past articles

24 December 06

David Vandervelde: Stop Fuckin' Round With The Modern Rock And Roll – Lesson No. One (This Guy)

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Brad Kopplin Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) A shag haircut doesn’t have to be a precursor to anything. It doesn’t have to indicate any predisposed personality traits or suggestive behaviorisms of the spotted wearer. There certainly could be some hot-blooded, devil may care individual operating beneath it, but it would be awfully speculative on the part of the accuser. Worry about your own business instead of judging others based on their preferred hair styling. Mind your p’s and q’s and stop thinking that shaggy hair means rock and roll to the tilt. It is usually right on though. You can try it and see that, 90-percent of the time, if you go up to that teenaged/20-something lad with drooping locks that swish when they nod or brush their teeth, and ask what they thought of the newest Gossip record, you’d see that aloof demeanor joggle and that new, rarely seen intangible wash of freak out spill into their facial features just like that. They’d gush and stammer. It might be stereotypical, but it’s a sign. David Vandervelde’s haircut doesn’t affect him personally. It’s got so little to do with his music, really, but it is at least a surface indication of his hedonism, by way of the temple, the chapel, the alter of rock ‘n fucking roll. He is devout. He’s a 22-year-old man swallowed whole by the powers that be – in this case Marc Bolan, Mickey Finn, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ron Wood – and as they’re whispering into his ears, there’s no mistaking that they’re telling him to eat, drink and be the late 1960s and all of the 1970s. Then they tell him, “But kid, do it your way.” And so it is. Vandervelde is a child born of the 80s, but there’s none of that ducktailing of hair or wearing of acid-washed jeans to him. He’s a vintage throwback to those years when the most experimental music being made could actually be heard coming out of transistor radios.more...

20 December 06

Shearwater: Where Are We? Oh, Where Our Eyes Can Never Adjust

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) One impossibility, or more appropriately, one downfall with imagination, regardless of its strength or direction is that it can draw all it wants and create representations and facsimiles of places that we’ve never been, but there’s no way to adequately feel an unfamiliar place without having been there first. There’s no way to get to anywhere telepathically without doing oneself all kinds of disservices. There’s a reason why we say that words don’t do certain things, tastes, views, people, smells or destinations justice. You had to be there. You have to be there. Whatever the tense, you’ve never been. The places that have most shaped the teeth and the eyes and the ears and the skin of Shearwater lead singer Jonathan Meiberg are places that we only see in encyclopedias and on television. He’s fallen madly in love with these far-flung places of trees that he pictures as animated and nocturnal. These are places like the Falkland Islands, located in the South Atlantic Ocean just to the east of Argentina that are more lost world than found world. He’s comfortable and goes there whenever he has the chance. It’s those records and T-shirts that you buy that help send him there when he needs to get there again for a temporary fix. He studies community life at the far ends of the earth – he’s been to the Arctic and worked his way over icebergs in different modes of observation. When he’s in the Falklands, he’s getting up at sunrise, drinking some coffee, eating some oatmeal and hiking miles and miles out into what amount to isolation booths in forests to study birds of prey. He goes mildly crazy and it’s voluntary, all of it. He might even be proud of the insanity for all we can tell. This place and this walking he describes as “walking around on Mordor.” Meiberg unhesitatingly takes us to this place, to this dementia on the song’s from the band’s latest album, Palo Santo, a potpourri of glee hidden as glum and softness hidden as bracing electricity. Somehow it feels like all of those conditions might exist out there on those two islands in the middle of the sea.more...

18 December 06

Free Tunes

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18 December 06

Mates of State: Take Your Cutes And Shove Them

Words by Sean Moeller //Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) Bars and rock saloons all have beer. You can distinguish the okay from the better based on what they have on tap. Most often it’s just a different form of domestic disappointment, though it’s outright snobbery when a man or woman can’t just be happy with a Bud heavy or its nearest ale competitor. It’s not the most scientific way to judge a barroom. That’s done through touch games, those contraptions that typically sit at the ends of bars, where for a handful of quarters, you can stare at side-by-side photographs of topless women or debriefed broncos and in a race against the clock distinguish the differences between the left and the right. For instance, possibly look for an apple missing from the bowl of fruit, the drapes hanging lower in one frame or the sudden disappearance of a bracelet or hair ribbon. Only your choicest bars have these time passers. One such bar that I’m familiar with has such a titillating, coin-operated machine and sitting in front of it was where I first spied Mates of State drummer Jason Hammel years ago, when the band was touring in support of Our Constant Concern, the group’s sophomore disc. There he was in a winter parka in the lower bar area of the late, great, filthy Gabe’s Oasis – where the local dead-enders and scary old men had swivel stools with their names on them – spotting these oddities on and off the bodies of women hiding only the parts beneath a bikini bottom. That’s mildly scandalous, right? That’s not cute or adorable. It’s not 2 Live Crew or Marilyn Manson nasty, but it’s a start in the right direction for some of that scary street cred. You can’t help but feel that all Hammel and his wife/Mates vocalist and organist Kori Gardner would like for Christmas is a dark rumor to spread through the indie ranks that linked them to associations with the seedy rock and roll underbelly – anything to spring them free from the gag-inducing label of being a little bunny rabbit band, something plush and inoculate. It’s so not so. Just because they gaze dazzlingly into each other’s eyes when they’re playing on stage doesn’t mean a blasted thing. The next time you’re catching The Shins in action, tell me that James Mercer isn’t shooting those same looks at his bandmates. He does and you know it.more...