First of all, I would like to thank Jay-Z for dropping his new album, the first of his I actually think is worth all the hype that's usually showered on him, on my birthday so I could kick off my day with its sounds. It's nice to know you're thinking of me, dude. But I am a little worried about my sleep schedule last night (see Fig. 1) perfectly aligning with that album's title. Is Jay-Z truly part of the Illuminati and capable of mind control from hundreds of miles away?!
I would also like to thank Bong Joon-ho for dropping his latest film, one I've been anxiously anticipating, just in time so I could watch it this afternoon. Okja did not disappoint. It made me laugh. It made me recoil in horror. It made me think. It made me feel. Thank you.
I would like to thank Popeye's chicken for still being there to deliver my customary birthday dinner. I ate too much and it was all delicious.
Fig. 2
Edgar Wright also deserves a big slab of thanks for releasing his latest movie just in time for me to thoroughly enjoy it in the theater this evening. No spoilers! But it's really good.
I would like to thank the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion for "Bellbottoms," a song that still excited me as much today every time I hear it as when I first encountered its mind-blowing power 23 years ago.
Thank you to my coworkers who had no idea who The Chemical Brothers are, making me feel suitably ancient.
Tom Petty and his Heartbreakers deserve a round of applause from me as well, since they provided the soundtrack that kept me in a cheery mood late last night and into my 45th year.
I'd like to thank David Bowie. That's it. I just want to thank David Bowie.
I'd like to thank my wife for buying me Juul Pods as a birthday gift in hopes I will smoke actual cigarettes less and live longer. I'm trying, honey.
And thanks to all of you who read this, and everyone who sent me birthday wishes, for making this big doofus (see Fig. 2) feel pretty special today.
Here’s an unexpected little gem from French artist Matt Springfield that popped up in my mailbox today. “Poplife! (Single Mix)” is a musical tweaking of a track that original appeared on Springfield’s 2012 album Erase All Data. A few extra synths in the intro and some shifting of dynamics within the song turns what was an excellent slide of danceable power pop into a new wave tank of a tune.
I’m only now making my way through Springfield’s earlier stuff, but so far all I’ve listened to is similar enough to “Poplife!” that I’m still hooked and digging deeper.
You’re faced with what feels like a million decisions all at once, and no answer feels right because this is YOUR FUTURE you’re deciding on. Everything from changing locks to replacing floors to tearing out a ceiling to discover that the weird covering is actually glued to the plaster beneath and there is a hundred years of black dust raining down on you as you make the discovery.
Through all of this I’m been super busy at the 9-to-5 due to a really cool project that’s launching very soon (that I can’t wait to turn you on to!) which is totally doable, but at the same time, Mich’s office is also in the midst of a huge project she’s heavily involved in, so our time is spread pretty thin. Amazingly, she is somehow managing to do all her office work and wrangle the many, many contractors coming through with estimates and doing work.
I don’t know how she does it. It’s impressive.
Next week will be interesting—I’m taking most of the week off to finish packing and preparing the new place for our move. Schedules are tight, but luckily I booked this time a while ago.* I know, not much of a vacation, but it’ll be nice to have a couple additional free days to take care of all of this stuff. I hate moving. Hate it, hate it. I’m, a middle-aged man who has managed to accumulate a lot of stuff over the years, so packing is just so, so painful.** And then there’s figuring out where everything will go in the new place, and…
Ugh.
But aside from that “ugh” and the insanity and the stress and all the other fun stuff that goes along with being a homeowner, there is also this: awe. I am still in shock that the beautiful house with the gorgeous little yard I’ve been wandering around periodically over the last few days is ours. Ours, ours, OURS! And for all the headaches owning property is raining down on both me and Mich, it’s still a thrilling feeling.
To create our home.
*In my line of work, I always feel like there is never a good time to take any vacation time. I don’t know if that’s just my overwhelming guilt at actually using time off I have coming to me, or it’s just the speed and non-stop momentum of the career I picked. Probably a little of both. But I am jealous of people in my industry who seem to be able to take vacation time and just unplug, figuring everyone else can handle whatever comes up in their absence. How do you do that? I want to learn!
**Not to mention, boy are the cats in for a surprise!
After listening to the Baby Driver soundtrack, it's obvious Edgar Wright has taken the mantle of Master Movie Mixtape Maker™ from Quentin Tarantino. Not a clunker in the lot, If you've got Spotify, stream the magic below.
(Which, by the way, while I enjoyed judging the battle of bands I skipped their show for, I am still smarting over missing that show. I bet it was amazing. Maybe the best show of the year. They better come back through Chicago soon!)
Still in a bit of shock. And got pulled into work over the weekend so I haven't had time to properly process everything that happened this morning. But I promise more pictures once we take possession of our new home tomorrow!
It's aiming to be one of the most exciting, thrilling, terrifying, paralyzing, euphoric, confusing, confounding, transformative moments in my life.
I almost feel like I'm turning into a grown-up!
In the face of such a huge, momentous event that is arriving from over the horizon at an alarming speed, allow me to distract myself with one of my favorite one-and-a-half minute songs of all time.
I knew very little about Australia's San Cisco before yesterday. Aside from their new album The Water showing up in my inbox a while ago, the only other thing I had from them was an invite to a 2013 show they were playing in Chicago, which I immediately forwarded to the Chicagoist staff at the time in case anyone wanted to write about it. No one claimed it.
I wish I'd paid more attention to that 2013 email. But I'm glad I finally got around to listening to The Water yesterday since it brightened up my day immensely.
The album is stuffed with fizzy and jaunty rock pop and is way more assured and polished than it should be, given how young the band is. Though perhaps that's not surprising—this is the band's third album and they've been playing together since they were in high school (though those days are not that far behind them). The Water is a self-assured and musically mature effort, while still exuding a bouncy and authentic glow of youth.
Tl;dr—this is 36 solid minutes of undeniable summer jamz that have a darker heart than their sunny sonic composition might immediately convey, but your ears will be too busy smiling to notice until the third or fourth listen and you'll already be hooked.
The best news is that despite being based in Australia, the band is making their way to the States this fall! You can look for me at their Thalia Hall show on August 17. Don't live in Chicago? Check out all their upcoming tour dates here.
I got hip to Green Day just a titch too late to have seen them in any basements, though I had plenty of friends who did. I love how this video weaves grainy, early 924 Gilman Street footage over Green Day's most recent video off Revolution Radio (a kick ass album, by the way), and reminds the viewer that even mega-international superstars once played DIY clubs for just a couple buck a head for an all ages show.
Man, I wish I'd been to one on those basement or small club shows during the Lookout! days!
I'm almost done with Simon Reynolds' Shock And Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century, which has taken me longer than I anticipated to get though its 600+ pages.* And I have a couple shorter reads I'm ready to tackle that I'm hoping to finish before we move to our new house next month.** But I'm always behind in my reading stack, primarily because I have the tendency to buy new books I hear about on the radio, or on podcasts, or read about online or in magazines. But maybe it's time to pause on that front.
Luckily I got distracted and did not immediately jump onto AmazonSmile and order it. Had I done so, then I would have slapped myself silly just one week later. As I was packing up books to donate yesterday—I get a lot of review copies sent to me and if I don't keep them I donate them to Open Books—I came across, you guessed it, The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock by David Weigel.
Whew!
And yes, I'll tell you how it is once I finish it.
*The book is excellent; the time it's taken me to finish it has nothing to do with length or readability and everything to do with my insanely busy personal schedule.
The game beat it's Kickstarter goal of $10,000 hours before kicking off and now they're hoping to hit $20,000 with a week still to go. Head over to read the article and maybe you'll buy a game for yourself.
The History Of Color TV is based in Germany but led by British singer/guitarist Jaike Stambach. So the head-on slam of styles between austere gauzy, rainy guitars and a more languid strain of Britpop the group produces makes total sense. Britgaze? Shoepop? Neither? Neither.
There’s a fair amount of melodrama in this music, and for me that means this is an album for special moments and not heavy rotation, but I know many folks for whom this is the perfect tonic to even the sunniest of days. If you’re in the mood for a band that somehow mixes a dreamy lethargy with soaring volume and mournful melodies, then The History Of Color TV is something to pour into your ears, posthaste.
The strongest track, in my humble estimation, is the opener “Granite Verge of Tears,” a slowly building majestic little slice that puts visions of roaring seas far below a plunging cliff I’m standing on into my head. So stream it below and see what it evokes in your own imagination. And if you enjoy it just keep on streaming or just buy the whole thing.
Sometimes the opening line of a press bio actually does nail what you can expect from a band:
MINKA is a dance band. They live, breathe, and procreate in Philadelphia. They will play your roof or basement, warehouse or venue. They will play the bottom of your swimming pool. Dick Rubin, leader of the band, has been known to perform fully nude.
Once you throw in that the title of their new EP is Born In The Viper Room, you have a really good idea what to expect, but Oingo Boingo and The Cars rub shoulders with the imagined LA scene in MINKA’s version of The Viper Room. So this is what The Viper Room would sound like if it relocated to Philadelphia?
Actually they do remind me of quirky, urgent groups from the late ‘90s, like Ima Robot. Not a bad thing.
The EP jumps all over the place—the band’s sound is there but it feels like a group of musicians who are a little too accomplished to be able to stay in one place. The opening track “ I Can’t Shake This Feeling” is pure new wave, followed by the disco-lite “Josephine,” which is followed by the David Bowie-influenced “Gravity.” Actually, “Gravity” sounds more like a straight up Bowie imitation (which is actually vocally spot on) and I honestly can’t decide if I really like it or if the straight up Black Tie White Noise-era rip is really annoying.
And then there's the Cars meets Queen "Company Man" followed by the—uh, is that a Prince vibe?—dancey "Still Waiting" ... the point is the EP is all over the place, but at five songs this musical ADHD is OK. I do suspect they are probably a 100% fun live, party party, band.
Check out the whole EP below and tell me what you think. You can either stream it or download it for free / pay what you want.
So I admit that I’d been avoiding listening to the new Dan Auerbach album. I don’t have anything personal against the dude, but I’d grown a little tired of him. I’ve been a fan since the earliest days of The Black Keys. When I met Mich I think they might have actually been one of her own personal top five bands at the time. I’ve seen him grow from tiny clubs like The Empty Bottle to selling out Metro to working their way up through various Lollapalooza line-ups and selling out massive halls.
I think the turning point might’ve been a Lollapalooza after show at The Metro. Sine she loved the band so much I let Mich use my photo pass to shoot the band—and she did a fine job, she does know how to use a camera! But the crowd was so full of aggro drunk dudes who wanted to fight anything that moved, people so far removed from what I thought the band’s fanbase was, that it gave me pause and I took a few steps back. Funny how shitty concert experiences can change your perception of a band sometimes. It’s not their fault they started attracting asshole fans, but once that happens it’s hard to separate the two.
And yes, I’ve admired Auerbach’s solo work and collaborations on the production side with other artists (mostly*) but much of it didn’t have the spark early Black Keys material had and felt too polished.
And then comes along his new album Waiting On A Song, which is certainly polished, but only inasmuch as it feels so fresh and well realized it’s slowly growing irresistible. It totally mixes earthy ‘60s and '70s vibes as Auerbach mixes Southern Cali vibes with Motwon swing, and super catchy pop cores.
It totally doesn’t hurt that he recruited a bevy of legends to come in the studio and monkey around on the songs. When you’ve got John Prine, Duane Eddy, Jerry Douglas, Russ Pahl, Pat McLaughlin, Bobby Wood and Gene Chrisman on your team there’s a good chance the game is gonna end with you winning by a pretty large margin.
And Waiting On A Song is a winning album, as in winning me over, as in winning the early starting gun for summer vibes, and as in winning me back into the camp of Auerbach. His stuff in The Arcs pointed at the direction this second proper solo album would take, but it didn’t have quite the same tight approach of the songwriting on Waiting On A Song.
I heard an interview on a Rolling Stone podcast this morning where Auerbach said that when writing this he unplugged from pretty much everything—the web, the media, other music—and just wrote tunes with the folks he was collaborating with. So that probably explains the neat economy of the mostly perfect realizing of the tunes on the final tracklist. And with a running time of 33 minutes there ain't a second of filler.
Huh, I meant for this post to be a quick paragraph or two and two videos. I guess I had more thoughts on Auerbach in general than I realized!
So yeah, I held off listening to the new Dan Auerbach album, and that was a huge mistake. Don't make the same mistake.
* I still don't really dig that Lana Del Rey album. So sue me.
The Atomic Numbers operated out of Detroit in the late '90s and is one of those bands that I remember seeing for the first time and thinking "oh my god they are in my head how do they know to make this exact sound?!" So needless to say I was a fan.
A friend of mine was their booking agent, so they were high on my list of band I wanted to play The Note when I became talent buyer there. Most bands were resistant—it took me a while to convince people the venue was a viable place for the "cool rock bands" to play—but The Atomic Numbers were one of the first bigger name acts to agree to a show after I'd established a few months of music that proved I wasn't kidding about what I wanting to turn the club into.
If I remember correctly they only played The Note once, and I think the band broke up shortly after that (or went on a hiatus they never returned from), which bummed me out mightily. It's not easy to find much of their stuff online based on the time period they existed in, and the fact I don't think they really broke out of being a regional act. But man they were good. And heck, it even looks like Amazon still has one copy of the band's full-length you can buy!
If you can't snag that in time, I stumbled across Jeff Hupp's, the band's bassist, Soundcloud page which graciously has that whole, excellent, debut album streaming.
A while ago someone asked me why they haven’t read a review from me slamming this band or that in a very long time. And the obvious reason is that today, unless it’s a really big band making really terrible noise people should be warned about, what’s the point? I’d rather spend time turning people on to music I think they’ll like. And wouldn’t you rather read about music you might like?
That isn’t to say that a sharper, darker wit never slips into my writing, or gives shit to even the subjects I am behind. But I’ve definitely been trying to keep things positive.
The way things are in the world right, I’d rather not add to the doom and gloom if I don’t have to
I was supposed to see Boss Hog last weekend but life and work got in the way. I haven’t seen the band since they played The Metro in the late ‘90s (1995? 1996?) and I was really looking forward to it. But hey, what can you do. Hopefully they’ll come around when the release their next album in another 17 years.*
The band still has it on the new album Brood X, and Cristina Martinez + Jon Spencer sparks are still white hot. You have to love a couple that has been together this long as both lovers and collaborators, and still vibe off each other with such heat. And for such a public duo, the two are still shrouded in mystery and cool and attitude and that whole inscrutable and impenetrable layer that seems to settle over anyone who is a living legend.
Let’s get down and get gritty.
*This is a joke. Their last album came out in 2000. That would be lost on anyone not already a fan. Sorry 'bout that!
Hm, May seemed pretty below average, music-wise. I listened to less albums, and most of the ones I did scored on the lower end of the spectrum. I don't know what that means, exactly. It does seem to indicate we've hit a slight lull in the releases for the year. Of course there a bunch on the back burner, so maybe if I spend more time enjoying my porch on the weekends in June I'll have a better chance of finding some new discoveries that tickle me a bit more.
So, the stats.
The guide to understanding my rating system is here, if you're interested.
Total number of new/upcoming releases listened to in May 2017: 41
Number of those releases that rated 7-10: 0
Number of those releases that rated 4-6: 30
Number of those releases that rated 1-3: 11
Highest rated album: Paramore's After Laughter. And wow, did this catch me off guard when I realized it was actually the new album I probably listened to the most this month. Especially considering I’ve never really been a fan!
New band I’d never heard of that caught me off guard: Well, I’ve heard of the members of BNQT, but was ready to write them off as yet another indie supergroup with (mostly) lesser known players from famous bands. But their debut Volume 1 is really good!
Most surprising discovery: Just how good Elf Power still is on their new album Twitching In Time. I expected something pleasing, but not this satisfying.
