past articles

29 January 07

The Elected: As Told By The Last Gasp, Sometimes Resembling An Anchor, Other Times An Actor

There’s quite a difference between bohemianism and what The Elected’s Blake Sennett filled his band’s latest album, Sun, Sun, Sun, with. Bohemianism is predominantly for bands somewhat similar to the ones that Sennett’s used to be in just a few years ago, which choose to wear themselves to the bone for artistic purposes, to voluntarily live lives of meagerness and have nothingness so as to achieve solemnity in purpose. It’s karmic. It’s what has to be done to make any art that’s worth a shit, they say. It’s one of the reason’s The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne and his wife still live in the same dumpy house they bought in the Oklahoma City ghetto years ago for $40,000 or whatever it was. It’s why Pete Doherty of Babyshambles lives in hellholes, is impossibly wretched and still lands a foxy Kate Moss for a playmate. Without some kind of strife, there is a shortage of artistic matter to trace upon. By now, Sennett is not living hand-to-mouth (if he ever was) thanks to the success of Rilo Kiley (for which the anticipation of a new record is positively killing a lot of people) and this, his side project, and though he’s surrounded by the modern bohemianism of Silver Lake, Calif., what he’s procured for a sophomore effort is devilishly close to what Steinbeck would have taken a stab at writing had he more of an access to wryness in prose and a dimension of modern times that would have thrown more recreational sex into stories. All the scoring — making love in a van, a whole song about the one girl who’s ever done him good — is overshadowed on the album by a general direction of keeping unfortunately on the wrong side of prosperity.more...

25 January 07

Casper & the Cookies: Slaves To Sound Ardently Host The Spirit Of The Almighty Sugarly Pop Song

Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) It’s interesting to note that Casper & the Cookies frontman and songwriter Jason NeSmith finds Phil Spector to be creepy and kind of a dick. He’s always been fond of the accused murderer (stay tuned as that trial begins in mid-March) and sonic pioneer’s infamous ways with sound, but that’s as far as it goes. You’d think they could be more the buddy types with each other, but they aren’t. NeSmith doesn’t force anyone to play a bass guitar at gunpoint and he’s yet to grow the world’s most catastrophic afro. The two are, however, slaves to sound. As a child, NeSmith collected adaptors from Radio Shack and did geeky, audiophile things with them when other boys were making hamburgers out of Play-doh or playing on Little League baseball teams — collecting baseball cards, not fanzine photographs of the Eurythmics and Men At Work. He is no groundling when it comes to the sweet wines of the year. He is a connoisseur of the multitudinous methods of arriving at a point that piques most interests no matter what their predisposed predilections for sound enjoyment are. The truth is that there is no substitute for a meaty, meaty hook and some choruses about people, people in love, people looking for love, the happy things people do when they’re together, kissing for the first time, and peppering it all with some succulent bridges and parsley. And there is no antidote for fighting these kinds of songs that take you by a storm before you even realize that anything’s been brewing in the clouds.more...

22 January 07

The Velvet Teen: Turned To Grenades And Arbitrary Beauty When Teddy Bears Got Old And Boring 

Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) There’s a bullhorn that The Velvet Teen lead singer Judah Nagler employs while he’s performing (as a matter of fact, it looks exactly like the one depicted at your left) that’s merely an extension of his own voice, the one the skies and his parents gave him. It’s become hard to tell where he ends and that gauzy, washout of silty discourse begins. The skiddish irascibility of his pipes is endearing in the way that it doesn’t necessarily get itself into any trouble, forcing it to have to scramble or cover its tracks. A distortion pedal can make an okay guitarist significantly better, you see. It’s been done a jillion times before. Nagler doesn’t use this chain store model of bullhorn as a cover-up to a voice that cracks and leaks in all the wrong places, but he uses it to contort his adventurous melodies and tangents even more, coaxing them into a different body in what is just one of the many incantations of the Northern California band. When it began six years ago, the band — then consisting of Nagler, bassist Josh Staples and drummer Logan Whitehurst — was mostly pretty pop and gloss, out to canoodle with soft, good-smelling girls through their songs, not send those songs colliding headlong into one another like kids on a roller skating rink for the first time, busting out the apeshit all over the place. They were working with Death Cab For Cutie’s Chris Walla and no working relationship was more appropriate at the time that the band was recording its full-length debut, Out of the Fierce Parade. That isn’t to say that the Velvet and the Teen does not strive for likeability among the fairer sex these days, but objectives are quite a bit larger in scope.more...

17 January 07

Headlights: Keep Your Friends And Your Loves Close -- Keep The City You Call Home Closer

Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) Once, twice, maybe a army of times in your life, you’ve learned that people are super easy to break up with. Sure, there’s a brief, awkward period of time where it feels dirty wrong to have cruelly and, in all likelihood, unjustly trampled upon a living heart, but that passes like a caboose into the distance, the clanging of the guilt riding away down the cold rails. It’s gone before you know it if you’re the one doing the severing of ties. Proving that point expertly, some have even taken to breaking up through text messaging and e-mail. This greatly lessens the awkward stage, often nipping it completely in the bud. There’s a pressing of send and immediately the burden has been lifted. Another call is made and suddenly drinks are on the house and the better part of two years is spiked gleefully through the heading resting on a pint of ale, making a hollow, yet pleasant splash, like a coin reaching the floor of a wishing well and making good on the flip instantaneously. Bands, like people, but in groups, are easier to break up with. Those don’t even get a courtesy call to tell them that their services will no longer be necessary. Some bands — that shall remain nameless — are dumped over a period of years. We start distancing when they release a green album, we give them obvious, frosty kisses when they pull something like Maladroit, and denounce them forever when a steaming pile of Make Believe comes from their hands. Yes indeed, bands are the easiest people to break up with. But try breaking up with a city. This proves to be almost impossible. You cannot send them break-up notes accusing them of changing (to quote Kevin Barnes, “Cause man, of course I have.”) Cities, most of them, do not age well if you see them on a daily basis or even here or there. Even the cities that we think we’re cutting ourselves loose from find ways to get back to us, to trigger a pang deep down in our stomaches that aches for what it used to give us when we were just learning about other places.more...

14 January 07

Vietnam: Bring On The Hedonism, Tomorrow's A Grey, Grey Mess, Not A Golden Goose

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) For a little over a month, Brooklyn’s Vietnam lived in historic Hollywood, Calif., hotel the Highland Gardens, which sits just northwest of Grauman’s (Mann’s) Chinese Theater. Home also to the Academy Awards, the neighborhood is the scene for the showiest of nights, where the rich of the rich dress and parade the red carpet, patting their own backs for their momentous achievements in cinema. The Highland Gardens Hotel, however, is only an artifact of old Hollywood — the same old Hollywood that was making Las Vegas more of a destination than a desert. The Rat Pack hunkered down in Highland Gardens, which was called the Landmark Motor Hotel at the time, highballing and kicking up trouble. It hasn’t visibly changed all that much since those days when Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra would pass out flat on the couches in their rooms. The exterior appears to have been preserved in its unspectacularly drab, 1950s austerity, lacking much color, but indeed having its share of palm trees popping out of the ground in front of the lobby to give it the perfect amount of California glamour. Just two stories high and eerily similar to the Lorraine Hotel in downtown Memphis, Tenn., where Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated in 1968, Highland Gardens is notable for its proximity to the fuse box, where the Hollywood machine is perpetually churning and putting flickers, gleams of stardust into the corners of eyeballs. The world — that world — is an oyster for everyone, as optimism, more than any other place in the entire country, runs rampant like alley cats and paparazzi. The hotel is noted for being a playground for the Rat Pack, but it’s famous for being the site of Janis Joplin’s fatal heroin overdose on Oct. 4, 1970 at the age of 27. She was found by a bandmate in room 105 the morning after, bottoms up between her bed and a nightstand. She had been seen the night before drinking screwdrivers at the Troubadour and Barney’s Beanery and the last person to see her alive was a night clerk at the hotel desk, who was oblivious to her fame, and methodically gave her change for a five dollar bill so she could buy cigarettes. The four members of Vietnam know this story. They may have even tried to rent out room 105 for that matter, wanting to channel the late soul singer who was once quoted as saying, “On stage, I make love to 25,000 people, then I go home alone.” These worlds, these words, these lost times and these sentiments of desperateness, lonely occupancy, the end is coming are the backbone of the debut full-length the band was making while paying rent at the Highland.more...

11 January 07

The Horns of Happiness: Look What You've Done Again You Conniving, Jumpy Little Song You, Hold Still...

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) A guy’s gotta have diversions. He’s gotta have something to wrest the mind away from its treacherous preoccupations and give it some breathing holes. He’d do it for the captive crickets and the poor lightning bugs clicking around inside a Mason jar, used now as a portable lamp, never to see their families and friends again. Why wouldn’t he do it for himself? A one-tracked mind, to go with a one-tracked world, can surely solve highly involved mathematic problems, but it cannot keep a woman happy (unless that happiness is the one-track it burrows into) and it cannot see those three-dimensional Magic Eye illusions that were all the coffee table book rage last decade. A guy’s also gotta have dimensions — vacuums to get sucked into and out of, each providing a unique branding that works like a tattoo, but is invisible and leaves a pleasant scent of orange peels, cinnamon rolls and laundry drying on the line outside, on a sun-kissed afternoon. Finding fountains of the gluey inspiration weighing a man down begs that the man find a way to make good with it, to let it not go completely to waste as he keeps scratching the same, identical itch that’s been made raw with burning. Good examples of scratching the same itch, well, let’s see, there’s the Red Hot Chili Peppers on Stadium Arcadium and how about the Beastie Boys for the block. Why don’t we get excited when we see a jar of apple sauce? Why don’t we fall head-over-heels in love with drinking water? To answer the first query: Because we’ve seen apple sauce so many times in so many different settings; and to answer the second query: Because we have so much of it. Songs and bands come a dime a dozen. They’ve been done and done over so many times, but what keeps people still making them is that they hope that theirs makes people forget that they’ve ever spooned apple sauce into themselves or drank a glass of water.more...

7 January 07

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7 January 07

Annuals: Uncharacteristic Beasts of Revelations And Family Ties No Longer Baby Boys And Girl

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) Men and women purchase minivans for very specific and very similar reasons. These men and women are exactly like the parents of the Annuals. The test drives, the financing and the signing on the dotted line are done because certain needs aren’t being met. They’re looking for more space for wee ones. They must haul things. These vehicles are meant for carrying whole slumber parties worth of people, basketball teams and bickering siblings, who can’t keep their hands to themselves, crossing invisible barrier lines and pinching or slugging each other to pass the time on vacations to Mount Rushmore and the Badlands. Years later, after the minivans have exhausted their first lives on the family of five or six, etc., they become metamorphous and are adopted by the working poor — rock and roll bands that tour around the country playing for lads and lasses in all of the various underbellied haunts and the occasional plum of an establishment that this great nation has been founded on. These minivans then carry stinky men and women, always in a state of partial or complete ungrooming, probably some amount of weed, Charles Bukowski books, the latest copy of Magnet, a token mascot and either unbridled optimism or a jaded version of such. Sometimes the vans are living dual lives, daylighting as the family’s extracurricular activities mobile and moonlighting as the way 15-year-old kids are getting to and from practices and shows opening for the best young emo bands around. Rarely are these minivans built to, meant to or actually do carry living, snorting polycephalic beings such as this NorthCarolina band of age-old friends still hovering near, on or below the legal drinking age. The six heads of this invigorating band (think of being thrown into a freezing ass lake of perfect blue water with headphones on and as your body takes in all parts of the shock of that temperature change, what you continue to hear loudly and with as much clarity as the water had blue, is a gold rush, a sunken treasure) are not extensions of serpents or the Beast of Revelations, but the composite of a hydra that sounds like a mountain and plays with fire. They make a big, beautiful trail of savory expansiveness that you wouldn’t be afraid to hang on your wall for all visitors to see. The songs that make up the band’s debut album, this past year’s Be He Me, are explorations of multiple degrees, where ideas clamor about at times and before they’re put to bed, they go around bear hugging as many other ideas as come into reach. It’s orch pop with a chilling way to speed up a pulse rate, snaking through reminiscence, fiction and longing until what’s come of it a direct ratio of lighting bolts to fireflies — power and flare mixed with peace and nature.more...

3 January 07

Track A Tiger: An Action With Potentially Serious Ramifications And A Band That Frowns On The Sunny Side, Within Reason

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) This year, or rather the year that found its right mind to wrap itself up, a young male, an Italian blogger to be precise, had a burning question for Track A Tiger lead singer and songwriter Jim Vallet as he was readying a piece about the band for screen. He wanted to know — damn it — why the members, and Jim specifically, were so sad. He believed that the band was severely broken up about something and that something was life in general. They were sobbing wrecks, destined for hankies and the sovereign state of melancholy that turns the air mighty chilly and blanches faces of all their original colors. He sensed a dreariness in the daily lives of these men, a condition that would make cracking smiles as difficult as cutting diamonds. You listen to Woke Up Early the Day I Died and you think, “That Italian dude might know what he’s talking about after all,” because there’s enough desperation in the tales of these album characters to choke a horse. It’s just that Vallet and his crew — guitarist Patrick Melvin, bassist Aaron Wilkins and drummer Mike Ciuni (the band recently parted ways with vocalist/keyboardist Alisa Jo Monnier and is seeking a replacement of celestial talents) — aren’t really like that. They might sadden their mothers with the songs they write, but those sad songs say so much more, as a birdie named Elton once sang. There’s no glory in a happy song. There’s no honor in jubilance — although Lionel Ritchie did make a fine living through that exact manner. Movies are not considered complete unless there is some variation of a story arch that follows the line: happy, good, tragedy, sad, journey, discovery, ending happiness or at the very least, less sadness. This is the truth and therefore, Track A Tiger adhere to that winning formula, by writing smashingly good songs for the afternoons when grey skies aren’t clearing up and baby rain droplets are tapping against the window panes like lost or blind birds. Vallet, in his writing, understands that there needs to be brevity in joy. A song must be long in sorrow if it’s ever going to get anywhere in life. It just must be on the verge of despair to be allowed entrance into his world, which was originally shaped by growing up along the banks of the Mississippi River, in a whatever Iowa town that’s reputable for nothing except being within spitting distance of Wisconsin dairy farm country. It’s a depressing place (now you know where he gets the inclination) that for the longest time was only known for it’s towering stone bluffs and its still active Ku Klux Klan chapter. This is where he came from, young Italian. Maybe now you understand where he’s “coming” from — literally and lyrically. That place is the setting and the reason for the song, “Here at the End,” which he explains thusly, “I was thinking about people I’ve seen that move back (to Dubuque) after all kinds of bad shit happens in their lives…and the town seems to make it worse. Lonely, divorced, living back with their parents, drinking, shit like that.”more...

1 January 07

The Changes: They Back The Questionable Bear Quarterback But Bless Their Savory Take On The Lonesome Hours

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Johnnie Cluney//Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) Right now, it’s the end of the third quarter of the Chicago Bears-Green Bay Packers game on New Year’s Eve 2006. (Most Bear football addicts are pissed off that they had to do their fancy dining early and probably postpone the lion’s share of their alcoholic imbibing until just two hours before the six becomes a seven — and now it looks like they’ll be drowning their sorrows thanks to a shit game). A quarterback that is endorsed by half of the four members of Chicago-based band The Changes is sitting on the sidelines after completing just two of 12 passing attempts. He was roundly booed by the home crowd and was yanked after the first half, when his passer rating was 0 and he’d thrown three interceptions right into the hands of the hated Packer d-backs. Rex Grossman is seen as an embarrassingly lousy quarterback on one of the best football teams in the National Football League. His team’s own fans turned on him months ago and fans have begun wearing replica jerseys with the last three letters of Grossman’s name blacked out with tape. Football has nothing to do with The Changes, per se, but they come from a city that’s been crying for the next best thing since October and they this band of four natives are trying to make a name for themselves in an industry that exists for the next big thing. The truth is that The Changes — lead singer/guitarist Darren Spitzer, lead guitarist/chief songwriter Dave Rothblatt, bassist Rob Kallick and drummer Jonny Basofin — earned one of their biggest professional breaks just across the street from Soldier Field (where the Bears were getting it handed to them), on the other side of Lake Shore Drive when they won a battle of the bands contest and a right to open the Lollapalooza festival at Grant Park in 2005, the year it became a stand-alone event in the Windy City. It’s interesting that the third-biggest city in the United States has had such a difficult time in getting back to the Super Bowl — which it won in 1985 with one of the most storied teams in league history — and in breaking rock and roll bands nationally. There’s Wilco and The Smashing Pumpkins (dead or alive?) and then there’s…Kanye West, Rhymefest. Hardly bands. There are gobs of bands in the comfortable middle — deserving, working their way into prominence and those that never made it too big outside of Cook County and now play a cover band once a year for an annual Halloween show — Catfish Haven, Bound Stems, The Redwalls, Local H, Fig Dish. The city’s mothering instinct, its ability to nurture is suspect.more...