- 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?!
Hi everybody, i’m Conan Neutron, I play in the band Replicator from Oakland, CA. There are many tour diaries, but this one is mine. Thanks to the SSC gang for asking us to do it here.
There are no two ways about it, by the time we had reached Boston we were pretty spent, emotionally, mentally and physically exhausted with a series of shows that, while featuring good performances and some great people, were definitely less then stellar. Morale was low and our cash flow situation even lower.
Luckily, our time in Boston was JUST what we needed, a chance to recharge the mental and emotional batteries with a day off in a kick ass city, and a well and truly wicked awesome show!
And indeed, Replicator had a wicked awesome time.
Conan telling it like it is at the show…
Replicator posing all crazy go nuts like.
But first we stayed at this place:
Our crappy hotel, which Todd dubbed “the Moneyshot motor lodge”
Hi everybody, i’m Conan Neutron, I play in the band Replicator from Oakland, CA. There are many tour diaries, but this one is mine. Thanks to the SSC gang for asking us to do it here.
I dreamed that there was a gigantic alien spaceship destroying the planet, giant destructive beams levelling cities, forests, townships, mini-malls, everything. Whenever another city would explode in shattering glass and fire, I would stir a little bit, until finally I woke up and realized that there was a garbage truck right next to my head and that dudes were emptying cans into it. Tour had invaded even the deepest part of my distopian dreams. This wasn’t half as good as looking around bleary eyed from the bench seat of the Supernaut to see a well dressed man in a suit and tie with a briefcase giving me a horrified and disgusted look at the realization that the van near his place had held a sleeping rock and roll type person with colored hair. Ahh yes, good times.
This, folks… is the rock and roll lifestyle.
We were ready to leave DC almost immediately. I really didn’t want to miss seeing ANYTHING in DC for the second time in a row, but it was starting to look like that was going to be the case. We had to get the new t-shirt design out to Chris from hifi so that we can have a new set of tshirts in time for the leg of the tour with them. Soooo… again it looked like I was going to be in our nations capital and not able to actually see anything. Total drag, but that’s the thing with tour. A lot of people, non band people anyway, always say: “oh cool! you’re going on a vacation/roadtrip”, yes, but the thing is on vacations and roadtrips you generally get to see the city instead of the venue, where ever you are staying and where you eat. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great, but it’s not a vacation, not at all.
Anyway, we did at least get to drive by the Washington Monument, Capital building, and the Asshole in Chief’s pad , which is more then I had seen before… so there you go.
We drove for awhile through Maryland, and up the Jersey turnpike, which… incidentally is very recognizable from the Sopranos, then into New York City. One of the best and at the same time overrated cities in the world.
check out below the fold for an explanation of that statement.
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The events around the show in our fine nations capital was stressful and exhausting, involved but it’s true, at least there were cookies.
But before DC we had stayed the night in Philadelphia…
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Let’s say you just drove 14 hours straight through 6 states to play a show on your tour, let’s also hypothetically say that this is the first thing you see when you get out of the van:
/
Yup, Replicator played Wilmington, Delaware at the Mojo 13, which spparantly is the home of band swallowing clown.
but i’m getting ahead of myself here.
I’ll put the confession up front, which is that I loved the New Pornographers’ last album, 2005’s Twin Cinema. Loved it. It was probably my favorite album of 2005, actually, which is saying a fair amount. As such, I had high hopes for the band’s latest release, Challengers — perhaps unreasonably high hopes.
And now that the new album has dropped, it turns out it might not be a fair comparison anyway. To my ears, at least, Challengers has a lot more in common with Neko Case’s last album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, at least in spirit, than it does with Twin Cinema — or, to be honest, with anything else the New Pornographers have produced. Like Fox Confessor, it’s an almost introverted album, one that wears neither its heart nor its hooks on its sleeve. In fact, the moody title track, on which Neko takes lead vocals, almost sounds like a Fox Confessor outtake — although, don’t get me wrong, its quality is very high indeed.
Sonically, Challengers does have most of the expected NP trademarks — beautiful harmonies, clever drum parts, a careful, almost obsessive attention to the arrangements. It’s much less immediate, however; it’s an album that’s about texture more than anything else, and so it demands repeated listens. It’s not an album you can listen to once and really “get,” if that makes any sense.
There are a couple of songs — “Mutiny I Promise You,” and the simple (for NP) “Adventures in Solitude” — that retain some of the punchiness of the band’s previous work. They’re tucked on the back of the album, however. For the most part, even the more energetic songs, like “All the Things that Go to Make Heaven and Earth,” never really go for the throat. There’s no “Letter from an Occupant” or “Stacked Crooked” on here, nothing that you’ll come away humming.
And maybe that’s why I felt a bit let down by Challengers, despite the fact that by most measures, it’s a very good album, one that might even be bordering on great. Part of what I always loved about NP is their willingness to put gorgeous vocal lines inside their stuttering power-pop arrangements, the fact that no matter how intricate their music gets, they aren’t afraid of melody. That aspect of the band’s sound is toned so far down on Challengers that it’s almost invisible, and I miss it.
If you give Challengers a chance, give it the space to grow, unfold, and reveal its secrets, it will certainly reward you. I’m sure that I’ll play it several more times, and that I’ll continue to be impressed by the deftness and depth of NP’s execution. But I can’t help feeling that as good as it is, it could have been a little better if it had balanced that depth with a bit more directness.
Label: Matador
Release date: August 21, 2007
Rating: 8/10, at least so far.
Waking up well rested, with a good nights sleep under your belt is a godsend, even to a stone cold atheist such as myself. Having the equivalent of a 5 star breakfast waiting for you when you finally do awaken may possibly be the best thing ever.
We devoured the breakfast goodies that Ben’s mother prepared for us as if we were starving refugees who had just emerged from a desert island into civilization.
Laundry! beds! non-fast food!
heavenly.
Ben’s mom’s wireless network has never worked, so basically ripped it apart and completely reconfigured it from scratch. It took awhlie, but I got it humming pretty good, hey, it’s the least I can do since she’s always so nice to us on tour.
We ended up paying a visit to Ben’s paternal grandparents, really nice older folks. His grandpa worked at the Ford plant for 30-40 years or so, so he’s very excited to hear how much we love the Supernaut, our 2006 Ford Econoline van.
After retelling some of our tour stories to a rapt audience, Ben’s granddad mentioned something about “hitting the big time”
“This IS the big time.” Ben said.
Everybody laughed, but in a way, it’s true… we don’t want to be pop stars, we like making the fiercely uncomprimising music we love to make. Would we be bummed to be really popular? Of course not! duh. But it’s not the end goal.
