The Foundation Free Fridays series at Tipitina’s continues tonight with one of the busiest bands playing out of the city. Gravy opens.
In a wide-ranging conversation with the New Orleans Suspects’ bassist Reggie Scanlan, we touched on the past, present and future.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrSr_S_V8I4
The band has just returned from a 10-day tour in Colorado that took them all over the state. The tour culminated in two concerts in the idyllic mountain town of Telluride where they played at the famed Opera House and then performed in picturesque Town Park at the Telluride Jazz Festival. They hit the stage right before fellow New Orleanians, Galactic.
Despite the silly name, The Lunchtime Sardine Club, aka Oliver Newton, is no joke. Debut album Icecapades is out on Sonic Anhedonic Recording Co., and it’s cut from the same cloth as alternative folks artists Andrew Bird and Sufjan Stevens.
The Lunchtime Sardine Club make music that comes from deep within—the songs are beautifully intricate, yet they maintain a serene simplicity that makes them so accessible.
http://youtu.be/_-8QbnFTNVc
The recently released free track “I’m… Jesuschristmaam” is a good example of this. This track is possibly the strongest of the album, a wonderful 5-minute indie folk epic that builds us up and brings us down gently.
Some albums give off light; others suck it up like a black hole. They’re so dark you’d need Diogenes’ lantern to negotiate their lightless depths. Such an album is Pulp’s 1998 release This Is Hardcore, one of the most unremittingly bleak LPs this side of Lou Reed’s Überbummer Berlin. The brainchild of Jarvis Cocker, jaded romantic in search of purification through immersion in the squalid, This Is Hardcore is a joyless (but always melodic) diagnosis of the human condition, and the diagnosis isn’t good.
You’ve got the Fear, says Cocker, because you’re taking too many drugs, and you equate sex not with love but with pornography, and you fail your young and are terrified of growing old. And there aren’t enough kicks or kink out there to save you; and even the man who does right is dissatisfied. Cocker is the same fellow who 3 years earlier had written “Sorted for E’s & Wizz,” which eviscerated rave culture and reduced it to a lost soul who’s seriously lost the plot: “And this hollow feeling grows and grows and grows and grows/And you want to phone your mother and say/’Mother, I can never come home again/Cos I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere/Somewhere in a field in Hampshire.'” A nattering nabob of negativity he may have been, but no one else of Cocker’s time–which was marked by a rebirth of pride in the culture of the UK–wrote so cogently and forthrightly about the “hollow feeling” at the core of Cool Britannia.
Pulp was formed in 1978, but it wasn’t until 1995’s Different Class–with its hits “Common People,” “Mis-Shapes,” “Disco 2000,” and “Something Changed”–that the band became bona fide rock stars and reluctant members of the Britpop movement. And while Different Class was chock full of class-conscious satire and dark sarcasm, it sounded upbeat; “Sorted for E’s & Wizz” may well be the cheeriest-sounding song ever written about the down side of a drug culture, while “Common People,” as sarcastic a song as any ever written, is also perky and upbeat sounding.
He’s baaaaack! Nearly two decades have passed and the scars had almost healed when who should return to us like a reanimated New Romantic zombie but Adam Ant, the guy in the admiral’s jacket who gave us “Antmusic,” “Ant Rap,” and other songs of its anty ilk. Remember “Goody Two Shoes?” Of course you do. “Don’t drink/ Don’t smoke/ What do you do”? My answer, and I think it was the correct one, was always run like hell from wherever Ant’s voice was coming from.
But there are undoubtedly still Ant People out there who are overjoyed to have Ant back, and to them I bring glad tidings; not only has Ant released a new album, Adam Ant Is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter, but his Adam Ant & the Good, the Mad & the Lovely Posse Tour is making a stop at the 9:30 Club on Tuesday, August 13.
http://youtu.be/BjYCvC7koBg
The bizarrely attired Mr. Ant—who remains a sartorial outrage, although nowadays he looks more than a bit like Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow–was The Face in the early ’80s UK, what with his screwy percussion, catchy horn charts, and sing-song, almost childish melodies. He and his fellow Ants even won a Brit Award for Best British Album in 1982, discrediting that organization forever. But the hits stopped coming, and in 1995 Ant released what seemed his final album, Wonderful, to take up acting. But alas, as some guy named Springsteen once sang, “Well now, everything dies, baby, that’s a fact/ But maybe everything that dies someday comes back,” and with Adam Ant we see hard proof of “The Boss Prinzip.”
“The memory of my first actual record is probably inaccurate, but my wider memories of being around vinyl from a very young age are vivid.”
“I feel incredibly grateful that I spent the single digit years of my life in a house that not just played music, but played records. I was present for, and involved in the ceremony of, putting vinyl on the platter. These were classics of the format too, Dark Side of the Moon, Rumours, Hotel California, and weirder stuff like Hawkwind.
My grandfather was a jazz musician. He died when I was very young, but I have misty recollections of sitting on his knee at the piano, or thumbing through his many acres of 78s, not really knowing what they were. I wish I knew what happened to them…
As a kid I had 45s and Queen albums. But I would liberate anything I liked the sound of, (mostly Hotel California) and any song I was into, I would hit hard, playing it over and over. However, the album that meant the most to me was Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds.
I still have that original pressing, and I can’t think of a more beautiful gatefold record that I have ever seen or owned. Turning each leaf of the book that is mounted inside reveals another gorgeously detailed, terrifying, and hypnotic painting. I shared hours with those amazing tunes and the artwork. In hindsight, the two were symbiotic. Experiences like that are pretty integral in developing a relationship with music.
You know you’ve made it big when you have a song featured on video games. The Killers‘ hit song “When You Were Young” is an option for the popular game, Guitar Hero 3. While many younger kids may have first heard the song while playing, older Killers’ fans know the Las Vegas band has plenty more hits up their sleeves.
2001 marked the starting point for The Killers. After going on countless tours, selling millions of copies of their three studio albums, and getting nominated for plenty of awards, including several Grammys, the band took a much needed, but brief, break in 2011. Their return in 2012 was marked with the release of their fourth and most recent studio album, Battle Born.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff0oWESdmH0
Rumored to be in the process of recording their next album, The Killers also have their hands full playing shows across America and Asia. They’ll be making a stop at the Merriweather Post Pavilion this Saturday, August 10. If you haven’t bought your tickets yet, we have a pair to give away within the next twenty-four hours…
Though Alexis & the Samurai has been getting the bulk of the media attention since they began playing to packed houses on Monday nights at Chickie Wah Wah, the two principals in that duo also lead this much bigger band.
Sweet Crude is the sometimes-Francophone seven piece band led by Alexis Marceaux and Sam Craft. The band sings some of their songs in French but that is as close to Cajun music as the indie rock group gets.
After a recent performance, Marceaux explained why there is no accordion or frottoir (rubboard) in the group despite their affinity for the music of parts west of here. Paraphrasing here—she said that the band is interested in helping to sustain the Cajun French language of south Louisiana while staying true to their progressive musical focus.
Greater Manchester’s most in the know radio host Shell Zenner broadcasts the best new music every week on the UK’s Amazing Radio and Bolton FM. You can also catch Shell’s broadcast right here at TVD, each and every Thursday.
“Tonights show is a mish mash of new musical nuggets from artists new and old.
Frankie & The Heartstrings join me in conversation to talk about new album The Days Run Away, touring the bejesus out of the country and setting up their own shop in Sunderland. This weeks Record Of The Week is by Wolf People, it’s the aces Fain and I’ll be spinning three tracks from the album.
With new music in the mix from Younghusband, Scott & Charlene’s Wedding, Jacco Gardner, and more you’d be daft to miss it.”
Come 1975, David Bowie was in very, very precarious shape. As a famous man (me) once said, Death is the icing on the birthday cake of Life, and Bowie was scooping off the icing with his fingers and licking them clean. Extremely paranoid, frazzled, and down to 17 pounds–due largely to his phenomenal intake of cocaine, which would have sufficed to wire Liechtenstein, and a diet that consisted solely of peppers and milk–Bowie was obsessed with the Black Arts, Naziism and fascism, and a hodgepodge of esoteric spiritual practices, and was convinced that someone, the ghost of Aleister Crowley or his future “Prancing in the Streets” duet partner Mick Jagger perhaps, was stealing his sperm.
You would think it a good time for rock’s greatest vampire–I don’t know whether anyone was really stealing his sperm, but he certainly stole his fair share of ideas from Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Brian Eno, the Krautrockers, etc.–to make a beeline for rehab, or at the very least the nearest Burger King (peppers and milk?) Instead he went into an LA studio–a town about which he would later say, “The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth”–and recorded Station to Station, one of the very best LPs of his career. Which is a miracle, especially when one takes into consideration Bowie’s claim of having virtually no recollection of making it.
Not only did Bowie create a new album, his tenth, he created a new persona–The Thin White Duke–to go with it. Bowie had learned from Ziggy Stardust–or perhaps his stint as a mime–to always hide behind a mask. He’d killed off glam-bam-thank-you-ma’am alien Ziggy Stardust before making Station to Station’s predecessor Young Americans, perhaps because the Zigster’s surname was filched by the opportunistic hack Alvin Stardust and Bowie didn’t want anyone thinking they were family. But he evidently felt naked singing Young Americans’ “plastic soul” as an anonymous plastic soul man, and figured it was high time he became somebody else.
In any event, The Thin White Duke was a suave, amoral, and aristocratic creature, mad perhaps but always elegantly attired in a tuxedo vest and crisp white shirt with his former spiky flame-hued do slicked back, and never to be seen without a pack of Gitanes. Bowie himself described The Thin White Duke as “a nasty character indeed.”
Into big bands and modern indie pop? What about psychedelic alt-blues? MH and His Orchestra, Paperhaus, and Atoka Chase are playing a show at the 9:30 Club on Friday, August 9, and we’ve got a pair of tickets to give away.
Lead by the songwriter Max Holiday, MH and his Orchestra makes a unique cocktail of tunes by throwing old drum machines and pristine string work over recognizable song structures. The sense of familiarity is brought home by MH’s mid-century lounge croon that wobbles in and out of both Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra…and maybe, occasionally, Robert Smith.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3sbgjZsu44
He and his revolving band released the debut full-length The Throes last year, displaying a wide variety of musical knowledge and instrumentation. This year, they let loose with the single “Washington, D.C.,” which builds on the wall of sound showcased in The Throes.
The Grammy-awarding winning trumpeter Irvin Mayfield appeared at a press conference at his namesake club in the Royal Sonesta Hotel to announce the schedule for this year’s Festival of Giving: 7 Nights of Music, 7 Nights of Giving.
The series is unique for New Orleans in that 100% of tickets sales will benefit a different non-profit organization each night beginning on Friday, August 23 and extending through Thursday, August 29, 2013.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV_XzZqntVo
The “Love Sessions” will feature Irvin Mayfield & the Jazz Playhouse Revue with numerous special guests. Each concert will be recorded. Read More »
Justin Hayward is doing things a little differently right now. His new album, Spirits of the Western Sky, is his first in sixteen years and is still collecting warm reviews. He’s embarked on a rare solo tour to support it and fans are happily along for the ride. “It’s been very well received and they work beautifully as stage songs,” he tells us. “I’m very lucky.”
Hayward uses the word “lucky” to describe himself throughout our conversation with him. Most would use the words “supremely talented” and maybe “legendary,” but we won’t split hairs. While he’s reverent and grateful for his past, Spirits feels like a step into the future for Hayward, who continues to perform as frontman for proto-prog-rockers, The Moody Blues. The songwriting on Spirits departs from his Moodies past and explores some unexpected genres—most notably bluegrass and electronica—without losing the ethereal, melodic style that earned him his third Ivor Novello songwriting award in May.
Hayward reflected on his luck, his foray into the Nashville bluegrass scene, and he told us how the idea of the western sky has always been part of his creative life. To our delight, he brought it back to vinyl in the end, too. We feel pretty lucky about that.
In Search of the Lost Chord and Days of Future Passed were the first two vinyl records I ever bought myself, and that’s still my favorite way to listen to those albums. What made you decide to release Spirits of the Western Sky on vinyl as well as digitally and CD? Has vinyl become a new priority for you?
Yes, it is a priority because there are definitely people out there who feel exactly the same way. I’m not sure—I don’t have a preference; I don’t put one vinyl system or analog above digital, really. I know that when Universal asked me to re-master those first seven Moody Blues albums, I realized that the transfer to digital had been done in such a rush in the ’80s that it was really badly done. The vinyl was far superior for many years—I hope now that’s been rectified.
But as a thing to hold and to own, of course the vinyl was much nicer. I was kind of hoping when they did the transfer to digital that they’d keep the packaging the same and just put a little CD in the middle of a big sleeve. [Laughs] But that didn’t happen, so there you go.
What do Matchbox Twenty and the Goo Goo Dolls have in common? Well, both are familiar names when it comes to American rock bands. Both have been in the business for decades. Both have had numerous chart-topping singles throughout their long careers…and both are currently on a summer tour together.
With hits like “Iris” and “If You’re Gone,” it’s hard to find someone who hasn’t heard of either of these bands. Matchbox Twenty and the Goo Goo Dolls, of course, have plenty of other tracks between them that are just as great as those chart-toppers. With two great American bands sharing one stage, it’s safe to say that the #MB20GoosTour is one you wouldn’t want to miss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-Naa1HXeDQ
Want to win tickets to see both bands on their stop at Jiffy Lube Live this Saturday, August 10? We’re giving two pairs of Pavilion tickets away!
Acquaintances is a new band made up of some indie scene vets, including members of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, The Poison Arrows, Ponys, and Don Caballero. Their new self-titled album, released on LP by Epitonic/File 13, features a familiar brand of indie rock that’s disinterested in obscuring its influences, but the whole thing is delivered with an appealing mix of casualness and assurance. By the end they’ve managed to produce a very good debut.
Acquaintances can surely be considered an indie rock supergroup. Even though some of the band’s previous activity hasn’t exactly been rewarded with a high profile, every member of the band has indeed chalked up prior experience on the scene. The outfit is composed of guitarist-vocalist Jared Gummere of the Ponys and Bare Mutants, bassist Patrick Morris of Don Caballero and The Poison Arrows, and drummer Chris Wilson of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists and Shake Ray Turbine.
For added spice, Stephen Schmidt of Thumbnail, Chino Horde and Avenue Boulevard adds guitar and vocals to three tracks on Acquaintances’ debut, and Justin Sinkovich of Thumbnail, Atombombpocketknife and The Poison Arrows lends guitar, vocals, and organ to five of the disc’s cuts. And if you’re unsure about your knowledge of some of these names, you’re not alone.
The Foundation Free Fridays series at Tipitina’s continues tonight with one of the busiest bands playing out of the city. Gravy opens.
