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California has Amoeba. New Jersey has the Princeton Record Exchange. New England has… Newbury Comics.
What is Newbury Comics, you uninitiated ask? Well, if you listen to some of our more mookish locals, it’s the Best Record Store Ever–you know, much in the same way that Fenway is America’s Favorite Ballpark, even though it features “Fan Service” instead of Customer Service and the aforementioned fans are generally jerks to anyone who dares to enter the hallowed space wearing the opposing team’s colors.
Okay, so I’m obviously jaded NOW, but when I first moved here, I naively believed that no lover of America’s favorite pastime would jeer at me (not to be confused with “heckle me,” which is fine because it requires some measure of intelligence) for four entire innings of a ballgame. I also did a lot of retail therapy at Newbury Comics because I was lonely and bored, and the store was a warm place to go on a frigid winter night. That, of course, should have been my first tip-off. Much in the way that Fenway (albeit historic) is not terribly representative of America’s other ballparks (where middle-to-lower class folks can generally afford to take the kids on a family outing), Newbury Comics (although convenient) isn’t much of a record store.
Whereas your average REAL record store devotes ninety percent of its (linoleum) floor space to dusty racks of CDs and vinyl, relegating most extras to wall displays, Newbury Comics gives up about forty percent of the (carpeted) floor to New England sports paraphernalia.* Worse, because all of the Hot Topic locations in the greater Boston area are located in the South Shore suburbs (hmmm…) Newbury Comics has decided to pick up the slack. For this reason, at Newbury Comics one can buy such classy bumper stickers as “Fuck Me I’m Irish” and “I’ve Got the Biggest Dick in the Band.” In short, the store’s interior looks suspiciously like the bastard child spawned when a Spencer’s Toys and Gifts drunkenly hooked up with a Tower Records to celebrate the Pats’ victory in Super Bowl XXXIX. Kids, remember that the closer you are to that cherry bedroom set from Jordan’s Furniture when you open that six-pack of Narragansett, the more regrets you’ll have the morning after.
Speaking of beer, Newbury Comics has now combined all of its 
best elements–novelty items AND music–to bring you the Newbury Artist Pint Glass* series. The first musical “artists” featured in the series were The Used, whose limited-edition pint glass debuted on May 22, 2007 and almost certainly sold out (only 1,000 copies were made!). The next musical artist is Marilyn Manson, whose pint glass will be guaranteed to those who pre-ordered a copy of Eat Me, Drink Me and available to the rest of the public starting Tuesday, June 5.
Tragically, I won’t be able to make it to the store on June 5 because I’ll be at the Paradise seeing The Sea and Cake (a band that believes in a kinder, gentler form of drinking and eating). If anyone wants to pick up a Marilyn Manson pint glass for me, that’d be… um… wicked cool. Yeah!
Release date: June 5, 2007
Label: N/A
Rating: 3/10 (the text on the glass is clearly a credsuck, but the heart is kind of cute)
The thing I really like about the Psychedelic Furs (well, you know, other than their songs) is that, even though they’re an 80s fixture, they consistently play at small-to-medium venues when they tour:
06/28/07 | The Vogue | Indianapolis, IN
06/29/07 | House Of Blues - Chicago | Chicago, IL
07/04/07 | Pier Six Concert Pavilion | Baltimore, MD
07/10/07 | Avalon - Boston | Boston, MA
07/11/07 | Westbury North Fork Theatre | Westbury, NY
07/14/07 | 4th & B Concert Theater | San Diego, CA
07/15/07 | Mezzanine | San Francisco, CA
07/17/07 | Orange County Fair - Pacific Amphitheatre | Costa Mesa, CA
07/19/07 | Ogden Theatre | Denver, CO
07/21/07 | House of Blues - Dallas | Dallas, TX
Another thing I like? With The Fixx and The Alarm opening, this means that when I go see them in Boston, the crowd at Avalon will NOT be chiefly comprised of drunken BU students. Yay!
I went through a phase during my early twenties in which I liked–nay, nearly adored–the quavery way in which Conor Oberst sang about social anxiety and meeting strangers at nightclubs (yep, despite my many protests to the contrary, I was often a bit, shall we say, emo). Then, sometime after turning twenty-five, I got to the point where, though I still had a soft spot in my heart for “Nothing Gets Crossed Out,” I snickered a little every time I listened to “Lover I Don’t Have to Love.” Then Bright Eyes turned twenty-five, but he was STILL EMO. Worse, the second time I saw him play, his once-perky butt, which had looked so smashing in those burgundy cords when he was wearing them at twenty-three, was already beginning its inevitable gravitational sag. Listening to him singing “When the President Talks to God” at Berkeley Community Theatre, I was annoyed by the lack of subtlety with which he was preaching to the choir of my fellow card-carrying liberals. In short, I was pretty convinced that I had grown up and he hadn’t.
Cassadaga opens the way many Bright Eyes records do: with a drawn-out voiceover of a someone talking to Conor Oberst. In the past, said individual has discussed such uplifting topics as, say, plummeting 30,000 feet in a plane on somebody’s birthday. My best guess this time around? On opening track “Clairiaudiets (Kill Or Be Killed),” the spirit of that plane crash victim from I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning has, apparently, come back to speak through a medium in the employ of the Cassadaga Hotel.
So, the bad news? Conor appears to still be experiencing a few aftereffects of a Nebraska coming-of-age ritual involving a hell of a lot of peyote. The good news? His new album veers away from its cheesy voodoo crystal dreamcatcher beginnings to become the the subtle, beautiful, soaring–that’s right, I said soaring–and, above all, MATURE album I somehow always hoped Young Conor was capable of creating. And, new-age as it may seem, on Cassadaga, Mr. Oberst indeed acts as a medium–he does engage in many a conversation with the dead horses beaten on previous Bright Eyes albums, but he is no longer hitting them.
Not only are Bright Eyes moving away from personal confessions and political diatribe toward lyrics involving tenderness and layered metaphor, but… Conor’s voice is no longer cracking! And, in turn, his new ability to croon with constancy is mimetic of the way in which his songs have become complex and comforting (see “If the Brakeman Turns My Way” and “I Must Belong Somewhere”) rather than coarse and (dare I say this of his earlier work?!…) complaining.
Conor’s moping about hookups (see “Lua” on I’m Wide Awake) has graduated into the character studies found in songs like “Classic Cars,” and the album’s musical arrangements are similarly well-crafted. The ballads on Cassadaga are still heavy on the steel guitar of I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning and the driving guitar found on Lifted, but they’re rounded out by careful percussion (with Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney, Quasi, and The Jicks playing on this album, that doesn’t surprise me) and great backing vocals. The sound’s even more country-influenced than before, but, for the more Americana-esque subject matter covered by the album, that works. Moreover, I think this is an album that the ex-emo kids and I will be able to un-ironically enjoy for many more years of our collective adulthood.
But since many of you come to this site seeking ridicule, I will leave you with this side-by-side comparison of Conor’s current hairstyle of choice with the coiff sported by Kevin Costner during the Dances With Wolves era: Read more »
If you know a bit of the history behind Cambridge, MA venue T.T. The Bear’s Place, you probably also know that some of the changes made in connection with the past few years’ remodeling decisions have not been entirely, ah, acoustically beneficial. (It’s rumored, for example, that the venue’s proprietress won’t add any buffering material to the back of the stage simply because she likes the weird wall mural too much to obscure it.) Though T.T. The Bear’s has become increasingly notorious for attracting breakthrough bands and then making them sound like shit, a number of artists find ways to elude the rumored curse. Elvis Perkins, the Pernice Brothers, and Archer Prewitt all sounded effortlessly great on the triple bill they played there last December. And last Friday, Brooklyn indie pop act The Essex Green overcame obvious sound difficulties to rock the house regardless.
That’s right, I said rock the house. The Essex Green definitely err on the side of twee, but musically, they know what they’re doing, and they have great chemistry to boot. Returning to the Boston area to headline at TT’s a little over a month afer opening at Paradise Rock Club for Camera Obscura, The Essex Green brought even more verve to the stage the second time around. Usually it annoys me when bands do that jamming back-to-back crap, but when this band did it, it didn’t look pretentious. One gets the feeling they’re all good friends–hell, they’ve probably even coupled off a little bit, but not in that gross, annoying Fleetwood Mac kind of way.
Anyway, away from their antics and on to the music. They opened with the first two tracks of Cannibal Sea (“This Isn’t Farm Life†and “Don’t Know Why You Stayâ€) in succession, then graciously proceeded to take a bunch of requests (including “The Late Great Cassiopiaâ€), most of them unsolicited. Yeah, okay, this might make them crowd-pleasing pushovers, but I found it somewhat charming that they juggled the set list to accommodate the screams of the bouncy chicks in the front row and their drunken male Seattleite compatriot who kept leaning on me (also unsolicited) and encouraging me to dance. Read more »
I should be honest: up until now, I haven’t really listened to a whole lot of Minus The Bear. My first and last time doing so before preparing to review this album was while road-tripping with a friend, who said, as he turned up the volume, “These guys are great, they sing about drinking and philosophy.â€
“Really original topic for a guy to sing about,†I thought to myself, “and how like some of the asshats I’ve dated! Tell me, would you like some Paxil with that Bertrand Russell?â€
Uh… yeah. To make a long story short, I never got into MTB–my impressions of them were that, though they were definitely following in the footsteps of Dismemberment Plan musically, they were more of a boys’ club lyrically. By my standards, they were backsliding (I’m not saying that chicks aren’t into also into drinking and philosophy, it’s just that we covered that territory years ago when Indigo Girls released “Closer to Fine”). Anyway, like D-Plan, Minus The Bear are putting out that automatic indie yawn-trigger–an album of remixes. Unlike A People’s History of The Dismemberment Plan, which is a retrospective of D-Plan’s career, Interpretaciones Del Oso is a reinterpretation of MTB’s second album, Menos el Oso. Wow, that reminds me–remember when The Faint remixed their third album and it really sucked?
So to recap, dear reader, there were up to three strikes against this album–(1) boy’s club, (2) oh-god-not-another-album-remix, and (3) it’s a little early in the band’s musical career to do (2)–before I even threw it on my decks.
Except that, well–oh God, shoot me now–I kinda *liked* it. And this is after test-driving it in the kitchen, the living room, AND the bedroom. Oh yes, that’s right. I was NAPPING to it. On the one hand, that’s not a particularly ringing endorsement, but on the other? Whoever parsed MTB into something to which I could get shut-eye (it was a GOOD nap, people, a really wonderful winter nap) is somewhat talented, and knows that the way for the indie neopatriarchy to best invade my subconscious is to do it in my sleep. It’s true that the remixes in and of themselves don’t rely on much not already done in electronica for years–I mean, some of this sounds like the soundtrack for “The X-Files‖but it’s an interesting product considering the kind of material being parsed.
The other way in which this album sets itself apart from other remix collections is that it’s cohesive. Unlike a lot of electronic “interpretations†of other artists, which generally feature a few highlights and a majority of lowlights (I’m thinking, for example, the juxtaposition of 808 State’s brilliant remix of “Made of Stone†with some of the other more “WTF??†remixes on the Stone Roses’ The Remixes album) Interpretaciones Del Oso sounds less like a comp and more like an actual album. It’s a bit of an impressive feat to come up with an overall mood for a remix album (on the other hand, the overall mood may also arise from the fact that the mixes, though well-done, are still somewhat standard fare).
My favorite track at the moment is the Alias remix of MTB’s erstwhile single “Pachuca Sunrise.†It’s true that it reminds me a little of, like, Anggun (you might remember her track “Snow on the Sahara†from the Lilith Fair Free Music Sampler, Volume 1), with a delicious patriarchal twist. “Don’t cry / I’ll bring this home to youâ€? Ya know, I think I kind of like my caveman hunter-gatherer ballads melted down into mellow electronic beats.
Release date: February 20, 2007
Label: Suicide Squeeze Records
Oh, Valentine’s Day, my enemy, my scourge.
It’s not that I hate couples (with the exception of those who think that “get a room” means “sure, go ahead, make out on the second car of the Red Line Inbound at 8:30 in the morning”), or hate any polyamorous variations thereon, or even, ya know, hate love. In fact, it’s partly because I’m so down with love that I hate V-Day to begin with, because, as I see it, it attempts to parcel love out into the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Furthermore, a day that began centuries ago as a saint’s attempt to help the poor but then turned into a full-on Hallmark campaign? It’s like an artist releasing their seminal album on Misra and then ending up signed with Geffen. And THAT, my friends, is SO.NOT.INDIE.
So, on the heels of the fabulous KISS post in which DJ muses about Paul Stanley’s sexual orientation, I thought I’d feed my–and perhaps your–cynicism with a little queerpunk. Here’s one of my favorite songs about love from Pansy Division:
Home alone tonight? That’s okay–at least you don’t have to maneuver a bouquet of overpriced, pesticide-drenched roses through an overcrowded restaurant while Karl Marx turns in his grave at capitalism’s appropriation of human passion. So go ahead, get comfortable. Pull up a chair, grab a homemade cookie or two, and turn up the volume…
