past articles

30 July 06

The Donkeys: Scruffiness Comes In All Forms, Even As Men Play Songs And Lakes Dress Up Like Mirrors

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) There’s a line in ‘C’mon Virginia,” a song off of the debut album by San Diego’s The Donkeys where singer/drummer Sam Sprague sings, “You’ve got those eyes/Seems you could throw a penny in ‘em,” that somehow makes it all sink in. It’s a simple piece of lyric that’s only supposed to be about a dame batting some pretty blue, cavernous eyes, but the calming and delightful way that the bushy Sprague lays it out makes you want to imagine the young band as a neverland of sorts, a place to lose yourself completely without a bread crumb or popcorn trail to lead you back. Everything they do is reminiscent to a quiet pier, a tranquil lake that looks like it’s make of mirrors or a shady yard with a spacious oak tree and a tire swing dangling down from a creaky branch. They are easy living and virtuous. They’re in favor of bringing back the good old days and the soda fountains. They support cookouts and beer from the bottle. They are gentle beings who believe in country, folk, roots and rock as much as they do peace, love and dope. Listening to their lone album, you bear witness to the idea of what it must be like to be completely assured, to be connected to that one part of your makeup that’s beyond reproach, that is your true constitution any way you cut it. They are sympathetic to their inner motors and drive shafts, which leads to the delivery of songs of innumerable pleasures and sleepy acquiescence. It’s given to the listener with resounding love marks and invisible kisses, put down on record as triumphs that aren’t belabored or trite. These are songs that have ancestors aplenty, but their shared features and distinctive markings are few.more...

23 July 06

Two Gallants: These Songs Will Self-Destruct In Five Minutes – There Will Be Dancing And Much Wine

Words by Sean Moeller //Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Photos by Jesse Codling Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) As far as the public record shows, Adam Stephens and Tyson Vogel don’t contemplate the state of Missouri’s wineries and the tiny, ancient towns they were founded in during the mid-1800s when they are making songs. Where this laptop sits, in Hermann, Mo. , the history of a German town racked by Prohibition in 1920 is exactly the kind of subject and (some would say) a tragedy that created the kinds of people who make for the best muses. The people who had it all, lost it all and the people on the outside looking in, who will never have anything and want so much more. It’s a little place along the Missouri River and the Katy Trail, tucked into some fertile hills that served as a breeding ground for grapes, mushrooms, greed, the haves and the have-nots. There were millionaires and beggars in this city an eternity from everywhere in the 1800s, but really just an hour and a half west of St. Louis. Stephens and Vogel, the lifelong friends who make up the San Francisco duo Two Gallants, might never have set foot or given this place one care in all their lives, but it carries a history with it that the balladeer and his right-hand man can appreciate. They could appreciate the government coming calling to rip out every grape vine in the country, with the blood of the last city’s vines dripping from its maw. It could appreciate the bootleggers, who secretly the little purple creatures that were so utterly forbidden that grape jelly was imported throughout Prohibition. Just as Stephens appreciated the story of the homeless man in the parking lot of the Jack-In-The-Box enough, over a decade ago, to pen his first song about him, the woes and injustices and harrowing stories of fighting to live life the way its meant to be lived – with verve and choices – find their ways into many of the lyrics he continues to write. They may not be first-person accounts about the girl-next-door or thankless jobs, but the storyteller in Stephens is better for his eye to antiquated people, places and details. ...more...

16 July 06

French Kicks: Something Spectacular This Way Comes When A Night Is Bedded

Words by Sean Moeller / Illustration by Johnnie Cluney Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) To the naked eye, French Kicks lead singer Nick Stumpf stands close to 10-feet tall, barefoot. To the keen eye, we’re easily talking 6-foot-7, 6-foot-8, again, barefoot. All the same, that’s a drink of water that could irrigate Augusta National Golf Club for a week and a half – greens and fairways, all of it. His curly mop brushes against low-hanging ceiling fans and chandeliers as he waltzes through dining parlors and supper clubs, to be sure. He’s got saplings for legs and he’s got to be all ribs without a shirt. For such a massive, skyscraperly man, he sure knows how to keep his songwriting on an eye-to-eye basis. He keeps his words at the street so that you could imagine them bleeding out the light of a fluorescent street lamp or a neon Schlitz sign, spilling out a flickering and hissing potion that comes out naturally after midnights. He doesn’t float his lyrics on the highwires – up at the levels of where he thinks them. He brings them into being with a demulcent swish to them, borrowing from the air of a near-dead pub at closing time, when the smoke’s numb and the cool air beyond the door will whip the comfortable trance right the hell out of you, should you want it to.more...

9 July 06

Oakley Hall: This Stuff's Made In New York City. NEW YORK CITY! Don't Get The Rope

By Sean Moeller Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) The great and secluded J.D. Salinger began writing the classic American novel about phoniness in 1945, just as the second World War was ending. He continued to deliberate on the subject of what’s seen not really being what’s at the core until he abruptly and without reason slunk off into a hermitic lifestyle at the age of 46. No question, the white-haired and wrinkled up genius still commiserates regularly, in his darkened study about the deficiencies he feels are firmly embedded into the human condition. There are certain times in everyone’s life when they’re someone they’ve no right being. They portray themselves as the confidante, the tease, the eccentric, the know-it-all, the comedian, the devil, the angel, the mover and shaker, a million of things they aren’t. Music snobs are as alert for and irritated by poseurs as Holden Caulfield was. They pounce on the derivative and cry out for a band’s beheading should they stray to close to another band’s wings, dragging off of their fumes and drafting from a sidecar. Most often, there’s no connection. There’s no reason that a band should be driven out of town for giving off more than an average amount of a Talking Heads influence or getting lavish with odes to California even though they’re just five blokes from Ireland. The Japanese love American pop – crazy nuts for The Beach Boys, Mr. T Experience and Presidents of the United States of America with no discretion. Shonen Knife worship The Monkees and they’re nothing close to being mistaken for Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith. Oakley Hall, a six-piece with a backwoods mentality and a bluegrassy clutch on male-female harmonies—lacquered with psychedelia and campfire smoke, smothered in barbeque sauce and smelling like the freshness of the outdoors, calls one of the biggest urban centrals in the world home. Hailing from Brooklyn, N.Y. , the band is a transplant, like most residents, come to the city for a myriad of reasons and bringing with them their roots. Their tales of countrified aloofness are as real as anything you’d get from an Okie or an Allman Brother. Creedance Clearwater Revival was from wine country in Northern California not tobacco fields. The Byrds were nearly their neighbors and The Band was from Canada , though they proudly boasted one native of Arkansas. Oakley Hall guitarist and lap steel player Fred Wallace, who moved to New York after his Virginia home burned to the ground, doesn’t buy anyone suggesting that the themes of the songs on “Second Guessing” and “Gypsum Strings” – the band’s two full-lengths, which were released within five months of each other this spring – are old-fashioned.more...