Category: Rock ‘n’ Roll Photog

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Rhubarb Whiskey: Same Sad End

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Rhubarb Whiskey is Emchy (accordion, vocals), Boylamayka Sazerac (guitar, mandolin, upright bass, vocals) and Sizzle La Fey (violin, mandolin, banjo, piano), and they’re back and better than ever with their second record, Same Sad End.

There are, well, not murder ballads, exactly; maybe a murder waltz? Murder two-step? Songs which could be used to score a romantic montage for Bonnie and Clyde?
 

 
Dreamy sad wandering songs:
 

 
And this one, which haunts me. I keep listening to it hoping the story will change and Ella will get a happy ending and she never does.
 

 

Should you need a revivifying drink after that, the band does have a signature cocktail!

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Notes on an End: My Chemical Romance, 2001-2013

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Last Friday night I awoke from an extended fever-induced nap to discover My Chemical Romance had dissolved.

My reactions were, in order:

what.

WHAT.

Hold on, let’s check their blog . . .

Well, shit. I guess this is really happening.

Then I sat here for a while, toggling between various feeds on my screen and emotions in my heart: sadness, because I love(d) them best; relief, because the waiting for the other shoe to drop is over; gratitude, for the tunes, for the dear friends I’ve met in their pit, for the fact that I went to as many shows as I could, and for the fact that they went out with grace, dignity and finality, rather than in a hail of public meltdowns, regrettable shows and/or terrible tours. It’s a death, of a kind, but it is a clean one.

(You’ll notice there’s no “shock” in there; that is because I really wasn’t surprised. I was excited when they released Conventional Weapons, the compilation of the songs they recorded after The Black Parade and then scrapped in favor of Danger Days: The True Lives of Fabulous Killjoys, but it was the kind of “tying up loose ends” move that felt like the beginning of the end.)

Saturday I listened to Danger Days – Dr. Deathdefying’s sign off was more of a punch to the heart than usual – while the Internet did the modern equivalent of bargaining with the Reaper, i.e. discussed rumors that the band might reform under a different name, or with a change in line-up; on Sunday, Gerard Way posted an extended letter gently but firmly quashing all of those possibilities.

As I write this, it’s Tuesday night, and my emotions are still mixed. I’m still sad that they’ve called it quits, but I’m genuinely curious to see what they do next.

I’m also still grateful for the ways they changed my life for the better, by convincing me that rock and roll still had something to give me, if I would let it, and moreover that there was room for me in their pit, standing next to the ladies that are now some of my very best girls.

They were, as a band, completely ridiculous and totally over the top, and but they were also totally sincere about all of it, and that is why they were (are) my favorite.

I don’t have that many pictures of them, but these are the best of what I’ve got:


 
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Gerard Way, red-haired and almost angelic. Makes me smile every time I look at it.
 
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Gerard Way, in, as he was quick to tell us, fake fur. And a campy pose, because it was nearly impossible to get a shot of him any other way.
 
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Mikey Way and his sparkly bass, or the one that my friend Meg refers to as “the cover-shot for Hot Bassist Monthly.”
 
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Frank Iero, Gerard Way, and Mikey Way in pretty quasi-apoclayptic light.
 
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Frank Iero, shredding.
 
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Frank Iero, again; he hardly ever held still like this.
 
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Ray Toro, in the picture that gets a “all blown out but still pretty good” award.
 
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Gerard Way and Mikey Way, in quasi-apocalyptic darkness.

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Navy Skies: Cut My Teeth

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Today is the first day of spring.

Time to open the windows and get the air moving in the house.

Make sure there aren’t any cobwebs in awkward locations, like, say, stretched across the entrance to your front porch.

Lay out your garden – window gardens count – and start looking at seeds.

Gather up all the projects that fell by the wayside during the winter gloom and figure out which ones you can finish before the heat of summer makes you lazy again.

While you’re doing all of that, you should listen to this song turned up as loudly as possible:
 

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Alex Culbreth and the Dead Country Stars: Heart in a Mason Jar

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heartmason

Heart In A Mason Jar is the new record from Alex Culbreth (Parlor Soldiers) and his band The Dead County Stars. They play both kinds, country AND western.

The record is full of things I like, including some honky-tonk swing:
 

 

A variety of melancholy slow jams:
 

 
A sobering, bittersweet love song for a hallucination:
 

 
And a dollop of full-tilt bluegrass:
 

 
And if you need a live performance to sway you, here they are at Ashland Coffee and Tea with Bang Bang:
 

Bang Bang-Alex Culbreth&Dead Country Stars@AC&T 2012

 
They are touring just about all over creation in the next couple of months; go out and see them if they’re stopping near you!

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Video: Judas Priest, Living After Midnight

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Same band (well, mostly, there was a change of drummers), same song, thirty years apart. I couldn’t decide which one filled me with more joy, so I’m posting both of them.

I love the spandex AND the crowd singing AND the drummer-cam AND that they are all covered in silver spikes AND that my foot automatically starts tapping and I cannot help but sing along AND basically this is just to say, I love you, Judas Priest.
 

Judas Priest - Living After Midnight

 
Judas Priest - Living After Midnight (Live at the Seminole Hard Rock Arena)

 
p.s. The YouTube recommendations I get from watching these videos are also tremendously entertaining. More on that later though!

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Video: Crawl Babies, Black Hole Mary

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This song is from Crawl Babies‘ newest record Death Dance, due out at the end of March.

I love this video, and this song, but, having had the chance to listen to the whole record, I also have to tell you it is amazing. A veritable garden of (sometimes puzzling) delights that oscillates gently between Twin Peaks-flavored dreaminess and country-rock swagger.

On the subject of puzzling delights, back to the video at hand. It takes a subtle but distinctive turn for the freaky about halfway through, and becomes an accurate visual representation of what happens when people get left alone in their own heads for too long.

 

Crawl Babies- Black Hole Mary (Official Music Video)

 

Crawl Babies @ bandcamp

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Postcards from the Pit: Black Veil Brides / William Control / Wildstreet, 1/25/2013

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This was not my first show of the new year, but it was the one I looked forward to for days in a state of nervous, fluttery happiness. It was also my second Black Veil Brides event in one week; the first one was a viewing of Legion of the Black, the movie that accompanies / amplifies their new record, Wretched and Divine: The Story of the Wild Ones.

I say accompanies/amplifies because the movie both illustrates and provides a narrative structure for the record. You can listen to and enjoy the record without ever watching the film, but it’s somewhat like listening to the official soundtrack of a Broadway show and never seeing the stage play itself.

I got watch five minutes of the movie at the listening party in December; having now experienced the rest I can tell you it is interesting, conceptually and thematically, but I’m holding off on making detailed commentary until I can watch it again when it gets a wider re-release in the spring.

Meanwhile, onwards to the show:
 
Wildstreet, of New York, were up first. They have a new record out. Here are some pictures of (most of) them:
 

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Next up wasWilliam Control, aka William Francis (Aiden), who is also the voice of F.E.A.R., a character in Legion of the Black. He temporarily pushed the tone of the evening in the direction of goth-industrial dance music.

He sounds so much like Rogue from The Cruxshadows that I spent the last half of his set seriously wondering if I had missed a memo and Rogue had cut off his dreads and renamed himself. (And if he was going to play Marilyn My Bitterness because I love that song.)

Anyway, minor case of identity confusion aside, I did dig Mr. Control’s grooves, so if goth-industrial dance music is your thing, check him out.

There is only one picture of him because singing in a pit of sp00ky darkness periodically illuminated by strobing red and purple light: excellent for atmosphere, bad for photography.
 

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And then it was time for the main event: the Black Veil Brides. Despite the occasional rough patch – I really hope someone got Andy Biersack some hot tea liberally mixed with whiskey afterwards – they were really great.

I thought the new material mixed well with their older songs. They stuck mostly to the heavier, growlier, thrashier end of their range, this time around, but there were some softer moments. I was particularly pleased that they made room in the setlist for Jinxx (guitar) to play Overture, the instrumental track from Wretched and Divine – I have a weakness for big burly dudes playing the violin, okay – and also did their cover of Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell.

Here are some pictures of them:

 

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Video: The Rest, Always On My Mind

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Always On My Mind is absolutely my favorite song from The Rest‘s SEESAW, so I was very excited when a link for the video below appeared in my inbox.

The video itself is kind of weird but in an awesome way. I can’t decide if it’s a love story, a ghost story, a murder mystery, or all of those things at the same time, but it’s beautifully shot and lit and contains my favorite romance trope, which is young lovers dancing in their living room.

They also spend a good deal of time wearing giant animal masks and wandering mournfully through fog, which is really just the slightly hallucinatory cherry on top.
 

The Rest - Always On My Mind

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Video: Fall Out Boy feat. 2 Chainz, My Songs Know What You Did In the Dark (Light Em Up)

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So, y’all, this is how my day went today:

7:15 AM: While going about my normal morning business of GChatting with a friend and scrolling through Tumblr, I clicked on something purporting to be the “New FOB single!!” – rumors have been swirling for a while now, but more intensely in the last week or so; evidence had surfaced of their appearance on the Jimmy Fallon show later this month; and my pre-caffeine judgement is often poor – and was Taylor Swift-rolled.

Well, I suppose I deserved that, I typed into the GChat window, as the strains of We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together emanated from my computer. (Yes, I left it on. That one and I Knew You Were Trouble When You Walked In have grown on me, and not like a fungus, either.)

My friend commiserated with my rueful amusement, and the conversation moved on.

8:15 AM: Hum Hallelujah floats up on shuffle as I’m walking to the train. I spend a few minutes pondering pop music; Pete Wentz’s pirate smile and tendency to throw himself off the stage and into the pit; the shimmery golden quality of light in Harlem in the morning; whether it is really so terrible that I enjoy popular pop music that makes me feel things (conclusion: no); the frequently frustrating and often agonizing condition of being a fan of a band that is on “hiatus” or “is working on a new record” and how those things often go together and sometimes lead to one another; and the various bands for whom I have waited, including Guns N’ Roses (well, really Axl Rose)(15 years), Mötley Crüe (8 years), Bon Jovi (2 years and 3 years, for separate hiatuses) My Chemical Romance (2 years) and Panic! at the Disco (18 months), and Ryan Ross (2 years and counting); and how the internet and Internet Time have probably warped my sense of what constitutes a long time to wait.

9:15 AM: I check in with the intertubes and discover that somewhere in the time I left the house and got to work, Fall Out Boy came off hiatus.

That there is a song, a video, a record, a bunch of shows in tiny clubs planned the next month – for tomorrow, in New York – and a bigger tour scheduled for May.

I wasn’t able to get a ticket for the show tomorrow, but I’m not the tiniest bit upset. Why? Because five years ago when I fell (back) into being a rock fan, I also fell into a community of fans – some local, some far away, all connected via the internet – and in the last five years, we have mourned a lot of bands. Today we got one back, and that shared joy is just the best feeling.

Also, the song they released is the best thing I’ve heard for a while. Hand claps, thudding, roaring drums, aggressive guitars, sly and lacerating lyrics, and Patrick Stump soaring upwards over the tumult. It doesn’t get better than that, ladies and gentlemen.
 
http://youtu.be/HsfY8iFbYjE

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Fanmix: Warren Ellis, Gun Machine

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Fan mixes: collections of music created as both soundtrack and illustration for other works, usually works of fiction, intended as both appreciation of and enticement to read the work of fiction.

This one is for Gun Machine by Warren Ellis, who is author of, among other things, Transmetropolitan and Crooked Little Vein, and is NOT the dude who plays music with Nick Cave.

Gun Machine is a murder mystery set in New York. But not the New York you usually see on cop shows; the Financial District, which is older and darker. Down there you’re off the grid. The streets are narrow and twisty and reality can be very thin. Depending on how the wind is blowing off the water, it does feel like you could walk around a corner today and stumble into the 17th century, 1926 could be tomorrow and 2018 was last week.

“Off the grid” would actually sum up the book as a whole. It is also bloody, startling, deeply lonely, occasionally bitingly funny, like watching my own city from the wrong end of a telescope, a complex puzzle, and very, very good. If you pick it up, be sure to both read and listen carefully; Ellis uses music and sounds much like Nathaniel Hawthorne used light, that is, as both text and subtext.

The mix below is my attempt at capturing the spirit of the work. The songs chosen are intended to trace the outline of the narrative in broad strokes. All of them, save for two, are available for sale and/or free download from the artist.

The exceptions are Panic! at the Disco’s cover of Karma Police, which is a fan bootleg of a live performance, chosen for the quality of the static, and Kasey Anderson and the Honkies’ Abbaddon Blues, because it is from Let the Bloody Moon Rise, a record which saw only limited release before Anderson went on indefinite-but-hopefully-not-permanent hiatus and which is now (almost) out of circulation.

1.BT, Go(d)t
 


 
2. Panic! at the Disco, Karma Police (Radiohead cover)
 

 
(If you want a visual.)
 
3. Foster the People, Pumped Up Kicks
 
Foster The People - Pumped up Kicks

 
4. Breakfast in Fur, Whisper
 
Breakfast in Fur - Whisper (Official)

 
5. David C. Clements, Oh Child
 

 
6. Blondie, Heart of Glass
 
Blondie - Heart Of Glass

 
7. Jane’s Addiction, Chip Away
 
Jane's Addiction - Chip Away

 
8. Firewater, A Little Revolution
 
FIREWATER: A Little Revolution

 
9. Milan Jay, In the Shadows of Footsteps
 

 
10. BL/\CK CEILING, I’MNLUVWITCHU
 

 
11.Xiu Xiu, Hi
 
Xiu Xiu - Hi [OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO]

 
12. Kasey Anderson and the Honkies, Abbaddon Blues
 

 
13. Cage the Elephant, Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked
 
Cage The Elephant - Ain't No Rest For The Wicked

 
14. Blackwater Jukebox, Carousel
 

 
15. Willow Sea, Night Light