Author Archive
Killer Serials: Another Radiohead Release?
It’s Christmas in August for Radiohead fans. Pitchfork reported yesterday that yet another new Radiohead track has hit the Internet, the second in a week!
The first—“Henry Patch (in memory of),” a paean to the eponymous last British World War I veteran, who died in July—was announced on the band’s Web site and covered widely in the press. The latest one, called “These Are My Twisted Words,” appeared yesterday without fanfare on a Radiohead fan site. Its origins are, apparently, a mystery—so much so that Pitchfork was unable to verify that it’s actually a Radiohead song. (It definitely is.)
The appearance of these two singles is part of a Web-era trend that has bands releasing material bit-by-bit, rather than in LP-sized chunks. Although musical purists might decry the incipient death of album, Thom Yorke—perhaps music’s purest purist—isn’t one of them. He hates making albums, calls the process “creative hoo-ha,” and finds recording them insufferable. This from the architect of arguably the best album of the 1990s.
In unrelated news, Slate’s Emily Yoffe today writes that because of something to do with the distinction between dopamine and opioids, animals are driven into insatiable fits when given morsels of sustenance at a time, rather than a full ration.
So, is our reverence for albums simply arbitrary, based on archaic packaging methods? Is the serialization of music going to turn us into crazed lab rats?
While you think about it, enjoy maybe-Radiohead’s latest song:
Air America: U.S. Air Guitar Championships @ 9:30 Club
What’s more American than air guitar?
Nothing, apparently. On entering the 9:30 Club on Friday, it wasn’t immediately clear whether the venue was hosting the U.S. Air Guitar Championship or a political convention. Bunting hung from the balcony, “God Bless America” and other patriotic standards blasted from the PA, and a cache of red-white-and-blue balloons cascaded from the rafters as the event began.
It was an election, of sorts. Some of the competitors even had delegations–most noticeably Sanjar the Destroyer, whose supporters wore white-and-black tees reading “STD: Sexually Transmitted Destruction”; and hometown favorite The Shred (i.e. Lance Kasten), the 47-year-old construction worker whose ankle-breaking plunge from atop an amp stack at last year’s finals aptly summed up the straight-faced absurdity of this new American pastime.
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9:30 Two-fer: Fleet Foxes and M. Ward
I’ve heard the Name Game play out in many contexts, but at a concert—between the drummer and some guy standing ten rows into the audience—was a new one. “Do you know Rebecca Callahan*?” shouted a tall kid in a white Polo. “She was, like, two grades ahead…”
“Rebecca, oh, yeah,” replied Fleet Foxes drummer J. Tillman.
This, one supposes, is the fate of stage banter at a show when the drummer admits he grew up in a nearby suburb (Rockville) and is pressed upon to kill time between every song while the lead singer re-tunes his 12-string guitar and the rest of the band hangs out in unhelpful silence. But that was the sort of casual vibe Fleet Foxes brought to the 9:30 Club on Wednesday, breaking down the distance between the band and the sold-out audience in such a way that it felt less like a crowded concert hall than the living room of a buddy who makes you pay $9 for a Guinness. Other topics of band-audience banter included the menu at Rockville pastry shop The Fractured Prune, frontman Robin Pecknold’s bad haircut (hidden beneath a red knit hat, which he refused to remove), and whether Tillman more closely resembled Jesus Christ, Charles Manson, or Rob Zombie.
Album Review: American Central Dust, by Son Volt
Two things about Son Volt’s new album, American Central Dust, to start: First, there’s little here Son Volt hasn’t shown us before. Second, it’s one of the best albums I’ve heard this year.
The record finds Jay Farrar back on the road, searching for meaning beneath America’s fingernails. He gives us grainy portraits of Rust-Belt Americans, portrayed with such reverence that one might imagine Farrar as a candidate for elective office were his paeans not so genuine (and irreligious). And Son Volt, which rose (like Uncle Tupelo before it) from the dust of troubadours, describes the land in the same terms as its forebears, and often from the same perspective: the seat of a moving vehicle, with America whizzing past the window.
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Extraordinary People: John Legend @ Merriweather
“Where do you get the balls to change your name from Gordon to ‘Sting’?” asked the comedian Dana Carvey sometime in the mid-90’s, when the musician’s stage name was still viable stand-up fodder. One might ask the same of John Stephens, who changed his name to John Legend while he was still a small-time act in Chicago. To his credit, Legend’s spent the intervening years slowly justifying his ambitious moniker, carving out a niche of the outskirts of pop R&B, not far from its borders with rock and big-band. He brought his horn section, dancing girls, and Clorox-white pants to Merriweather Friday.
Legend’s little brother, Vaughn Anthony, was the first opener, and it’s well that he was not so presumptuous in his selection of a stage name as big brother. Anthony’s songs seemed primarily vehicles for conveying past sexual conquests in anticipation of future ones. Apropos, he shed articles of clothing as his set progressed, revealing a physique that was more well-developed than his musicianship. His voice was fine, but not terribly interesting—a mixture of crooning vulnerability and blunt sexual confidence. It would not surprise me if he makes piles of money.
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“Black River Killer”: Blitzen Trapper’s Calvinistic New Music Video
Oregon folk-rock posse Blitzen Trapper this week released a music video for the song “Black River Killer,” off the band’s 2008 record Furr. The song is a sociopath’s anthem; the diary of a murderer who keeps getting released by the state then consistently kills the first person he encounters. The video, directed by newcomer Daniel Elkayam, depicts the faceless recidivist’s travels from victim to victim and jailhouse to jailhouse in a series of scenes sewn together as a single, swooping tracking shot.
(Video embedded after jump.)
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Wilco (The Lovefest) @ Wolf Trap
The critical buzz around Wilco’s latest, self-titled album has centered on the notion of identity. Some have heralded Wilco (the album) as a reclamation of the insouciance of the band’s early albums, while others—particularly City Paper’s own Aaron Leitko—have described it as a tour of the band’s sonic arc over the last decade. But aside the reflexivism of its latest studio release, Wilco at Wolf Trap on Wednesday reiterated what might be the band’s most enduring legacy: its ability to put on one hell of a live show.
Tiny Vipers @ The Red and The Black Tonight (w/ Balmorhea, Argos)
Jesy Fortino’s bandonym, Tiny Vipers, is somewhat incongruous with her music, which gets into your blood not through swift, piercing fangs but soft, silent osmosis, and arrests your nerves not with the violent invasion of venom but the gentle insidiousness of carbon monoxide.
Fortino, of Seattle, writes small music for big spaces: Her 2007 debut album, Hands Across the Void, was a collection of solemn dispatches into the vast hollow of humanity. In her new album, Life on Earth–which is due out on July 7–Tiny Vipers continues to confront daunting expanses armed with minimalist acoustic compositions. Fortino’s voice is somnolent and sweet, but as lullabies her songs are likely to bring about restless sleep. One is tempted to draw a parallel with Nick Drake, but Fortino’s music is far more ominous, which is saying something. She deals in minor chords, deliberate picking, and grim assessments of the human condition that capture your attention not because they are catchy, but because they are bewitching.
If you make it to The Red and The Black tonight, don’t expect toe-tapping folk rhythms. But just because Fortino’s fangs don’t take the shape of infectious hooks doesn’t mean Tiny Vipers won’t get under your skin.
TINY VIPERS, BALMORHEA, ARGOS @ THE RED AND THE BLACK, 1212 H ST. NW, 9 P.M. $8
Kristian Matsson: The Tallest Man in Folk?
I got some flack from a friend the other week when I all but anointed local boy Joe Pug the savior of folk music. His counterargument—aside from my insinuation being broad to the point of inanity—was a Swedish rambler by the name of Kristian Matsson, otherwise known as The Tallest Man on Earth. Matsson opened for John Vanderslice Tuesday night at The Black Cat.
Vanderslice is a talented musician who, with the help of other talented musicians, performed a repertoire rich with rollicking, smartly arranged pop-rock songs. Between songs he kept it light and affable, complimenting a blueberry pie an audience member had baked for the band and asking to check out some guy in the front row’s camera. But there was no upstaging Matsson, whose stage presence combined the quirk of a street mime with the brimstone of a tent revivalist to create something weird and very moving.
Seeking Joe Pug: A Discursive Interview
I’ve come to be untroubled in my seeking
And I’ve come to say that nothing is for naught
I’ve come to reach out blind, to reach forward and behind
For the more I seek, the more I’m sought
These lyrics, from Joe Pug’s “Hymn 101,” might as well be the tagline for Pug’s current year-long tour, which has taken him from tooling around the local circuit in his hometown, Chicago, to tailing alt.-country legend Steve Earle’s tour bus on a swing down through Texas and back up toward the Great Lakes. From there, he’ll take a brief sojourn to Norway then take up with Josh Ritter for an upper-Midwest tour before heading west for festival season. “I rent a room in Chicago,” he tells me Tuesday after a set in Richmond, “but I’ve probably slept in it about 20 times this year.”
