- Doug Stephen in FOR FUCK SAKE EVERYONE KNOCK IT OFF WITH THE GOD DAMNED ACCORDIONS JESUS CHRIST Woah, okay Vice Magazine.
- Doug Stephen in Vampire Weekend - S/T I’ve never listened to a solo Paul Simon record, or to Graceland, so I don’t know about that. But the songs I’ve heard by Vampire Weekend...
- bjyhore in New Single: Patrick Wolf’s “Accident and Emergency” She had actually been robbed of it cant be cruel. Mistress. I could do. jennifer lopez porn Three.
Instead of compiling a list of ten albums/artists that I liked in 2007 (which would, of course, involve confessing that I listened to more than my usual share of Timbaland and Timberlake), I’m going to wax poetic (prosaic?) about one record and one show, and why they made my year. Here goes:
Best album of 2007: The Weakerthans, Reunion Tour
Unlike earlier Weakerthans albums, which tend to fade in, build up, and fade out, Reunion Tour is, with a few exceptions, a highly successful exercise in decrescendo. The deceptively-titled opener, “Civil Twilight” (it sounds, you know, slow), throws down. Three songs later, “Tournament of Hearts”–likely a dark horse by Weakerthans standards but my personal favorite on the album–sets impulsive lyric energy (“have to stop myself from climbing / on the table full of empties / to yell…”) against a backdrop of growling guitar and insistent drums. I’m still not quite sure how Jason Tait manages to make his kit sound like the entire percussion section of a high school marching band, but the result is infectious.
After “Tournament,” the album shifts into a set of down-tempo elegiac tracks: the heart-wrenching “Virtute The Cat Explains Her Departure” (the followup, of course, to Reconstruction Site’s “Plea from a Cat named Virtute”); the spoken-word “Elegy for Gump Worsley”; the bittersweet tribute to moving, “Sun in an Empty Room”; and, finally, the kick-drum laced “Night Windows,” which–if the song’s casualty is indeed a fallen solider–is the most moving anti-war ballad I’ve heard in a very long time.
Following this potential sobfest, the short, slow “Bigfoot” makes peace with the album’s losses (“the visions that I see believe in me”), and then “Reunion Tour” (slightly more upbeat) and “Utilities” carry the album to a hopeful close. It’s this thematic arc, plus John K. Samson’s almost-but-not-quite-through-the-nose plaintive singing style, plus the deceptively simple musical arrangements, that makes Reunion Tour simultaneously so comforting and so smart. I dub it “album I would like to curl up inside”: pretty much the highest rating I give.
Best live show of 2007: John Vanderslice at The Middle East Upstairs (September 28, 2007, Cambridge, MA)
I generally believe it’s a huge mistake to conflate a musician’s stage persona with the rest of their real-life existence, and vice versa–to me, it seems similar to mistaking a novelist for one of his or her characters. But that doesn’t mean that a stage act can’t give me warm fuzzies, because this is what John Vanderslice does every time I see him. On this particular occasion, it certainly didn’t hurt that Boston-based Bishop Allen were opening: they played a flawless set. Ultimately, though, John Vanderslice’s set was the memorable one, because it was horrifically flawed yet completely awesome. Read more »
Dear readers: I heartily apologize for the tardiness of this review. My excuse is that Billy Corgan, like the proverbial homework-eating canine of yesteryear, broke my iBook. Actually, that’s not true, my iBook sort of broke itself–but it’s repaired now, so, on with the show!
Because Smashing Pumpkins always make me think of high school, it’s somewhat weird to be writing a review of their “reunion” album a week before I miss my ten-year high school reunion.
Nerdy and fourteen, I was a skinny, straight-edged Lutheran chick in my first year of Catholic school. You Reformation nerds out there (there has to be at least ONE Reformation nerd reading SSC, right? right?) can infer that this was a bit of culture shock for a strict constructionist. Incense. Holy water. PRAYING TO THE SAINTS?!?! I’d gone from the fishbowl of my K-through-8 Lutheran school with folksy chapel services to a shark tank in which students were asking St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle to intercede for them on behalf of the soul of Kurt Cobain. Yes, you read that right–the day after Kurt Cobain died, Peter Hoey, who was generally not devout, raised his hand during the prayer at the beginning of biology class and requested an intercession.
It was social overload, but I was loving every minute of it.
The first time I ever heard of the Smashing Pumpkins, I was riding on a bus from Sacramento to San Francisco on a field trip to the DeYoung Museum for my freshman history class. Read more »
Dear Mr. Butler,
I am writing concerning your management’s commentary on my review of the Psychedelic Furs’ show at Avalon Ballroom in Boston on July 10, 2007. Let me first state that I am a huge fan of your work. I love the way in which the Furs combined post-punk and pop, and I’d been looking forward to your show for weeks.
I’ve said this before on the site, but as you may not have read back that far in our archives (nor may you wish to at this point), I’ll say it again: “We at Superstarcastic believe that the musical is personal.” If you read, for example, DJ’s review of The Wrens’ The Meadowlands, or anything Amber writes about shoegaze, you’ll find that, though our writers make every effort to explain how and why an artist, album, song, or musical genre has an effect on them, they make no pretense that such effects are objective. Rather, our reviews tend to be littered with narratives about personal experience: what someone went through personally that his/her favorite artist mirrored for them musically, what someone was doing when s/he first fell in love with a certain song (I’m reminded of the time that my then-boyfriend cut work so we could drive down the California coast on a warmer-than-average San Francisco summer day; he made me listen to “Heaven”), and so on.
Because to simply be earnest would make us look, well, emo, many of us compensate by being a little tongue-in-cheek. The resultant reviews contain a bit of empathy here and a lot of sarcasm there, but they lay no claims to fair and balanced coverage. Though our website contains some strict reporting (i.e., tour date announcements and the like–it would be pretty dumb of us to embellish those) the bulk of our articles are devoted to our personal opinions about music. Music reviewing is, in short, a subjective business–one to which we bring our critical faculties (such as they are) but also our own experience. Read more »
Montreal’s Stars have settled on dates for this autumn’s U.S. tour. If your idea of a great band involves (1) a weird frontman who play the mouth organ, (2) a sweet-voiced woman on guitar, and/or (3) a lust for life, you can catch them at one of these stops:
October 17, 2007 / Higher Ground, Burlington, VT
October 18, 2007 / Town Hall, New York, NY
October 19, 2007 / Berklee, Boston, MA
October 20, 2007 / 9:30 Club, Washington, DC
October 24, 2007 / Starlight Ballroom, Philadelphia, PA
October 26, 2007 / Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro, NC
October 27, 2007 / The Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, GA
October 28, 2007 / Club Downunder, Tallahassee, FL
October 30, 2007 / Stubb’s, Austin, TX
October 31, 2007 / House of Blues, Dallas, TX
November 2, 2007 / Vic Theatre, Chicago, IL
November 3, 2007 / Pantages Theatre, Minneapolis, MN
November 4, 2007 / Slowdown, Omaha, NE
November 6, 2007 / Gothic Theatre, Denver, CO
November 8, 2007 / Rialto Theatre, Tucson, AZ
November 9, 2007 / House of Blues, San Diego, CA
November 10, 2007 / The Orpheum, Los Angeles, CA
November 13, 2007 / Bimbo’s, San Francisco, CA
November 14, 2007 / Bimbo’s, San Francisco, CA
November 15, 2007 / The Crystal Ballroom, Portland OR
November 16, 2007 / The Showbox, Seattle, WA
Stars’ new album, In Our Bedroom after the War, will be released on September 25.
“We’ve played that song 5,000 times, and we’ll play it 5,000 more,” frontman Cy Curnin said drily after The Fixx finished their trademark track “One Thing Leads to Another” at Avalon Ballroom on Tuesday evening. Though his devil-may-care quips were amusing–and coupled with some of the most eccentric dance moves I’ve witnessed to date–I’m guessing that some of them might have been fueled by the fact that his band was opening for the Furs. At the other end of the spectrum were the night’s openers, The Alarm: Mike Peters, who was happy to be back on tour after winning a battle with cancer a few years past, was as cheerful and radiant as Curnin was dour and devil-may-care. It appeared that Peters’ attitude and not Curnin’s mirrored most of the audience’s appreciation of the show; by the end of the night, however, I found myself identifying with Curnin’s skepticism.
The Psychedlic Furs started their set with a sax-filled, pile-driving rendition of “Heartbeat,” only slightly occluded by frontman Richard Butler’s strange arrangement of his hands into a rhombus shape just above his crotch as he gyrated Read more »
Remix compilations are, essentially, retrospectives: culling the past work of a band that is self-admittedly past its heyday or has already broken up. However, the remix album, which has become increasingly popular among indie artists who haven’t yet amassed the reputation or repertoire of bands with retrospective remix releases, signifies something a bit different. Featuring all of the tracks from a previous album (usually the most recent) in order but mixed up, the remix album acts as a placeholder of sorts for a band uncertain about its future or simply facing a lull in new material. By releasing a remix of their 2004 (2005 in the U.S.) release Set Yourself on Fire, Stars initially appear to have fallen squarely into this category. In the worst-case scenario, remix album efforts come off as lazy and/or just plain lame (this was, I believe, the general consensus about most of The Faint’s Danse Macabre Remixes), but sometimes–as with Minus The Bear’s Interpretaciones del Oso (released earlier this year)–such projects can yield interesting results.
By giving their remix album the title Do You Trust Your Friends?, Montreal chamber pop band Stars bring another element of this quickly-growing genre back to the forefront: the importance of who is doing the remixes. It’s fitting that Stars–whose songs favor earnest quirkiness over irony and goofy feelings over detachment–would call attention to the inherent vulnerability of laying one’s work open for aural redesign; it’s also not surprising that Stars emphasize the personal relationships behind this project. The remixes, covers, and collaborations on Do You Trust Your Friends? are, quite literally, the work of Stars’ contemporaries and friends–bands or artists that have toured with Stars (Apostle of Hustle, The Dears), shared members with Stars (Kevin Drew and Stars bassist Evan Cranley co-founded Broken Social Scene, which eventually also included Stars vocalist/guitarist Amy Millan), or inherited members from Stars (Emily Haines, who was a guest vocalist on a few tracks for Stars’ first full-length album, Nightsongs, went on to front Metric). So, without further ado…
Friends Stars can really, really trust:
Jason Collett (covering “Reunion”). While the lyrics of this song are pure Torquil Campbell, right down to the details of huffing up the results of high school chem class experiments, Collett’s version, which brings in handclaps and countrified guitar, transposes the experience described in the song’s lyrics onto the more right-leaning, Skoal-slinging element of the population–a contingent that Stars hasn’t exactly embraced in the past. With Jason Collett at the helm, suddenly this song isn’t just about one wussy kid from in Vancouver or all of us dorks who identify with him: it could be about a line dancing, Wrangler-wearing dude from Anytown, USA (as a leftist geek with redneck roots, I adore this result). Read more »
