- joiezabel in Scarlett Johansson - Anywhere I Lay My Head it really is brilliant, scott. i hate you.
- hotshotrobot in Scarlett Johansson - Anywhere I Lay My Head Goddammit, Borch, now how am i supposed to review this? I can’t top that!
- Borch in The Avett Brothers - House of Blues - May 14th Good Lord, that’s a beautiful song! The Avett Bros. were in Chicago? Why wasn’t I notified?!
Leaves, a Chicago quartet of drums, guitar, bass and sax, stands tall w/in a 
burgeoning scene of rock/jazz that’s coming from all corners of the city, which you’re more likely to stumble upon than hear broadcast from the rooftops. Having just released Live at the Ice Factory (Fresh Produce), Leaves are busy, but don’t expect them to go on a “look-at-us tour” – each member can be found in one of their countless side projects throughout the city, and naming every one of them would take a companion volume. Go to their myspace page instead.
I was fortunate to hear Leaves perform a live set on The Rock Show on Northwestern University radio WNUR, 89.3. It took awhile, but I eventually met the band at a Logan Square dive called Winds Cafe, and talked to them as bass player Dan Thatcher prepared to set up for a Tuesday night gig with The Ed Breazeale Group.
1. When historians listen to your most recent CD 1,000 years from now, what will they say?
Tyler Beach (guitar): [unhorsed by the thought of how far away 1000 years is] If it were still around in, wow, 1000 years, I think they’d find it strange, experimental, unpolished…
Dan Thatcher (acoustic bass): … if it’s not totally lost, maybe they’d find an organic connection that has been lost in the music that’s getting made in 3007.
Charles Rumback (drums/nord): They won’t understand how we fit in, how to categorize us. We’ll be a big mystery.
[Saxophonist Charles Gorcynski was not available for comment]Â
2. If you could play a show with any band/musician living or dead, who would you pick and why?
TB: I don’t know, I guess John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Elvin Jones, God rest his soul…
CR: Sure, those, and Pharaoh Sanders… maybe Bowie too…
DT: The band I play with – Leaves.
TB:Â Me too.
CR: Definitely. You’d always like things to be perfect and to play with a legend, but if you find a group of guys that work well together, then those are the guys that you really want to be with. Not that playing with Coltrane wouldn’t be great, but when you’ve got guys that enjoy each other and are part of something really excellent, hopefully that’s the band you want to be in the most. It is for me.
3. What is the strangest band-related dream you’ve ever had?
Gross, my headline kind of rhymes!
Aaaanyway, the tour dates are…
2/23 St Paul, MN @ Fitzgerald Theater with Chuck Klosterman
3/10 Mexico City, Mexico MX @ Beat @ Deportivo
4/16 Columbia, MO @ Blue Note
4/17 St. Louis, MO @ Creepy Crawl
4/18 Nashville, TN @ Mercy Lounge
4/20 Dallas, TX @ Gypsy Tea Room
4/21 Austin, TX @ Emo’s
4/22 Houston, TX @ Numbers
4/27 Indio, CA @ Coachella
5/2 San Francisco, CA @ Great American Music Hall
5/4 Portland, OR @ Dante’s
5/5 Seattle, WA @ Neumo’s
5/6 Vancouver, BC @ Plaza Club
5/9 Denver, CO @ Bluebird Theater
5/10 Omaha, NE @ Sokol Underground
5/11 Des Moines, IA @ Vaudeville Mews
5/12 Chicago, IL @ The Abbey (two shows)
5/15 Montreal, QC @ Le National
5/16 Toronto, ON @ Lee’s Palace
5/18 New York, NY @ Irving Plaza
5/19 Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club
5/23 Columbus, OH @ The Basement
5/24 Newport, KY @ Southgate House
Tapes ‘n Tapes are apparently working on a bunch of new songs. If you want to ask them about those, or about how they got the hookup with Chuck, you can probably drop ‘em a line at their website.
A little while back i posted a splurb about ex-Jawbox, Burning Airlines, and current Channels guit-slinger, record producer, and all-around swell dude J. Robbins’ son, Cal, who turned the big Uno last Saturday, the 27th. Happy birthday, Cal! If you haven’t been keeping up, here’s the scoop (straight from the DeSoto Records website): Cal was diagnosed last September with Type 1 SMA, or Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a genetic motor neuron disease that kills most children afflicted with it before their second birthday.
The good news: J.’s friends and fans have gone crazy with the fundraising to send love and support their way. There have already been benefit shows galore, and Chicago artist and Dianogah bassist Jay Ryan made $620 auctioning one of his original drawings on eBay.
But, yeah, i know what you’re saying–way to tell us this stuff ahead of time, DJ, you bonehead. Is there anything going on right now? Well, hey, i’m glad you asked. In recognition of Cal’s first birthday, the wonderful folks at Copper Press Magazine have set up a subscription drive to raise some more cash for treatment:
Copper Press feels indebted to J. Robbins, and we are humbled at the opportunity to offer his family financially through the generosity of its readership. To this end, we’ve set up a subscription drive to raise money for Cal’s treatment.$5 of every subscription will go toward a fund expressly reserved for the Robbins family. Our goal is modest: 1000 subscriptions, $5000, and of course, we’re all for exceeding those numbers with your help of course.To subscribe to a year of Copper Press (four issues), please send $18 via PayPal to benefitcal@copperpress.com or pay via CCNow. Check or m.o. is also accepted. We will send monthly checks to the Robbins family.
Copper Press is a fine publication, and they are stand-up chaps for doing this. Over the years, J.’s done some phenomenal work and brought us some great music, both in his bands and in his studio work (with bands like The Dismemberment Plan and Murder By Death). Now’s our chance to give back.
For more updates on goings-on with Cal, be sure to read his new blog.
dear exZAKtly,
hey, will you please get me my absent sound cd back? i’m feeling relaxed and meditative tonight and would really like to hear those intense and intricate sounds right about now. it is hard to find music that puts you into a dreamlike state without making you want to sleep, but, as you may recall from the last time i wrote about this band, absent sound does just that with their delicious brand of post-rock ambiance.
so if you could snag their cd it’s all true back from your co-worker, i’d appreciate it. feel free to listen to it again so i can make you go see them with me when they play chicago - i can’t wait to see the choreographed film and video loop projections they use with their live shows. i find it to be such perfect headphone music that it will be interesting to see it translated to a visceral experience but we shall see what we shall see. in the meantime, i guess we will have to content ourselves with their answers to superstarcastic’s 5 questions.
thank you kindly,
joiezabel
ps. do you think they are trying to be funny with that last answer, considering that, like most of the cool kids, they are canadian and all?
1. when historians listen to your most recent CD 1000 years from now, what will they say?
Holy shit this is so ahead of it’s time!!!
2. if you could play a show with any band/musician living or dead, who would you pick and why?
Josh- G!YBE because the tension they create is so pure.
Jim- Mike Patton because he is so insanely versitile.
Dave- James Brown is the most intense live act ever.
Rob- The Beatles, Can and Absent Sound, fuck now that’s a bill!
3. what is the strangest band-related dream (one of) you have had?
Hanging out with Lou Reed and Eddie Vedder; also camping up north with Sonic Youth.
4. what do your fans look like?
Humans with spirals and X’s in their eyes hypnotized by the sounds of Absent Sound.
5. what bullshit do you run into at most every show that makes you think “man, this bullshit again?”
When there are sound people/ promoters/ and bands who don’t care enough about the totality and importance of a great experience of music, so in other words they just show up to play/or punch the clock. We’ve seen that you really do only get out what you put in.
bonus question: why won’t you forget to tip your bartender?
Cause it’s the American way!
perhaps because of the international attention given to their brilliant 2006 record and the glass-handed kites (superstarcastic review of it here), danish quartet mew has re-released their 2003 album frengers. previously available in the usa only as an import, frengers is a powerful slab of rock’n'roll and is more single-friendly than last year’s conceptual offering.
mew’s sound on frengers is, as always, hard to define (alterna-psych-prog-rock-pop?) but the soaring vocal choruses, guitar riffs, rippling bass and pumped-up percussion combine to create a dazzling sonic atmosphere evocative of northern wastelands. singer jonas bjerre has one of those voices that will either annoy the crap out of you or will give you the good kind of chicken skin. it’s high and sharp and sometimes he reaches notes that men shouldn’t be able to reach without being kicked you-know-where. it contrasts oddly with the immense orchestra-rock sound and fiery instrumentation but the resulting effect has a weird energy that works.
the song structures on frengers (a compound of “friends” and “strangers”) are strange, multi-textured and anything but predictable, odd aural experiments that manage to remain lush and melodic. the sound kinda reminds me of early mercury rev and frankly renders it nearly impossible to remain sedately seated when such moving things are happening in your ears.
Frengers opens with the shimmering riffs and kinetic basslines of “Am I Wry? No,” a hard-edged song faintly reminiscent of my bloody valentine, only with choirlike vocals and frantic, choppy drumming. mew’s promotional representatives were kind enough to provide us with a copy of this song so you could hear it for yourselves before rushing out to get your paws on this reissue. please download and enjoy.
You can tell by the name… easy to love if bliss-pop is your thing, and infuriating if it’s not, the Oohlas are a pop-drenched trio that test the limits of the word ‘overbearing’. Lead by former Everclear drummer Greg Eklund on guitar, his brother, Mark fills in on bass/vocals, and Ollie Stone adds another layer of guitar and vocals to combine for a geyser of music that you could pour on pancakes. A host of drummers appear on the band’s debut Best Stop Pop, and there is a lot of sound to process - too much - that never lets up from start to finish.
Of course, the album is likeable - what’s a pop record if not accessible, as a minimum? The first two songs ‘Gone’ and ‘Tripped’ start the album off right, and you enjoy them for the same reasons that make you tire of Best Stop at it’s midpoint - endless fuzz guitars, female vocals heavy on the cute side, and hurried tempos that never change time signature or dynamics.
If you’re already tired of the enthusiasm of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Camera Obscura, then this is not for you because the Oohlas exemplify what is already out there, only they offer more of it at once. The band has all the elements in line to make them blend in with today’s favorite flavor, and with the longevity of a Snickers fun-size candy bar (which is actually less fun).
The New Pornographers, for example, found a way to maintain an untenable balance that keeps each release from being cloying and syrupy as it gets denser and richer. The Oohlas, however, fail at that unlikely mix of ecstasy and subtlety, having buried each track with layers of synth upon guitar upon synth’d guitar, and so on. They are just trying to get onto this wave before it crests, and so they drown us in a stew of effects and hooks to get there.
The production is mostly to fault, because the songs are well written, and for all the peppy contents, there are a couple of surprising turns that have greater depth than a blue jeans commercial. Stone makes us uncomfortable and claustrophobic on the album’s closer, ‘The Rapid’, as she wigs out about being overcrowded and overloaded. It achieves the intended effect, but goes on a bit longer than was necessary to get the point across (okay, germs are everywhere and packed venues suck… there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, I think).
Had the band been established on more original ground, the jokes would go over a little better. Take the shrill ‘TV Dinner’ for example: Stone wails and demands to know, “Why… don’t…. you…. love meeeeeeee?!” in the voice of an adolescent waif who can’t understand that we don’t love her because she’s asking us at the top of her tortured lungs in the middle of a crowded cafeteria. It’s teenage whininess trying to be funny, but it could be regretfully anthemic for the dumped girls who take it seriously and identify with it. Poor boyfriends. Sure, most high school memories are laughable now, but my skin still crawls when I think of the icky and clutching Amanda [last name withheld] from Junior year who kept asking me basically the same question, and this song brings it all back.
The Oohlas aren’t contemptible for trying to fit in without rattling anyone’s cage, and the genre hasn’t quite worn out its welcome, but it will as the stream floods with new bands whose only contribution to the medium is to add more, more, more and more to existing structures.
Released September 26, 2006
Stolen Transmission
5/10
