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onestowatch · 5 years

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The Wombats' Matthew Murphy on Picasso, “Black Mirror,” and Solo Project, Love Fame Tragedy [Q&A]

After 17 years at the helm of the English indie rock band The Wombats, Matthew "Murph" Murphy decided it was time for a change. In a two year span, The Wombats toured with The Rolling Stones, Weezer and The Pixies, released their fourth studio album Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life and made sure to hit up all the spots on the festival circuit this summer. When he wasn't on the road, Murph was spending time in Los Angeles – ultimately moving there from London – and working on new material that didn't quite fit The Wombats' mold. He played a little of what he calls "contact list roulette," recruiting musical collaborators to work with him in the studio on some new songs. And that's where Love Fame Tragedy was born – the solo project sees Murphy exploring different musical avenues and creating an entirely new sound. "I just wanted to try something new," Murphy said in a statement. "Something that didn't involve any politics." He found inspiration for the name after visiting a Picasso exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. "It triggered a lot of things," he said, "and a lot of songs flew out after that." Love Fame Tragedy finds Murphy joined by a cast of companions, including The Pixies' Joey Santiago, Alt-J's Gus Unger-Hamilton and former Soundgarden and Pearl Jam drummer Matt Chamberlain. The singles had been trickling out slowly all summer, but, at long last, we have the full EP.

I spoke with Murphy over the phone a few days before the EP dropped. We chatted about the project, as well as drawing inspiration from the likes of Picasso, moving to LA and Black Mirror. Get a look inside Murphy's solo project, Love Fame Tragedy, and make sure to check out his debut EP, I Don’t Want To Play The Victim, But I’m Really Good At It.

OTW: Let’s talk about the name “Love Fame Tragedy." I understand you saw a Picasso exhibit and were inspired by one of the paintings. What in particular inspired you?

MM: Whenever I have days off, I go to museums or try to get some inspiration in some form. I saw this Picasso exhibition and it was so hilariously dark because, you know, the whole premise behind “Love Fame Tragedy” is him painting his mistress out of town whilst his wife is in Paris and he’s in the countryside… it’s pretty dark shit. I was also looking for something that had, like, a looping kind of comic feeling, which I think “Love Fame Tragedy” does. I think [the paintings] are kind of linked, and one leads into another. I just liked it. Before I knew it, I’d completely ripped off a Picasso exhibition and that was the name of the band.

OTW: When I first saw the name, I couldn’t help but think of The Wombats’ debut, A Guide to Love, Loss, and Desperation. You certainly have a thing with threes.

MM: Yeah, I do. Well, three’s a very powerful number, apparently.

OTW: Both the sound and the music videos have been pretty experimental for this project. What was the songwriting process like?

MM: The songwriting process for me is the same as it’s always been. It’s just me trying to excite myself. For this project, I’m working with this one guy Tyler Cunningham. He lives in LA. He and I are doing the videos and doing all the artwork together. It’s exciting to be creating this long thread, which I’ve never really done on an album before. It’s always different directors for this, the label wants to do that, whereas this is very much streamlined. It just means I can be a bit more creative and clever with artwork, videos, and general content.

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OTW: LA is such a creative hub; almost everyone there is a transplant. What are some things you’ve gotten from immersing yourself in the city?

MM: LA’s been such a special place for me. I met my wife and had a baby there. The essence of collaboration that’s running through the water there is important. I’ve been inspired by that. That’s why I’ve had other people guest on this record, and I just feel 10-15 percent happier there. It’s a very New Age-y place, and that kind of rubs off on you. I just feel like happiness and sadness are really conducive to creativity, but happiness even more, so I’m really thankful for LA for providing me with that.

OTW: You mentioned all the different guests on the record. You’ve worked with some iconic names like Joey Santiago (The Pixies) and Matt Chamberlain (Pearl Jam). How did having all those different minds working together impact your thought process?

MM: It was all pretty chilled out. Me and Joey played golf beforehand; we kind of bonded on the Weezer/Pixies tour and I said, “Do you want to come to the studio?” And that’s what he did. There wasn’t too much overthinking. Collaborating with people and making new friends all the time is a much better existence than locking yourself in a room in London and writing for ten hours a day like I used to.

OTW: I loved how you let the songs trickle in slowly, kind of building the anticipation for the full EP. MM: I didn’t really decide to do it that way (laughs) I wanted to make a Love Fame Tragedy album, and all I’ve been doing is writing the songs, getting them recorded and being happy with them. But I am excited about the way it’s coming out. It’s exciting for me. There are going to be two EPs and then an extra handful of songs, which will all make one big, pretty long album at the end of it, next year. But it is fun doing EPs because you can treat everything like a mini album; everything’s got its own title, its own artwork. It’s kind of a cool way of doing it and a way I was happy to go along with. It just seems like a much more exciting way to do things.

OTW: You performed some of the new songs at the Reading Festival. What was that experience like? MM: It was horrendous! (laughs) Everything went wrong. It was a baptism of fire. It was kind of amazing that that happened because every show since then has been so great and so strong and exciting. I think we got all of the bad juju out. It wasn’t that bad a gig, I just had no guitar for the whole thing so it was just really weird. The other guys were great. We had the voice and we had the rest of the band. We just didn’t have my guitar, which was pretty interesting. But people seemed to like it.

OTW: I feel like sometimes happy accidents like that help you grow as a band.

MM: I think so. I mean, I’d met the guys way before that, but it was definitely a real bonding experience.

OTW: What do you hope your fans will get out of these live performances?

MM: Same reason I write music: I just like to make a connection with someone, and want them to feel something. That’s kind of all I do. There’s no dramatic or political statements or anything I’m massively pedaling. They’re just confessional songs and I hope they hit people the way some of them have hit me.

OTW: I think the subject matter in the songs resonates with a lot of people. Like in “My Cheating Heart,” I noticed themes of self-indulgence, materialism, temptation… love, fame AND tragedy all kind of combined into one explosion of a song. “Backflip” kind of reminded me of modern dating.

MM: “My Cheating Heart” is about a state of anxiety, really, and a lot of things that I felt when I first moved to Los Angeles and how I dealt with it… or didn’t deal with it. And “Backflip,” I guess, is about modern dating. I feel like that’s more so because of the video and the visuals and things.

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OTW: Very Black Mirror-ish.

MM: Yeah, it’s completely ripped off from “Metalhead!” I had the idea for all these shifting shapes, or whatever, which apparently is an idea people had a few years ago. I just said to the director, Watch ‘Metalhead’… can we just make it look like that?” I think we did a pretty good job.

OTW: Hey, Quentin Tarantino says he steals from every movie ever made, so don’t feel bad.

MM: (laughs) Oh no, I don’t feel bad!

OTW: What other themes do you think you’ll explore with this process?

MM: A lot of the songs are barking up the same tree I’ve always barked up. Problems with relationships… maybe relationships are like a metaphor for me having problems with the outside world? I don’t know. When I find them, I’ll be sure to explore them.

OTW: Before we go, who are your Ones to Watch?

MM: I really like Emily King. Me, my wife and daughter listen to her every morning. I think she’s pretty special.

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#matthew murphy #the wombats #interview #alternative #pop #indie rock #love fame tragedy #I don't want to play the victim but I'm really good at it

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topweeklyupdate · 6 years

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TØP Weekly Update #81: Ned’s Declassified Trench Survival Guide (1/25/19)

Wowza! After a quiet past month, we got flooded with a huge deluge of content so substantial that it requires the Weekly Update to revert to its old long-form format. That required a few extra sleepless hours from me this week, but I literally cannot complain when my favorite band is keeping me so well fed. We’ve got a lot to sort through, but I believe we can do it together.

This Week’s TØPics:

Meet Ned: “Chlorine” Music Video Released

Clancy Returns to Mess Up Our Lives

TØP to Headline Lollapalooza Paris

Sirius XM Radio Town Hall and Hosting Gig

ALTer Ego Saves the Best for First

Upcoming: Bandito Europe Kicks Off This Week

And MORE!

Major News, Releases, and Announcements:

The biggest news of the week (as you know, otherwise why would you be here?) was undoubtedly the release of the music video for “Chlorine”. Not set in the world of Dema (unless Trench has been developed into an Australian suburb in the last few months), the video features Tyler and Josh filling up a swimming pool for an adorable little goat/cat/Furby critter named “Ned”. The fine Clique folks on Twitter and Reddit have been very active speculating just what in the heck this all means and if it has anything at all to do with the rest of the band’s current narrative. My theory: Tyler read some early fan speculation about the reversed “We are Banditos” clip in “Nico and the Niners”, which sounds like “So keep Ned by you,” and Tyler found that so funny that he thought up of the most ridiculous idea for who “Ned” could be and put it into the first music video they filmed after the fans had their hands on the whole album.

Much more shocking than the music video (which we’ve known was coming for a few weeks) was the revival of dmaorg.info for the first time since well before the release of the album. Three big takeaways from this new letter: First, from a narrative standpoint, Clancy is back in Dema, brought back by the kindly old bishop Keons. He is still uncomfortable there, but he also was never fully comfortable out in Trench either, and now feels torn about where he belongs. Second, the file name is the atomic number and mass of chlorine, because Tyler Joseph is a monster. Third, the hidden message on this one, coded in letters that are double printed, is “SODEEPNEDBYYOU”, which I’d say pretty much confirms the theory about ol’ Ned’s origins.

Finally, we got another new show announcement, as Twenty One Pilots will be headlining Lollapalooza Paris this July in their first of five European summer festivals. If you’re a French/European fan who hasn’t been able to get to a show from the upcoming tour, now’s your chance!

Performances and Other Shenanigans:

As fun as it was to join with the Clique in losing our minds speculating over "Chlorine”-related nonsense this week, the most special piece of Twenty One Pilots content from this past week was Tyler’s acoustic piano set for Sirius XM’s Town Hall, which was released in full on Monday. I could write half a book on this performance, which Tyler designed to chronologically trace the arc of his career and the evolution of his creative process. It wasn’t just Tyler sitting down to play some songs; he clearly put a lot of thought into the performance, as he introduced each song with a meaningful story and even inserted a recurring bit with Josh calling in from his travels through New York. Highlights include a gorgeous stripped-down rendition of “Taxi Cab”, Tyler describing the importance of an actual sustain pedal for composing songs on piano, and, of course, the first ever performance of “Cut My Lip” with percussion provided by Tyler’s wedding ring striking the piano. That said, the most impactful part of the whole show for me was Tyler’s revealing introduction to an almost spoken-word rendition of “Holding On To You”, which was enough to make me listen to a song I’ve heard a thousand times these last six years in a completely new way. The entire set is a must-listen for any fan.

That element only scratches the surface of the band’s surprisingly extensive collaboration with Sirius over the weekend. In addition to a fun and engaged fan Q&A at the tail-end of the Town Hall (in which they confirmed new songs will be joining the setlist this year), Tyler and Josh did a game job hosting the weekend Top 45 countdown for the Hits 1 station, talking about other artists, pop culture, and other inane nonsense with the goofy and dry humor of two guys who know each other very well. Here’s a collection of some of their best dialogue from the weekend; completionists will have to go to Sirius’s On-Demand website and go on that complete archive binge.

With all that’s happened in the past seven days, one can almost forget that the week started off with the band’s first performance of 2019 (well, technically the Town Hall was recorded first, but it’s the first one the general public saw and the first full concert production with both Tyler and Josh and... look, you get it). Tyler and Josh expectedly killed their contribution to iHeart’s ALTer Ego festival, opening the show with the night’s longest set. (Tyler quipped that they “saved the best for first”; River Cuomo later joked that Weezer “saved the best for the middle”.) The stream of the show has been mostly taken down by our corporate overlords, but I’m sure ya’ll can find the relevant clips if you scour the Interwebs long enough. Also, Josh paid back this radio sponsorship by answering some fan questions that’s worth a watch for a few laughs.

It was refreshing to see Twenty One Pilots back in the competitive environment of a festival where not everyone knows them and their songs, considering they’ve been away from that setting since they headlined Firefly nearly two years ago. I’m looking forward to how general festival audiences receive Trench when they start headlining later this year.

One last thing to note: chart performance for “My Blood” and “Chlorine” are stable. Haven’t budged much at all. We’ll see how that changes when the music video’s impact hits.

Upcoming Shows:

Let’s wrap up this week by looking ahead to the future! Next Wednesday, Tyler and Josh will literally return to Dema when they kick off the Bandito Tour in Kiev, Ukraine, the home of the university where most of the Dema scenes were shot in the “Nico and the Niners” music video. It will be the band’s first show in the country, giving 10,000 Ukrainian fans the chance to see their band in person at their city’s Palace of Sports for the first full show of the year. With the recent release of the “Chlorine” video and the performance of “Cut My Lip”, I feel pretty secure in guessing that those songs will finally make the setlist. Everything else is up in the air: Will other songs from Trench make their way on? Will any old favorites return? New covers? What songs will have to be cut? Who is the support act? Will Ned be there? These and more important questions will be answered by this time next week.

Power to the local dreamer.

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#twenty one pilots #tyler joseph #josh dun #chlorine #trench #billboard #bandito tour #clancy #dmaorg #iheartradio #alter ego #lollapalooza #sirius xm #top weekly update

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timalexanderdollery · 5 years

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The Frozen 2 soundtrack: a guide to the best songs

Disney

The best songs from Frozen 2 are the ones that didn’t make it into the movie. Sorry, “Into the Unknown.”

It’s not an exaggeration to say the release of the Frozen 2 soundtrack this past weekend — just ahead of Frozen 2’s November 22 release date — counts as an event. Not since the heyday of Disney’s ’90s animated musicals has a film soundtrack had such high expectations to live up to.

Sales of the original Frozen soundtrack blew away all other competitors when it was released in late November 2013 (just a few days before the film itself); it then went on to reign as the No. 1 album of 2014. At the 2014 Oscars, “Let It Go” won Best Original Song; the next year, at the 2015 Grammys, the album won Best Compilation Soundtrack, garnering Robert Lopez — who wrote all of Frozen’s songs with his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez — the rare EGOT distinction. (The pair is credited with writing the entire Frozen 2 soundtrack as well.)

Oh, and if you had younger kids, your kids were probably obsessed with it. In 2014, Frozen was everywhere: The film itself grossed a staggering $1.27 billion worldwide, and the film’s fandom was so eager for more that it drove over $5 billion in retail sales of related Frozen merchandise — just in 2014 alone. Not only that, but five years after the film’s release, the soundtrack was still on the CD sales charts. That’s some heavy lifting.

So does the new Frozen 2 soundtrack hold up to all that hype? Yeah, pretty much.

The Frozen 2 soundtrack has just seven new songs — plus a reprise, several covers, and a few “outtakes.” But there’s a lot to explore.

The Frozen 2 soundtrack boasts the soundtrack versions of its seven totally new songs as well as covers of those songs by artists Kacey Musgraves, Panic! At the Disco, and Weezer. Both Kristen Bell, who voices Princess Anna, and Jonathan Groff, who plays her boyfriend Kristoff, get songs of their own. (There’s also a teensy reprise of the Groffsauce classic “Reindeer(s) are Better Than People.”) The soundtrack also comes with a few surprises — most pleasantly, the revelation that Westworld star Evan Rachel Wood, a new addition to Frozen cast, has a great singing voice. (Fun fact for Broadway buffs: Wood is in a band with guitarist Zane Carney, brother of Hadestown’s Reeve Carney.)

Wood plays Queen Iduna, Elsa and Anna’s late mother. Apparently, her spirit is still alive and kicking, and in the Frozen 2 soundtrack’s opening number, “All Is Found,” she gets a beautiful refrain — “where the north wind meets the sea / there’s a river full of memory” — that recurs throughout other songs and the film’s score. Musgraves covers this song, and it’s just lovely.

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If you already know you love Frozen, you’ll specifically want to seek out the “deluxe” version of the soundtrack, which contains a few more songs listed as “outtakes.” These songs — which were apparently all cut before they made it into the movie — include extra solos for Anna and Kristoff, and a gorgeous duet, “I Seek the Truth,” between songwriter Anderson-Lopez and Patti Murin, who originated the role of Anna in Frozen on Broadway.

The best of the outtakes is “Get This Right,” a fun, conversational duet between a self-doubting Kristoff and an ever-adventurous Anna, which doubles as a kind of spiritual sequel and answer to Frozen’s “Love Is an Open Door.”

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Oh, and here’s the best part if you like to sing along: The deluxe soundtrack contains with instrumental — a.k.a. karaoke — versions of all the songs.

Let go of the idea that there’s a new “Let It Go” on the Frozen 2 soundtrack

The centerpiece of the new soundtrack, however, is clearly meant to be “Into the Unknown.” It’s the showcase song for Broadway superstar Idina Menzel, who plays, Elsa. But is it the diva power number that fans of “Let It Go” have been wanting?

Eh. I’m leaning toward “no.”

Menzel earned her superstar rep for belting into the stratosphere on songs like Wicked’s “Defying Gravity” and Frozen’s “Let It Go,” and Frozen 2’s “Into the Unknown” seems to take off the musical gloves and let her fling high notes left and right as Elsa wrestles with restlessness and the call of a new adventure. She’s joined in the chorus by Norwegian pop artist Aurora, who voices an eerie incorporeal voice that’s been summoning Elsa out into the snowy wilderness.

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Audio ads for the Frozen 2 soundtrack all feature Menzel’s version of the song, but if that version itself isn’t far enough over the top, the album also sports a cover from Panic! At the Disco, with frontman Brendon Urie repeatedly shrieking the central motif at the very top of his — and humanity’s — vocal range.

It’s all very showy and attention-grabbing. But that doesn’t make it the album’s best song.

As a musical theater nerd, I personally get annoyed whenever lyrics feel repetitive or time-biding — that is, when they seem to exist just to fill out a line, or when they say something generically relatable but not character-specific. The Frozen songwriting team usually avoids those traps. (Robert Lopez co-created Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon, while he and Anderson-Lopez also did songs for Disney’s Coco and the Broadway version of Frozen.) But “Into the Unknown” has a few lyrics that fall flat, like “some look for trouble while others don’t” and “Ignore your whispers, which I wish would go away.” It’s fine, but compared to the tight, character-building lyrics of “Let It Go” — “a kingdom of isolation and it looks like I’m the queen” — it’s not nearly as satisfying.

The other detail that makes “Into the Unknown” less effective for me is that it’s overly packed with drama. If we assess how well the Frozen movies function within the constraints of the musical theater genre — where songs must drive plot and/or provide important character revelations — then “Into the Unknown,” like “Let It Go,” is a “want song.” It arrives early in the plot and reveals the heroine’s inner desire for something new, thus providing the motive that will propel the rest of the storyline. But “Into the Unknown” gives away too much, too early, both structurally and theatrically. High notes spell out drama, which is why “Let It Go” really only has one good one. Too many high notes too often, and the drama becomes less effective.

Think of “Into the Unknown” in terms of the function it serves in Frozen 2’s overall story. In fact, let’s consider in the context of a Broadway show that the first Frozen film has a lot in common with, Wicked.

In Wicked, the want song — the equivalent to Frozen 2’s “Into the Unknown” — is “The Wizard and I.” It’s followed by the big exciting number that closes the first act, “Defying Gravity.” And then later, there’s the “eleven o’clock number”: the late-in-the-second-act showstopper that marks as a crucial character turning point or climax. In Wicked, that’s “No Good Deed.” Each of these songs has one or two dramatic points, but they work because they aren’t all high-intensity all the time.

Perhaps because an animated movie like Frozen 2 doesn’t have as much room to steadily build drama through multiple songs, it seems to have overloaded on drama in one big early number with “Into the Unknown.” But that makes the song less exciting for me than it may be for others.

At first, my pick for best song went to Kristoff’s solo number, “Lost in the Woods” — but upon reflection, I think I was just glad Jonathan Groff finally got a chance to really sing in a Frozen movie. (He’s probably best known now for Manhunter, but before that, he found fame originating Broadway roles in Spring Awakening and Hamilton.) After a few listens, “Lost in the Woods” starts to feel too generic. Any character could sing these lyrics at any time — which is great if you want a song to be a pop hit, but disappointing as a character-builder for Kristoff. It doesn’t help that the out-of-place ’80s rock instrumentation gives the song an REO Speedwagon-y, Peter Cetera ”Glory of Love”-era vibe. Nothing against the Speedwagon, but it doesn’t quite mesh with Kristoff’s 19th-century Norwegian ice-harvester aesthetic.

Basically, I want good musical scores to give me specific, interesting character development through interesting songs that propel the plot — high notes optional. That’s why “I Seek the Truth,” Anna and Elsa’s duet from the outtakes section of the deluxe edition, is probably the Frozen 2 song I’d take with me to a desert island. It’s a beautiful duet with insights into both characters, and it’s one of the more complex songs in the score. (In general, the “outtake” songs are collectively the score’s strongest group of songs, and I wish the movie had had room for them!)

But if the outtakes don’t count, then after many listens, I’ve decided that the best song from the Frozen 2 score is “Show Yourself,” which Elsa sings when she apparently reaches the end of her quest and locates the source of the “disembodied voice” she’s been following. Menzel and Wood get a gorgeous duet in this number, with Wood appearing to attach a definable spirit to the incorporeal voice performed by Aurora in the earlier “Into the Unknown.”

“Show Yourself” also has plenty of suspense and excitement, but at this point in the story, that intensity level feels more earned than it does on “Into the Unknown,” and the duet is thrilling.

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Of course, we don’t yet know which song works best in the movie itself. Perhaps, in context, Josh Gad’s songs as Olaf the Snowman will win the day! One thing is a given, however: This weekend, movie theaters will be full of Frozen fans wanting to experience these songs in their full glory. And I’ll be right there with them, heading into the mostly known experience of Frozen 2.

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shanedakotamuir · 5 years

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The Frozen 2 soundtrack: a guide to the best songs

Disney

The best songs from Frozen 2 are the ones that didn’t make it into the movie. Sorry, “Into the Unknown.”

So does the new Frozen 2 soundtrack hold up to all that hype? Yeah, pretty much.

The Frozen 2 soundtrack has just seven new songs — plus a reprise, several covers, and a few “outtakes.” But there’s a lot to explore.

youtube

Oh, and here’s the best part if you like to sing along: The deluxe soundtrack contains with instrumental — a.k.a. karaoke — versions of all the songs.

Let go of the idea that there’s a new “Let It Go” on the Frozen 2 soundtrack

Eh. I’m leaning toward “no.”

youtube

It’s all very showy and attention-grabbing. But that doesn’t make it the album’s best song.

youtube

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2OwJXZI

#Vox - All

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corneliusreignallen · 5 years

Text

The Frozen 2 soundtrack: a guide to the best songs

Disney

The best songs from Frozen 2 are the ones that didn’t make it into the movie. Sorry, “Into the Unknown.”

So does the new Frozen 2 soundtrack hold up to all that hype? Yeah, pretty much.

The Frozen 2 soundtrack has just seven new songs — plus a reprise, several covers, and a few “outtakes.” But there’s a lot to explore.

youtube

Oh, and here’s the best part if you like to sing along: The deluxe soundtrack contains with instrumental — a.k.a. karaoke — versions of all the songs.

Let go of the idea that there’s a new “Let It Go” on the Frozen 2 soundtrack

Eh. I’m leaning toward “no.”

youtube

It’s all very showy and attention-grabbing. But that doesn’t make it the album’s best song.

youtube

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2OwJXZI

#Vox - All

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gracieyvonnehunter · 5 years

Text

The Frozen 2 soundtrack: a guide to the best songs

Disney

The best songs from Frozen 2 are the ones that didn’t make it into the movie. Sorry, “Into the Unknown.”

So does the new Frozen 2 soundtrack hold up to all that hype? Yeah, pretty much.

The Frozen 2 soundtrack has just seven new songs — plus a reprise, several covers, and a few “outtakes.” But there’s a lot to explore.

youtube

Oh, and here’s the best part if you like to sing along: The deluxe soundtrack contains with instrumental — a.k.a. karaoke — versions of all the songs.

Let go of the idea that there’s a new “Let It Go” on the Frozen 2 soundtrack

Eh. I’m leaning toward “no.”

youtube

It’s all very showy and attention-grabbing. But that doesn’t make it the album’s best song.

youtube

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2OwJXZI

#Vox - All

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nonsubstantial · 7 years

Text

EVERY ALBUM I LOVED FROM 2016

alright. long list, but if you’re looking for music recommendations, save this somewhere. and fyi, these aren’t just albums I simply liked. every album on this list I loved, meaning that I probably listened to it at least 5 times, and that it had some special significance to me as a listener. I’ll start with the best first, and go roughly in order of importance. Lastly, the best way to know what you’ll like is just to listen, so I linked one song from each.

1. Danny Brown - Atrocity Exhibition

10 out of 10. My favorite album of 2016, and all time. Danny Brown became a pretty prolific name amongst people discussing experimental hip hop following his 2012 album, XXX, which focused on themes drug abuse, poverty, and the music industry... but with a uniquely personal and self reflective take. What interested me most was that his commentary on working with music could be abstracted into analysis of all forms of art, and I feel like that refreshingly analytical perspective, interspersing crude humour and bleak narratives, was what cemented the album as the classic it is today. His new album though, surpassed even that. The narrative depth here is on another fucking level. Everything I just praised XXX for is also true of Atrocity Exhibition, but instead of being drawn to certain standout moments on the album (like I was with XXX), literally the entire album feels like a standout moment. Every song carries a unique tone and a deep story worthy of intense investigation, and each is different and memorable, even compared to the other songs on the album. That variety means that no matter what mood I’m in, I can usually find some emotional payoff in at least one track. However, the album as a whole is not without a narrative thread. And that thread is Danny Brown himself. XXX invited us the see the humanity behind his music, and even if one couldn’t agree with or appreciate every set of bars, it still allowed for appreciation of Danny Brown as a fellow human being; to find value in learning from his flaws, which he was never shy about. He went as far as to ask in a chorus “what the fuck I got to lie for?”. His personality is explored to an even greater, and even more authentic extent on Atrocity Exhibition. Not to mention that if you appreciate experimental and meticulous production, this album delivers what feels like the contemporary payoff of the entire music industry’s sound refinement efforts over the past few decades. Every song is a fucking treat, genre blending ear candy for people who seek a wide variety of sound and style. A type of detail in its creation that still pays off even on my (presumably) 100th listen. Barring the specifics of what makes each individual song so great, in my honest opinion, it doesn’t get any better than this.

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2. The Drones - Feelin Kinda Free

This album goes hard as hell. In the way that Danny Brown’s album reflects upon the self, this album reflects upon society, and easily delivers more intelligent and elegiac political commentary than I could ever imagine writing into music. Taman Shud (linked) has got to be my favorite song of the entire year, addressing sensationalism in politics and media by using a notably Australian example to show how generalizing nuanced issues for the sake of appealing to the greatest audience of laypeople surrenders authenticity and impedes efforts of finding suitably nuanced solutions to those problems... and the rest of the album isn’t subdued either. I need also to mention the song Shut Down SETI, because not only does it reflect exactly why my massive childhood interest in extraterrestrials eventually tapered out, but I think that many things can be explained as the product of subtle egotism, and it’s important to try to analyze our behavior through that lens. The instrumentation is nice change of pace for this band, since their iconic blues guitar lead really met its apex on their 2013 album, I See Seaweed, and fortunately, the band was diligent enough to make it sound like they’ve always been producing this kind of eccentric noise rock.

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3. Street Sects - End Position

Contender for the most fucked up album on this list. It’s a roller coaster of horror and industrial noise, but it’s not without something deep to say. I think it ends up being profound in the way that it combines horror at the implicit ideological failings of society with horror at the explicit violence committed by people in society who feel forsaken. I don’t think I’ve ever started listening to this album and not felt compelled to keep listening for as long as possible. The wide variety of samples and noises keep it constantly interesting, and the tone of both those samples and the vocal performances flow as water from one idea to the next. In fact, every song bleeds into the next, and the album’s tension never slows down completely until about halfway through the last song, where its roller coaster finally screeches to a halt.

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4. Kero Kero Bonito - Bonito Generation

The most personally uplifting album on this list. One of Kero Kero Bonito’s previous songs, Sick Beat, is notable for being the greatest video gamer anthem ever produced, but unfortunately I felt like the rest of that first album lacked the kind of depth that the single had. All of the songs on their newest album, however, are memorable and thought provoking in the same way that Sick Beat was. Their oldest song that made it onto this project, Picture This, is about how the ability to take photos and selfies has become fundamental to our understandings of ourselves and others. Every word of that song is massively important, and manages to do justice to both the intimacy of creating art and the delight in being able to share it. One other song, Graduation, is literally about graduating from college, and holy shit if it didn’t perfectly encapsulate my experience of receiving my undergrad degree, the very same semester that the song came out, complete with both my enthusiasm and disillusionment towards the college experience!! I also can’t stop gaily repeating the line from Break, where the singer, Sarah Midori Perry, casually croons “I’ve got a smile on my face. cause now I’m taking a break” ... every time I, you know, take a break. I honestly can’t recommend this enough. Every song is deeply memorable, motivating, and motivated in its own intent: to portray life as beautiful and vibrant.

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while 1-4 are masterpieces that have affected me on a deeply personal level, 5-11 I would still consider artistic successes that excel in almost every way. I loved every song on these albums and highly encourage everyone to listen:

5. Death Grips - Bottomless Pit

6. Lemon Demon - Spirit Phone

7. Run The Jewels - Run The Jewels 3

8. Weezer - The White Album

9. Vektor - Terminal Redux

10. Ştiu Nu Ştiu - Fake End

11. Fire! - She Sleeps, She Sleeps

the rest of this list I still highly enjoyed and would still highly recommend. while I don’t think they’re as profound as 1-11, I have consistently enjoyed them and I hope to relisten to them many more times:

12. Deerhoof - The Magic

13. G.L.O.S.S. - TRANS DAY OF REVENGE

14. case/lang/viers - case/lang/viers

15. Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

16. Uyama Hiroto - freeform jazz

17. Show Me The Body - Body War

18. Cult Of Luna and Julie Christmas - Mariner

19. Frankie Cosmos - Next Thing

20. Crying - Beyond the Fleeting Gales

21. Young Thug - Slime Season 3

22. The Body - No One Deserves Happiness

23. Childish Gambino - “Awaken, My Love!”

24. Blank Banshee - MEGA

25. Princess nokia - 1992

26. Nine Inch Nails - Not The Actual Events

27. Katie Dey - Flood Network

28. The Dillinger Escape Plan - Dissociation

29. A Tribe Called Quest - We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service

30. The Dear Hunter - Act V: Hymns With The Devil In Confessional

31. Kendrick Lamar - Untitled Unmastered.

32. Beyoncé - Lemonade

33. Jerry Paper - Toon Time Raw!

34. The Avalanches - Wildflower

35. KRIMEWATCH - demo

36. Xenia Rubinos - Black Terry Cat

37. Ulcerate - Shrines of Paralysis

38. The Caretaker - Everywhere at the end of time

#i'll probably reblog this a couple of times #music recommendation #albums #2016 #SAVE AND SHARE IF YOU'RE LOOKING FOR NEW MUSIC

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glittergummicandypeach · 4 years

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This is how Brian Baker ended up in Bad Religion over 25 years ago

If there was a punk-rock hall of fame, Bad Religion would certainly belong in it. The long-running California punk outfit have maintained a positive agenda while creating some classic songs. But if the band drove up to the front door of said punk building, they’d probably look through the glass door, look at each other and then drive away. Their reasons for being are about the visceral and emotional. Definitely not the realm of the self-aggrandizing. That point comes through loud and clear in Do What You Want, the new band biography written by Jim Ruland and the band. Below, Alternative Press is running an excerpt from the book.

This selection from Do What You Want focuses on Brian Baker joining the ranks of Bad Religion in 1994. Baker (known for his reputation in the Washington, D.C., punk and hardcore scenes) turned down an offer to join R.E.M. to play guitar with the SoCal punk legends.

Read more: Watch Bad Religion’s Brian Baker stir the pot making “Seeing Red” sauce

The night of Brett’s last show with Bad Religion, his replacement watched from the audience. Brian Baker was already part of the Epitaph family when he was invited to join Bad Religion. Brett had put out a record by Brian’s band, Dag Nasty, in 1992. In fact, Jay recalled that Brian started lobbying for a spot in Bad Religion while he was recording with Epitaph. “He told me, ‘If Hetson ever leaves, call me.’ He said to Hetson, ‘If Brett ever leaves, call me.’ It was really funny because when Brett left, both me and Hetson were like, ‘Brian wants the job.’”

Of course, Brian wasn’t as well known for his guitar work with Dag Nasty as he was for being one of the founding members of what was arguably the most important hardcore band to ever plug in an amplifier: Minor Threat.

Brian started playing guitar when he was eight years old. He learned to play at the same time as his best friend, Michael Hampton, another influential guitar player in the D.C. hardcore scene, who would go on to play in State of Alert with Henry Rollins and the Faith with Ian MacKaye’s brother Alec. When Brian was twelve, he joined his first band, Silent Thunder, which basically just played KISS and Aerosmith covers in the drummer’s basement. “I think we might have played one show,” Brian said, “but I know we had T-shirts!”

Read more: Here are 10 of the most influential bands of hardcore

The Bakers moved to Michigan, where Brian formed a band called Hameron with some other kids at his school. This time it was Cheap Trick and Ted Nugent covers. When Carlos Santana came to town, the drummer’s dad secured backstage passes for his son, who brought Brian along. Before the show, they were given a tour of the entire backstage area where Brian made his presence felt by picking up one of Santana’s guitars and jamming on it. Instead of being escorted out of the building, the crew brought Brian an amp and encouraged him to keep playing. That would be the highlight of any kid’s night, but this was just the warm-up. Right before the second encore, one of the guitar techs slung a Les Paul guitar around Brian’s neck and pushed him out onstage. Brian ended up playing a couple songs with Carlos Santana in front of twenty-five thousand people.

However, Brian’s newfound fame in Michigan was destined to be short-lived because not long afterward he moved back to Washington, D.C., where all his friends were now into punk rock. For most kids, listening to punk made you an outcast, but at Georgetown Day School punk was cool. The first time Brian saw real punks outside of his circle of friends was when he saw the Cramps play at the Ontario Theatre on August 21, 1980. “I felt a visceral tingle,” he said. “I felt like I was on fire.”

After the Teen Idles broke up, vocalist Ian MacKaye and drummer Jeff Nelson started a new band. They invited Lyle Preslar to play guitar, and recruited Brian to play bass. This was approximately the same time that Bad Religion was forming on the other side of the country. Like his future bandmate Jay Bentley, Brian was a guitar player who was asked to switch instruments for the sake of the band. Brian was only fifteen years old, by far the youngest member of the band.

Read more: Bad Religion’s Brian Baker found his new band’s singer in a catering line

“I’d never played bass,” Brian said. “I was a guitar player. I suppose I was asked to join the band because there was no one else available who had an instrument and wasn’t already in a band. Our scene was so small. I went to high school with the guitar player who was two grades above me. I played bass because I was the last one there. I started playing chords on it. They told me, ‘No, you play one note at a time.’”

Most scenes are defined by one or two bands, but the D.C. punk community was exceptionally vital with a large number of bands for such a small city. Dischord, the label MacKaye co-owns with Jeff Nelson, was the epicenter for the scene, but it sometimes seemed as if everyone Brian knew was making music.

“I was part of this group of twenty or thirty people in Washington, D.C., and everyone had a band,” Brian said. “That whole experience was really profound. I was in Minor Threat and my friends were in the Faith. These guys were in Void and these guys were in Marginal Man. Everyone was in their own band. Someone would play a show and we’d all go watch. Our band would play and they’d come watch us. It was all the same. Minor Threat would play and it would be the same thing if Government Issue were playing. The same people would go to both shows. The only difference was who was onstage.”

Read more: Bad Religion unboxing: Tours they’d rather forget, interviews they walked out of

Much like the L.A. scene, each band had its own distinct sound, but it was Minor Threat that broke out of the pack and rose to prominence in D.C. and beyond. As the youngest member, Brian downplayed his contribution to the band. “I could play and Lyle could play,” Brian said. “I mean we knew how to play our instruments, but we had the best drummer in town and Ian wrote great songs.”

With a mix of sledgehammer riffs and howling intensity, Minor Threat set the bar for hardcore punk. Musically, Minor Threat made other bands sound tame in comparison, but the clarity and coherence of MacKaye’s message was never compromised.

[Photo: Thorsten Martin-Edigshaus]

Although it didn’t feel like it at the time, being in Minor Threat was a watershed moment that set the stage for the rest of Brian’s career. “It was a classic case of right place, right time,” Brian said. “It was a lightning-in-a-bottle situation. My high school band that jammed at the guitar player’s mom’s house after school got to be one of the most influential punk rock bands ever. And always will be.”

After Minor Threat broke up, Brian collaborated with Glenn Danzig in the infant stages of what would become Samhain, though Brian left the group before they played their first show. Brian also did a stint in the Meatmen while “sort of ” going to college before leaving school for good and forming Dag Nasty in 1985. After Dag Nasty broke up in 1988, Brian went on to join Junkyard, an L.A. hard rock band. They did two records for Geffen and toured extensively in the United States before being dropped in 1992. Junkyard fizzled out soon after that and Brian moved on to his next project.

Read more: Bad Religion and Alkaline Trio are cancelling their tour so fans can get refunds

Next, he started a band called Careless, an alternative rock band with what Brian described as “a weird crossover of styles.” Major labels were throwing around stupid amounts of money in the hopes of signing an alternative act that could deliver a hit. “We were Weezer before Weezer,” Brian said. “Not metal. Not grunge. Whatever the fuck we were. The problem was whatever the fuck we were didn’t get a record deal.” The band was very close to being signed—they had a publishing deal with Virgin—but it didn’t happen.

Brian decided to take a hiatus from playing music at this point. “I realized I’d been in a band consistently for fourteen years,” Brian said. “It was time to step back for a bit and recharge my batteries.” He started working full time at Cole Rehearsal Studios in Hollywood. Cole was a pro-am studio, meaning they rented to professionals and amateurs alike. A band like Danzig might have a practice space locked out for a month while a bunch of kids just off the bus from Tulsa rented the room right next to it by the hour.

“It was entertaining,” Brian said. “I was basically the front-of-house guy. When you came into Cole, I was the guy at the front desk. ‘You’re going to be in B. Your mics are set up, and if you need anything let me know.’ I was basically a concierge. I think it helped that people would recognize me. ‘Oh my god you’re Brian from Minor Threat!’ So that was interesting to them.”

Read more: Why you’re not punk if you don’t support BLM, according to Brett Gurewitz

Brian was a talented guitar player with an affable personality who was willing to do whatever was necessary to assist. It didn’t matter if you were on your way up or crashing back down to earth, Brian had been there and was willing to lend a hand. “I was a kind of goodwill ambassador,” Brian said. “Lending my experience and trying to be funny and lightening up the process. That’s what I did.”

At Cole, Brian struck up a friendship with Tommy Stinson of the Replacements, who’d formed a new band called Bash & Pop and was looking to recruit some musicians for a follow-up album. Stinson asked Brian to join his band, and for a while they wrote music and played shows together in L.A. Around this time Brian met Scott Litt, who was working with Juliana Hatfield. Litt enlisted Brian’s help during preproduction of Hatfield’s new record. It turned out that Litt had produced a number of R.E.M.’s albums, and he was so impressed with Brian he introduced him to the R.E.M. camp. The rockers from Athens, Georgia, were looking for a fill-in guitar player for their next tour.

Brian met with Michael Stipe and, like a lot of tryouts Brian had been on, the subject turned to Minor Threat. It helped that Brian was a really good guitar player, but Stipe and MacKaye were also friends, and Brian discovered he and Stipe knew a lot of the same people. Brian formally tried out and was offered the gig.

Read more: ‘Tony Hawk’s Pro-Skater 1 + 2’ adds 30 new songs to soundtrack

“I was still working at Cole and life was looking good when I got a conference call from Greg Hetson and Greg Graffin asking if I wanted to try out for Bad Religion. They had a new record coming out and they were touring immediately. They needed someone right now and they didn’t want some random person. Because of Brett’s importance in the band, they felt they needed someone with a pedigree.”

In a matter of days, Brian went from being a guy who worked at a rent-by-the-hour practice space to being offered gigs in R.E.M. and Bad Religion. Brian loved Bad Religion; they were his favorite West Coast punk rock band. “When I bought my first Bad Religion record, I got How Could Hell Be Any Worse? and Black Flag’s Jealous Again the same day. I really liked ‘We’re Only Gonna Die.’ I thought that Black Flag were more powerful, but I preferred the singing in Bad Religion.”

Despite his affection for the band, he felt the honorable thing to do was tell Greg that he’d already accepted an offer to tour with R.E.M. Greg countered by matching the salary that R.E.M. was going to pay him and offering him a chance to become a full member of the band. That made the prospect of turning down R.E.M. much easier.

Read more: 10 Vans collabs from some of your favorite bands

“It meant being part of a team and not an outside guy,” Brian explained. “It meant being an equal partner in what we decided to do and where we decided to go. In some camps you can be hired for a tour and let go. You’re not pretty anymore or someone’s wife is looking at you the wrong way. There are all kinds of things that can happen. But being a member of the band you’re a partner. You have security you don’t have as a side player.”

In addition, he already knew several members of the band. He was acquainted with Brett and Jay from Epitaph when Dag Nasty’s Four on the Floor came out, and he knew Hetson from around town. “Hetson was a local Lothario barfly like me,” Brian said. “He was someone I’d see at bars. We knew each other from Circle Jerks and Minor Threat. He was a punk icon. I was a punk icon. We’d go to bars and be punk icons.”

Brian’s audition took place at Cole while Greg was in town, and he played with the full band. It was something of a foregone conclusion that he would get the gig because they didn’t bring anyone else in for a tryout. It was Brian’s job to lose.

“It was great,” Brian said. “They found out I’m a real person. I’m not just this myth.”

After the audition, he was officially offered the gig. Brian would now get his first taste of Bad Religion’s bicoastal arrangement. In L.A., he rehearsed with Jay, Hetson, and Bobby—or whoever was available. Then he flew out to Ithaca to work with Greg on some songs. The next time he would play with the entire band would be at his first Bad Religion gig for a one-off show in Germany. The airline lost one of the two guitars that he’d brought, which made his first trip to the European continent more nerve-wracking than it needed to be.

Read more: Minor Threat, Bad Brains and the DC hardcore scene examined in new documentary

“I flew to Europe to play the Bizarre Festival with Bad Religion,” Brian said. “My first show was a forty-five-minute set at a big European festival with sixty thousand people. I walked out on the stage to play with Greg and the whole band for the first time, and I’d never played in front of that many people ever. It was insane. It was absolutely insane.”

A number of Epitaph bands were playing the festival, and Brett watched Brian’s debut from the soundboard. It was like the Epitaph Summer Nationals only this time Brian and Brett had traded places.

Brian’s performance at the Bizarre Festival changed the narrative from despair over Brett’s departure to excitement about Brian’s arrival. Minor Threat had never played in Europe, so Brian joining Bad Religion was a very big deal over there. Bad Religion received considerable media attention and a lot of it centered on Minor Threat.

Read more: Here are 20 punk and metal songs you can easily learn on guitar

“Publicly,” Jay explained, “when someone leaves the band and people want to know what happened, my answer is, ‘You’ll have to ask him.’ But when someone like Brett leaves and you’ve lost one of your songwriters, you can’t just go, ‘You’ll have to talk to him’ because that’s not going to fly. So having someone like Brian Baker from Minor Threat helped get us out of that awkward conversation. ‘What happened? Here’s Brian!’ It buffered the situation without completely ignoring that we’d lost a major player in our band by replacing him with another major player.”

The festival also opened Brian’s eyes about how Bad Religion was perceived in Europe. “I knew Bad Religion was a successful band. I knew they were a punk band, but I did not know they were a big band. I knew they played the Hollywood Palladium in L.A. and they could play Roseland in New York. I thought of them as nowhere near as big as the Offspring or Green Day, but at that Replacements, Soul Asylum level. Then I went to Germany and was like Jesus Christ. I had no concept.”

The Bizarre Festival, though intense, was just a warm-up. The moment Brian got off the stage, he had less than a month to prepare for what they were calling the Ain’t Life a Mystery Tour, which would take them to eleven European countries in five weeks.

Read more: NOFX and Frank Turner want the world to shut up about what’s not punk

Brian asked for help and he turned to an unlikely person: Brett Gurewitz. Brian didn’t have copies of Bad Religion’s back catalog, which he needed so he could learn the songs. Brian had avoided getting involved in the dispute between Brett and the band, and the two remained on good terms. That didn’t stop Brett from issuing Brian a warning: “Those guys are crazy. You won’t last three months.”

Stranger Than Fiction was released in early September, a few weeks before the European tour. KROQ put “Infected” into heavy rotation despite Atlantic pushing “21st Century (Digital Boy)” as the first single from the album. It was a less than ideal situation to have the most powerful rock and roll radio station playing one song while the record label promoted another. Neither song gained the momentum necessary to break out nationally, and it had a negative impact on sales.

Before Brett’s departure Bad Religion shot two videos for the album, both by Gore Verbinski. “Stranger Than Fiction” features a random cast of characters who have assembled for a book burning under a bridge in downtown L.A. The exceptionally strange video for “21st Century (Digital Boy)” required covering the band members with blue paint and submerging them in a pool of green slime, which would act as a liquid green screen. “Unfortunately,” Brett recalled, “the idea didn’t work and it looked like we were drowning in weird blue liquid.” Life isn’t always a mystery, but the video certainly is.

Read more: Here are 10 punk bands who made synths and electronics rock hard

In late September, the band embarked on its first European tour without Brett. The tour started in France and proceeded to Spain. In San Sebastian, at a show at Discoteca Erne, calamity struck. When the band entered through the ground floor of the building, they assumed that the structure was being renovated because portions of the second story, where the club was located, were supported with jacks. Bad Religion had been touring Europe for six consecutive years, and they’d performed in plenty of dodgy venues. From rundown squats to buildings that weren’t up to code, the band had grown accustomed to playing in places that would have been shut down in the United States.

The band opened up with “Recipe for Hate” and the fans immediately started jumping around and dancing to the music. Right at the song’s climax, the left side of the floor suddenly collapsed. “We started playing the show,” Greg recalled, “and a big hole opened up in front of me on the dance floor and bodies started falling into the hole.” The people who had been standing in front of the stage disappeared into the space where the floor had been.

Bad Religion stopped playing and the people on the right side of the dance floor shouted in protest, unaware of what had happened. But the screams of those who had fallen or were in danger of falling drowned them out. A huge cloud of dust rose from the lower level and people continued to tumble into the pit.

Read more: Quiz: How well do you know your punk-rock history?

The band was quickly ushered off the stage and out of the venue while fans and club personnel attended to those who had been injured. The hole that had opened up in front of the stage was enormous: approximately seventy feet long by forty feet wide and between fifteen and twenty feet deep. Hundreds of fans fell into the chasm created by the collapse. Between the lights and the dust and the screams from below it resembled a scene out of a disaster movie. It took twenty minutes for the first ambulance to arrive and two hours to get everyone who’d been hurt out of harm’s way. Although hundreds had been injured, thankfully there were no fatalities.

The band had questions and demanded answers. What happened? Had the show been oversold? Did the venue have the proper permits? The disco’s promoters insisted the venue had held events in the recent past with 3,500 and 4,000 guests. By the band’s count, fewer than three thousand people had come through the door to see Bad Religion. In retrospect, the presence of temporary jacks to help support the joists was a huge red flag that the structure was unsound and the venue unsafe.

Brian Baker and Jay Bentley [Photo: Jim Wright]

Bad Religion’s soundman, Ronnie Kimball, took photos of the scene to document the damage, but on his way out of the venue, his camera was confiscated and the images were lost. Neither the club’s owners nor the local police wanted word to get out about what had happened, and they were eager to see Bad Religion leave San Sebastian.

Read more: Bad Religion mark 40 years with autobiography

Much to the band’s surprise, the incident received minimal media coverage in the weeks that followed. Less than two weeks later, an incident occurred at a Pink Floyd concert in London where a section of the bleachers collapsed. Nearly one hundred fans fell but no one was hurt. This story generated major headlines across the United States and Europe. The silence out of Spain struck Bad Religion as odd.

“To this day,” Greg said, “when we go to Spain, people tell us, ‘I was there. I was at that show.’ We get asked about it all the time.”

It’s a minor miracle that the show will go down in history as one of Bad Religion’s shortest performances and not its deadliest. Although the tragedy was widely known in Europe, few fans in the United States were aware of it until the band discussed the incident in their newsletter, The Bad Times, which enjoyed an intermittent eleven-issue run from 1994 until 2001.

Although the band, the crew, and the majority of the fans escaped unscathed, Bad Religion had experienced enough upheavals over the last few months, and they were eager to leave behind the feeling of the ground giving way beneath their feet.

The post This is how Brian Baker ended up in Bad Religion over 25 years ago appeared first on Alternative Press.

This content was originally published here.

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corneliuscai-blog · 7 years

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rockandrollportlandor · 8 years

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GOOD CHEER RECORDS HOLIDAY SHOWCASE

I've expressed before my affection for Good Cheer Records, a local label that emerged from the DIY all ages indie rock scene in Portland, but whose personnel have connections and influence in the mainstream of local and national indie music. Geek rockerMo Troper, also a writer for the Portland Mercury (cleverly disguised as Morgan Troper), even scored the coveted Pitchfork review, something which has eluded many of the best bands in town at the moment. Troper, the label's co-founder with Blake Hickman, has vanished to Los Angeles, replaced by Maya Stoner, a performer in several GC bands. Kyle Bates' project Drowse has seen praise from Vice's Noisey blog and SPIN Magazine, while another one of the label's star acts, Little Star, have gotten great reviews all over the place, including here on ROCK AND ROLL PORTLAND, OR. My favorite Good Cheer band, Mr. Bones, is sadly over, but the label, with so many other good acts, has hardly been damaged by these shifts--or a scandal that saw Jackson Walker, a member of Good Cheer band Naked Hour, excommunicated in the wake of his much younger ex-girlfriend's allegations of physical/emotional abuse. Good Cheer's bands are each unique, but broadly speaking they traffic in a hyper-sincere, heart-on-sleeve, guitar-based pop/rock that seems to trace its roots back to the 90's and early 00's, a time before MP3s--or at least a time when a single MP3 took a whole morning to download. It's the art-damaged cool and guitar abuse of bands like Pavement and Sonic Youth injected with the bloodletting melodicism of emo and the sweetness of twee-pop. It's a reminder of the truth in that old quote about Pavement being "the band that launched a thousand Weezers." These tendencies make the label's roster a refreshing departure, perhaps even a necessary counter-reaction, to the various fusions of psychedelic rock, dream pop, and blissed-out oddball party music so often seems to dominate Portlandian "pop". The earnestness of Good Cheer's bands, which the label proudly declares free of "mercenary ambition", makes a lot of what was represented by 2016's now-tainted "Mt. Portland" compilation seem positively decadent. On the other side of the coin, that comp's hip groups, often resented across the music scene for their perceived complacence and supposedly undeserved "fame", offer a sense of easy fun and trippy euphoria that the Good Cheer bands often lack--the label's name is pretty ironic, since good cheer is just about the last thing you'll get from most of these bands. Rather, they provide what Kurt Cobain ambivalently called "the comfort in being sad," the paradoxical sense of suffering as painful but life-affirming. At best that means a strangely joyous catharsis on the other side of the pain, at worst it might be written off as wallowing, navel gazing, and irksome preciousness. It's not for everybody, but it's way up my moody emo kid alley. These bands' music is about intimate feelings--even at its most bombastic, it's introverted almost as a rule, and perhaps that's how they create the feeling that they're Your Special Band, even when you're, as I was on this December Wednesday night, surrounded by a bunch of other people watching them. Good Cheer maintains the sense that their acts are the best band in your shitty hometown, who you see in some basement when you're 17, and finally, you've found a place where you fit in, finally, some people who speak for you. Perhaps the ideal place to see these bands is indeed someone's basement, but it was also fitting to see them in a major mid-sized venue like the Holocene--it was a sign that Good Cheer have emerged from a scrappy underground operation to become a major force in that vague genre known as "Portland pop". I didn't catch the entire show, which crammed six acts, successfully, into three hours, but the first group I caught was ALIEN BOY, one of the moodier bands on this moody label. Frontwoman Sonia Weber sings with the lovelorn yearning of Morrissey, but without the sass--unlike with the Moz, we never wonder if she's just milking it. The guitars hiss like TV static and twinkle like stars seen out a car window in the vanishing autumn, the rhythm section sprinting with teenage energy, paradoxically despondent and enthusiastic. At the Holocene, Weber's vocals seemed pretty off key a lot of the time, but it didn't really matter. The melody's largely in the guitars, and even the melody isn't that important. It's the mood the band creates with all of these elements that makes them such a powerful emotive unit. Even off-key, Weber's vocals are the definite not-so-secret weapon here, her contralto timber pitched perfectly in the dead center of the human vocal spectrum, neither male nor female, and therefore unusually universal in a social order still cleaved traumatically in two by a gender binary inherited from a religious order no one even believes in anymore. The group's latest EP, "Stay Alive", is a fantastic piece of gothic power pop, the fury of the instruments on tracks like "Burning II" contrasted to heart-rending effect with the vulnerability of Weber's vocals. These guys are one of my favorite acts Good Cheer has in its corner for 2017. Next up were a pair of musical twin bands, both involving Kyle Bates: DROWSE and FLOATING ROOM. Drowse is the more ambient of two, creating a storm of darkly psychedelic mood energy, as if Bates were some mad scientist attempting to isolate The Feels in their pure plasma form. Bates has been admirably candid about his struggle with clinical depression, even in his press releases, and some of his music is meant to be a literal translation of these horrifying experiences in musical form. As a person who's visited similar hells, I can definitely relate, and if you haven't, Drowse can give you a taste. It's the kind of music you bathe in almost more than listen to. I find it pretty hard to articulate with a vocabulary developed for pop songs--do yourself a favor and just listen. Undergirding the pure emotional whirlpool is a theoretical edge, at least according to Drowse's bio, which references Roland Barthes and Sarah Manguso alongside Mt. Erie and Unwound. I'm pretty sure those are uncommon influences for an indie music bio. Floating Room is the more conventional indie rock side of Bates' muse, but he still hangs in the background, and Maya Stoner writes lyrics and sings lead, while he continues his role as a sound-sculptor. Under this moniker he deals in his version of the Good Cheer house sound, described on the group's Bandcamp page as "the type of sadness felt at 4 in the morning, reserved for the heartbroken and the nervous." The guitar squalls of Drowse, almost more like weather patterns than music, wash over the structure of the songs like photo filters, providing a depth and texture that the more purely rock n roll acts on Good Cheer can't touch. Eschewing the crunchier "alt rock" guitar tones and punk rock enthusiasms of Alien Boy, Mr. Bones, or Cool American for a generously reverberated, fuzz-soaked, more plodding sound, Floating Room crosses definitively into shoegaze territory. It's gloriously eerie and ice-cold in temperature. It's the perfect soundtrack for walking through the woods in the snow, when all sounds are muffled by the falling flakes a the beautiful deathly calm seems to pervade the landscape--and it is a landscape, one you can seemingly gaze far into. On some tracks, the band is almost too delicate for this world, and the sounds seem made of glass, or icicles, ready to crash and fall the moment the temperature gets back above freezing. It's music for winter, for the low-hanging winter sun, gone as soon as it comes up, peering over the leafless treetops, secretly gathering power again once the solstice has passed. TURTLENECKED, the stage name of Harrison Smith, came up next, playing a very short set. Lanky and nervous, he paced the stage, singing R&B songs about being neurotic and narcissistic and romantic, all from electronic backing tracks played from his laptop. It was a very amusing break from all the intensity--even as he sang about heartbreak or unrequited love, Smith was funny, unlike anyone else who I saw perform that night. The stuff on his Bandcamp is mostly minimal indie pop, just electric guitar and drums, very dressed down and sparse, focused on Smith's deadpan vocals, both snarky and pathetic, but always charismatic. An older album, "Pure Plush Bone Cage", was fuzzier and noisier, but Smith's newer style, clean and clear, works better, matching the music's emotional exhibitionism. This presumably even newer R&B stuff is another pretty much genius leap forward. Turtlenecked captures the fine line between self-pity and self-aggrandizement, or rather signals its non-existence, refusing to apologize for anything--or else apologizing for everything--it doesn't really matter which--who ever believes an apology anyway? Good Cheer's brand can, as I said above, come off as overly precious, but Turtlenecked is an exception--one gets the wonderful sense that he barely even believes himself, but it's only the same sincerity of his labelmates doubling back on itself. Morrissey knows this trick well--it's basically his bread and butter. While most of the Good Cheer bands seem to work as band entities, Harrison Smith of one of the few who doesn't really need a band, or for whom any backing band would only be a backing band. He's just an entertaining and engaging enough figure in his own right--perhaps only Mo Troper, among his labelmates, rivals him for sheer personal charisma. Finally was the band I was most keen on seeing, COOL AMERICAN, named for a brand of Doritos. It's the project of singer-guitarist Nathan Tucker, a serious-looking dude who blew through the set with apparently great anxiety, often failing to sing directly into the microphone, seemingly wound tighter than a human can be wound. The band's tall bass player, Tim Howe, with his goofy grin and a santa hat borrowed from Maya Stoner, provided the necessary humorous counterpoint. Cool American's style is a pleasantly loose but melancholy power pop, filled with breezy riffs, mid-tempo grooves and smoothy shifting tempos and beats. But there's also a punk edge in it--at some point in every song, Tucker upshifts into a cathartic yelp, from which I felt sympathy pangs in my own vocal chords, before this explosion of his nervous energy receded, and he began to recharge again. Tucker's vocal range is limited, but the melody's in the guitars, spinning circles around each other, swirling and looping when they aren't exploding. Probably the most direct example of my Pavement-meets-emo description above, Cool American's unusual combination of mellowness and tension feels very much like West Coast life as I've come to know it, the cycle of putting up a veneer of "no worries" chillness and having it break down in the face of un-chill reality, only to put it up again, because fuck life, life should be better than it is. Better to try and fail to be chill and hopeful than live in cynical detachment. And for all their moodiness, the Good Cheer bands are never cynical. They don't just express heavy feelings, they believe in them, affirming their value and meaning in a society that usually runs scared from them. Unlike so much of the buzzy music in Portland, these bands never come off as careerist--you get the sense that any day one of them might break up because so-and-so had to move away for school or whatever. One could be cynical in response and argue that this sincerity is just another brand, but if so, I'll take it over the glassy-eyed smugness and empty glitz of so much of what passes for indie music these days. Long live Good Cheer.

#good cheer records #turtlenecked #alien boy #cool american #drowse #floating room #mo troper #portland music

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