DANIEL BROCKMAN

You may now unpeg your pants

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:26:40 GMT

Regeneration Tour at Bank of America Pavilion, August 20, 2008
If the inaugural Regeneration Tour seemed likely to play out as a string of “We’ve played our big hit, now what” moments, well, guess again.

Guitar solos?

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:01:06 GMT

Obits go back to basics
“It actually feels really liberating, like a moment where you’re like, ‘Boy, am I glad to be an adult!’"

SOLO PROJECT: “Coming from a hardcore/punk-rock background, the guitar solo is the first thing that gets left at the door,” says Sohrab Habibion.

“It actually feels really liberating, like a moment where you’re like, ‘Boy, am I glad to be an adult!’ It’s like walking into a room and you’re not worried if your fly is unzipped. We just don’t care.” Obits guitarist Sohrab Habibion is pontificating about his new band’s exotic sound — and their break with old-guard indie-rock orthodoxy.

“We’re not young guys, so this band has definitely benefitted from our involvement in bands before. I think both in terms of how we write, what kind of music we’re trying to write, and also in terms of how we communicate, since we’re not 25, there’s as little ego as you could possibly get in a band scenario — which is pretty great.”

Habibion (singer/guitarist for early-’90s Jawbox associates Edsel) and singer/guitarist Rick Froberg (former singer for San Diego emo progenitors Drive like Jehu and garage punks Hot Snakes) have a lot of indie-guitar history to be liberated from. Obits has been, until recently, a long-gestating rehearsal-space project with a goal to, as Habibion puts it, “really crack the kind of music that we want to listen to, inasmuch as we can actually play it.”

“We are making music for our own pleasure,” he continues. “There’s no paradigm that we have to hold ourselves to. I come from the DC hardcore scene, and there are so many great bands, and I learned a lot about music and how musicmaking can be a very beneficial social and socially activist thing. And yet there were a lot of unspoken rules, and I’m glad to have nothing to do with that anymore. It feels really good to just sort of say, ‘Hey, let’s play something that sounds like a fucked-up Chuck Berry song,’ and have everybody else say, ‘Yeah, let’s try that!’ ”

The irony is, the gentlemen of Obits are stepping out of their comfort zone by exploring sounds that would normally be considered pretty “trad” — and by rediscovering their love for the buh-lazing guitar solo. “You listen to a million records and you’re like, ‘Man, I wish I could play that Tom Verlaine solo!’, but we’ve all been in situations where that sort of thing is verboten. And you know, coming from a hardcore/punk rock background, the guitar solo is the first thing that gets left at the door. So part of it, for us, is to try to, in as tasteful a way as possible, reintroduce that in our music. It’s actually taken us a long time to figure out how to do that in a way that doesn’t feel cheesy.”

Three 6 Mafia

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:02:39 GMT

Last 2 Walk | Sony
Last 2 Walk is a club-banging record, but it’s hard to recommend something so by-the-book.

Retro active

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:51:20 GMT

The Regeneration Tour reheats the ’80s
The ’80s, pop culture’s most tenacious decade, were a mix of greed, technological breakthrough, and hope for a bright future.

SKINNY TIE, SYNTH, NO HAIR “A hell of a lot of it is nostalgia, right?” says the Human League’s
Phil Oakey.

The ’80s, pop culture’s most tenacious decade, were a mix of greed, technological breakthrough, and hope for a bright future. At least, that’s the story we buy into before pegging our pants and bounding out to one ’80s karaoke night after the next.

“The music from that era is very uplifting — I think it’s the last really creative decade of music,” says Belinda Carlisle, solo artist and still-occasional Go-Go, speaking from a London hotel before embarking upon the 2008 Regeneration Tour, which comes to the Comcast Center this Wednesday with a cavalcade of ’80s recidivists. “A lot of songs from that era are anthemic and uplifting. Sometimes the stuff sounds ’80s due to production, but the decade, songwise, certainly has a certain sound.”

Sax-crazed: No decade blew harder than the '80s. By Daniel Brockman

Phil Oakey, of the Human League (also rocking Regeneration), has a somewhat amused perspective about the appeal of ’80s music. “A hell of a lot of it is nostalgia, right? It’s not exactly cutting-edge, but it serves to remind the audience how much they enjoyed something from a formative period in their lives that was, and is, very important to them.”

The Human League began in the late ’70s as a product of and a reaction to the rise of British punk; their career culminated in the worldwide smash of their 1981 Dare album and single “Don’t You Want Me.” “There was a bleak industrial movement going on in Britain, and we sort of liked being a part of it, but at the same time, we really loved pop. I wanted to be Donna Summer or Barry White, you know? And we really wanted chart success. People that we admired, like David Bowie or Bryan Ferry, were often people who’d stepped up their game and said, ‘Right, we’d better do some popular records!’ ”

One defining characteristic of this game-stepping-up was technology — in particular the rise of the synthesizer. Oakey and Mike Score, singer and synth player for A Flock of Seagulls (also on Regeneration), had similar moments of epiphany. “When I was a kid, I was into science fiction,” says Score, “and that’s what I wanted the band to sound like: from outer space, almost. And synthesizers were the newest, latest thing. I think I was the second person in Liverpool to have a synthesizer.”

Millionaires

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:35:06 GMT

Harpers Ferry, August 10, 2008
Millionaires played the kind of set I wish I’d see more of: high-energy, hit-filled, and mercifully short.

The Faint

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:22:05 GMT

Fasciinatiion | Blank.wav
It’s as if I were at a party where they’re endlessly playing “Dead or Alive” while some guy next to me mumbles nonsense in my ear and some kid in the corner hits random keys on a Juno.

At home away from home

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:48:55 GMT

CSS take on the world — again
“We love all the pop stuff.” says Sá. “We do love the Pixies, but we also love Mariah, you know?"

SÃO PAULO ROCK CITY? “It’s our home, we love it — but I think everyone in the band feels that
every time we come back, nothing’s really changed.”

CSS guitarist Luiza Sá is resting in New York City, on a rare break from her band’s non-stop tour, and reminiscing about the first song they played at their first rehearsal: Madonna’s “Hollywood.” “We met up to rehearse, we were all in the living room, and we’re like, let’s just play something to see how it sounds. And then [CSS vocalist] Lovefoxxx came in wearing a Motörhead T-shirt — I think she was scared that we were going to be all ‘Rock and roll, grrrr!’ — and we turned to her and said, ‘Hey, we just learned Madonna’s “Hollywood,” ’ and she was so happy about it, just ‘Oh, thank God!’ ”

Brazilliant! A brief foray into Brazilian rock. By Daniel Brockman

CSS’s willfully careless mishmash of pop and rock styles has made them an international phenomenon and arguably São Paulo’s biggest musical export. The success of “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above” and “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex,” from their 2006 CSS Sub Pop debut, shows that, at least in certain circles, the world is ready for their mix of froth and hooks. “We love all the pop stuff.” says Sá. “We do love the Pixies, but we also love Mariah, you know? And we don’t want to choose. Our songs are our versions of pop.”

Said songs are fun and wacky; they’re also naively naughty. “Fuck Off Is Not the Only Thing You Have To Show” is all the more insanely catchy for its nutty use of the English language. “When we did the first album, we didn’t speak English all the time, so we could say a lot of shit and we didn’t realize it. Now, we’re not the same people because we’ve toured a lot, and we speak English all the time, and the new album shows that. The first album we recorded not really even considering that we were going to tour; and then we toured so much that we changed as musicians. This new album is much more organic, much more how we sound live. We’re not being all serious and trying to start a revolution, you know. It’s still us, we’re just a little bit more mature.”

Miley Cyrus

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:04:08 GMT

Breakout | Hollywood
Breakout is a puzzling mishmash that makes sense only if you read between the lines and see the 15-year-old trapped in a machine that is partly of her own design.

Melvins

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:15:34 GMT

Nude with Boots | Ipecac
Hey Melvins, a question.

Risky business

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:04:24 GMT

Santogold finds her own way
I know I can’t be the only person whose ears perked up earlier this year on hearing the chorus of the then-new Ashlee Simpson single “Outta My Head (Ay Ya Ya).”

VIDEO: Santogold, "L.E.S. Artistes"

I know I can’t be the only person whose ears perked up earlier this year on hearing the chorus of the then-new Ashlee Simpson single “Outta My Head (Ay Ya Ya).” In retrospect, even though Bittersweet World bombed with little more than a collective shrug from the public, the song’s commanding chorus, with its soaring yet sing-song melody and its vaguely ’80s stomp, bore the stamp of songwriter Santi White — a/k/a Santogold.

If Ms. White’s gig working on this song (and Bittersweet World’s “Ragdoll”) gets played down in her bio in favor of subsequent gigs opening for Björk and Coldplay and her friendship/collaboration with M.I.A. and DJ Switch, consider that an act of misdirection. Although those artists are much “cooler” and have more cultural currency, Ms. White’s work on “Outta My Head” and “Ragdoll” bespeaks the pop-savvy combination of huge choruses and offbeat sing-songy chantitude that now make up her willfully diverse major-label debut, Santogold (Downtown/Atlantic).

So what’s her current game plan? Santi (responding via e-mail to reserve a strained voice for her tour with Coldplay) is coy: “My methodology seems to be sink or swim.” At once an out-of-the-blue ingénue and an interdisciplinary music-biz vet who’s dipped her feet into the deep end of major-label A&R and songwriting, Santogold has crafted an odd and off-kilter pop record. If it’s the work of a crazy outsider, it’s also created with the sheen of someone who knows what she’s doing. “The key [to this record] was having a strong vision of how it should sound in my head. That way when I worked with different producers, I made sure that their style merged with my vision rather than overpowered it.”

Even if “Santogold” the music-biz phenomenon seems to have come out of nowhere, Santi White the savvy vet has been prepping this debut for the better part of a decade. Has it all gone according to plan? “Well, I’ve pretty much been unprepared for each part as I’ve stepped into it. And as much stress as it causes me, there’s always so much more to learn.”

One thing Ms. White has had to learn is that the media don’t always know what to do with an artist whose genre straddling challenges racial assumptions — she caused a small uproar when she accused those who would label her music as R&B and hip-hop of being “racist.” “Hip-hop, particularly old-school, is one of the genres that has influenced me as an artist, as well as punk, dub, new wave, indie rock, and electronic music. I just am disappointed when journalists belittle the broad scope of my music by shoving it in a little genre box, especially one that’s the least accurate.”

The new girl

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:43:25 GMT

Katy Perry storms the boys’ club
“I am the pink in a sea of darkness.”

VIDEO: Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl"

Katy Perry is munching on cheese puffs on a day off from the Warped Tour when I ask how she hooked up with the army of hot-shot producers and hitmakers who’ve helped push her debut album, One of the Boys (Capitol), to the top. “Glen [Ballard] found me when I was 17, brought me to Los Angeles, and kind of put me under his wing. He told me, ‘Write a song a day so you can, you know, get that muscle flexed.’ And I did — I wrote 65 to 75 songs for my record over the course of five years, with different people, producers, by myself. I tried everything.”

The album does sound like the product of trying everything: an almost unholy mash-up of Alanis and Britney, the former’s trashy candor mixed with the latter’s dance-floor whoomp. And it can’t be an accident. In addition to Alanis guru Ballard, Perry, now 23, worked with writer/producer Max Martin (Britney’s “Baby One More Time”), whose grubby Europrints are all over the smash #1 single “I Kissed a Girl.” Even with all this heavy-handed production artillery, the song and the album still rock hard enough for Perry to straddle both the pop charts and a boys’ club like the Warped Tour (thanks in part to the guitar-army production of pop-punk vet Butch Walker).

“I am the pink in a sea of darkness,” she points out. “There’s all those screamo bands and metal bands, and it’s all just kind of dark with black merchandise and T-shirts, and I’m coming out with like pink amplifiers and pink Les Pauls and SGs. It’s pretty funny. I think that as much as I’m a pop girl, I put on a rock show. I try to jump around as much as any of the other bands. I have bruises on my legs — the female physique on the Warped Tour basically gets thrown around, it gets dented.

“I’ve been to Warped Tour many times, and I consider it almost my family — although I’m the black sheep of the family. Of course, I’m the black sheep of my family in real life, too.”

Perry, who grew up the daughter of two pastors and wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music, began her career with a 2001 Christian album under the name Katy Hudson. “When you grow up from 15 to 23, you do change a little bit, and I changed a lot. I’m very happy to be where I came from, and I’m glad I have that foundation and I still have faith. But I’m out on my own now, and I make decisions on my own. Hopefully those are successful decisions.”

Japanamayhem

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:25:23 GMT

Boris are completely out of control
Although Boris might seem just another Japanese drone-happy drop-tuned stoner-rock outfit, close inspection reveals instead a 16-year investigation of the meaning of sound and music itself.

TUNE IN TOKYO: Smile might just be one of the most deconstructed and bizarre rock albums ever made.

A Japanese rock primer: レッツロック! (Let's rock!) By Daniel Brockman

“I think any attempt at expression has to start from a point of resignation, of knowing that nothing is truly going to be communicated,” says Boris drummer/vocalist Atsuo.

If this doesn’t sound like a quote from your typical rock drummer, that might be because Boris — who come to the Middle East downstairs this Friday — are not your typical rock band. Although they might seem just another Japanese drone-happy drop-tuned stoner-rock outfit, close inspection reveals instead a 16-year investigation of the meaning of sound and music itself. Their new Smile (Southern Lord) might just be one of the most deconstructed and bizarre rock albums ever made — or at least the most deconstructed and bizarre album to land in the “Rock/Pop” bin.

Boris’s rise to international acclaim has hardly been overnight: Smile is the band’s 18th album since their 1992 inception. Over time they’ve careered through more styles and moods than can be fathomed — from gentle folk to spacy drone to punishing full-throttle metal (often within the same song). Born out of a Tokyo scene open to novelty and intensity, Boris have been finding a place for their music in the Western world, and without the cutesy patronizing that often accompanies Japanese exports. (See: the 5.6.7.8.’s, Shonen Knife, Cibo Matto, etc.)

“We don’t have real expectations or demands,” says Atsuo. (He’s responding through a translator to my e-mailed questions.) “We enjoy all the different kinds of responses we get, including those times when audiences don’t seem to ‘understand’ us. Boris isn’t just for the members of the group. It’s a product of the various images many different people have of us. We, the members of the group, can’t control it.”

For a band this conceptual (their albums may be one long droning track, like 1996’s Absolutego, or speaker-shredding hardcore, like 2006’s Vein), Boris seem most concerned with seeking out musical purity. The results are often psychotic. “We’ve gotten to know more music as we’ve gotten older,” says Atsuo, “and the sounds our bodies naturally produce go in various different directions. We just record whatever we’re feeling at the moment, and the song eventually communicates to us which direction it will take. Our emotions are in constant flux.”

Sweet and lo-

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:30:05 GMT

Your cynicism is no match for Times New Viking
“You know, sometimes capturing the cleanness of how everything sounds is a futile attempt,” says Times New Viking vocalist and keyboard slapper Beth Murphy.

Times New Viking, "(My Head)/RIP Allegory" (mp3)

“You know, sometimes capturing the cleanness of how everything sounds is a futile attempt,” says Times New Viking vocalist and keyboard slapper Beth Murphy when I ask about the alleged “lo-fi” thing that her band have going on. Three albums into their discography, capturing “cleanness” is a futile attempt that this Columbus trio have not been bothering themselves too much with.

Dial up track seven on their new Rip It Off (Matador) and you’ll be assaulted with a blast of cymbal washes, guitar scuzz, and the following line of verse, delivered far beyond the safe confines of the digital distortion threshold: “Faces on fire and your hair is a mess/Let’s do something that hasn’t been done yet!” Within a fraction of a second, it’s all there: the abandon of the moment alongside the desperate hope of snaring something elusive. So, will Times New Viking — who come to Great Scott on Sunday — ever clean up their act?

“We just go on an album-by-album basis, but we tend to like to capture a take in the first couple of times that we play the song, and we like to record everything ourselves. This record was very cohesive with how it was recorded.”

Murphy isn’t kidding: Rip It Off is off-the-cuff and violent but also passionate and desperate, and with 10 of its 16 tracks lasting less than two minutes, it’s over before you know it. Like TNV’s previous two releases, it was recorded quickly, and it will likely be a jarring addition to any randomized playlists, by virtue of its recording style and also the music’s off-kilter combination of oddly familiar harmonies with caterwauling dissonance and raw shards of distorted sound. “With our æsthetic, with our style, we think that it’s a taste thing — you don’t have to like it. Most of us in the band don’t listen to a lot of newer music — we come from a tradition of lo-fi music. In some ways, it has to do with our musical heritage, [our] coming from Ohio: the people we were around when we started didn’t necessarily strive to be amazingly huge outside of Ohio. In a sense, our music is made first for our peers.”

The numbers of the beast

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:35:00 GMT

Iron Maiden at Comcast Center, June 20, 2008
As a million fingers air-guitared frantically, Maiden put on a fireballing motherfucker of a show.

Judas Priest

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:13:51 GMT

Nostradamus | Epic
It’s a ridiculous album, sure, but also the most grandiose metal record likely to be released this year.

Distinguished flannel

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:08:52 GMT

Mudhoney at the Middle East Downstairs, June 6, 2008
The world-weariness of the whole thing made it clear why this is the wrong band to look to if you’re trolling for Day-Glo flannel nostalgia.

Teenage kicks

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:44:30 GMT

M83 at the Middle East Downstairs, June 2
Gonzalez and Kibby humped their machines in unison as if the devices were all that stood between them and some serious Dionysian revelry.

Rush survive 40 years on rock’s very edge

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:49:50 GMT

‘Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone’
“When we started out, we were just kids playing the kind of music that we liked,” says bassist/singer Geddy Lee.

RUSH LIMBO: Rush are an oddity in a rock biz founded on oddities: forging ahead long enough to create their own niche.

Prog bites: Eight completely awesome Rush moments. By Daniel Brockman

“When we started out, we were just kids playing the kind of music that we liked,” says bassist/singer Geddy Lee. “It was kind of progressive rock, it was kind of heavy metal, but it didn’t really fit into any easy description, and by virtue of that it was not of the taste du jour for most mainstream rock periodicals, and I think that’s what made us outsiders. We were not groovy-looking, we were not the pop taste of the moment. We were suburban kids made good.”

No fucking kidding! Rush, who play the Comcast Center (what used to be the Tweeter Center, and before that Great Woods) on Sunday, are one of rock’s most quietly enduring success stories: 40 years later, the Canadian trio’s rabid fan base and enduring legacy continue to frustrate those who’d like to pretend that ’70s prog never existed. (And who but Rush would do something like follow up last year’s Snakes & Arrows with this year’s Snakes & Arrows Live?) Of course, Geddy thinks that the whole “prog is a four-letter word” stigma is all smoke and mirrors. “Look at a band like Radiohead: they are a big-themed band, and they’re kind of the leader in the current prog-rock parade, in my opinion. They are probably loved by a lot of people who don’t like ‘prog rock,’ because they have an image that makes them acceptable, a grooviness that supersedes their music. And I think that’s part and parcel with acceptance of certain bands: if they have a groovy buzz, then it almost makes what they are doing musically acceptable by association. I think it’s a lot about a time and a place, more than the actual music that they’re playing.”

This assessment makes sense from a member of a band who, with their virtuoso chops, raised the bar stultifyingly high in terms of actual music being played. “We’re just concerned with playing well — even after 400 years of touring, we still discuss, you know, how we sucked last night, or how can we make that one song better, or with that song that we’ve played for 35 years, how the chorus could be played better. In some ways we’re overly focused on playing well, it’s the part that makes us feel best about what we do.”

Monday, we're in love

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:58:24 GMT

The Cure, Agannis Arena, May 12, 2008
Witnessing the Cure was like an inexplicably uplifting trip through a never-ending black hole.

V/A

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:41:55 GMT

Ed Rec Vol. III | Ed Banger
Pedro Winter a/k/a Busy P’s Ed Banger Records seems to specialize in dance/hip-hop made by and for reformed metalheads.