A TRL I Can Get Behind
It’s a sad fact that a lot of bands can’t even hold themselves together for a set longer than an hour. Of the many bands I’ve seen, only a few have been able to pull off anything over an hour and forty-five minutes. Some of those bands include Green Day, The Clientele, and of course, California punk legends, X.
The show was part of the “TRL National Tour.” The set list was comprised of fan-voted favorites like “Los Angeles” and “Burning House of Love.” X’s original line-up shredded through hits like “Johnny Hit & Run Pauline,” “Under The Big Black Sun,” “Los Angeles;” hell, pretty much all their classics. I couldn’t help but feel the exhuberance throughout the near two hour set. John Doe’s and D.J. Bonebrake’s energy was awe-inspiring. Billy Zoom, stood to the left of the stage, smiling, nodding and playing perfectly in tune. Exene even broke her usual seeming disinterest for the situation by occasionally bantering with the crowd.
Just before going into “The Have Nots,” John Doe made a comment about the song being responsible for too many DUIs and how he was happy to play it in New York, since the locals don’t drive. A fairly innebreated woman then screamed, “We’re New Yorkers! We don’t fucking drive, we take the train!” With a mix of disdain and a hint mischief, Exene looks the girl dead in the eye and said, “That’s what he just said. You people don’t drive.” She rolled her eyes and X played the song.
This was one of the most high energy show’s I’ve ever been to. There was a symbiosis between the band and the audience. The more excited the crowd became, the more enthused got and vice versa. The crowd, many of whom were well into their forties or older, were more lively than an audience at a grindcore show. There was one gentleman in particular who kept on moshing outside the pit. Despite the best efforts of those on the edge to keep him in, he still found his way into groups of perfectly psyched folks who just wanted to enjoy their beers or waters. Naturally, his flailing prevented such enjoyment. I could have sworn John Doe shook his head when the guy knocked my friend’s beer all over the girl to his right.
Other than that minor incident, the show was fantastic, absolutely fantastic. They’re playing at the World Cafe in Philadelphia on June 4 and making their way west. I highly recommend checking out one of the remaining shows on the tour (you can peep the show dates here).
Fair thee well,
Ian
Drag Me To Hell
Drag Me To Hell is the best kind of nostalgia. See, back when I was young and impressionable, I saw a movie called Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn. The flick is extremely, gut-wrenchingly violent; chock full of rotting flesh, blood, boils and even a dismembered hand. It’s also one of the funniest films ever made. The thing is, while director Sam Raimi saw the sheer terror involved in calling up the spirits of the dead, he also saw the absolute absurdity of the situation. Mr. Raimi brings this same whimsically horrifying feel to his newest film, Drag Me To Hell.
Drag Me To Hell follows the story of Christine (Allison Lohman), a loan officer at a small California bank. When Christine refuses to grant an old gypsy woman an extension on her mortgage, the woman places a curse on Christine. Christine has three days before a demon drags her, body and soul, into the pits of Hell. The plot is that of many a Hammer or Universal horror movie that cam before, but Mr. Raimi, aided by a well-rounded cast, play all the beats just right. There’s a fight scene in a parking garage between Christine and the old gypsy woman that is both terrifying and hysterical. The scene is a masterpiece of macabre absurdity.
In a summer of remakes and rehashes capitalizing on your childhood memories (I’m looking at you McG and Michael Bay), I urge you to check this flick out.
Be seeing you,
Ian Gonzales
Metric – Fantasies
PURCHASE: iTunes ($9.99) | AmazonMP3 ($5.00)
I’m a little ashamed to say I’d never heard Metric until just a couple of weeks ago. The name of the band gets thrown around in conversation all the time, although never by me, and it’s generally thrown in my direction along with other bands I pretend to have heard. Like Placebo. Go ahead and laugh at the jerk who never heard Metric. When you’re done laughing, I’m going to punch you in the face and tell you how rich I am. It will be a soft punch and I’m actually quite poor.
In 1992 I was 14 years old and attending high school in the small town of Oakland, NJ. I will refer to this time as “back in my day” when describing it to my grandchildren. At this point in my life, I was freebasing cassette tapes. There was a small group of kids in my school that were immersed in the alternative rock scene and, in retrospect, were probably one or two genes away from shooting up the place. It was during this phase that I first heard Pod by The Breeders, which was recommended to me by a female alterna-friend who made her own miniature pottery and sold it to kids at school. Yes, the kids actually paid for this pottery.
There was something about Kim Deal’s voice and her lyrics on the Pod record that interested me. I needed to know what she looked like, who she was and where she came from. Since this was before the internet was widely in use, I had to find pictures and information by visiting record stores to thumb through the magazines. At one point I made a visit to the library to search their archives and find out as much as I could. Needless to say, the Oakland Public Library didn’t have much.
The first time I heard Metric’s new album Fantasies, I decided not to look at the band. I resisted the urge to Google them, and have avoided reading articles with detailed information or photos. It’s become so easy to get information about a band and a lot of the mystique is gone. There’s something about Metric that makes me want to file their record along with the cassettes and CDs from my high school days, and I’d like to keep the information overload at bay so I can be left alone with the music.
Watch the video for “Sick Mise” below:
Joel Dobbins – Investment
Joel Dobbins’ free online release Investment is almost astonishingly well produced. And Dobbins certainly has an ear for the grand, but this album is too epic for its own good.
From the first track Tears of Joy – an impressive sonic accomplishment – you can’t help but feel that Dobbins is walking a tightrope over mindless pop oblivion. And you can’t help but cover your eyes for fear that he won’t make it to the other side. He doesn’t make it. But Dobbins doesn’t die in the fall, either.
In Investment, at least, Dobbins comes across as a young man who seems to instinctively know that that good writing and catchy melodies are all that matter. But he hasn’t yet reconciled that truth with his amazing technical proficiency. Conserving the pop gadgetry for when he really needs it would do Investment wonders.
Tortured Soul Gently Rocks You, Your Mom
by Zach Huff – A&SB Contributor
Smooth jazz doesn’t get nearly as much props as it deserves.
Enter Tortured Soul to save the day and gently rock you and your mother.
The band cleverly maintains a soft jazz edge on their album Did You Miss Me while merging it with dance and elevator music. A lot of funk and groove is laced in the bass lines and keyboard riffs, but it’s never anything too hectic or sweat-inducing; you’ll find yourself tapping your toes and swaying with the beat, but not grinding up against the crotch of an adjacent person who also feels the groove.
The vocals are a pretty awesome amalgamation of things that probably don’t belong in the same sentence. They’re Hall and Oats meets Prince meets Stevie Wonder, with the songwriting sensibilities of Erasure.
Chase Pagan – Bells & Whistles [Review]
Sumptuous - The adjective that comes to mind when Chase Pagan’s upcoming album Bells & Whistles comes whirring to life on your CD player.
But instead of asking why the hell I still use CD players, you should ask yourself why you’ve never heard of Chase Pagan. His second release is a fun, bouncy pop rock wonder that shows off Pagan’s tremendous range without, well, showing off. What makes Bells & Whistles a truly special work is that Pagan’s range is so broad that the listener never even considers whether he is reaching too far.
While he can hardly contain his affinity for instrumental flourish in this 13-track album, Pagan always has the good sense to break each song down to the bare-bones melodies and sing-songy rhyme patterns that form the base of any good rock album. Even better, his lyrics are interesting.
Zinner Bound, Gagged by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
by Zach Huff – A&SB Contributor
Have you ever stayed awake at night, staring at the slowly rotating ceiling fan blades above (or empty ceiling, should you be fan-less) while wondering, “What would a Yeah Yeah Yeahs album sound like if Karen O and Brian Chase decided beat down the guitar-driven awesomeness that is Nick Zinner’s overbearing guitar prowess, likely through the use of baseball bats and lots of rope?”
Well, lie awake no rore.
It’s Blitz! has finally been released, and allegedly it’s totally a “dance rock” album. How’s that? They replaced most of the guitars with synths. Or at least that’s why I think people are touting it as a dance rock album.
To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s a dance rock album… because it isn’t. I mean, I don’t think it is.
Dino Spumoni – My Last Bow [Review]
Video records of Spumoni’s farewell performance at p.s. 118 in Greenpoint have been lost, save the above still image captured from a security camera in the school cafeteria
Dino Spumoni, once the undisputed king of New York City pop, takes a wistful look back in his latest and final album My Last Bow. Spumoni’s sensational run was largely defined by his legendary in-show antics at Manhattan’s old Circle Theater, most notably his debut of chart-topping single Smashed.
“Darling, you left my heart/ In pieces on the floor/ So tell me why shouldn’t I/ Break some things of yours?/I’ll smash your lamp/ the antique chair/ … Darling – POW – I’ll smash ‘em all”
Ever since, Spumoni’s lyrics have revolved around a comic zeal for chasing women at the expense of his own, or everyone else’s physical well-being. His next hit, No Touching – said to have been debuted at a demolitions-worker convention – seemed to perfect these themes.
“You’d better not touch my gal,” Spumoni crooned in halted, almost threatening tones. “I’ll pop you in the kisser pal.”
In My Last Bow, Spumoni makes it painfully clear that his partying days are over, and the same goes for his time as an inspired songwriter. (Some would argue it became clear when he released YO Dino Raps in the mid-90′s) In the title track Spumoni wails, pathetically, “Life was a gas/ but that gas has passed,” over a somber piano melody that falls down sonic stairs, much like Spumoni’s painful attempt at introspection, “I’ve gone from top of the pops/ to the back of the class.”
By the end of his opening tune at P.S. 118 the students seemed morose and inconsolable. One large-nosed child with a southern twang sobbed to his football-headed friend, “This really bites, Arnold!”
My sentiments exactly.
MSTRKRFT – Fist of God
by Alex Truong – A&SB Contributor
Just when you thought the universe was running out of cool stuff to dance to, MSTRKRFT comes up and slaps you upside the head with some amazing beats. A duo with a penchant for capitalization is capitalizing on the market for synth beats that have the pop appeal of Justice (MSTRKRFT actually has a Justice dance remix on their MySpace, which is absolutely worth checking out) with a little bit of the weirdness of the Faint. MSTRKRFT’s ALP and JFK have a sound that can also waver a little bit more in the way of a techno-ized Dub Trio in its distortions backed up by rapid drumming. It is not, however, so heavy that the movement of feet becomes impossible. Featuring the likes of Ghostface Killah, E-40 (hyphy love), and John Legend shows that ALP and JFK’s new shit has no shortage of talent. Their latest LP, Fist of God, is being released digitally to the plugged-in this March 17th.
Most of the tracks, like “It Ain’t Love (Featuring Lil Mo),” and “Bounce (Featuring Nore and Isis),” feature a consistent beat with solid and repeating hooks (read: easy to improvise dance steps, WORD) that might give way to a synth-heavy breakdown a couple of minutes into the song.
Del Marquis – Character Assassination
We’ve all heard it before these last couple years: 80′s music is back. That was close to true, but nearly every band to carry that meme has added distinctly modern touches to the synth-laden, filter-blanketed tunes danced to at coke parties in a decade long past. Del Marquis thinks 80′s music is back too, but he means that literally. His EP Character Assassination could have been released in 1984 and none of those bloodshot eyes would have looked at the DJ twice about it.
That’s not to say Character Assassination is a bad EP. Del Marquis (The guitarist for Scissor Sisters) takes a fresh take on music that replaces the guttural tones of acoustic instrumentation and smooths them with the tonic heights of modern technology… wait a minute, isn’t that what they said about new music in the 80′s?
