording a new EP, and the collaborative environment — “to have Jared be there with me and excited, it was such a fun thing” — had a profound impact on Berlin. It was if he’d taken his music and shaken out all the mope.

The second EP, Dream Happy Dreams, opens with a burping synth-drum beat and the sound of little children laughing. The song, “A Lovely Tuesday Afternoon,” then launches into an uptempo rock groove, tinkling pianos and the kind of soaring synth line that would be right at home on a Flaming Lips record. The melody soars even higher when Berlin sings, “We’ll make it/ We’re tired but we still have faith/ We’ll make it.”

Dream Happy Dreams continues in this uplifting vein, adding influences from Berlin’s youth like the Beatles and Beach Boys. Berlin, who lived in small-town Texas before moving to Jacksonville at 16, was reared on ’60s music. His father was a DJ at an oldies station. “I’d go with him to the station, get a Mountain Dew and a bag of Skittles and we’d play this game: who can name the song the fastest?” he remembers. “My dad was a Beatles head. I got all of that ’60s stuff in volumes, and didn’t give any resistance.”

Because he was home-schooled, Berlin didn’t have a big peer group to hip him to the latest new sounds. It wasn’t until his mid-teens that he developed his own, more modern, tastes. “It was never about the need to check out the latest Bush record,” he says. “In the ’90s, I started getting into the Flaming Lips, Ben Folds, quirky, nerdier stuff. Weezer, I loved Weezer. Still do.”

That sense of whimsy finally found its way into Berlin’s music with Dream Happy Dreams. “As we were working on it, Jared and I looked at each other and said, ‘I think this is good. This feels like our own sound,’” he says.

Despite the artistic success of the music, Sunbears! were determined not to jump back into the music-biz rat race. They didn’t shop the EPs to labels, didn’t rustle up a booking agent, didn’t even press CDs.
But a funny thing happened. Sunbears! started to take off anyway. One of their favorite bands, Dredg out of San Francisco, played Jacksonville on a Halloween, and Sunbears! wrangled an opening slot — strictly for the fun of it. The duo performed a loopy set dressed as zombies.

“Dredg was more serious, darker, but they came up to us afterward and said, ‘We have 20 dates all through the Midwest. If you guys wanna play, it starts next week. We can toss you 150 a night,’” Berlin recounts. “We thought, ‘Yeah, we can jump in a car and drive across the country for a couple weeks. It was amazing. We played for like 1,200 people a night. And it was weird, because the whole time it was happening, we never had any intention of making anything happen. We played 300 shows with Bernard and never came close to what Sunbears! has done, and Sunbears! is on its 48th show.”

They include a month-long tour with Black Kids and Mates of State.

How long will this serendipitous tour arc last for Sunbears!? Will they have to, at some point, knuckle down and try?

“I guess it’s something we’ll have to deal with soon,” Berlin says with a chuckle. “I really don’t want to start looking at things like, ‘What can we do to push this thing forward?’ I’ve been through that a couple times before. I’d rather it grow organically.

“And I’m weird about promoting myself. I feel like a tool saying, ‘Check out my record.’ I think the music’s been getting better and better and I’m happy with it. We’re not trying to impress anyone.”

Pretty impressive.

The July 3rd Hotdog Show w/ Sunbears!/Juicy Pony/The Grecian Urn/eFFeX/Shunda K./DJ Mini Horse Fri., July 3, (doors at 9 p.m.), Crowbar, Ybor City. $5.

Sunbears! on stage performing “We’ll Make It.”

A live Sunbears! performance of Bowie’s “Under Pressure.”

Jonathan Berlin alone at the piano performing the Sunbears! “It’s Too Late.”

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.”

Vidal has been doing the solo musician thing full time for the past few years. Recently, after a gig with a few other Florida area bands, Vidal came up with an idea to pool their energies and tap into new audiences — create a Florida circuit to celebrate and draw attention to the state’s original and diverse musical culture.

And thus the Citrus Circuit Tour was born. The participating bands share rides and gear, and each hosts the others in their respective home towns. Have Gun Will Travel headlines in Tampa with Vidal, The Takers, and Truckstop Coffee providing support.

Vidal has a pretty positive outlook for a musician working the regional angle, not necessarily an easy feat. “I think you just can’t lose your hunger. And the grass is not greener. It can’t get more green and lush than it is here, on so many levels.”

The show takes place this Saturday, June 27, 9 p.m., at New World Brewery, Ybor City, $7 (21 and up).

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.

Read more

Check out CL’s main music site

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. But Beautiful debuted at No. 1 on the jazz charts, but Scaggs, 65, does not consider himself a jazz singer. You won’t hear any scatting or bold deconstructions from him. Instead, he hews to the gorgeous melodies, adding slight curves and punctuations.

The singer did not enter into the world of standards lightly. He started toying with the tunes about 10 years ago, after making friends with a cluster of jazz musicians in his adopted hometown of San Francisco. The vocalist quickly discovered that the material “is much harder than more modern pop songs,” he said in a phone interview.

“I had to study. There were a few songs that fell a little more naturally into my style of singing, the ones in a bluesier vein. The rest of it, I had to work hard, study a lot, do a lot of practicing, searching, finding my own way with the songs. I’ve learned a lot, and it’s served me in other [musical] forms.”

That’s important. Scaggs hasn’t forgotten his past associations with pop/R&B, blues and rock. In fact, one of the most overlooked albums of the decade has been Dig, a program of sensual blue-eyed soul that could be regarded as “Silk Degrees II.” Big problem: Dig was released on Sept. 11, 2001. Into the tank it went.

These days, Scaggs’ concerts run the gamut of his wide-ranging musical palette, incorporating the Gershwin/Ellington/Weill milieu with originals from his own book. It’s significant to note that Scaggs does not try to standard-ize everything. Many of his hits retain the spunk and bounce of their original versions. “Some things have to stay within a certain arrangement — they don’t work out of context,” he explains. “‘Breakdown Dead Ahead’ doesn’t work without that tempo and aggressive guitar style. ‘Low Down,’ on the other hand, I’ve done in a number of different ways. It’s pretty malleable.”

Malleable is a good adjective for Scaggs’ career. He grew up near Dallas and started out as a preteen singing in his friend Steve Miller’s blues band, then scuffled around the London blues scene before settling in the hub of hippiedom, San Francisco, during the Summer of Love, 1967.

Reuniting with Miller, he appeared on the Steve Miller Band’s first two albums, then scored a solo deal on Atlantic. His self-titled debut, a gritty blues-rock effort recorded at Muscle Shoals and featuring lead guitar by Duane Allman, garnered only a lukewarm commercial reception.

Scaggs switched to Columbia and by 1974’s Slow Dancer had moved in a slicker pop-soul direction. He then joined forces with a cadre of studio musicians who would later form the band Toto and concocted Silk Degrees. Songs from the LP dominated the airwaves and also found their way into the clubs.

Although not categorically a disco record, it rode the wave that washed over American pop culture. Scaggs gently rejects the notion that Silk Degrees is among the best disco albums ever. “I never related what I did to the trendy scenes around me,” he says. “The style was more derived from people like the Isley Brothers, a lot of songs that came out of Philly and other urban R&B. The only things with contemporary dance beats were ‘What Can I Say,’ ‘Low Down’ and ‘It’s Over.’”

1977

Videos from that era capture Scaggs dressed in suits and big-collar shirts, tentatively dancing in front of large ensembles. They show a recalcitrant performer, a reluctant superstar. After 1980’s Top 10 Middle Man spawned the hits “JoJo” and “Breakdown Dead Ahead,” Scaggs simply left the biz.

He owned and operated the San Francisco nightclub Slim’s and performed there on rare occasions. “I just took off,” he explains, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I had family matters to attend to, two young children to raise. I just didn’t have any music in me at the time. Because I’d had a great deal of success, I was able to step away from it. Retire, if you like.”

He returned to the shelves with 1988’s Other Roads, which peaked at No. 47 on the Billboard 200 and yielded the middling Adult Contemporary hit “Heart of Mine.” It was his last taste of chart success.

Although it’s improbable that Scaggs will remotely approach his former commercial perch, he sounds perfectly sanguine about walking away while his career was in high gear. “I needed those years to let the music come back into me,” he says. “I don’t think I would be as interested or involved in it as I am today if I wasn’t able to take that time off.”

Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald
Thurs., July 2, 7:30 p.m., Ruth Eckerd Hall. $103, $72.50, $62.50. rutheckerdhall.com.

“Breakdown Dead Ahead” from the 2000s

“Lowdown” from 1976 in Japan

“Never Let Me Go,” with still photos, but a good example of Boz singing a standard.

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.”

Audio clips after the jump.

Born in a boxing ring is a great way to put it. Kristeen doesn’t so much “play” the piano as she does “beat it into submission.” The resulting sound is like heavy-metal with a piano. Vocally, Kristeen has a multi-octave range that she’s not afraid to use. Ordinarily, I’m not too keen on the vocal stylings she uses but together with the music they make it work perfectly.

Maybe I’m just getting old, but KRISTEENYOUNG are edgy, brash and dramatic … and Essential Listening.

KRISTEENYOUNG – If You Marry Him
KRISTEENYOUNG – Comfort Is Never A Goal
KRISTEENYOUNG – He’s Sickened By My Crude Emotion

KRISTEENYOUNG’s Official Site, KRISTEENYOUNG on myspace, Buy Music for Strippers, Hookers, and the Odd On-Looker