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Bits: Nicole Atkins, The Meat Puppets, The Twilight Singers, The Black Keys, A Place to Bury Strangers

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  • Nicole Atkins will be playing a live acoustic session and chatting on livestream Wednesday, 1.19, at 1:30 PM ET/10:30 AM PT.
  • The Meat Puppets will be releasing their new album, Lollipop, in April, Paste reports. Their line-up now includes Shandon Sahm, son of Texan multi-instrumentalist Doug Sahm, on drums.
  • The Twilight Singers’ upcoming album, Dynamite Steps, is available for pre-order at Sub Pop. The pre-order entitles you to stream the album online immediately, and if you pre-order by 2.15, you’ll receive two non-album tracks.
  • Though they’ve had to cancel their Australia/New Zealand tour and part of their European tour, the Black Keys juggernaut rolls on with an appearance on Austin City Limits airing 1.22 on PBS, in a split episode with Sonic Youth. (The Keys’ appearance was taped about three months ago. I am very excited about this, having hoped for a Keys ACL for a long time now.)
  • A Place to Bury Strangers will hit the road again this spring, including SXSW gigs where they will premiere material from their forthcoming, as-yet-untitled album. These guys are amazing live.

    THU 3/10 – ATLANTA, GA – Masquerade*

    FRI 3/11 – DURHAM, NC – Motorco Music Hall*

    SUN 3/13 – DENTON, TX – 35 Conferette Festival*^

    TUE 3/15 – SAN ANTONIO, TX – Korova*

    WED 3/16 – AUSTIN, TX – SXSW

    THU 3/17 – AUSTIN, TX – SXSW

    FRI 3/18 – AUSTIN, TX – SXSW

    SAT 3/19 – AUSTIN, TX – SXSW

    SUN 3/20 – HOT SPRINGS NATIONAL PARK, AR – Valley of the Vapors

    MON 3/21 – HOT SPRINGS NATIONAL PARK, AR – Valley of the Vapors (pedal workshop)

    TUE 3/22 – OXFORD, MS – Proud Larrys*

    WED 3/23 – GREENVILLE, SC – The Handlebar*

    THU 3/24 – BALTIMORE, MD – Ottobar*

    *with Hooray for Earth

    ^with Dan Deacon, !!!, How to Dress Well & Local Natives

Speaking of APTBS, they’ve treated us to a tale of hopscotch gone awry with the video for their remix of Holy Fuck’s “Red Lights”, directed by Thomas Smith as a gift to APTBS.

Holy Fuck – Red Lights (A Place to Bury Strangers Remix) from Spool on Vimeo.

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Bits: Strand of Oaks, Young Circles

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  • The highly successful campaign to have Strand of Oaks’ album Pope Killdragon released on vinyl is in its last 48 hours. Use it to help fund all things Strand of Oaks and pre-order the vinyl. (Not sure why you’d want to? Check out this video for all the answer you need to that.)
  • Young Circles’ Bones EP dropped today, and damn if they haven’t made it free.

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Bits: Juniper Tar, The Builders and the Butchers, Gregg Allman, Drive-By Truckers, The Black Keys

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  • Juniper Tar has a frigging sweet deal in their online store: their full-length album To The Trees, The Howl Street EP, a lovely T-shirt plus a handmade mix CD. Eight bucks plus shipping. Get on that.
  • My Old Kentucky Blog has a new tune for you from the Builders and the Butchers’ forthcoming album, Dead Reckoning. Hot.
  • Gregg Allman’s new album, Low Country Blues, is streaming on NPR’s First Listen. It’s well worth a listen. (I think I may even like his cover of Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman”, which is an accomplishment since that song is nearly sacred to me.)
  • Drive-By Truckers has begun posting behind the scenes episodes for their new album Go-Go Boots at their Vimeo page. You can find the first two episodes and other goodies there.
  • The Black Keys made a return visit to Letterman yesterday, and you can watch the performance at The Audio Perv if’n you missed it. And if you missed their great appearance on Saturday Night Live this weekend, well, we’ve got that for you, too. (They also played “Tighten Up”.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8A1yy_CrIc?fs=1]

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Secret Colours: Follow the Drone

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If black leather rebel rock crashed its bike into the front of psych rock’s Haight Street squat, the impact might sound a lot like Secret Colours. While the vocals of the Chicago band are a lighter-than-air haze, they are countered by a swampy, low-end rhythm that drives and sneers, and it’s all covered in a fallout dust of guitar noise.

Secret Colours – Follow the Drone

Find the “Follow the Drone” single-EP along with two more single-EPs, as well as their well-worth-a-listen full-length album (“Chemical Swirl” is a sexy number).

Secret Colours Bandcamp

Secret Colours Official Website

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Bits: Cadillac Sky, The Due Diligence, Bill Monroe, Justin Townes Earle, The Black Keys

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  • We are very sad to announce that Cadillac Sky are going on “indefinite hiatus”, i.e. they broke up. But I guess if you’re going to go, it’s good to go out on the best album of your career. And we still have The David Mayfield Parade to enjoy, along with projects the other guys will surely be involved with.
  • The Due Diligence is touring! Along with Crazy Brains and a number of local openers, they are hitting a number of joints down the eastern U.S., including a January 13 stop at Now That’s Class with Shivering Timbers.
  • The International Bluegrass Music Museum will be hosting the Bill Monroe Centennial Celebration in honor of what would have been the 100th birthday of the late bluegrass great September 12-14 in Owensboro, Kentucky. The amazing line-up will include Earl Scruggs, Ralph Stanley, Doc Watson, Jesse McReynolds, Mac Wiseman, J.D. Crowe, Bobby Osborne, Eddie Adcock, Tom Gray, Kenny Baker, Curly Seckler, Everett Lilly, The Lewis Family, Bill Clifton, Rodney Dillard, Melvin Goins and Paul Williams.
  • Justin Townes Earle will be hitting the Late Show with David Letterman tomorrow night, January 5, while the Black Keys will be making their Saturday Night Live debut on January 8.

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A Foreign Country: The Godfathers

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A Foreign Country is a non-regular series in which I’ll write about music I dug in my youth that I still enjoy now. The name comes from the L.P. Hartley quote “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”, because, while I do continue to enjoy some of the music I listened to in my early days, my tastes have changed since then (thank fuck for that) and even the songs I still like are heard through different ears.

The Godfathers - Birth School Work Death

While it is a problem that occurs with frustrating regularity that I will find a band with one great song that is followed by a string of disappointments, some of my best album purchases have resulted from taking a chance on one great song. It happened for me with the Jayhawks (“Waiting for the Sun” from Hollywood Town Hall) and Jeff Buckley (“Grace” from the album of the same name), and in 1988, it happened with the Godfathers.

In the farm community where I grew up, about twenty minutes outside of Akron, Ohio, it took some determination to hear new music that was outside of Casey Kasem’s Top 40 or the classic/stoner rock played on WMMS. But if it was a weekday afternoon and the reception was good that day, I could hear a couple of hours of alternative music from the Akron City Schools’ public radio station. Alternative music had a different, decidedly more amorphous definition then, and in a sitting, I would hear the likes of Joy Division, the Smiths, Faith No More (the Chuck Mosley incarnation), the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Lime Spiders, Lords of the New Church, the Bolshoi and To Damascus. And I also heard a song called “Birth, School, Work, Death” by the Godfathers.

 


 

On one of the occasions when I successfully whined my mother into taking me to the Westwood Connection, an alternative music shop on the College of Wooster campus, I also successfully pled my case for her to buy me the Godfathers album, also titled Birth, School, Work, Death. I didn’t know anymore about the band then that they were from England, and they seemed a little pissed off. At heart, my circumstances in the late 1980s were worlds away from those of the working class in Thatcher’s Britain, but growing up outside of Akron and Cleveland in the Reagan Era, with a mother who worked in a factory and a father who worked construction, I was close enough to get it. And, being a teenager, I had all sorts of anger and frustration… as manufactured, misplaced and melodramatic as it might have been. It was still enough to feel like the metallic, grinding guitar work, stomping force and spittle-inflected ranting of the Godfathers’ music spoke for me as clearly as it spoke for anyone in industrial Britain. Not that I was considering any of this at the time. I just knew it was loud and angry and good for dancing to up in my bedroom.

I never became a big enough fan to pursue any of the Godfathers’ other albums, but I still occasionally pop in my cassette of BSWD – which is beginning to sound a little woozy after all these years – and I still enjoy the hell out of it and am infected by its energy.

As it usually turns out when I start researching my nostalgia, I’ve learned that the Godfathers reunited in 2008, have been touring, released a live CD/DVD in 2010 and plan to release an album of new material this year.

The Godfathers Official Website

The Godfathers Facebook

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Rock ‘n’ Roll Photog: Life by Keith Richards

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Today, Jennifer treats us to our first book review after a wild ride with Keith “Have fun deducing how much of what I say is fact and how much is drug-addled hallucination” Richards.

IMG_5144

My first reaction, on turning the final page, was my god, this man is exhausting. And also to be amazed, again, that he’s still alive to co-write his autobiography. Yes, co-write; his assistant in this massive undertaking is James Fox, whom the jacket copy informs me is an old friend of Richards’, author of White Mischief and former journalist for the Sunday Times in London.
What they have produced together is a complex and fascinating portrait of Keith Richards, which reads like you’re sitting at the kitchen table with him while he tells you fabulous tales of sex, drugs (lots and LOTS of drugs) and rock and roll. (He also, unsurprisingly, has a lot of feelings about Mick Jagger.) I could almost see his hands waving and the smoke curling above his head. A good many of the stories cover territory that long-time and/or devoted Rolling Stones fans will already be familiar with; more recent, or more casual fans, on the other hand, may feel a little bit lost in the sea of names and partial descriptions of past events.

But the inside scoop on the scandalous behavior is really not the best part. Richards is most interesting when he digresses into a guitar lesson, and explains the secrets to the Stones’ disctinctive sound, or wanders off on an extended tangent about the mechanics of constructing songs.

The book is a big book, dense and sometimes rambling, and by turns hilarious, horrifying and mind-blowing, in a You did what? With whom? kind of way. I was left with a variety of things to chew over, about music and fame and rockstars in general, if not Keith Richards in particular, most notably the isolating nature of fame.

I was also left with the desire to read all the rest of the Stones’ memoirs, to get more views on the story.

Which brings me to: Please Allow Me To Correct a Few Things an review of the book in Slate by Bill Wyman (journalist, NOT rockstar) which is written as Mick Jagger’s response to the book. Just to be clear: Mick Jagger did not write the article. It’s a parody, a literary put-on, but it’s a very sharply observed parody. There’s also a postscript to the piece on Wyman’s blog. I mention it because it’s easy to get caught up in Richards’ story, and get to a point where all of the madness seems perfectly normal.

In summary: A big book, but not a dull one. Rating: \m/\m/ (two sets of metalfingers out of two)

— Jennifer

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Bits: Hell and Half of Georgia, the Low Anthem, Conrad Plymouth, the Twilight Singers, Mark Sandman

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  • Shows! Hell and Half of Georgia will be playing a free show in Long Beach, California tomorrow, 12.29.10. On the other side of the country on the same day, the Avett Brothers, the Low Anthem and Bombadil will be playing a benefit show in Carrboro, North Carolina – tickets go on sale at 10:00 AM EST today, 12.28.10. (The Avett/Anthem/Bombadil benefit show sold out within the first hour.) Conrad Plymouth will play a New Year’s Eve show with Ian Olvera and the Sleepwalkers and Laarks at Linneman’s in Milkwaukee, Wisconsin.

  • The Twilight Singers have made another track, “On the Corner”, from the upcoming album Dynamite Steps available for free download.

  • And the news I’m personally most excited about right now is the impending release of Cure for Pain: The Mark Sandman Story. The singer/bass player/avant-instrumentalist for Morphine was and is a huge influence on me, and I’m very much looking forward to this documentary, which will be hitting the festival circuit in 2011. Check out the trailer below, and find more video clips at the Gatling Pictures website.

Cure for Pain: The Mark Sandman Story (Trailer) from Gatling Pictures on Vimeo.

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Bits: Bootsy Collins, Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, Captain Beefheart

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  • Ohio-born funk master Bootsy Collins has started the Bootsy Collins Foundation to promote music and education for those who might not be able to afford it on their own. “Say It Loud, An Instrument For Every Child.”

  • Nonesuch has made a track, “Sabu Yerkoy”, off of the second (and final) collaboration from Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, called simply Ali and Toumani, available for free download.

  • Those wishing to pay their respects to Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, who died December 17, can leave their tributes at The Captain Beefheart Radar Station. And self-titled has a post that includes Beefheart’s Letterman interview along with John Peel’s short documentary (in 6 parts) on Beefheart’s career.