And so in honor of one of my favorite holidays, I present to you Panic’s Halloween video, which they made themselves while on tour, back in 2008, before Ryan Ross and Jon Walker left the band. It’s perhaps a little bit bittersweet to watch now, but mostly sweet, and their attempt at boy-band style synchronized dancing will always be hilarious.
“Lonely Boy” (No, it isn’t a Paul Anka cover or an Andrew Gold cover) from the forthcoming Black Keys’ album El Camino, which drops December 6.
It has great energy, and I think it will pair nicely with “Howlin’ for You” on the Keep April from Slashing Her Wrists playlist. Dan and Pat have promised this is their most rock ‘n’ roll album to date, and I’m looking forward to hearing the rest.
I’ve been saying this a lot lately in conversation with friends: I always thought that my idealism would fade away as I became older. But aside from a supremely apathetic phase in my 20s, my idealism has remained intact. Certainly it has become a crankier form of idealism as I’ve become more informed about the world and watched as humanity has failed to live up to its potential again and again, but I still believe that if everyone put aside self-absorption and pettiness, we could have a great thing going on her on earth. And as an avid/rabid music listener, I’ve always been open to finding good music wherever it may be hiding, from whatever race, creed, class and corner of the globe it may be coming from.
So when I was tripping around Netflix looking for something interesting to watch one day, Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam and The Taqwacores caught my eye quickly and held my attention. I was posting about it on my social media networks before I even watched it.
The Taqwacores is a feature film based on Michael Muhammad Knight’s novel of the same name. Knight is a Muslim convert from an Irish Catholic family who wrote about a fantasy he had of a punk house full of Muslims. Or, at least, he thought it was a fantasy until the book was published and got into the hands of young Muslims across the U.S. who identified with the characters, ideas and music portrayed. Soon, as Knight says, they connected the dots, and a loose network of misfit Muslims was strung together. Friends were made, bands were born and taqwacore become a word used for Muslims living in the spirit of punk, questioning, fighting, learning and living by their own ideals.
Taqwacore: The Birth of Islam Punk is a documentary about Knight and the real-life people and bands that were brought together by his book, ultimately culminating in an all-inclusive celebration and exhibition of the power of music to knock down barriers and draw people together.
I came away from this duo of films invigorated and excited that people are still out there using music as a tool for the betterment of the world, to include the excluded, to give voice to subversive thought, to be heard over the din of blind, self-serving authority figures.
Check out this thoughtful interview conducted by Jian Ghomeshi with Michael Muhammad Knight and Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam filmmaker Omar Majeed for Q TV.
The trailer for The Taqwacores:
The trailer for Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam:
JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound release their Bloodshot Records debut, Want More, today and it is a fine, fine soul album that feels and breathes and dances with a deep shimmy, not playing out as a lifeless set-piece as can easily happen when a modern band takes up a sound closely associated with an earlier era. Lyrically, it’s a relatable album that speaks in real terms instead of heart-shaped metaphors. Musically, it’s a straight-up rump-shaker of rich grooves that just seems to grow richer with each listen. And, personally, I was singing along within two or three spins of the album.
JC was kind enough to answer a few questions for us…
When and why did you start singing? How did the Uptown Sound come together?
Because my mom was always singing, I started singing around the house as a toddler. I did Chorus in elementary and middle school, and formed my first band in high school. JCBUS came together because Ben, our bassist, and I answered an ad put out by Billy, our guitarist, who was looking to make aggressive dance music.
A press release describes your music as “post-punk soul”. What does that mean to you? How do you think your music fits into this era?
Post-punk soul, to me, is emotive music that doesn’t try to fit into the typical “soul” girdle of warmly lit, grease-lensed love. We discuss love in our music, but usually more graphically than traditional soul, and we also don’t only take the point of view that the common portrayal of love is the ‘be-all, end-all’ ultimate goal. We write about the lighter side of lust and the general messiness of love, its hindsight is less hazy and more 20/20 when we write about why a relationship went wrong, etc. I don’t think our music fits into the post-punk era so much, but it does harken to a post-punk aesthetic that’s been pressed through a soul filter.
I hear some Stax influence in your music, like Otis Redding and the Dramatics. Who else are you influenced by?
For me personally: Patti LaBelle and Tina Turner are huge performance influences. Vocally, I draw inspiration from Otis, Teddy Pendergrass, Anita Baker and Amy Winehouse.
For the band: Bad Brains, Gang of Four, Living Colour, The Stooges, Bowie, Tower of Power, The MGs… the list could go on and on.
How did the idea to soul up Wilco come about?
Well, it started with Billy wondering what Syl Johnson (we were working with Syl at the time for the Numero Group revue) would sound like covering music like Wilco or Bowie, and from there it blossomed into the version we do now.
How did things come together with JCBUS and Bloodshot?
We stormed the Bloodshot office and held them hostage until they agreed to our demands…
What have you and the band been listening to lately?
Right now, I’m listening to a lot of Adele, Tune-Yards, JD MacPherson, Jill Scott, Joe Bataan… A lot of stuff all the time, really, but the artists I listed above have been getting a lot of play lately.
Listen to and download their first single, “Everything Will Be Fine”.
We just received this submission minutes ago from Drew Smith, and even though I’m at my day job with limited resources (can’t even get you proper images to go with the post), it’s so heartbreakingly beautiful that I couldn’t wait to share it.
From Drew, the story of the video:
My first ‘real’ job was teaching English as a Second Language in Ontario. I kept in correspondence with many of my students, and was pleasantly surprised to find one of them, Sohee Jeon, had become an established animator in South Korea. She expressed how much she had been enjoying my music, and while I was working on my newest record The Secret Languages she generously offered up her services to make an animated video for my newest single “Love Teethâ€.
You can download the song in exchange for a tweet here.
Regular readers of our blog will recognize the Dead Exs from previous posts by my co-blogger Jennifer and our friend @Popa2unes. Jennifer has described their sound as “a delicious blues-funk stew lightly seasoned with garage-rock flair”, and their dirty, fuzzed-up grooves fit in well here.
Now Popa has generously donated a signed copy of the Dead Exs’ CD Resurrection for one of you lucky people to own. All you need to do is drop a comment below that includes your name or preferred internet handle and a reliable e-mail address and then wait patiently. The giveaway will close on October 24 at 5 PM EST, and the winner will be chosen at random and announced on October 25.
And while you’re here, you can download the song “More Stuff” by right-clicking on the link below. Enjoy!
I am half-Italian/Sicilian-American on my father’s side. As such, I feel both a deep part of and an alien to my family’s culture. I’ve never been to Italy, though my heart clenches like a fool in love when I see an Italian landscape. I have taught myself a bit of proper Italian, though the first Italian I learned was the end-vowel-clipping tones of those who came to seek the American dream from the lower calf of Italia’s boot. As such, I have a love/hate relationship with the fake Italian songs so popular in the early 1950s, before rock ‘n’ roll really took hold of America.
Arguably, the greatest practioner of fake Italian songs was one of my great loves, Dino Paul Crocetti, i.e., Dean Martin. Dino’s story reflects my own father’s story in some ways. Like my father, he was born in Ohio (my father from Cleveland, Dean from Steubenville), and part of his family came from the Abruzzo region of Italy. Like my father, he spoke mostly Italian until he was five years old, like my father, he loved to sit in his favorite chair and watch Westerns. And, like my father, a handsome man (I am told I look just like my father, so this compliment may be self-serving).
So here, per voi, this Friday slackday, is a selection of the best fake Italian songs of that Italian-loving era. Per voi, cafones. Va’ fa’ un culo! (Don’t translate that.)
The greatest of fake Italian songs:
Here’s Rosemary Clooney, of Irish descent, telling the story of how Mitch Miller talked her into singing one of the biggest hits of her career, a song which was actually written by the great Armenian-American author William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian (creator of Alvin and the Chipmunks). (Thanks to Rick Saunders for the illuminating information.)
Dino and Rosemary duke it out on this fake Italian song, “Mambo Italiano”.
I was going to include Sergio Franchi’s “Pizza-zza” here – despite the fact that Franchi was native Italian, this song sounds ridiculously fake – but there are no videos for it available. So here instead is the only mildly fake Italian “Buona Sera” by the inimitable Louis Prima.
Readers, The Rest have a present for you: two of their songs, downloadable for free at their bandcamp, until Halloween. This offering is particularly special as these songs were, along with the rest of their upcoming record, almost lost when their hard drive crashed and were resurrected only with the help of black box technology.
The name of the salvaged record is SEESAW, and it will officially be out in 2012; until then, there are two songs from it to enjoy. Always on My Mind is dreamy, heavy, and crunchy at the same time. (Honestly, my first reaction was This is like a big bubblebath of noise. I may or may not be a weensy bit over-fond of fuzzy guitars.) The Last Day is a hair lighter and a shade bouncier, but no less delicious.
As a preview of what to expect, here is The Rest with Modern Time Travel (necessities), from their first record, Everyone All At Once:
Good morning, NTSIBbers. Today I would like you to meet Dustbowl Revival, a roots/jazz collective from Venice, California. They recently put out a record called Holy Ghost Station, and if you like your bluegrass to have some jazzy swing, this record is for you.
Also, if we have any swing dancers in the audience – or people that love swing dancers and want to provide them with snazzy new music – I am reliably informed that Dustbowl’s tunes are, in general, ideally suited to the St. Louis Shag, the Collegiate Shag, Balboa, and the Jitterbug. Furthermore, Lowdown Blues, one of my favorites, is perfect for the Lindy Hop.
Zach Lupetin, founder / ringmaster of the Revival / Collective, was kind enough to answer a few questions about the group:
What inspired you to delve so deeply into this particular era / genre of American music?
I’d say first, I started writing songs when I was in high school and my father (a great blues harp player in Chicago who often plays with Dustbowl when he’s in town) was blasting a lot of big band, blues and early rock n’ roll – British invasion stuff. My mom was heavy into the sixties folky scene and Patsy Cline and those country artists that had crossed over.
In college it sorted started seeping in and I had some friends in a band there that pushed me to look earlier, which sort of started a love-affair with close-harmony bluegrass and jug-band style tunes, Dixieland, that playful Fats Waller piano boogie and the earliest form of all – the church music and Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and so forth.
I lived in the Village in NYC for a little while and there is this crusty old bar called Arthur’s Tavern on Grove and there is a Dixieland band that has played ever Monday night for the last 59 years or something absurd. Old cats who can really blow. Something about that sound, the raw happiness in it, that really stuck in my mind – not sure why. It’s like seeing into a past life or something. You’re deep in it without any real reason to be.
Seeing what C.W. Stoneking and The Del McCoury-Preservation Hall Jazz Band are doing combining roots and pre-war jazz forms really got me going. The band has been together for over three years now and keeps getting bigger.
Do you ever go out on tour, or is it a strictly catch you in Los Angeles kind of affair?
The band is a bit of a large gang (usually 7-9 of us at a time) so extensive touring has not quite happened. Though we have played a good deal in San Francisco and the Bay as well as Seattle, Anchorage, Chicago, and San Diego.
The LA area is so diverse that it’s easy to fall into a nice rhythm of playing clubs and events here. I’ve traveled extensively in Europe and lived in Prague for a bit so I’d love to bring the group across the pond – would be a blast.
How many of you are there, exactly, and who plays what in the band as of right now?
Our core instrumentation is usually: acoustic guitar (Z.Lupetin), mandolin (Daniel Mark), fiddle (Connor Vance), trumpet (Matt Rubin), trombone (Ulf Bjorlin), clarinet (Nate Ketner), a gal singer (Caitlin Doyle) (plus washboard), drums (Josh Heffernan), upright bass (Austin Nicholsen + often we have a gypsy guitar player (Ray Bergstrom), blues harp (JT Ross), tuba, banjo (Matt Breur) accordion (Gee Rabe) and pedal steel.
We even had a bagpipe once! We act as a collective so we are constantly having new musicians in the area come in and out.
Thanks Zach!
Now, as examples of the Dustbowl Revival’s groove, I give you my absolute favorite song of theirs, Le Bataillon. Be sure to listen carefully to the lyrics, as they are amazing and kind of trippy:
“In England, last year we were over there, and my friend John from the Black Diamond Heavies – well, you can’t have no pocket knife in England, and we were partyin’, and he was yelling at these old geezers about something or they were yelling at him. They saw he had a pocket knife in his pocket, and they told one of the bobbies outside, and they took him to jail. And we said, ‘Is there anything we can do?’ And they said, ‘No’, and I said, ‘Well… okay!’ And we went back in and started dancing again, and my friend was in jail.
The next morning, he came swaggering up. He said [adopts rough, John Wesley Myers voice], ‘Man, that’s the nicest jail I ever spent the night in. But they took my coon dick bone!'”1
This is the story behind the centerpiece song of Scott H. Biram’s new album Bad Ingredients. Aside from memorializing John Wesley Myers’ confiscated good luck charm, the boogie woogie rockin’ “I Want My Mojo Back” also pays tribute back down the line to Lightnin’ Hopkins and the whole mojo hand tradition.
Though known as a punk-blues songster, Biram tends to draw on a variety of forms, from blues to bluegrass to country to metal and other points between. And while that remains true for Bad Ingredients – his almost out-of-place cover of Bill Monroe’s tender “Memories of You, Sweetheart” being the most obvious example – this is probably Biram’s bluesiest album to date. From the fiery, highly idiomatic “Dontcha Lie to Me, Baby” to the stellar “Born in Jail” with its slow hip-drag groove to the slinky Lightnin’ Hopkins cover “Have You Ever Loved a Woman?” and on, this album is made for a sweaty juke joint. Though, as ever, it is indelibly stamped with Biram’s ornery, furious brand of passion.
And it’s just damn good. This is one of those rare albums where I can’t pick one favorite track because so many of them are excellent (aside from ones mentioned, “Just Another River” and “Victory Song” also vie strongly for attention). If you’re already a Biram admirer, this album, which drops tomorrow, is a given. If you’re uncertain, watch that video posted above, get the song download below and be convinced.
As ever, Scott H. Biram is touring, and you should not miss the opportunity to see him live.
Oct 14 2011 Riley’s Tavern – Hunter, TX
Oct 27 2011 Sam’s Burger Joint – San Antonio, TX
Oct 28 2011 Triple Crown – San Marcos, TX
Oct 29 2011 Scoot Inn – Austin, TX
Nov 5 2011 VZD’s – Oklahoma City, OK
Nov 7 2011 Bender’s Tavern – Denver, CO
Nov 8 2011 Belly Up Aspen – Aspen, CO
Nov 10 2011 Urban Lounge – Salt Lake City, UT
Nov 10 2011 Heavy Metal Shop (FREE INSTORE) – Salt Lake City, UT
Nov 11 2011 Trap Bar at Grand Targhee Resort – Alta, WY
Nov 12 2011 The Palace – Missoula, MT
Nov 15 2011 Media Club – Vancouver, BC CANADA
Nov 16 2011 Tractor Tavern – Seattle, WA
Nov 17 2011 Dante’s – Portland, OR
Nov 18 2011 Humboldt Brews – Arcata, CA
Nov 19 2011 Bottom of the Hill – San Francisco, CA
Nov 20 2011 The Satellite Club – Los Angeles, CA
Nov 22 2011 Casbah – San Diego, CA
Nov 23 2011 Rhythm Room – Phoenix, AZ
Nov 26 2011 The Mohawk – Austin, TX
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