Obviously that headline is a complete fabrication, but it made you look, didn’t it? If you don’t already have this great little song stuck in your head for all of eternity, here’s your chance! The brand new video for “Bitter, Drunk and Cold” from the Far West.
Nice threads, guys!
It’s a simple yet sublime pleasure, and just thinking about it can make you feel a little calmer, a little more content. Imagine: You bring out one of the good rocks glasses (or your favorite mug or a special occasion tea cup) and pour a couple fingers of amber liquid (or something dark and strong or just some whole milk). You drop the needle on the jazz platter (or pull up a blues album on your mp3 player or dig out that mixtape from college). Ensconcing yourself in the coziest seat in the house, you crack the spine on a classic (or find your place in that sci-fi paperback or pull up a biography on your e-book reader). And then, you go away for a while. Ah, bliss.
In this series, some of NTSIB’s friends share beloved albums, books and drinks to recommend or inspire.
Inaugurating the series is photographer Nate Burrell. An Ohio boy who now makes his home in St. Louis, Nate takes primo shots of exceptional musicians, sometimes as they work the stage and sometimes away from the stage, in more relaxed moments. Regular readers will have seen some of his shots of mr. Gnome and JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, as well as his personal favorites of 2010, graciously shared on this site. Nate has his own site, Before the Blink, featuring some of his beautiful work.
And he’s just a hell of a guy. Take it away, Nate…
Good Read:
The Tao of Wu (by RZA) — a really solid read that has a unique way of telling a story page after page that is some parts philosophy, other parts autobiography, with a healthy dose of street knowledge, interpretations of clarity, and tales of everyday life from an extremely talented and insightful man who has certainly walked both sides of the line.
Good Listen:
I’m Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die (various artists from the 1959-1960 Southern Journey Field Recordings by Alan Lomax) — Alan Lomax, who is one of the most important preservationists of American Music, turns in an absolute gem on this 15 song LP. With an extremely raw sense of capturing the soul, love, pain, and yearning from the instruments and voices of folks ranging from Pentecostal choirs to farm hands to prison groups, this album also includes the first known recordings of Fred McDowell, and also documents the first time that field songs were recorded in stereo. The quality is superb, the music is honest, and the feel of the record is timeless. Just a wonderful listen from start to finish.
Good Drink:
you can’t really go wrong with a nice and simple Whiskey & Ginger poured with a heavy hand into a rocks glass with a few ice cubes; I mean…it’s good in the summer and even tastier in the winter, so it’s got to be okay, right?
Photo credit: Corey Woodruff
Wasara is a death metal/folk hybrid from Finland, and they just recently released a new record called Hehku (“The Glow”). It is a dark, brooding gem of a record, and as soon as I heard it I wanted to know more about both the songs and the people singing them. Here, lead singer/lyricst Antti Ã…ström (lower right corner, above) and I chat about the record and the band:
Where in Finland are you all from?
All of us are from southern part of Finland. I’m from this small town called Lohja, about 50km from Helsinki. At this time of year there’s nothing “southern†in here… 50cm of snow and -20 Celsius – just cold and dark.
How did you get together as a band?
We started this in ’96 with our bass player Ipi and ex-drummer Mikko, we have known each other since childhood. First our music was improvised punk, played as loud as possible in our basement, but it soon developed to more metal-like Finnish rock/punk with influences from every possible genre.
There was a time we had a few songs with synths and techno-beat and on the other hand we had songs that were pure black-metal. We were about 16 when we started this and we all had wide musical backgrounds despite our young age – hence the chaos.
There have been few changes in the Wasara camp along these years, but this line-up (Antti, Ipi, Tuomo, Saku, Harri) has shown its power, like our new Hehku album proves.
First demo was recorded in the year 2000 and it was the first “official†thing under the name of Wasara. It’s been long road to finally be at this point and have our third album in our hands. It was truly a journey with many ups and downs.
The first demo was recorded in 2000?
Yes. It turned out to be too “rock” ‘cos the guy who recorded it was a hip hop guy and didn’t quite get what we tried to achieve soundwise :D Second demo was more what we wanted and that got us the record deal with Firebox Records in 2003. Wasara’s first album Kaiken kauniin loppu was released in the same year.
Your music is a really interesting combination of death metal and folk music. What inspired you to meld those genres?
We haven’t really given it any thoughts . . . we just write the kind of music that we want to listen. And like I said before, every one of us have long history of listening and playing different kinds of music. I, for example, have been a huge death metal fan since I got my hands on Grave’s Into the Grave album.
I also love traditional Finnish music and instruments. One of my favourite Finnish folk bands is Värttinä. They capture perfectly the Finnish atmosphere with different kinds of instruments and with beautiful female vocals. Other bands which have been huge inspiration for me are Amorphis, CMX, Mana Mana, Paradise lost, 3rd and the Mortal, Käsi, etc etc.
Are your songs variations on existing Finnish folk songs, or are they new songs written in a traditional folk-y style?
They are new songs as far as I know. Some of the songs were born in a completely different style than folk or death, but after every one of us had put their own layer on the songs they transformed in their present form. We don’t care if the song is folk or doom or something else, if it sounds like Wasara, then it must be Wasara.
Main thing for us is to achieve the right atmosphere for every song. In the process of Hehku we had all the strings in our hands and we took our time to make it as good as possible, without any compromises. If we wanted to put violin or a piano to a song, we just put it. It took almost a year to record Hehku but it was worth it. Now we just hope that people will find it amongst the endless stream of new music.
Is there a lot of overlap between the death metal and folk scenes in Finland?
Not sure what you mean but there are very few bands that combine folk and deathmetal and sing in Finnish. It is not that common, but bands who go abroad and get some publicity, usually are those who combine folk and other Finnish stuff in their music. In Finland it’s not that popular to play folkish metal.
I was wondering how the song titles translate. I tried Google translate but I have a feeling they got quite thoroughly mangled in the process. (Saatanaiset, for example, is rendered as “Bring Women.”)
And what is the instrument at the start of Saatanaiset, is that an organ? A guitar?
The instrument is an accordion (Finnish: haitari) and it is used almost on every song on the album.
The titles of the album are (roughly translated):
1. Saatanaiset ( she satans or she devils)
2. Ikuset ( eternals )
3. Minulla on monta nimeä ( I have many names )
4. Saunalaulu ( saunasong )
5. Kuollut on kuollut ( dead is dead )
6. Totuudennäkijä ( seer of truth )
7. Unohdetun mielenvirtaa ( mindstrem of the forgotten )
8. Kainista kasvaneet ( risen from Cain or grown from Cain )
9. Kymmenen unohdimme ( We forgot the ten )
10. Hehku ( the glow )
Saatanaiset was most likely written in a post-hangover depression. Saatanaiset as a word translates to something like “she satansâ€.
The lyrics tells a story where women uses their beauty and looks in general to lure men to their slaves:
They watch without remorse those men those worms /
they sing their songs, they sing to their slaves /
how could they dominate, how could they make their men to be the darkest soil /
They took us with them…Saatanaiset!
http://youtu.be/gohrcJWGHE4
Two of the songs on Hehku struck me as being more folk than metal: Saunalaulu and Kainista kasvaneet. What are those songs about?
Saunalaulu (saunasong) is a song about my familys sauna which is over 100 years old. It tells a story [about] how boys are turned to men in the sauna and how sauna is the place for truth. Elderly people tell their stories in there. It is a place for cleansing ones body and soul. For me it is the album’s most personal song.
Kainista kasvaneet is a song about going to hell. We were condemned to hell from the very beginning when Cain turned to the darkside. We are constantly lured by different kinds of things. No one is so pure they could ever get to heaven.
http://youtu.be/A7QFU7K4uCg
I’ve also gathered from the internet that “Wasara” translates as “Hammer”. Is that right?
Yes, but it is nowadays spelled vasara.
Wasara on Spotify.
Wasara on Facebook. (In Finnish)
Take a listen to this voice.
Cold Specks is gearing up to release their full-length debut, I Predict A Graceful Expulsion, on May 22, and it sounds like this will be an album worth keeping an eye and ear out for.
Here is Cold Specks performing “Old Stepstone” and “Lay Me Down” on Later… with Jools Holland.
Check out Cold Specks on tour.
March 13th-18th – SXSW – Austin, TX
March 21st – Co-operators Hall at River Run – Guelph, ON
March 22nd – The Music Gallery – Toronto, ON
May 1st – Lincoln Hall – Chicago, IL
May 2nd – High Noon Saloon – Madison, WI
May 3rd – Cedar Cultural Centre – Minneapolis, MN
May 4th – West End Cultural Centre – Winnipeg, MB
May 6th – McDougall United Church – Edmonton, AB
May 7th – Central United Church – Calgary, AB
May 8th – Southminster United Church – Lethbridge, AB
May 9th – The Royal – Nelson, BC
May 11th – The Commodore Ballroom – Vancouver, BC
May 12th – Alix Goolden Hall – Victoria, BC
May 13th – Tractor Tavern – Seattle, WA
May 14th – Doug Fir Lounge – Portland, OR
May 16th – The Independent – San Francisco, CA
May 18th – Troubadour – Los Angeles, CA
May 19th – The Compound Grilll – Phoenix, AZ
May 20th – Club Congress – Tucson, AZ
May 22nd – The Prophet Bar – Dallas, TX
May 23rd – Stubb’s BBQ (Indoor) – Austin, TX
May 24th – One Eyed Jacks – New Orleans, LA
May 25th – Variety Playhouse – Atlanta, GA
May 26th – Grey Eagle – Asheville, NC
May 27th – Rock and Roll Hotel – Washington, DC
May 28th – Johnny Brenda’s – Philadelphia, PA
May 30th – Bowery Ballroom – New York, NY
May 31st – Middle East Downstairs – Cambridge, MA
June 2nd – The Music Hall, Toronto, ON
I first heard “I Fought the Law” by the Crickets as I first heard many of the oldies: travelling in the car with my parents. Much of the foundation of my music education was laid while sitting in the back seat of the car as we drove to family gatherings, listening to the only radio station – WMJI Majic 105.7 – that my mother, father and I could agree on.
Sonny Curtis wrote the song and brought it with him when he joined the Crickets after Buddy Holly’s death, releasing it in 1965. The song was covered in 1966 by the Bobby Fuller Four and did well for them (though Fuller’s tremolo warble makes me want to punch him), but I’m going to take a wild guess that the majority of people reading this are most familiar with the Clash’s 1979 cover.
You’ll notice a couple of small lyrical changes from the Crickets’ original. For instance, the narrator of the original is robbing people with a zip gun, while, starting with the Bobby Fuller Four cover, he began robbing people with a six-gun. Though, of course, the biggest change implemented by the Clash took the narrator from merely missing his baby (or, as Fuller had it, leaving his baby) to killing her, making him much more of an outlaw than he started out. But, you know, at least he feels bad about it.
The lyrics of “I Fought the Law” seem to invite people to mess with them, and nobody messed with them more than Jello Biafra as he rewrote them to comment on the murders of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk for the Dead Kennedys’ 1980s re-working of the song.
This is a fabulously entertaining mini-documentary about Akron-native Chris Butler who has played with local legends 15 60 75 (The Numbers Band), Tin Huey (which was also the springboard for Mr. Ralph Carney), and was, of course, the creator of and guitarist for the Waitresses.
We started the week with a taste of my current fixation, Elbow, including a luscious duet from Guy Garvey and Richard Hawley, so let’s end it with some Hawley solo work.
Richard Hawley’s work is like something you’d hear as the soundtrack to a slightly garbled, scratched and dusty black-and-white film found at the back of an old drawer. I first heard Hawley when “The Ocean” was slipped into a mix sent to me.
I didn’t know what to make of it the first time I heard it. It sounded like an old lounge singer was trying to make another go at a career by using a new producer with shiny new gadgets, yet still using all the old musical tricks. You might construe from that description that I didn’t like it, but the song eased its way further and further under my skin until hearing it late at night while driving down city streets felt like serenity.
So, lean back, have an entirely too sweet cocktail, imagine waves lapping against a Mediterranean beach while a couple who look curiously like Astrud Gilberto and Marcello Mastroianni walk along the sandy shore, and enjoy a little more Richard Hawley.
“Coles Corner”
“Born Under a Bad Sign”
“Serious”
The last time I wrote about Water Tower Bucket Boys was in September. Since that time they have changed their name to just Water Tower and become a trio. They’ve also put out a new record, called Meet Me Where the Crow Don’t Fly, and if, like me, you are into high-quality punk-infused bluegrass, you will want to get ahold of those tunes right away.
Meanwhile, after listening to (and LOVING) their earlier record, Sole Kitchen, I had some questions. Below, Kenny Feinstein (guitar, mandolin, harmonica and vocals) has some answers.
Is it difficult, being a (mostly) bluegrass band, and hailing from an area of the country (i.e. the Pacific NW in general) that’s best known as the epicenter of grunge?
It is not difficult really. We are just as connected to grunge as we are to country music generally speaking. In fact, our most intense/hardcore fans seem to come from Seattle.
I understand Gil Landry of Old Crow Medicine Show has given you a copy of a very special map. It sounds like the Marauder’s Map, but for buskers. I bet he doesn’t give that out to everyone. What are some of the stories of the map? And also what states does it go through? (Are you allowed to give excerpts? Like if you find yourself in Nebraska and have to sing for your supper, where should you go?)
The map started in Asheville, North Carolina for us because that is where we met Gil. The trail winds down through New Orleans, through a few hot spots in Texas (had to miss these), a few spots in New Mexico and Arizona, and plenty in California. Because of our schedule, we had to drive from Baton Rouge, Lousiana to Madrid, New Mexico pretty much non-stop.
We started out at around 3 pm or so and drove late into the night. Somewhere outside of Dallas at 2 am we ran into an insane lightning storm. The rain was so bad we had to stop on the side of the road and wait. After 20 something hours of driving we finally made it to New Mexico and took a little nap in middle of the desert.
A very valuable piece of the map is in Madrid, New Mexico. This is a one-street town/artist colony with a pub called the Mine Shaft Tavern at the end of the block. The houses that line the street all seem to be inhabited by different types of artists. Behind the stage in the tavern is an entrance to a now defunct mine.
Basically Gil said “you need to get to this town.” Even though the place is so small, tourists come from miles around to see what wonders lie there. Gil said you can busk across the street from the bed and breakfast any day and make good money, so we did. He also mentioned that the people at the tavern would ask us onstage, which they did. We had a great adventure in that town, and a great couple of shows.
Why did you name the band Water Tower?
We live close to a water tower where we used to spend a lot of time hanging out and playing music.
Normally I ask what was the rock and roll lightning strike song. This time I’m going to ask: what was the country lightening strike? (Though you can tell me the rock and roll lightening strike song, too.)
Bill Monroe- Shady Grove. Rock song: The Offspring- Bad Habit
What was your first show (that you went to, not that you played)?
Red Hot Chili Peppers in Mexico City.
What was the first record/tape/cd/etc you acquired? What was the last one?
I found a Paula Abdul tape in my brother’s trash can. I cherished it until it was gone. Latest record I got was Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter IV.
And now, as further enticement, I present some recent videos for new songs:
Meet Me Where the Crown Don’t Fly, the title track on the new record:
Easy Way Out, recorded at the 2011 Pickathon:
It’s almost that time again. Time to sit around on the couch in your underwear with a beer in your hand and your laptop overheating your legs. Okay, for some of you this is just known as “Thursday”, but come March 11th – and extending through the 18th – you’ll be able to do this while communing with your fellow poor and lazy people who won’t be attending South by Southwest and still get to witness one-of-a-kind performances from up-and-coming musicians
This is Couch by Couch West, where the beer is cheaper, and the only hipster is you. Run by a secret cabal, CXCW started last year as an alternative entertainment gathering for those uninterested in or unable to go to SXSW, and we are thrilled that it’s being brought back for a second year because it was a hell of a good time.
The virtual showcase takes place over two platforms, with sharing of beer recommendations, pictures of zonked-out pets, and, most importantly, couch session videos on the CXCW Tumblr shiny new main stage to be announced this weekend (follow on Twitter or Facebook for the premiere) shiny new main stage and lewd and drunken conversation happening on Twitter (follow @couchxcouchwest and hashtags #cxcw, #cxcw12 and #cxcw2012).
MUSICIANS! If you want to participate by taping a couch session, post the video of your session to YouTube or Vimeo, then e-mail your video link to cxcwest at gmail dot com. You can begin submitting now and keep submitting until the 18th. It’s a unique and fantastically fun way to gain a little exposure. (And if it’s good enough for Neko Case, well…)
Here are a few favorite couch sessions from last year (you can check out more at last year’s CXCW Tumblr)…
Conrad Plymouth – “Texas in a Drawer” (A Heidi Spencer Cover)
The Imperial Rooster – “God Has Left the Building”
Doc Dailey – “German Train”
The Ridges – “Not a Ghost”
Daniel Knox – CXCW – You Win Some, You Tie Some from Daniel Knox on Vimeo.
This is Eich Bein Ein Auslander from Dos Dedos Mis Amigos, first released in 1994, and the first PWEI song I ever heard.
It was in a club – I think it was the Electric Ballroom in London sometime in 1998, but I could be wrong – and what I remember is watching the people on the dance floor swaying and stomping to the thudding beat, all gracefully synchronized within their personal space bubbles and not smushed into each other, as I had experienced elsewhere.
It was mesmerizing, and I immediately wanted to join them.
Also very popular in clubs at the time was Def Con I, from This Is the Day…This Is the Hour…This Is This!, originally released in 1988.
Dos Dedos Mis Amigos was easily acquired, but all I could find from their earlier work was a kind of greatest hits compilation: the 1997 live album The Radio 1 Sessions 1986-87. YouTube is sadly deficient in my favorite tracks from that record (Demolition Girl and Illusion of Love) but here are some other ones that I like a whole lot:
First up is Evelyn, originally released on their first record “proper album” (cf. Axel, see comments for details) Box Frenzy in 1987. You will notice it is totally unlike both Eich Bein Ein Auslander and Def Con I in every way possible. I nonetheless love it very much:
http://youtu.be/kMlZMZKp_yw
This one is called Back Country Chainstore Massacre (not Chainsaw, as the video is labeled), from the Now for a Feast! compilation record in 1988:
http://youtu.be/PNc-DeKtW0I
Oh Grebo I Think I Love You is another one of my favorites:
Finally, one that I haven’t listened to as much but still love: Not Now James, We’re Busy, from from This Is the Day…This Is the Hour…This Is This!. Be sure to turn it up so you can feel the bass rattle your bones.
http://youtu.be/GHsBSVgPSJQ
