Imagine you and I were having a conversation, and suppose I asked you who you thought my favorite guitarist of the moment is. For the sake of argument, let s say you said Thurston Moore. I would stare at you blankly in response, because you clearly didn t understand my question.
Suppose you followed up with Jack White, in which case my whole body would heave in a fit of laughter because at that point I would know that you were surely fooling around with me. I would wipe a tear from my eyes and say, No, you re wrong. Funny, but still wrong.
You could suggest Jesper Mortensen, a logical choice that would give me pause for reflection, but it would be a suggestion I would ultimately have to dismiss for the highly sought-after title of My Favorite Guitarist of the Moment.
Obviously, I would have no qualms about continuing in this obnoxious back-and-forth fashion until you realized that your only means of escape was to throttle my frail neck and run for cover. But I ll give you a hint: it has to do with the subject of this review, Matthew Friedberger, one-half the talent of the Fiery Furnaces.
Yes, Mr. Friedberger, with his Frankenstein grace and complete irreverence for economy in songwriting, can set my sympathetic nervous system on high alert like no other just by picking up a six-string. If my lower intestines were ever to spontaneously animate and burst out of my abdomen, wrapping themselves around a thousand guitars with ten thousand puckered fingertips, I reckon the sound they would make would be a close approximation to the noise generated by one Matthew Friedberger.
So it s no surprise my excitement level was at an all-time high when I learned that Mr. Friedberger intended to release not one, but two new albums this summer: an operatic story record of experimental design, and a summery pop album featuring, and I quote, a lot of guitar solos. Sweet devilish symphony!
What more could a nerdy music critic ask for? Well, more guitar solos for starters. Winter Women, the guitar-based pop half of Mr.
Friedberger s double-solo record, features prominent use of player piano, keyboards, synthesized strings, flutes, and programmed beats, but disparingly few mind-altering guitar solos. Nevertheless, one key characteristic that distinguishes Friedberger fans is their high tolerance for musical masochism: the more your desired guitar solo is withheld and obfuscated, the more ecstatic it sounds when it s finally unleashed.
Hello there my little chickadees.
Once again, the Post-Rockist comes to you from the seedy recesses of the www to bring you the most up-to-date old news that you certainly learned from any number of music sites in the past few days. The only difference between us and them: we re much less knowledgeable! But hey, so are you, because you don t just sit around all day and listen to albums like it s your job.
And if it is your job, can you get me an interview?
The sun that had for the last two days turned Chicago’s Union Park into something of a schvitz started its fiery descent at a moment so precise it could hardly have been a coincidence – precisely, that is, at the start of Devendra Banhart’s performance. With the day in its tawny final hour and the night not yet settled in, it was easy to imagine Banhart and his band slipping through some careless crevice of the space-time continuum, straight out of 1972, a few molecules still scrambled.
It would certainly help to explain the singer’s bizarre banter. He opened the act by explaining that, inspired by a tour stop in Greece, the band would be henceforth known as “Bathhouse of the Winds”: “where the winds go for anonymous sexual encounters.” Then he said something about sperm being wet and life being made out of water.
It wasn’t that the music was quite so moving. It was just that the musicians, in tight denim flares and gauzy shirts, all lanky and angelic with long locks and beards, looked so handsome in the amber light. It was the bottle of Maker’s Mark that the lead guitar player took swigs from when he wasn’t using its neck to play slide.
It was the young man alone who stepped in next to us, muttering, “Sweet! Open spot!” – then, ten minutes later, stomped away after offering his review: “Boring!
” It was because it was not just the sun that was going down but the temperature, and we had all survived one of the hottest weekends ever recorded on the planet. And it was because we knew that as much as we liked Devendra Banhart, as much as we would like Yo La Tengo after him and Spoon after them, and as much as we were all about to puke with anticipation for the legendary once-in-a-lifetime Os Mutantes final one-time only reunion tour extravaganza, we also knew that it was all about to be over. And we were all pretty damn tired.
I was so tired, in fact, that I wandered away from the Devendra Banhart show and bought a popsicle and fell asleep while I tried to eat it, the sounds of Yo La Tengo coloring my dreams. I had slept through Aesop Rock that afternoon, too, just as I had the day before during The Walkmen’s show, though I did wake up when I recognized that one song from the Saturn commercial.
“Well, I guess you did get in for free,” a friend said after I’d told him how many bands had provided soundtrack music for my snoozes.
That was true and it wasn’t true. I bought my thirty-dollar two-day whammy ticket in April, the day after the Os Mutantes announcement, in a fever of impulse. It was mailed to me a week later.
Of course I lost it. But someone I met at an after-hours coffee shop party in Evanston the night before the festival offered me a spare ticket she didn’t plan on selling. I got in on a free pass, but I’d paid my thirty dollars, and I wasn’t looking to waste it.
Besides, it’s not like I was sleeping because I was bored. It wasn’t that I even regretted falling asleep. Pitchfork, the baby brother of runaway child Intonation, was technically a first-annual festival, but it felt like something we had all been attending for years.
Friends I knew from college were there, friends from Ann Arbor and friends from Milwaukee. I ran into at least two dozen people I knew, including a quorum of ex-boyfriends.
Following the release of their third album A Hundred Miles Off, New York City s The Walkmen have announced that they intend to continue their quest of promoting overlooked early 1970s pop Americana.
This time around, instead of being merely influenced or inspired by musicians of yore, The Walkmen have recorded a note-for-note replica of Harry Nilsson s 1974 Pussy Cats, although they intend to call their record Pussy Cats Starring The Walkmen and release it October 24, 2006. Nilsson originally recorded with John Lennon in a fit of drugs, debauchery, and booze as part of Lennon s famous 18 month mid-life crisis known as his lost weekend. The Walkmen recorded Pussy Cats Starring The Walkmen in three weeks immediately before Marcata Recording Studio was moved from Harlem to update New York.
Nilsson ruptured his vocal chords while recording his album, while Hamilton Leithauser sings as though his vocal chords were permanently ruptured. For his album, Nilsson covered such rock n'roll classics as Subterranean Homesick Blues and Rock Around the Clock ; The Walkmen cover Nilsson covering such rock n'roll classics as Subterranean Homesick Blues and Rock Around the Clock. Now wrap your head around that meta conundrum.
To get a feel for how these step-sons of Schmilsson measure up, preview the original and the imposter:
Goodness, that s a good tune! And it s only the opening track. Did you notice the backing track that Lennon also employed on #9 Dream, which was released on his 1974 lost weekend record Walls and Bridges?
The Post-Rockist news staff is now patiently awaiting the legal release of the Walkmen s version.
Outkast - {Due in stores August 22, 2006}
Of Montreal - {Due in stores August 22, 2006}
The Rapture - {Available on , hitting the States September 5, 2006}
Boy George Humiliated By People With Cameras, Just Wants to Pick Up NYC Garbage
Go on, yuck it up. Well, ya ain t!
The least frivolous record ever…like a hard electronic spanking.
Germans have never been regarded as the most playful or jocular people. They have developed a reputation that is easily lampooned as ill-tempered drill sergeants mixed with androgynous perversion as seen on “Sprockets.
” One need only briefly glance at the photos I took on my trip to the Beate Uhse Erotic Museum in Berlin to see what I’m talking about. To me, and countless other non-Deutsche, that is what we think of when we think of Germans. Varcharz isn’t going to do anything to change that perception.
On their latest release, Mouse on Mars means business. Serious Fucking Business. This is quite possibly the least playful and least jocular album of the year.
Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner have put together a snarling beast of an album. And it is good…really good.
According to the Ipecac Recordings website, Varcharz has its foundation in the same recording sessions the resulted in 2004’s Radical Connector. This is almost impossible to believe. Varcharz is no dance album.
Gone are the overtly pop songs and with cleverly manipulated vocals, replaced by extremely aggressive and wildly experimental electronic rock. The attitude change between albums is even reflected in the language. While Radical Connector boasts song titles like “Detected Beats” and “Send Me Shivers,” this violence that is Varcharz includes “skik” and “igoegowhygowego.
” Even the song titles mirror that uniquely German trait of ill-tempered perversion.
The majority of Varcharz is a mix of experimental IDM-style electronics and the more chaotic side of post-rock. Grainy sounds, hissing backgrounds, and jolting beats rampage along through each song, usually getting more intense as the song builds as if the different components are fighting each other.
But, the knock-blow never comes. These songs don’t collapse into cacophony as if noise triumphed over rhythm or vice versa. Rather, noise and rhythm interact with each other and everything in the song mutates.
Beats become tonal, melodies become syncopated and the whole songs changes complexion. So, while the original timing or melodic phrasing endures, it only exists under a thousand tiny distortions. Perhaps the standout example of this transformation occurs in “bertney.
” It begins with a series of frantic and impatient beats, but as you listen these staccato noises actually spell out a hummable melody. These skittering beats continue, with the same melody, but as the song evolves, melody becomes the property of hazy squalls of noise with almost no rhythmic structure. The whole of Varcharz is marked by these instances of distortion and variation.
The most amazing part of this feat is that Mouse on Mars is able to deliver these subtle variations in a way that isn’t subtle at all. It’s just too extreme and intense to be subtle…or to give a fuck about subtlety.
Leave it to the Germans to create this music.
Rock and electronic music perverted to its very core.
{Visit the Mouse on Mars . Or, Varcharz today.
}
-Posted by E. Kula I know what you re thinking, What? Why no Day 2 coverage of the Lite Brite Indie Pop Film Test?
Why the glaring omission, O reliable music news source? Well, the fact of the matter is that the normally ubiquitous P-R machine felt obligated to lay low for an evening and, you know, play with the kids, count our piles of money, and in general stay out of the public s eye in light of recent damaging allegations linking the Post-Rockist s CFO to the financial interests of Jack Abramoff s tribal clients. And also, let s be honest, because we don t have to resources to pretend to be experts in touting the relative awesomeness of every single musical act that passes through our greedy little fingers.
Granted, it would have really been something else to boast of a sweaty night with Boston s Mission of Burma and what allmusic calls their vintage early- 80s post-punk sound, but when I go to something called the Lite Brite Indie Pop Film Test, I m gearing up for some sugary sweet pop music. And, like a catalogue of awkwardly fumbled dates, that s exactly what Lite Brite Day 3 delivered.
Sunday s line-up was a walking tour through the familiar stages of adolescent romantic grief in song format.
Oh No! Oh My!, Georgie James, and Camera Obscura played sets that were in respective turns naively hopeful, untouchably lusty, and breathlessly forlorn.
Seeking comfort in pop music has never been so obviously a growing process.
Austin s Oh No! Oh My!
started the night with a set filled with youthful humility, excessive punctuation, and ambitiously cute song structures. It was hard to dislike them, given how effortlessly they portrayed next generation suburban high school puppy lovers who take themselves and their poetry too seriously. Although Greg Barkley sang with the sort of nasally inflection that smelled a little too strongly of uncomfortable teenage melodrama, I found myself sitting patiently throughout the entire performance, pleasantly surprised at the freshness of their indie repetoire.
All the while the jumbotron captured images of the band with visual effects at least 30 years out of date.
Next on the roster was Georgie James, who herald from Washington, D.C.
, and come with the Post-Rockist s Pennsylvania correspondent s seal of approval. Ah yes, Georgie James. Sweet Georgie James.
No one in the band goes by the name Georgie or James, let alone Georgie James, the title was chosen as a fitting tribute to the singer/power pop songwriters listed as influences on their MySpace page: Marshall Crenshaw, Todd Rundgren, Chris Bell, Georgie James. To my ears, the quickest comparison I could come up with was that they sound like Beth Orton fronting Wings. Hey, there s a place for that, too.
There is something distinctly appealing about watching a band replicate the glossy guitar sound and fanciful rhythmic underpinnings of 1970s big pop songwriters without a trace of irony. John Davis, former drummer of the Dischord punk band Q And Not U and Georgie James guitarist/vocalist, jackknifed danceable chords the likes of which I ve never heard before and sweated like Philip Seymour Hoffman in a Turkish bath house. Despite Davis s energetic performance, all eyes were on the composed and doll-faced Laura Burhenn as she plucked notes on her Rhodes electric piano and dominated the plucky girl-boy vocals.
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