Monthly Archives: May 2014

From Single of the Week to later a First Date, we’re beginning to sense a pattern here with Scotland’s The Hazey Janes—and that’s deliriously fine music which happens to have been ringing through our office for months now. Today, “If Ever There Is Gladness” the band’s brand new video, makes its international debut right here.

Filmed in the city of Dundee, the band’s hometown, the video sees them collaborate with up-and-coming director Daniel Warren (“Whatever Gets You Through The Night”) and award wining choreographer Frank MacConnell (“A Wee Home From Home”).

As the Janes’ Andrew Mitchell explains, “We’re big fans of Daniel’s, however, only had a narrow window of opportunity to put our collective heads together. If I remember correctly, we had a conversation about the video while he was in San Francisco working on another project—the generational aspect, coupled with the cyclical nature of the story, amongst other things.

He wrote the treatment on the flight home and we shot the following weekend, just like that. Equally, having Frank involved was incredibly important to us. His perception and grasp of movement is second to none. To work with them both was very special indeed. Hopefully some of that comes across.”

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Manly men, by which I mean loin-clothing-wearing barbarian types who own giant stereos and broadswords they keep in the livingroom closet, listen to Manowar. Manly pets, ditto. I have a goldfish that listens to nothing but Manowar, and he is one macho goldfish. He’s the only goldfish I’ve ever run across with 12-inch biceps. Playing Manowar at volumes loud enough to blow your speakers will even increase the muscle mass of inanimate objects. Since I’ve started listening to Manowar, my livingroom furniture has significantly bulked up. My loveseat, a 98-pound weakling as of a month ago, could now best Vin Diesel in a barroom brawl.

This is because Manowar isn’t a metal band, but a feral crew of dragon-riding, subhuman-hacking, loin-cloth-wearing steroidal cases of the sort who hold battle swords aloft on their album covers. Just as a quick point of comparison, the guys on the covers of Manowar’s albums make the guys on the covers of Molly Hatchet’s albums look like total pussies. And the guys in Manowar don’t include a rider in their contract specifying the color-content of the M&Ms in the bowls on the backstage buffet table; no, they have a rider specifying how many human heads on stakes they want surrounding said table.

I should add that Manowar holds the world’s record for playing the loudest performance ever. It deafened the entire principality of Liechtenstein, permanently. Manowar also holds the world’s record for playing the longest heavy metal performance ever, in Bulgaria. They played for 5 hours and 1 minute. They spent the extra minute directing their deafening powers at a promoter hiding in the very back of the arena. He finally jumped out a second-floor window. Manowar is huge in Bulgaria. Manowar is huge in nations like Bulgaria. Their fans call themselves the “Army of Immortals.” Set fire to one, and you will discover the label is purest hokum.

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Sometime it is the unexpectedly off the wall, completely left-of-center grandeur that makes something so good. The Grand Undoing’s sophomore release is a glorious musical experiment with an oddball confidence akin to the early work of David Bowie.

Speaking in generalities, music is often the same sequences and chords regurgitated with some kind of new spin on it. Breaking the rules with unpredictable key changes and moments of dissidence often solidifies a songs “originality.” The Grand Undoing’s White Space Flavors and Parties on TV is 40 minutes of strange, wild, unchained melodies and lyrics that cross the fringe and head into the stratosphere. It may not be the most digestible singer-songwriter album this year, but it is possibly the most original.

The first single off the album, “Cross Over Now,” is a wild ride on a beautifully shambolic Art Rock locomotive that feels like it’s about to fly off the rails at any moment. Buckle your seatbelt and hit play.

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“Being born in 1990 was a weird one. I remember vinyl, tapes, and CDs all being played in my house at all hours of the day, there was always something on—a multitude of formats all with their unique pros and cons.”

“Vinyl was nice to watch spin around and listen to, but you couldn’t take them anywhere. CDs were THE BIG THING, but drained personal player batteries like nothing else (post 2000 in my case). Because of this, I never tended to focus much on formats at a young age, I was just to happy mumbling along to obscure takes of Beatles songs that my Dad would play (and once, Seal. Yes, Seal).

By the time I was around 8/9 years old, I was attempting to make Mix Tapes for the walk to school/to have hanging off my ears during whatever free time I had when I was alone. I think it’s here where I started to see the side of music that is almost like a ritual, where things need to be set up and prepared before you can listen and enjoy it. There was something nice about that at the time, like I was earning it and I think that’s something that’s always stuck with me i.e. Making time for music, because it should be enjoyed.

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No band, and I mean literally no band, from the Lamentable Creation to the Unpalatable Present, ever evolved as radically as Phoenix, Arizona’s Meat Puppets. Over their first three LPs they didn’t so much change as transcend time and space, blithely leapfrogging your normal stages of musical development and basic human logic in their bizarre segues from the brilliantly unintelligible rototiller-vocal hardcore country punk of 1982’s self-titled Meat Puppets to the vocally intelligible and sonically gripping psychedelic country of 1984’s Meat Puppets II to—frankly, I’m at a loss what to call 1985’s Up on the Sun, so let’s just settle for deliberately off-key, acid-twisted Byrdsian folk-rock with an Arizona sun- and sand-blasted Krautrock kink.

Those first three albums remain a twisted trifecta of artistic genius by a chemically-addled trio—Curt Kirkwood on guitar and vocals, brother Cris Kirkwood on bass and vocals, and Derrick Bostrom on drums—in a constant state of musical mutation and creative flux, and the Meat Puppets spent the next several years tinkering with and consolidating the sound they’d developed on Up on the Sun with 1986’s Out My Way and 1987’s Mirage and Huevos.

Then they went metallic on 1989’s Monsters, and many folks, including yours truly, got off the boat. It’s inevitable. I daresay I’d have lost interest in the Minutemen at some juncture, even had D. Boon not departed this mortal coil, and I can’t think of a single band that has continually maintained my interest for over 10 years except The Fall, whose Mark E. Smith is not a careerist, or even a human being, but a bullet from the gun of Paul Verlaine. And bullets, unlike careerists, never take wrong turns. Just ask Arthur Rimbaud.

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“I have many associations with vinyl, but the most primal one is the connection to my father. My parents owned an acoustic instrument shop in the California hills, and my dad plays banjo, guitar, and so on—Beatles, bluegrass, folk.”

“Though he played all the time when I was young, and plays constantly now in his band the Prozac Mtn Boys, there was a while where he wasn’t listening to music at all. For his birthday in 1986, my sister and I bought him the new Paul Simon LP Graceland in part, I think, to rev him up. Instead, I found myself totally fascinated by that record, slipping it out of the sleeve multiple times per day to place it on the platter and listen again and again.

I was just a boy sitting by the record player, concentrating on the words and the images and all of these sounds I’d never heard before. The album art on the cover—a small image of, what? A fresco maybe? On a large field of off white—doesn’t reveal anything about the contents. But because it’s a record, with a luxurious 12 inches of art, even that small image is enough to get lost in, to use as daydreaming fodder while listening to the album another time through.

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Ships Have Sailed are a rock collective from LA who specialize in cathartic rock carried by ambitious undercurrents. Their debut EP “Someday” boasts the finely crafted, stadium ready single “Midnight” which comes equipped with a big melodic hook, imbued with a surprising depth for a pop song.

The whimsical circus themed music video plays upon the melancholy undertones of the song, while showcasing its inherent cinematic qualities. In fact, if “Midnight” sounds familiar, you might have heard it at your local MCA theater after the credits roll or perhaps on one of the countless college radio stations blasting it this summer.

There is more to be discovered on the EP as it is an overall masterful exercise in tone and arrangement. The contagious low-key vocals remind one of Elliot Smith while the buzzing instrumentation leans more toward calculated early work of The Killers. Overall, Ships Have Sailed flex their implicit control over the pop-rock genre. One only hopes to hear them cross some uncharted waters on their next course.

“Someday” will see a national release this July, but the entire EP can be streamed now on Soundcloud.