Monthly Archives: September 2014

Mississippi Rail Company drops September single, lends talent to Touro Infirmary Fundraiser

Mississippi Rail Company has been releasing their new album a little differently. Their first album Coal Black Train (2012) debuted as a traditional record, but the dapper quartet decided that the format wasn’t suitable for their sophomore effort. Since January they have dropped one single each month, which are available free on their website (although a donation is suggested).

Regarding their untraditional release schedule, keyboardist and bandleader Travers Geoffray said, “We want listeners to hear each track individually rather than hear the songs in relation to each other as a collective work.” With twelve months of new tunes planned, the band is exploring new ground and featuring various genres including blues, swing, gospel, big band, and more.

The September single, “Redwood Jones,” was released last week just in time for their homecoming show at the Blue Nile. After a triumphant summer tour, the stylish group took the stage with Colin Lake and Jonny Sansone (both musicians were guests on the previous single “Three Little Girls.”)

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TVD Recommends:
The Rentals at the
Stone Pony, 9/26

I used to really love Weezer. It might have just been growing up with them, being of that age where there geek-rock jived with actually being something of a geek or an outcast. They sang about simple things, like playing in a garage band, going to shows, dreaming about girls, and Buddy Holly.

They were everywhere for a little while, or so it seemed strange when their bass player, Matt Sharp, showed up in a video with a band of robo-nerds called the Rentals on the Weezer-with-Moogs-on-overdrive single “Friends of P.,” a song so idiotically catchy just writing this sentence has ensured it will be glued to my subconscious for the rest of the evening.

Meanwhile back in Weezerville, Pinkerton came out in 1996 and it was a little weirder, a little less accessible than their debut, and for a while it seemed like that might be all we hear from them. Sharp left the band two years later to focus on the Rentals, however their sophomore effort, Seven More Minutes also suffered from disappointing sales.

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Graded on a Curve:
The Handsome Family,
Milk and Scissors

Brett Sparks is one somber fella. Or at least that’s the impression one gets from listening to The Handsome Family, the Americana band helmed by Sparks and his wife, Rennie Sparks. He may be a barrel of laughs in person, but on record he is always deadpan, never ebullient or excited or joyous.

And it works, because his devoid-of-passion vocals just happen to be the perfect vehicle for the weird and wonderful stories conjured up by his spouse, who writes the lyrics while he writes the music. Even when those stories are funny—as in the case of “Tin Foil,” which includes some hilarious lines (which are supposedly true) about how Liza Minnelli spent two months in bed because she was afraid a disintegrating Skylab would fall from space on her head—he sings them in that crisp and sober voice of his, and what you come away with is a case of the melancholies, but the good melancholies, the kind that let you know that life is hard but at least you’re still above ground.

The Handsome Family have enough great songs on the 10 or so studio LPs they’ve recorded since 1993 to fill the sinkhole behind the barn that a mesmerized farmer lowers himself into in an old clawfoot bathtub in their American Gothic classic, “The Bottomless Pit.” It was one of the first songs I ever heard by the alt-country band, and I was immediately smitten. Then I heard “Amelia Earhart vs. the Dancing Bear,” and wham! I was in love. It’s rare to come across a song written with the craft and eye to detail of a good short story, and those two songs rank—as do others Rennie Sparks has written—alongside such great story-telling songs as American Music Club’s “Johnny Mathis’ Feet,” Mountain Goats’ “Against Pollution,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman.” Oh, and let’s not forget Killdozer’s “Hamburger Martyr.”

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TVD Recommends:
Live Animals at the
Old U.S. Mint, Friday afternoon, 9/26

Heads up folks with free time and/or night schedules. One of the most exciting new bands to emerge on the scene is playing a 2 PM set in the aurally pristine performance space on the third floor of the Old U.S. Mint in the French Quarter.

Live Animals is the latest project from drummer Kevin O’Day. The band also features Smoky Brown on guitar, Josh Paxton on piano and Dr. Jimbo Walsh on bass.

The group plays eclectic original songs inspired by a wide range of performers from classic New Orleans funk to the avant-garde jazz of Sun Ra. The connection between the four musicians is their membership in Michael Ray’s Cosmic Krewe, the beautifully deranged band led by the former Sun Ra trumpeter and current member of Kool and the Gang.

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Surface Noise:
Wanda Jackson,
There’s a Party Goin’ On

She’s the “Queen of Rockabilly.” She used to date Elvis Presley. And with a career spanning five decades, Wanda Jackson is still rockin’ today, most recently playing the Bang Festival in Los Angeles last weekend. In recent years, she’s collaborated with Jack White and Justin Townes Earle, and has even been named as an influence by Cyndi Lauper and Adele.

Although she’s released albums of varied styles of country and gospel over the years, her place on the throne as the “Queen of Rockabilly” is what etched her mark on the musical family tree. Wanda was there at the beginning, raising the bar and setting a new place at the table for women in rock and roll—and in the process earning herself a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

I found myself back at Som Records in DC, sifting through the now very familiar dollar bin, and was shocked to see There’s a Party Goin’ On by the amazing Ms. Jackson. Surely this must have been a mistake, as original Wanda vinyl commands a fairer price. I quickly saw why it was relegated to the discount crate—the sleeve was split apart across the top and the minute scratches across the face of each side resembled USC’s offensive playbook.

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TVD Video Premiere: India Mill, “Caribesque”

India Mill isn’t a band afraid of rocking the boat. In fact, they take their music very seriously indeed and their mission statement in their own words is: “…to grasp the riot shield and baton in both hands and continue musical empowerment as witnessed by Stiff Little Fingers, The Clash, REM, Manic Street Preachers, and Bruce Springsteen.”

Lofty ambitions indeed, but when you’ve grown up in one of the poorest regions in the UK, it’s no surprise when your music comes out a little politically edged.

Their latest single, “Caribesque” certainly goes someway into realising their mission statement, and the video accompanying it further cements the song’s vision of a present-day dystopia that far too many people are having to live through just to get by while others prosper. You can watch it now, exclusively on The Vinyl District.

“Caribesque” is available digitally and their debut album, Under Every Sky will be released November 24th this year.

India Mill Official | Facebook | Twitter

Posted in TVD UK | 1 Comment

Skylar Gudasz,
The TVD First Date

“Hi, First Date. This is what I remember: two twin beds covered in my grandmother’s quilts, four windows opening out to the ghosts in the dark green Virginia forest, and a wooden crate of my parents’ vinyl one room away from my father’s decaying, prized, ancient Steinway upright.”

“My mother’s name was written before a last name I had never heard at the top of her records (Rickie Lee Jones, Carly Simon, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Nicolette Larson, Bonnie Raitt, JD Souther, Judy Collins)—it was how I found out she was married to another man before my father, whose own collection skipped most music written after 1910 save a pop culture tune in for the Boss (Rachmaninov, Mozart, Saint Saens).

We’d fold the laundry, sing, dance, cry, and fight alongside the record player and the piano. “Last Time I Saw Richard” on Joni Mitchell’s Blue vs. the one on Joni Mitchell’s Miles of Aisles. Musicals—Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Fantasticks. Old standards my grandmother sung. The Scott Joplin rags that my father played. Old time music—my mother’s bluegrass group met weekly, banjos, guitars, harmonies. My brother’s classical guitar playing “Snowflight.” On the radio, at school, there was Lauryn Hill. Dixie Chicks. Usher. Reba McEntire. Ashanti.

Fast forward: being too young to get into R movies, we snuck into The Royal Tenenbaums where Wes Anderson’s soundtrack gifted Nico, Mark Mothersbaugh, The Clash, The Velvet Underground, the Ramones, Elliott Smith, solo John Lennon. People make music that sounds like this?! Very exciting. Trip down 95 to the closest record store—Plan 9—CDs up top, vinyl in the basement, and enough Richmond scene kids to scare the backwoods redneck out of all of us into silence lest some negligent stray drawl betray our black shirts, safety pinned jean shorts, and Chuck Taylors. More discoveries there—Neutral Milk Hotel, Billie Holiday, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, T. Rex, Ella Fitzgerald. I broke up with a boy in part for listening to Green Day. Things were starting to take shape.

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Shell Zenner Presents

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.

“I’ve a ROTW from Allah Las who are possibly, maybe my favourite band in the hold wide world! As well as a #shellshock from Circa Waves who are certainly on the ones to watch lists at the moment!” —SZ

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Graded on a Curve:
Bob Carpenter,
Silent Passage

In the mid-‘70s Canadian singer-songwriter Bob Carpenter cut an LP for Warner Brothers, though a contract dispute kept it from coming out when it should’ve; it finally saw release a decade later via Canadian roots imprint Stony Plain. Carpenter never made another album, but the lack of profile doesn’t mean fans of the country and folk material serving as foundation for contemporary music’s Americana wing shouldn’t proceed directly to Silent Passage. It was recently reissued by the No Quarter label.

Not all lost records are equally deserving of being found. Often through collusion spiraling from deep within smoky dens of promotional intent, slabs ranging from pretty good to okay to suspect to downright crummy are suddenly championed, breathlessly even, as vessels of unknown brilliance valiantly rescued out of the clutches of unjust neglect to take their rightful place as timeless classics.

This sort of fervent stumping was once far more common. These days internet access and a set of speakers obviously allow interested parties to take a disc for a test drive prior to dropping their ducats on the barrelhead, and that’s quite a difference from sending off a check based totally on descriptions in a distributor’s quarterly catalog. Yes, many such transactions were conducted by mail order, distance only adding to the existential vacuum (envision a lonely Charlie Brown staring out from a comic strip panel) when a guaranteed garage monster was revealed to be a bunch of crusty also-rans. (Good grief).

There’s a noted deficiency of hype surrounding Bob Carpenter. With Tom Rush, Emmylou Harris, Billy-Joe Shaver, and others recording his songs, his abilities as a writer are secure. Plus, the musicians involved in the making of Silent Passage, amongst them Harris, Little Feat members Lowell George and Bill Payne, steel guitarist Buddy Cage (Jerry Garcia’s replacement in New Riders of the Purple Sage) and session heavyweights Russ Kunkel and Lee Sklar, establish it as more than an ordinary affair. But the absence of calculated overstatement is filled by a persistent lack of appreciation.

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TVD Ticket Giveaway: Big Star’s #1 Record
and Third performed live at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, 9/27

Every now and again we find ourselves in the audience at an event so special and unique that the experience easily defies the normal concert going affair. Such was the case last month as we took in Big Star’s #1 Record and Third performed in their entirety at Washington, DC’s premier venue, the 9:30 Club. As we wrote back in August:

Once a decade or eon or so, an LP comes along that is simply too tortured and nakedly honest for human ears. 1978’s twisted and raw Third/Sister Lovers is such an LP. The final offspring of the seventies’ incarnation of Memphis, Tennessee power pop band Big Star—which never dented the charts during its lifetime but has achieved cult superstardom in the years since—Third is anything but a catchy power pop record.

As such, Third is every bit as nakedly powerful a work of art as Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack Up,” or heroin- and booze-ravaged Charlie Parker’s tortured 1946 Dial Records take on “Lover Man,” which he couldn’t even stand on his own to record and which was followed by a long “vacation” in California’s Camarillo State Mental Hospital.

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Soul Serenade Live debuts at Gasa Gasa

Marc Stone will premiere an exciting new live DJ and concert series this Thursday, September 25 at the uptown club. Based on the DJ and bandleader’s Soul Serenade radio program on WWOZ 90.7 FM, Stone will bring together the best of Louisiana’s world-class musicians, as well as spin from his personal vintage vinyl collection.

The series will be unique and multifaceted, almost like a late-night television program, but with more focus on music. This week Stone will welcome New Orleans’ number one nouveau-traditional chanteuse Meschiya Lake and the unparalleled organ master Joe Krown. The two guests will give interviews, contribute to the DJ sets, as well as play solo, with each other, and with the Marc Stone Band.

Although she may be known for her brassy and nuanced interpretations of jazz classics, Lake is not to be pigeonholed. She can rock out with the best of them, as proved by her stunning vocal turns with trash rock masters R. Scully’s Rough 7.

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TVD Live: Islands at the Grog Shop, 9/19

The band left their entire set list in plain view under a spotlight towards the front of the stage. Everyone in the first few rows could clearly see they planned two songs for the encore. That didn’t stop them from waiting backstage for several minutes while the young audience screamed their own brains out. A guy in the crowd yelled, “Thank you!” and followed it up with “Yeah, bitch!” when the band finally came back on stage.

Before the last song, lead singer Nicholas Thorburn said, “It’s been six, eight years since I’ve been here?”

“Six years,” someone yelled back.

“Too long. Like in that David Bowie song, ‘Six Years.’”

The crowd applauded with loving zeal after every song—any song. They whistled and screamed their excitement, and Islands deserved it. Their live show was full of faithful reproductions of the album versions—like watching the band nail take after take in the studio.

The tracks sounded so faithful thanks mostly to the backing band’s perfectionist instrumental aptitude. The Gordon brothers, Evan and Geordie, switched adeptly between playing keyboards and bass and guitar. They not only replicated the notes and arrangements of every song, but the very tone of their instruments was spot on and uncannily similar, which is a hard thing to replicate live.

I was a little worried during the first few songs as Thorburn’s vocals were buried under the instruments, making it hard to pick out the vocal melodies let alone any actual lyrics. After the second song, he asked for “more vocals,” and the sound was brought into a perfect equilibrium.

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Graded on a Curve:
R.L. Burnside,
A Ass Pocket of Whiskey

Lookee here: This is not a review, but a tale told by an idiot, the idiot in question being yours truly. To wit: My brother, who has spent his whole life listening to the unlistenable in the form of avant-garde jazz skronk, has been recommending albums to me for years. But it was upon his imprimatur that I bought German free jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann’s 1996 LP Saxophone and Bleating Goat: Live at the Harrisburg Farm Show Arena. It’s a terrible album, although the goat has his moments, and it got a pretty good write-up in the pages of Goat Farmer Monthly, so maybe it’s me. Regardless, I vowed never to take jazzbro’s advice again.

And so it went with bluesman R.L. Burnside (1926-2005), the Holly Springs, Mississippi singer and guitarist who played a form of the blues so raw, groove-driven, and just plain weird he attracted the attention of Jon Spencer, who took his Blues Explosion down Muzzippi way in February 1996 to collaborate with Burnside on an LP full of sound and fury in the form of some rumbling, fuzzy, and feral blues. My brother kept telling me I had to hear it, but Saxophone and Bleating Goat was never far from my mind, and besides, as I’ve said on numerous occasions, I’ve never much cared for the blues, period. B.B. King bores me; his guitar Lucille bores me; and the blues in general bore me, although I’ve always made an exception for Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson, because the legends surrounding their lives and their singing and playing transcend not just the blues, but music in general.

Your average Delta blues musician always seemed to me to be playing by pure formula, and a staid formula at that, when what I was looking for was something weird and wild, with that element of the uncanny that makes Johnson so great. And I discovered it in Muddy Waters’ 1968 LP Electric Mud, on which the guitarists from Rotary Connection play some far-out shit that takes you a long way from what I consider your academic blues. In Burnside’s case, what makes his music unique was his trademark drone, which was more characteristic of the North Mississippi Hill Country blues than the better-known Delta blues. He also played it fast and loose with traditional 12- or 16-bar blues patterns, although I can’t really tell you, musical dunce that I am, what that even means.

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The Rooks,
The TVD First Date

“My grandfather was a Latin-Jazz trumpet player whose side-hustle (which later became his main hustle) was as the owner and manager of a custom shirt store around the corner from Grand Central. Among the many customers who frequented his shop, a decent portion of the business came from making costumes for a number of Broadway shows. In return, he would often receive tickets to performances, as well as cast recordings of their soundtracks.”

“Growing up, my mother had what at the time seemed to be a giant cabinet beneath the base of our TV, filled to the edges with vinyl. About half were those soundtracks her father had passed down, or those she had managed to ‘borrow’ without bothering to return. The rest were a bizarrely eclectic mix of funk, folk, classical, blue-eyed-soul, and the occasional glam-rock. Some of my earliest memories, and some my strongest moments of early connection with my mother involved us dancing around our apartment to genre-bending medleys of Earth Wind & Fire, Itzhak Perlman, Kenny Loggins, and Fiddler on the Roof, trying our best to land on our toes to keep the record from jumping (we were rarely successful).

At a certain point, cassettes took over as our go-to dance soundtracks. Skip ahead a little further and I’m downloading questionable Mp3 rips of Blink 182 albums and not dancing in front of anyone. By that time, my mother’s record player sat in the basement with a broken needle, only occasionally coming up in conversation with a casual “I should really get that fixed sometime.”

It wasn’t until the end of high school that I began to dig in heavily on the notion of an album as an artistic statement, started doing my homework, and ranting at the dinner table about all the classics she was raised on as if they were my own. Eventually, my mom offered to let me take the record player and a few favorites from her collection off to college with me.

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TVD Premiere: Hard Proof, “Soul Thing”

Afrobeat virtuosos Hard Proof are here to teach us all a little bit about the roots of rhythm. Their newest single, the appropriately titled “Soul Thing,” pays homage to the band’s love affair with infectious Ethiopian Jazz. The award-winning Austin ten-piece are the sole purveyors of African funk in the state of Texas and their walloping, action-packed performances have become the stuff of legend around the Longhorn State.

The band, along with engineer Chris “Frenchie” Smith, found an excellent way to translate their live performances into studio recordings earlier this year in the Austin based analog studio The Bubble.

The track, which boasts a cacophony of silky horns, Rhodes and rhythm, has a healthy dose of swing to capture the dance floor and enough punchy melody to please Jazz heads and general fans of Funk. The song’s melting pot of influences coalesces into a powerful world vibe with bongos and tasty guitar leading the charge.

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  • SUPPORTING YOUR LOCAL INDIE SHOPS SINCE 2007


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