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If you lived in the San Francisco Bay Area just after the dot.com bubble burst, you may or may not remember Rust Belt Music, an alt-country-flavored indie rock band comprised of Midwest-to-California transplants. RBM, as they were affectionately called by many of their fans, boasted a catalogue of keyboard- and guitar-driven songs. It was against this backdrop that frontman John Lindenbaum explored the effects of stagnating industry on the citizens of the Midwest and Northeast, then shifted this perspective westward to write songs about the urban underbelly of the Bay Area and its denizens. Oh, and speaking of The Lonesome Crowded West–back in the day, RBM also did a pretty mean cover of Modest Mouse’s “Trailer Trash†and were lucky enough to have a cadre of fans who screamed “FAKES!†at all the appropriate moments.
Performing with artists such as Rogue Wave, John Guilt, and Hudson Bell, Rust Belt Music were veterans at SF venues like the Hotel Utah Saloon, The Makeout Room, and Edinburgh Castle, also making appearances at Cafe du Nord and San Francisco’s annual Noise Pop festival. The band went through several lineup changes and are currently on hiatus (though a full-length project, The Company Town, was released last year). But The Lonelyhearts, the side project of Lindenbaum and RBM keyboardist Andre Perry, are recording new songs and planning a tour, despite the fact that Lindenbaum has long since moved to the opposite side of San Francisco Bay and Perry has moved far further east to attend graduate school at the University of Iowa.
A brief discography: in 2004 The Lonelyhearts released a four-song EP, Make Yourself at Home, that finally gave a home to Lindenbaum’s ballad “absinthe/resolution” (I shit you not, that’s the actual song title, so go listen to it while you mix some sugar with the green stuff)… and, let me tell you that, as far as my favorite modern-day New Year’s songs go, “absinthe/resolution†is second only to The Dismemberment Plan’s “The Ice of Bostonâ€). A full-length album, Dispatch, followed in 2005.
The Lonelyhearts have departed from Rust Belt Music’s catalogue into songs filled with larger amounts of space, both musically and thematically. RBM’s frenetic organ riffs have slowed into more meditative piano ballads, while the industrial-slum settings of Lindenbaum’s earlier songs with RBM have opened up into lonely swathes of prairie and desert. But the change that occurs in terms of vocals is perhaps the most striking. Unlike RBM, which had Lindenbaum routinely singing lead and Perry or original keyboardist Micah Weinberg providing occasional harmony, The Lonelyhearts find Lindenbaum and Perry sharing singing duties. Perry performs lead vox on several tracks of Dispatch; on others, his accentuated, chillingly clear vocals layer well with Lindenbaum’s huskier, increasingly howling drawl.
If you want to check their songs out, some downloads are available here. And if you’d like to get to know them a little better first, here be the interview:
1. When historians listen to your most recent CD 1000 years from now, what will they say?
Andre: They will laugh and say, “These guys made records 2000 miles away from each other and they could only get this good? Damn, we track basics on Venus while the rest of the band is laying down overdubs on Jupiter and we sound at least 900% better than the Lonelyhearts!” Actually I’m not sure but won’t the sun have exploded in 1000 years?
John: There won’t be people in 1000 years. But they would probably say something along the lines of “these guys sound awfully sad considering the plague hadn’t even started yet.” Read more »
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.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. (And, of course, androgynes, riot grrls, radical faeries, and goths, too. Well, maybe not so much the goths.)
Anyway. One of my friends sent me a video of Clell Tickle: Indie Marketing Guru, and I just had to pass it on. Go watch it if you’re bored and/or haven’t seen it already. I’m mostly posting it because it involves (a) Tapes ‘n Tapes, whom I like a lot, (b) Ted Leo, whom Joie loves, and (c) a henchman, “Hambone,” who looks a little like a cross between WWF and The Twilight Singers.
Readers beware: it also sort of mocks Pitchfork! At The Disco and involves a scene featuring one of the writers for the aforementioned site sitting on the john… NOT for the faint of stomach. Although, if you survived our two articles featuring Joanna Newsom’s headgear, your tummy can probably survive anything…
You know how they (by which I mean “my fellow feminazis”) say that the personal is political? Well, we (by which I mean “the writers of Superstarcastic“) believe that the musical is personal. Even though there are objective things we know we like in the music we listen to, we also know that it can be hard to pin down why what we like musically makes us so darn happy. Or fired-up. Or sad.
We are putting our list of end-of-the-year favorites out into the ether with the caveat that it’s subjective. Don’t get me wrong–each of us is, in his or her own right, a model of musical taste. However, rather than trying to come up with some arbitrary number (you know, the kind that’s divisible by five) of albums we can all agree on (it would be impossible), each of us came up with a short list of records that we really loved–some of which we share, most of which we don’t. More importantly: between us, we came up with 88 darlings–a kinder, gentler, rounder number than, say, 25, 50, or 100, and a palindrome to boot!
If you’re curious as to what we chose (and you should be!) our individual lists and comments are behind the jump, and, naturally, we want to hear yours. So, on with the show!
Read more »
Start holding your breath, readers, because in a few days we at Superstarcastic will (like all the other jerks out there) be posting an article about our favorite albums of 2006.
In the meantime, I’d like to take issue with Pitchfork’s top single of 2006. OF COURSE Justin Timberlake should receive the honor–it’s just that “My Love” is not his finest work. But “Dick in a Box”? That’s where it’s at. At the close of a year in which it seemed like every single was nu-gaze, cutesy pop, or sung by a chick wearing a deceased weasel on her head, “Dick in a Box” sparkled with originality by couching timely and helpful holiday gift-giving tips in the form of a satirical homage to ’90s boy bands. What more could you want from a song (or, furthermore, for Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa)?
So yeah–many of our writers believe that the single is dead, but I don’t. This year, I choose Justin Timberlake’s “Dick in a Box.”
According to some junk e-mail I recently got from Live Nation, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are playing a show on New Year’s Eve in New York at the Hammerstein Ballroom. But get this: they’re playing “w/ Bob Mould Band.”
Damn hipsters, ruining my life. I mean, I like CYHSY, but does anyone else think it’s wrong that Bob.Freaking.Mould is OPENING for a bunch of Pitchforkmedia darlings?? that CYHSY didn’t prostrate themselves and say, “um, you’re the düde from Hüsker Dü and Sugar, we’ll open for YOU”?
On second thought: knowing CYHSY, the request may well have sounded like ” you’re the ravaged cabbage düde from Hüsker drips on the wet sky Dü oh it looks so nice and oh it looks so Sugar nice, we’ll in this home on open for YOU ice” and was therefore unintelligible to Mr. Mould, who (in slight fear) politely declined. Yeah… that’s what I’m going to keeping telling myself.
So here’s a more intelligible request: come to MY house for New Year’s, Bob. There’s a bunch of us in Boston who’d like to see you, and we’ve got a fireplace and cookies.
