Category: feature

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Lydia Loveless: Being Good is Killing Me Inside

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You’re sitting in a dive bar, looking up into the neon beer signs. It’s one of those joints half full of the lonely and the tired and a few troublemakers. You overhear someone talking from a few bar stools down, a woman telling a stranger her story. While you don’t normally eavesdrop, she keeps saying things that sound like they could have come from your own mouth. Things to do with too many empty bottles littering the floor, things to do with a certain moral ambivalence and an ease with that ambivalence, things to do with isolation and fear. All these things delivered in a voice of world-weary defiance.

You turn to look down the bar and see the speaker of your truths. There you find a small, pale girl who can’t be more than 23. What the hell?

This is Lydia Loveless, a 21-year-old native of Columbus, Ohio, who plays her songs of late nights at the bar and next-day regrets – or a lack of regret – while planting one foot firmly in country and the other foot firmly in rock. Her new album Indestructible Machine is out today on Bloodshot Records. Listen to and download “Can’t Change Me”.

 

Lydia Loveless – Can’t Change Me

 

Lydia Loveless @ Bloodshot Records

Lydia Loveless @ Facebook

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Put the Needle on the Record: The 1980s at 45 Revolutions per Minute

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Many remember the 1980s as a time when style was deemed more important than substance (and all the unfavorable connotations that could imply), but Put the Needle on the Record: The 1980s at 45 Revolutions per Minute, a new book by Cleveland, Ohio, writer and music/pop culture historian Matthew Chojnacki, shows how the style of the ’80s was often carefully orchestrated to reflect the substance as the bold art on the sleeves of 7″ records was put to work selling a single song among hundreds of other songs on record store shelves.

Inspired by his own enormous collection of 7″ and 12″ records, Chojnacki has compiled over 250 7″ covers from the ’80s and included stories, insights and interesting comparison of the ephemeral trappings that did more than just protect the vinyl discs inside. With an afterword by ’80s style icon Nick Rhodes (Duran Duran), Put the Needle on the Record spotlights covers of everyone from Luther Vandross to Def Leppard to the Smiths in a stylish hardcover format and includes information gleaned from interviews with some 125 musicians and cover artists.

A couple of my favorite examples from the book include entries on Kate Bush and Def Leppard.

 

 

Designer John Carder Bush (also Kate’s brother) on “Army Dreamers”: “Have you ever noticed that a lot of the traditional anti-war songs, the ones that have come from soldiers’ experience, often have perky little tunes that almost deflect you from the cold reality of the words, and, somehow, this makes their message far more chilling? ‘Army Dreamers’ is one of those kinds of songs. The cover is an attempt to recreate a ‘40s soldiers’ pin-up girl, an integral part of that dreamy madness that attracts young men to the trappings of war. It’s also worth remembering that the wonderful video to the song was hardly seen because it was considered as too violent— such an innocent time!”

 

 

An impressive seven hit singles were released from Def Leppard’s Hysteria. Each of the single sleeves comprised a portion of the album’s cover art. The two final puzzle pieces were sold in a limited edition U.K. box set for “Love Bites.”

H y s t e r i a designer Andie Airfix: “Those were the days when record companies stretched the limits of seven- and twelve-inch single formats. Since Mercury Records had confidence in the success of so many singles from the album, they immediately agreed to the puzzle concept.”

The pieces: “Hysteria” (row one, center), “Love Bites” (row one, right), “Armageddon It” (row two, left), “Animal” (row two, center), “Women” (row two, right), “Pour Some Sugar on Me” (row three, center), and “Rocket” (row three, right).

Airfix vividly remembers the band’s reaction to her artwork, “the band saw my preparatory sketch and absolutely loved it. They wanted to retain a powerful image in line with hard rock, but also to modernize it and avoid the clichés. The head was intended to express dark fears associated with the psychotic state of hysteria. The computer background was
one of the first computer-generated graphics. Believe it or not, the image was a black-andwhite drawing, fed into a computer, colored very primitively, and then output as an 8 x 10 transparency—essentially a screen shot (hence the screen texture).”

Learn more about Put the Needle on the Record, available September 28, see some sample pages and pre-order the book at Matthew Chojnacki’s website.

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The Jim Jones Revue: Got Me So Messed Up, but I’m Feeling Fine

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Sometimes you don’t know what you need until it’s given to you. Rock ‘n’ roll, I give you the Jim Jones Revue because you have been missing rock from your roll for far too long.

Although the British band have only been around since 2008 and have just released their third album, Burning Your House Down, stateside – and the second album, Here to Save Your Soul, was a compilation of singles and previously unreleased songs – the Jim Jones Revue already has a more-than-solid reputation as a dependably superior band. I’d been hearing the buzz myself for a long while but didn’t focus in on them until John Wesley Myers (Black Diamond Heavies, James Leg) recommended them. It didn’t take long after that – about 4 minutes, the length of “Foghorn” – for me to fall in love.

The Jim Jones Revue’s rabid, rough, rapid-fire boogie woogie rock ‘n’ roll is like a cleansing fire, Jones’ voice scouring you like industrial-strength steel wool while the piano/guitar attack rains down on you. Then, for good measure, the rhythm section kicks you in the head from behind. Example? Here’s JJR’s performance of “High Horse” from The Late Show with David Letterman this past Tuesday:

 

 

Now, it would be nearly impossible for most bands to capture that kind of energy in the studio. The Jim Jones Revue makes it sound like second nature. Beginning to end, Burning Your House Down is the most throttling blitz of pure rock ‘n’ roll id I’ve heard in at least a decade. It is sexy, raging, exultant, and not a damn second of it is phoned in.

Short of setting a match to you, there’s really no way to convey to you how much Burning Your House Down fires me up (no pun intended). Just go buy the album and experience the inferno for yourself.

Then if you’re luckier than me and have a gig within driving distance, check the Jim Jones Revue out live and see how much hotter it gets.

9/8/2011 – Los Angeles, CA – Echo
9/10/2011 – Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg
9/11/2011 – Allston, MA – Brighton Music Hall
9/12/2011 – Montreal, QC – Casa del Popolo
9/13/2011 – Toronto, ON – Horseshoe Tavern
9/14/2011 – Chicago, IL – Schuba’s Tavern
9/16/2011 – Philadelphia, PA – The Blockley Pourhouse
9/17/2011 – Washington D.C. – Black Cat
9/18/2011 – Hoboken, NJ – Maxwell’s

The Jim Jones Revue Official Website

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Ones to Watch: Will Hanson

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Every once in a while a new (or at least new-to-me) musical act settles into my collection as if they have been there forever, rather than just for a week or a month. Les Wampas was one such act, and Will Hanson is another.

Moving a Body (12/26 Records), Hanson’s first solo effort – he was formerly a member of Proxy – came out in late August, and while I have only been listening to the whole thing for a week or so, every time his voice floats up on shuffle, I feel like I’m visiting with an old friend.

Originally based in London, Hanson recently moved to Glasgow, Scotland to record his (mostly) dark and sometimes dreamy, sometimes noisy tunes with producers Jamie Savage (Chemikal Underground) and Oli Bayston (Keith, Howls) at Chemikal Underground. His work with them was funded by Creative Scotland, and Mr. Hanson has additional Scottish connections via his 6 piece Glasgow based band.

Here they all are performing one of my favorite tracks, The Bats:

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Husky Burnette: Facedown in the Dirt

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I think of myself less as a “music blogger” than as a music pusher (cue Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman”), and Husky Burnette deals in just the kind of illicit substances I like best: a rough voice, a dirty groove and a foot-stomping beat. Hailing from Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they seem to grow ’em like that, Burnette’s music is, as Rick Saunders once put it, “hunched, sweatin’, swaggerin’ and all up on ya.”

Coming from the same lineage that brought us Johnny and Dorsey Burnette (you may know Johnny as the singer of “You’re Sixteen”) and having put some time in with folks like Roger Alan Wade, Husky is doing his own thing now, playing his blues and working it hard. His latest album Facedown in the Dirt is out now and it’s full of thumpin’ and bumpin’ and even a little grindin’.

 


 

Check out some righteous footage of one of Burnette’s recent gigs down in America’s sweaty penis (i.e., Florida), rockin’ a fiery rendition of “Stagger Lee”, accompanied by Philip Westfall on banjo cello and Rick Saunders beating the skins. Because that’s how ya do it.

 

 

Husky Burnette Official Website

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Daytrotter Barnstormer 5, Akron, OH, 8.31.11

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“We’re in a barn. Shit.” – Dean Povinsky, Wildlife

Having grown up in the country (not too far from the site where the Daytrotter Barnstormer 5 tour set down in Akron), I’m not unfamiliar with hearing live music in barns – though in my childhood experiences, the bands were usually a sidenote to a pig roasting on a spit or people getting drunk at a company picnic. Don’t get me wrong: there were people getting drunk at the beautiful Conrad Botzum Farmstead Barn Wednesday night, but the main event was clearly the music.

The show started promptly at 6:30 PM, the sun still out, shining in through the open barn door and windows. A group of photogenic young men dressed all in black with matching teal armbands (“We chose black for our uniforms,” keyboard player Tim Daugulis commented later. “What a great idea.” “Oh yeah: daylight,” singer/guitarist Dean Povinsky added) drew people into the barn from the deck and surrounding grounds with their energetic set. This was Wildlife. Belting out passionate vocals and rocking hard, half the band’s black uniforms were sweat-soaked by the third song. I liked Wildlife immediately and even got goosebumps during an a cappella break toward the end of the last song of their set.

Next up was Princeton, an L.A. band led by twin brothers Matt and Jesse Kivel. Their synth-heavy mellow dance music was not my thing, but they had a friendly presence, and the woman in striped jeans to my right danced ecstatically through most of the set.

Doug Paisley was probably the artist on the bill who most fit people’s idea of music you might usually hear emanating from a barn. Looking like the lovechild of Thurston Moore and John Doe, Paisley is a sweet guitarist with a comfortable, weathered voice. In his songs, he is a storyteller, but he joked about trying to keep quiet between songs because stage banter didn’t seem to work for him. “I don’t like telling the same jokes every night,” he said. “I think you should keep things fresh. That may be my problem.” Either way, he had a barnful of people quietly transfixed by the end of his set.

(In a slightly mistimed moment of serendipity, a bat flew high over Paisley’s head a couple of songs after he played “Bat Song”.)

For the seventh inning stretch, White Rabbits brought their spirited Brit-style pop-rock to make the barn bounce. They brought out a crop of new songs that still managed to engage the crowd, though it was with their last couple of songs, more familiar tunes, that really brought punch to their set.

I have gushed about Hacienda on this blog before, and this is going to be more of the same. I tell everyone that they are one of my favorite live bands for a very good reason. These guys always serve up a loose soul groove while still being a very tight unit, and there aren’t many bands who make me dance more at shows. The Villanueva brothers and cousin Dante brought out a bunch of new songs from their third album, recently recorded at Dan Auerbach’s relocated Easy Eye Studio in Nashville, my favorite being “You Just Don’t Know” with its superior soul groove. And while the new songs were great, it was in the more familiar tunes where they really laid it down. They ended their set with a spectacular version of their Everly Brothers cover “You’re My Girl” that featured an extended groove-jam intro and left the crowd hollering for more. They proceeded to top themselves with an encore of “Mama’s Cookin'” that could have set the barn aflame had it gotten any hotter.

All in all, a great evening in a great setting. I’d like to extend my personal thanks to Sean Moeller and the Daytrotter crew for bringing this great tour to Ohio this time around.

 

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Austin Lucas at Blue Moon Café, Shepherdstown, WV, 8.26.11

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Happy to have another guest post from the lovely and talented Michelle Evans (Dear Ben Nichols, The Vinyl District: Washington, D.C.), this time a live review of Austin Lucas and the Bold Party.

 

 

I discovered Austin Lucas a couple years ago, but I had yet to see him live. When I heard he was going to be at the intimately set Blue Moon Café in Shepherdstown, WV, with his brilliantly talented back-up band The Bold Party and opening acts Matt Kline (of The Fox Hunt) and Marcellus Hall (from Brooklyn), I packed up my ’89 Honda Accord (with pop-up headlights!) for a road-trip north to see some awesome music (oh, and my sister too).

I am very much a voice and lyrics person. I often say that if I can’t understand what someone is singing, I’m not likely to be very interested in what the singer has to say (although there are, of course, exceptions). While initially drawn by the overall tone and sorrowful beauty of Lucas’ voice, I came to find bluegrass, country (the real kind), mountain, and Old Time influences in his music – some of my favorite genres. But that’s not all I found. On his new full-length album, A New Home in the Old World, Lucas has employed the use of electric guitar, as can be heard on one of my new favorite songs by him, “Thunder Rail.” Some of my other favorite songs he performed that night included “Somebody Loves You,” “Go West” (below), and “Wash My Sins Away” (also below), all of which can be found on both Somebody Loves You and Live from the White Water Tavern.

Austin Lucas is by and large one of the alt-country genre’s unsung heroes. He not only has a beautiful, soulful voice that propels along a story, but a knack for constructing and writing songs that are both emotive and smart.

Recently coming off a tour with Willie Nelson’s Country Throwdown, Austin Lucas is currently headlining a tour with The Bold Party as well as touring as support for the Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band. If Lucas is performing within a few hours radius of where you live, see him (and definitely see him with The Bold Party, if you can). It won’t be long before he’ll move from intimate saloon settings to theaters, and you’ll regret not seeing him when.

 

Austin Lucas - Go West @ The BlueMoon Saloone 08/26/11

 

Austin Lucas - Wash My Sins Away @ The BlueMoon Saloone 08/26/11

 

Austin Lucas - Wild Boar @ The BlueMoon Saloone 08/26/11

 

Austin Lucas Official Website

Austin Lucas @ Reverb Nation

Austin Lucas @ Facebook

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Comrade Plymouth: Bodies of Bones and Breasts and Unmapped Chambers of Hearts

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Being moved to tears by live music is one thing – the confluence of proximity and energy can be powerful – but have you ever been moved to tears by something you heard on the radio? I had that singular experience once, not long after I had hosted Christopher Porterfield and Nick Berg for a night as they passed through Cleveland on their way to shows with Strand of Oaks and Yellow Ostrich in New York City. I tuned in to a little low-end-of-the-dial folk show to hear them play, as Conrad Plymouth, a little in-studio set with Timothy Showalter (a.k.a. Strand of Oaks). I expected it to be fun to hear my friends on the radio, and I expected it to be lovely, but I didn’t expect, as they played “Fergus Falls”, a song I’d listened to so many times, to be made weepy.

This is their gift, to reach right into your chest, gently pull out your heart and show you all the amazing things inside you. Inside humans. On Comrade Plymouth, Christopher Porterfield’s new solo record, he does it again. To paraphrase writer Raymond Chandler’s description of colleague Dashiell Hammett, Porterfield writes lyrics that seem never to have been written before. They don’t beg or shout to be heard, but you will stop to listen.

Have a listen to a couple of my favorite tracks:

 

 

 

Comrade Plymouth is available now via Conrad Plymouth’s Bandcamp on a name-your-own-price basis.

Conrad Plymouth Official Website

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Diamond Doves, Brooklyn Bowl, 8.19.11: “We Always Want People To Dance”

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NTSIB friend and cohort Joy Wagner kindly offered this sweet little interview/show review to us and the good dudes at Citizen Dick. Check out Diamond Doves’ music at their MySpace (and then entreat them to get off of MySpace).

 

 

The odds are good that, if you’re a regular follower of this blog, you’ve already heard of the Diamond Doves. They’ve backed up and opened for several popular acts: A.A. Bondy, The Felice Brothers, Elvis Perkins. In fact, they were Dearland, as in “Elvis Perkins In.”

These days, they’ve struck out on their own, but they’re not trying to ride any coattails. The Doves are doing this all themselves.

“With our band, we’re trying to break every rule we set for ourselves [in the previous band],” says Wyndham Garnett (guitar, trombone, vocals).

Brigham Brough (bass, vocals, saxophone) agrees. “Our past material taught us what we’re capable of and what we wanted to do. But we’re trying less to build off of that platform than to create anew.”

Which isn’t to say that they’re arrogant — just that they’ve learned from experience. Nick Kinsey (drums, clarinet, vocals) maintains “We’ve hit the ground running.”

And indeed, in the space of a few months, they seem to have picked a direction and headed for it full bore. In April, when I last saw them, they were playing upbeat, catchy, and well-orchestrated but fairly mild tunes: solidly enjoyable opening-band material. Between then and August, however, they’ve shifted into floor-shaking, guitar-driven indie rock that can convince even a notoriously apathetic Williamsburg hipster crowd to dance.

Garnett attributes this to the album they’ve been recording. “We’ve been working our ass off to make the new record and we want everyone to hear it.”

“We always want people to dance,” says Brough. “We want to write good songs and make good music. [Within the band] we want to inspire and challenge each other.”

Which seems to be working out pretty well. Their songwriting method is democratic, with each band member contributing his part and allowing the others to fill in theirs. Each takes his turn at singing, while Brough and Garnett often trade instruments onstage. Each has his own distinctive sound, and there is no clear frontman in the typical sense of the word.

Brough acknowledges that this approach is both “our biggest strength and our biggest weakness,” and that it keeps them on their toes.

Garnett asserts that with his contributions, “I want to impress my homeboys and give them something good to play.”

“Our energy ties it together,” says Kinsey, adding that the trio’s longtime friendship has given them a significant nonverbal connection. And indeed, their democratic interactions carry over off the stage. When I caught up with them after their set, they were affable, personable, visiting with friends and chatting over a shared plate of chicken wings. They have a habit of contributing to and even finishing one another’s sentences. The Diamond Doves are just three friends who are also in a band, making music they want everyone to check out.

“We speak music to each other,” Garnett explains, and I readily believe that.

After the chicken wings had vanished, the trio went outside to watch the other bands on the bill and catch up with Elvis Perkins, who’d offered a supportive presence; I sat in the lobby organizing my notes. A young man sharing the sofa explained that he’d journeyed all the way from Pennsylvania to hear the headlining act, and asking what I had come for. When I told him, he frowned in thought for a moment.

“The Diamond Doves, were they the first act?” He paused, then grinned. “They were fucken awesome.”

Between that and the dancing hipsters, I think this is a good sign.

 


Diamond Doves opening for the Felice Brothers, Club Helsinki, Hudson, NY, 3.26.11

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Southern Independent, Vol. 2

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The XXX movement is moving ahead and gaining steam. The project, spearheaded by Shooter Jennings, aims to promote and provide a support network for music that is “too rock for country, too country for rock”, music that is often invisible to the eye of the larger public because the bigger record labels and radio stations find it too difficult to pigeonhole.

Following up on last month’s Southern Independent, Vol. 1 compilation, the crew at Give Me My XXX have dropped their second volume today (with slots for the Vol. 3 dance card already filling up). Check out the track list below – a nice mix of artists you already know and love together with new artists that will become future old favorites.

1. Honky Tonk Carnie / Lonewolf OMB
2. Devil in New Orleans / Powder Mill
3. Quittin’ Time / Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre
4. Codeine / Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit
5. I Like The Way / The Imperial Rooster
6. Whatever Kills Me First / Joey Allcorn
7. Chevy Beretta / Jonny Corndawg
8. Santa Monica / John Carter Cash
9. Sweet Delta Water / Black Oak Arkansas
10. Down and Out / Honky Tonk Hustlas
11. Canteen Full of Dreams / Roger Alan Wade
12. I Ain’t Drunk / Whitey Morgan and the 78’s
13. Hear The Hills / North Mississippi Allstars
14. Hootchie Kootchie Man / Jerry McGill (recorded at Sun Studio, this previously unreleased track includes Waylon Jennings on guitar, Jim Dickerson on keys, Ritchie Albright on drums and the Memphis Horns)

To get the comp, all you have to do is register an account at Give Me My XXX. Nice and easy. If you need a little more appetite whetting, check out the videos for some select tracks below.

 

 

The Imperial Rooster - I LIke The Way (She...) Live from the Porch

 

Whitey Morgan and the 78's - I Ain't Drunk