Upset the Setup has A Tribe Called Quest’s rider. It’s pretty fun–and pretty tame–reading.

Pop Cesspool has an interesting compare/contrast with W and other Oliver Stone trailers.

The Apes will be playing a festival in Athens, GA.

Wale’s mixtape gets a glowing review in Pitchfork.

Deerhoof is coming to D.C.! One of the best bands around will be playing the 9:30 Club on October 26. Deerhoof’s new album, Offend Maggie, comes out October 7th on Kill Rock Stars. Sheet music has leaked for one song–”Fresh Born.”

Full tour dates after the jump.

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Stereolab. One of the most consistently inventive bands ever(?) have a new album coming out soon. For now, they have an MP3 of “Three Women.” Listen here.

The new album comes out August 19 on 4AD.

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Move your eyes to the right a little bit, maybe scroll up or down some, and you’ll come across a tidy little list of D.C.-area record labels. Among this list are some incredibly obscure labels releasing incredibly esoteric music. Over the next little while I’ll be briefly profiling a few 2008 releases from a few of these labels (four to be exact), starting today with Planaria Recordings.

Currently highlighted on the Planaria Web site’s splash screen is Extra Life, a New York City-based group led by Charlie Looker, formerly of Zs (also on Planaria). Zs wowed a small crowd at the Hosiery last year (with Looker) and a much larger crowd at Velvet Lounge last month (without him), playing a highly composed, dissonant avant-rock that has all of the band members hunched over their scores yet still managing to rock out. Extra Life shows obvious signs of this lineage, but ported into a much more accessible form.

It seems that Looker was a bit of an anomaly in Zs. One interview has a Zs member saying “Charlie writes the hits. I don’t even fucking get where he’s coming from.” After hearing Secular Works, Extra Life’s debut full-length on Planaria, it makes sense that Looker felt he needed to leave Zs: this is a totally different animal. Think math-rock overlaid with oddly soothing vocals that have the feel of a monotonic medieval chant, and you’re on the right track. While parts of the opening track remind of Discipline-era King Crimson (interlocking guitar lines, shifting rhythms), there are also some nearly indie-pop numbers that actually inspire me to (gasp) sing along.

Crowds at the Zs shows in D.C. tended to stand stock-still, mesmerized or perhaps just overwhelmed by the sheer force of all the music-theory-in-action going straight over their heads (and lest I be called elitist, I definitely fall into both these categories myself). But I’d guess an Extra Life show would be an entirely different affair. I can just imagine 15 people in a tiny venue trying to dance and sing along to this stuff, and it’s a satisfyingly amusing image.

Finally, after many hours of rendering and what not, here’s No Age playing a little instrumental at the Rock and Roll Hotel last Tuesday:

We’ve probably posted enough about this show (pick, interview, and photo spread). But I shot some video and thought we should put it up anyway for the hundreds of thousands of D.C. residents who decided not to attend the glorious Abe Vigoda-High Places-No Age show this past Tuesday night at the Rock and Roll Hotel.

OK. Show wasn’t so glorious. The main beef: the sound really kind of sucked. If you decided to really nerd out and stand up front, you couldn’t hear the vocals at all. The only way you got a decent idea of what these bands could do live was if you opted to stand in the back of the club. So next time, a little more vocals please!

Anyway, here are the vids with their rough sound and cheap camera work. The first video is of Abe Vigoda, the second is High Places. The video of No Age is one the way and will be posted later:

God, I miss At the Drive-In. One day in tenth grade, I went to a record store in North Carolina and bought two records: Parachutes by Coldplay and Relationship of Command by At the Drive-In. I thought one of the bands was nice enough, but that the other one was going to be huge—I just picked the wrong one.

I mention this only because At the Drive-In is really the last band I unequivocally loved that just sort of rocked, you know—swerved and screamed and shredded for no reason but to do it. And Black & White Jacksons remind me a little bit of that, which is indeed a Very Good Thing. They don’t really sound like the El Paso band, but they flail and wail like them a little bit. Delusions about acts like these becoming the biggest band in the world are gone now, of course, which is why it was a little weird seeing them last night at a place as wide open as Fort Reno.

Let’s be clear: Black & White Jacksons is a band for clubs. This speaks not to their appeal, realized or otherwise, but to their aesthetic—they make sweaty post-punk that finds its natural habitat in dank buildings with low ceilings, barely there stages, and bright lights. Fort Reno, for those who haven’t been there, is essentially a giant field, with a stage in the center. A few years ago, Q and Not U packed in enough bodies to sort of make it seem like a tiny club, but the crowd last night wasn’t quite at that level. So, playing to the picnicking crowd at about dusk, the band had their work cut out for them. They delivered in an intriguing way, perhaps moved by a certain reverence. “In the punk rock circles I traveled in, Fort Reno was looked at by us as something akin to Woodstock—only more community driven, sustainable, and inclusive,” says bassist Lucas Oswalt.

The four-piece is tight and loud—think a Dischord-bred Bloc Party—and while I’d imagine their stuff comes across gloriously claustrophobic in a crowded room, it mutated a little bit last night as it had more room to move. The band opened up with “There Are No Foxholes In An Atheist,” the first track from their EP, and never really slowed down, just allowing the last song to linger in the vast space before chugging in to the next one. Whereas this modus operandi might make songs seem to be falling all over themselves and into each other at, say, Asylum (where they’ll be playing August 29), in the open air each track sort of reverberated individually. Most of their set came from their EP, with “Don’t Bring A Knife To A Gunfight” hitting especially hard (complete with tambourines) and “Id Vs. Superego” providing a respite from the shouting as Michael Medlock switched from his usual scream-singing to singing-singing. The band also played a new song called “Marvin Berry.” The “Johnny B. Goode”- sounding riff at the beginning of the song fueled suspicion that the title was a reference to this, and Oswalt confirmed it, saying “Tim [George], our guitar player, had this fantastic riff that he would play on occasion at practice, and to us it sounded very akin to something Chuck Berry would play. Tim has an encyclopedic knowledge of music and is quick to acknowledge ‘the greats,’ if you get my meaning. We just kept referring to that riff and the developing song as ‘The Chuck Berry Song.’ So yeah, the title is a reference to Michael J. Fox’s performance in ‘Back to the Future.’ It’s probably my favorite song we perform right now.”

Medlock shimmied the whole night through (and his neon bracelets finally shone once the sun went down), and he got the kids at the show to do the same (there were twelve people on stage dancing at the end, by this count). This, incidentally, is probably the most fascinating part of the whole event: the sheer number of high school and college aged kids who showed up to the Tenleytown venue. Sure, there were some parents and toddlers and more than a few dogs, but the vast majority of the audience was comprised of kids who looked like they were glad to actually be able to see a show.

“It was great having younger people in the audience really getting into it,” Oswalt says. “We’re used to playing smaller places with less people, which obviously creates a different experience because it’s nighttime, and you’re usually playing to a pretty non-diverse demographic. Seeing dogs and little kids running around while hammering away on my bass under moonlight was both unusual and refreshing.”

There’s a lot of live music in the District, but a lot of it isn’t all-ages, and one gets the sense that this dearth is what drives a lot of Fort Reno’s traffic (that and, you know, that it’s free and it’s nice out during the summer). God bless the volunteers who run it. In any event, that’s an issue for another day, because no matter what the reason, the clubs of DC were brought outside Monday night, to satisfying effect.

Dischord Records is reporting that John Davis (Q and Not U, Georgie James) is hosting a weekly specialty show called 1, 2, 3, 4, More More More on XMU (channel 43). “This week John’s co-host will be Guy Picciotto (Fugazi), who will be in charge of the play-list,” the label goes on to say.

Abe Vigoda is a quartet. There are many angles from which to approach/sell this band. They are from L.A. which is now, suddenly, cool (again). They have apprenticed at various all-ages clubs including The Smell. The Smell got written up in the New Yorker. The band’s new album, Skeleton, is being put out by one of the guys in No Age. Heard of them? People–and maybe the band members themselves–have a habit of describing their songs as “tropical” or “tropical punk.” More than enough. Except the band happens to actually be really, really good.

So yeah, Abe Vigoda have some wind at their sails. The band arrives tonight for a show with No Age and High Places. There are plenty of reasons you should attend.

What you should really know about Abe Vigoda–aside from their joke name–is that 1) Skeleton might be one of the few genuinely gorgeous guitar records you’ll hear all year; 2) The four men who make up Abe Vigoda are having a good time. Things are still all Wow. Even a lunch detour to T.G.I. Friday’s.

Just after that the band’s pitstop at that family-feedbag joint, we caught up with AV guitarist Juan Velasquez for a quick interview:

So how was T.G.I. Friday’s?

“It was really good. I had this Strawberry Fields salad. Everything’s vaguely themed. It was pretty. It had chicken in it.”

“We got up. We played in Charlotte at the Milestone. We woke up pretty late and [went to] Friday’s. That’s the one that seemed the most appetizing. Our drummer got this burger with cheese on it and then there was this fried cheese patty on top of it and he’s sick about it now.”

The band has been on tour for just over a week. I asked how the tour was going. The usual question.

“It’s been pretty awesome. We’ve played some pretty fun shows with No Age.”

What’s some good advice on touring?

“The first [tour]….We were actually touring in a 4Runner….It was actually six of us in a five-seater. It was like that at first. Personal space. That might be it. That’s a good thing to have. And sleeping a lot. That helps. Everyone’s cranky if we don’t sleep.”

How do you think Skeleton turned out?

“I like it. It sounds good I think. It’s more polished than anything else we recorded, vocals are louder. It’s my favorite thing we’ve done I think….We had more of an idea of what we wanted to sound like. And we’ve been playing together for a while. We wanted it to sound pretty and dreamy sounding but still fast and crazy. It’s cleaned and defined. It made sense to have it be that way.”

What the hell is tropical punk?

“I don’t know. I guess it’s just like all the drumming stuff—the rhythms are like that and the guitar tones like afro-pop stuff, that type of guitar sound. That’s what people say. It’s there, I guess. We were writing stuff that’s a little different than that. I can hear it. It’s not a main point.”

What Afropop do you dig?

“There’s this band Hallelujah Chicken Run Band—that guitar tone. They’re kind of a rock band. That guitar tone is really cool. I know Michael—he likes Konono and the Congotronics stuff. Things like that.”

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So my generation’s Exile gets an unnecessary reissue with only a few bonus tracks and a needless DVD. Sweet. Perhaps the only person who needed this product more than Liz Phair was Liz Phair’s kid. The rest of us should prepare to shovel through the new-and-improved Liz Phair profile and the revisiting of all her missteps and failures. It’s an all-too-familiar cycle for the songwriter only now we get to look back at Phair circa 1993.

Thumbing through her arc now feels kinda sad—same kinda sad one feels when thinking about the Blake Babies‘ Juliana (I should get points for namedropping that band) or reading Dean Wareham’s book or listening to the Breeders‘ new one. And this reissue only reminds one of her sad career arc.

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