We brought you the first rumblings of a new Court and Spark record way back in May of last year. Folks, we're almost there. I promise this time.
Witch Season is officially complete and ready for an, um, August release. However, they've posted the following explanation on their website: "We may be slow, but we're thorough." Indeed.
The album took a year and a half, over 25 musicians, and many careful hours of production at the expert hands of Scott Solter at Tiny Telephone Studios. Some of the actual recordings took place there, as well as 15th Street Studio, and St. John the Evangelist Church, which is home to a one-of-a-kind pump organ.
The album promises to be a crowning achievement on their career, and is true labor of love. According to frontman MC Taylor, "We're all as happy as can be about how everything worked out, so we plan on being plenty busy through the next year." You can't argue that they've left you high and dry since 2001's Bless You, considering their numerous side projects, tours, and last fall's rarities collection, Double Roses.
But to further tide you over until August, the band is planning an as yet unnamed EP to be released in June (or thereabouts). The EP will feature guest spots from folk legend Linda Thompson and folk contemporary M Ward, among others. As a reader of these pages you are most likely aware that all tour itineraries lead to Austin in mid-March, and the Court and Spark's is no exception.
The band, along with Preston School of Industry, will aim their vans toward the indie mecca of the SXSW festival and stop at a few choice locations on the way. But the first order of business is a hometown appearance at this week's big kickoff of the festival season-- San Francisco's Noise Pop 2004. 02-27 San Francisco, CA - Thee Parkside (w/ All Night Radio and Hudson Bell-- Noise Pop) 03-13 San Francisco, CA - Bottom of the Hill # 03-18 Austin, TX - Friends (SXSW w/ the Wrens) 03-20 Austin, TX - ALLGO (SXSW w/ Preston School of Industry and +/-)
Tour co-sponsored by Kleenex, Sanrio, 9 Lives You love her or you hate her, that Chan Marshall gal.
And I mean you really love her or you really hate her. I'm on the love side. And I'd love to see her play one of these upcoming European shows, but I'm broke as fuck and I have college to worry about and my bike tires are flat.
Marshall's packing up her Danelectro, her boots and Ray-Bans for a few shows sprinkled aross the United Kingdom and Europe this March and April. Dates, mates:
Despite restraining order, can't get Phil Collins to stop feeling them at night Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons! Marchons! Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons, and shit.
As you may or may not have gleaned from the paraphrased chorus of "La Marseillaise" (and pardon my French), keyboard duo Air are preparing to wage French holy war upon the nylon-windsuit wearing, too loudly speaking, pigheaded, steak-eating, tough-ass patriots of the American shitterati. Man, writing stuff in French makes you feel like one suave, sexy bastard. I could do it all day.
Joie de vivre! Comment allez vous? Mise en scene!
J'aime parler fran ais. Merde! Merde!
Merdre (Alfred Jarry version)! Back on topic. You may remember Air from such soundtracks as The Virgin Suicides or from their recent full-length, Talkie Walkie, which stripped away the stylish kitsch of Moon Safari and the darkly stylish kitsch of 10,000Hz Legend in favor of more immediate and dairy-free compositions.
As in, it didn't sound so much like earlier Air albums as the soundtrack for a cheesy sci-fi B-movie with cardboard props. It's been nearly three years since Air last toured the States, so fans should be stoked about this chance to catch up on their gussied-up elevator music in the live setting. This tour includes a stop at that Salmonella Festival or whatever it is the kids keep talking about.
I don't know what's so great about diseases contracted from undercooked chicken; it all sounds pretty mops and brooms if you ask me. If you're an asshole still holding a grudge against the French for failing to support us in our debacle of a war, and feel sketchy about supporting anything froggy in these times of rampant jingoism, yet still have an unslakeable thirst for lace-cuffed keyboard muzak, here's my advice: Take a cue from David Rees' Get Your War On. Preserve your American heritage by showing up to the gig in a huge fuckin' SUV.
.. with an American flag flying at half-mast on its antenna.
What could be less French? The tour dates, courtesy of Astralwerks:
Scientists unconcerned by continued implosion of folk, possible outbreak of sparkalepsy If Sebadoh hadn't existed, someone would have had to make them up for the School of Rock 2: Electric Indie Boogaloo pitch. I mean, is there anyone with a better indie pedigree than Lou Barlow?
Dude played bass for Dinosaur freaking Jr., and went on to form one of the bands whose picture appears in the dictionary next to any number of entries-- including "lo-fi," "plaid," "Prozac," "bong-hit," and "grunge," for crying out loud. Sebadoh cemented their reputation with a series of albums that were quintessentially insecure, romantic, and-- make no mistake-- occasionally very noisy, thanks to the cacophony that drummer Jason Loewenstein and founder member Eric Gaffney brought to the table (see the crucial trilogy of 1992's Sebadoh III, 1993's Bubble and Scrape and the commercial breakthrough of 1994's Bakesale).
In Sebadoh's erratic live show, you were never quite sure whether Barlow was going to serenade you acoustic-style or smash the shit out of his electric guitar in the middle of a whirling frenzy of self- and sundry other hatreds: rock 'n' roll at its psychoanalytic best. Barlow worked out his issues in front of us, and we went along for the ride, often editing out the noisy songs for our distilled sad bastard mixtapes. Barlow and Loewenstein, who had not played together as Sebadoh since touring in support of their 1999 self-titled swan song, played together for Domino Records' 10th anniversary party last fall and eventually put together a two-week tour around it.
Barlow tells Pitchfork that his mother, of all people, was instrumental in further cementing the reunion when she asked her son and Loewenstein to play together at a benefit show for Community Resources for People with Autism in Eastham, MA. This yielded another two-week tour, and the boys seemed to be back on a roll. Towards the end of April, Barlow and Loewenstein will be taking the Sebadoh caravan back out on the road for two more weeks of lo-fi lovin'.
The lineup for the tour is basically Barlow and Loewenstein with, as Barlow says, "some simple non-electronic percussion we recorded on my trusty Tascam Porta-1 cassette four-track. I play acoustic guitars and Jake plays electric bass. We strip the songs down, but I'd like to think it still 'rocks.
'" The confirmed dates thus far: 04-20 Chicago, IL - Abbey Pub On February 12th, just days before Weezer's twelve-year anniversary, Rivers Cuomo shocked a roomful of Cal State Fullerton students by joining former Weezer bassist Matt Sharp, unannounced, during Sharp's solo acoustic performance at the university's Titan Student Union. In a small venue at the large Fullerton CSU campus called The Pub, Matt Sharp opened up with six songs, solo: "Jumping Around," "Goodbye West Coast," "January's Girl," "Thoughts From A Slow Train," "When I Get Up" (cover of a Tegan and Sara tune), and "The Love I'm Searching For." Then, with a heartfelt introduction from Sharp, Cuomo joined his former bandmate on stage, dumbfounding the audience of young Rentals fans.
Reportedly, cell phones began to buzz as friends called their friends and more friends called their friends until the room was packed, the fans delighted and cheering. Rivers, accompanying on acoustic guitar, performed four songs with Sharp. They started off with "Mrs.
Young," a song the two co-wrote before Weezer's self-titled 'Blue Album' was released in 1993. Then came "Time Song," a newly written collaboration from Cuomo and Sharp, followed by a priceless sing-a-long moment with "Say It Ain't So." After placing their instruments aside, the whole fake-ending-begging-for-an-encore thing began.
A restless and amazed crowd chanted them on until they finally finished with the 'Blue Album' classic (and Matt Sharp's memorable spoken-word performance) "Undone (The Sweater Song)." According to weezer.com, the two disillusioned ex-bandmates have buried the hatchet (emotionally and legally), rekindling their friendship and composing music together once again, separate from their own predominate projects.
Meanwhile, Weezer put the production of their fifth album on hold as personal business caused a few Weezer members to leave Los Angeles for awhile; production is set to resume in March. After the two-year break since Maladroit, Weezer has teamed up with famous Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin for their newest musical endeavor. Responsible for such commercial successes as Beastie Boys' License to Ill, Run D.
M.C.'s Raising Hell, Public Enemy's Yo!
Bum Rush the Show, as well as assorted work with Johnny Cash and Tom Petty and the Red Hot Chili Peppers-- one has to speculate on the direction of Weezer's fifth album. Energetic? Funkadelic?
Cop hate'n? Pat Wilson's first vocal freestyle performance? The previously announced Weezer DVD is still scheduled for release on March 23rd.
The DVD contains live performances, unseen promo videos, behind the scenes documentary footage from the classic 'Blue Album' days to the less classic post-Pinkerton era, and all those Spike Jonze videos you used to rock out to in your living room on MTV when your parents were at Sizzler: "I've come undoooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnne!" (As you thrash around on your couch playing a tennis racket like a flying-V guitar) Tracklist:
B-52's, Happy Mondays, Dee-Lite banned for life on principal Droners and improv noisemakers will converge on Brooklyn, NY, next month for the inaugural weekend-long No Fun Fest. The festival will take place at North Six in uber-hip Williamsburg, from March 19th through 21st.
Appearing at the festival are noise-rock superstars like Wolf Eyes, Sightings, and Double Leopards; bands who have risen from the ashes, such as To Live and Shave in L.A.; and absurdly-named bands you've probably never heard of, like Japanese Karaoke Afterlife Experiment.
In addition, almost every member of Sonic Youth is playing with his or her side project: Lee Ranaldo with Mission of Burma's Roger Miller and drummer William Hooker; Kim Gordon and Jim O'Rourke with Ikue Mori and DJ Olive; Thurston Moore and O'Rourke with frantic percussionist Chris Corsano and veteran saxophonist Paul Flaherty. The festival is curated primarily by Carlos Giffoni (whose band, Monotract, is performing), with assistance by Russ Waterhouse (of the legendary tape label White Tapes), Matt Redman, and Breathmint label head Bud Newton. Giffoni cited events like the Sonic Youth-curated All Tomorrow's Parties in Los Angeles and last year's Destijl festival as his inspiration for No Fun.
Bands will play on both of North Six's stages, with the upstairs and downstairs acts staggered. The downstairs events were Giffoni's "way of balancing out things by having an outside point of view in the curation, and also to give a chance to bands that otherwise would never get a chance to play this kind of event." The No Fun name was inspired by an off-handed comment made by Thurston Moore, and gives a nod to the "No" prefix that is so common in New York (e.
g., No Wave, the No New York compilation) as well as an admission that this music really is "no fun" for most people. As Giffoni said, "for about 90 percent or more of the world population, this will be considered terrible music to listen to.
And you have to be completely insane to try to organize this kind of event by yourself and the good-willed help of a few friends." If all goes well with the festival this year, Giffoni hopes to coordinate a similar event in the future, possibly even in South America. Lineup:
Go forward!
Move ahead! Try to detect it! It's not too late!
Okay. So first and foremost there's Nightclub Dwight, a sketchy yet charismatic cat who's always on the make-- when he starts to talk about getting some rocks, he ain't talking about ice cubes. He has a club called the Nice Nice with black lights that expose stains in white tights, where they have "dry ice and knife fights on every other Wednesday night.
" There's poor Jenny, always a little jonesey; she had "twenty-seven lovers in the back half of the summer." She knows you think it's way too many. There's Katrina the K-Hole, making out with a crackhead who "keeps it in his mouth in those crazy chipmunk cheeks, [she] gave him twenty and he kissed [her], spit a little treat between [her] teeth.
" There's Juanita, but the guys all call her LL Cool J, because she's "been here for years, and you can't call it a comeback when you've never even been away." There's the guy in the Indian Fringes who "looks an awful lot like Frampton," the rich kid who wandered too far up on Jefferson, and the guys who "mix the hoods with sleeveless fashions." Presiding over this vivid microcosm is the enigmatic Eyepatch Guy, with "needle-marked arms like the frontman in some grunge band, a big straw hat and a liquid orange suntan.
" This is the dystopian nightclub world of Craig Finn, ex-Lifter Puller frontman; a world populated by an idiosyncratic cast of junkies, club kids, losers and drunks, rockers and promoters and hack journalists and mounds of powdered drugs; a world of shady deals and date rapes (that's not just cork floating around in the wine) and after-hours clubs and puke-stained alleys. Finn, in nasal diatribes, built a hermetic cosmos around these characters over Archers of Loaf-style guitar skronk and canned synths, part mad-poet cartwheeling through tortured meters and morphing homonyms, part late-stage drunk who corners you at the bar to declaim on get-rich-quick schemes of questionable ethics. Lifter Puller called it quits in 2000, but Finn has returned to Frenchkiss Records with a new band, The Hold Steady, whose debut, The Hold Steady Almost Killed Me, comes out on March 15th, and will introduce a whole new cast of indelible characters.
The Hold Steady leans more toward classic rock than the art-punk of Lifter Puller, but judging from the lyrics (e.g. "Ginger and Jack and four or five Feminax.
Psycho eyes and a stovepipe hat. A ray of light in white rayon slacks"), Lifter Puller fans won't be disappointed. The Hold Steady is a bar band out to erase the memory of electroclash and wake up somnambulant hipsters dancing to minimal German DJ's wearing electrical tape.
Rounded out by guitarist Tad Kubler (ex-Lifter Puller, Song of Zarathustra) and rhythm section Galen Polivka and Judd Counsell (veterans of Punchdrunk, Koester and Verbena), The Hold Steady recorded this debut last summer at Atomic Recording Company in Brooklyn. Les Savy Fav's Tim Harrington and Seth Jabour worked on the album's design and layout. The tracklist: Scat Records will offer new vinyl runs of two classic Guided by Voices albums this summer.
Propeller and Bee Thousand (originally released in 1992 and 1994, respectively) will be back on shelves again in all of their wax glory as soon as June. And with some stylin' extras to boot, according to the label's website. The re-release of Bee Thousand celebrates the lo-fi landmark's 10th birthday.
Officially titled Bee Thousand: The Director's Cut, the gatefold double album features Bob Pollard's original cover art and offers an entire twelve inches of bonus material. The first record will contain "the existing album, unchanged" while the second disc will consist of album outtakes (all from Box), The Grand Hour and I Am a Scientist EP's, and a previously unreleased, "more straightforward rock version" of "My Valuable Hunting Knife" taken from the I Am A Scientist sessions. Scat Records main man Robert Griffin told Pitchfork "I've been meaning to get Bee Thousand back in print on vinyl for a while.
And it's been ages since either of the EP's were available on vinyl. When I sold the last copies of Bee Thousand a couple years ago, I had it in my mind to include those EP's somehow when it was time to repress." Fans have long bemoaned the ri-gottdamn-diculous prices charged by merchants and eBay hawks for the original GbV albums; all the whining can cease come June.
Griffin says he's glad to "[fill] a need and throw a little party for the record in the process." Scat's re-release of the original Propeller album will drop at around the same time, effectively celebrating its 12th anniversary with a bang. And though the 2004 Propeller boasts no "bonus material or remastering," there is a nice visual incentive to buy the record.
The original version of the album was of course released in a limited run of 500, with each record decked out in its own unique, handmade cover art. Scat's upcoming re-releases will reportedly all wear the same jacket, and it will be a handsome one chosen from amongst the several hundred original covers. The Guided By Voices Database website (linked below) is currently holding an online election to choose the cover for the re-release.
Least you'll have one chance to vote for something you believe in this year. "Woman Cleaning the T.V.
" is reportedly ahead in the balloting. "Of course, we could end up using the runner up if whoever owns the winner doesn't want to loan it out," Griffin admits. Hey, guy with the girl bending over on your Propeller LP: the people have spoken, time to pay the fiddler!
"Propeller is happening just because it's cool," says Griffin. "Stoughton Printing makes these extra-thick old school LP jackets; and being that there are some really cool Propeller LP covers out there, it seems like a winning combination. Otherwise, fans pay $400 and up for an original copy.
These will sell for $10 to $12 in most shops." Do you have a news tip for us? Anything crazy happen at a show you attended recently?
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