Author: Andrew Earles

Second Time Around

Post author By Andrew Earles
Post date July 5, 2007

The Final Solutions are celebrating the release of their second full-length album, which marks the latest chapter in the surprising story of what is, at this writing, Memphis’ best punk-rock band.

Named after the classic Pere Ubu song, the Solutions are an amalgam of local talent that avoids taking itself too seriously yet has emerged as an amazing live act with four singles and (now) two albums, both on Goner, under its belt. The cast is as follows: vocalist Zac Ives (co-owner of Goner Records), bassist Tommy Trouble (a high school honors English teacher by day), guitarist Justice Naczycz (leader of local hard-boogie enthusiasts Secret Service), and drummer Jay Reatard (you name it, but recently blowing minds with his solo album, Blood Visions).

For the sake of chronology, let us briefly travel back to the mid-’90s, when Ives, Trouble, and Naczycz were friends at Rhodes College. Those who paid close attention to show flyers or haunted Barrister’s during this period may remember a short-lived garage band by the name of the Jack Monkeys. “Tom was in a pop-punk band called Squirrels. They sounded like the Descendents or All, and Justice and I were in the Jack Monkeys with a drummer named Pete Nasty, who hadn’t played drums outside of the music room at Rhodes. We were really bad,” Ives says.

Reatard and Ives met at an Oblivians show when the former was in his mid-teens, and Ives began to give the future Reatard rides to shows. “During one of my last years at Rhodes, we put together a band for the talent show in the cafeteria and did Oblivians covers. That was one of the first times that Jay played drums,” Ives recalls.

Following graduation, Ives took a job in Washington, D.C. He returned to Memphis in 2000 to work for Archer Malmo and to eventually join Eric Friedl in the running of Goner Records. By this time, Trouble was teaching, Naczycz was following an acoustic singer-songwriter muse, and Reatard had retired the first version of his teen punk/garage band the Reatards to focus on the Lost Sounds.

“I started circulating compilation tapes of old Scandinavian punk rock,” Ives explains. “I’ve always been into the Television Personalities, especially the song ‘Part Time Punks,’ which I obsessed over for a while.”

Ives speaks loosely of the late-’70s/early-’80s “DIY” movement spearheaded by the likes of early Simple Minds, the Desperate Bicycles, the Homosexuals, and the aforementioned Television Personalities. The aesthetic was cheap, handmade packaging, marginal playing ability, and a turn away from the careerist direction that higher-profile punk rock had taken.

The four Memphians soon came together with Ohio transplant Quinn Powers on guitar (he was with the band for just over a year) and started making a mess of local club stages. “Our shortest show was probably one song, but we don’t really like to do that,” Ives says. “We want to put on a good show for everyone.”

Band activity ebbed and flowed over the next five or so years, resulting in a respectable discography and a much-talked-about live show.

Whereas the first Final Solutions LP was a mishmash of material, recorded at different stages in different places and pulled together to fill out an album, the new Songs by Solutions was a conscious effort. “We were writing for an album on this one,” Ives says. Recorded entirely by Reatard, Songs shows a band growing, even if they’re growing in a weird way to allow for the primary concerns of each member. “Reatard’s gotten extremely good at recording and knows exactly how he wants everything to come out,” Ives explains.

Everything came out nicely, albeit in very short, buzzsaw bursts of catchy aggro-pop. “Mental Shark Bite” and “Tammy” start things off in now-standard Solutions style, with repeated, almost spoken hooks, anthemic howls, smashed drums, and jagged or furiously strummed guitar. The minimal “I’m a Lightning Bug” sounds like pop music from an alternate universe that never experienced pop music, and the astonishingly long “Little Man in My Mind” clocks in at a whopping four-and-a-half minutes, which is like the Final Solutions doing Rush’s “2112.” (Not really, but you get the point.)

“Our songs are written in practice. One of us will bring in something, and everyone else will just work on top of that,” Ives says. “Tommy is responsible for most of the songs on Songs by Solutions. He’d just bring in a riff, and Justice would lay some guitar on top. Things would go from there.”

When asked about how pop and catchiness play into it all, Ives explains, “I have to have a hook. I can’t stand it when a singer is yelling at me.” Songs by Solutions is undoubtedly hummable in its frantic fury.

Fans of incendiary, unpredictable performances and bands who deliver without taking themselves too seriously are encouraged to witness just how far the Final Solutions have come.

Tags album, Music, preview, record, Review, The Final Solutions

We Recommend We Recommend

Yuk It Up

Post author By Andrew Earles
Post date June 21, 2007

It isn’t every day that Memphis gets to experience a genuine groundbreaker within the realm of stand-up comedy. Save for Andy Kaufman, Neil Hamburger has gifted the world with the strangest career ever to grace the genre.

Starting off as a very underground spoof of Borscht Belt/pre-Vietnam-era Vegas stand-up comedians and then the entire history of awful comedians, Hamburger turned flopsweat into something funny, unique, and very strange. Over the past 13 years, he (aka Gregg Turkington) has parlayed an “either you get it or you don’t” cultish following into major motion picture appearances (Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny), a hilarious DVD (The World’s Funnyman), and seven albums (all on Drag City, Hamburger’s home for his entire career). He regularly kills on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Tom Green Live (Green’s very popular Internet show) and riffed supreme on Fox News’ Red Eye program. (Hamburger congratulated Red Eye host Greg Gutfeld on his recent Emmy Award, “even though you won it on eBay.”) Still not biting? Search YouTube for clips of Hamburger’s act.

Depending on your capacity for purposely poor timing, perpetual coughs and throat-clearings (directly into the microphone for a near-deafening impact), truly offensive material, spectacular crowd counter-heckling, and at times, simply amazing jokes, this performance is not to be missed.

Neil Hamburger, Tuesday, June 26th, 9 p.m. at the Hi-Tone Cafe

Tags Comedian, comedy, live, Neil Hamburger, preview, Review, stand-up

Music Music Features

Rebirth

Post author By Andrew Earles
Post date May 24, 2007

If you’ve heard a Cherry Valence song, chances are it was live, and chances are you remember it being a great show. Far more people saw the Raleigh, North Carolina, band tear up a stage than heard their records, as they were one of those outfits that built their reputation on touring incessantly. And having double drummers helped. In the spring of 2004, after seven years and two albums, this became tiresome for founding members Paul Siller (bass) and Cheetie Kumar (guitar), who defected, got married, and formed Birds of Avalon later that year.

Where the Cherry Valence perfected a hybrid of AC/DC, Motörhead, the MC5, and the classic-rock-by-way-of-garage-punk revivalism of the Hellacopters, Birds of Avalon are more about layers, psychedelia, and the song.

The Birds of Avalon lineup was made complete by some North Carolina associates who had spent time in bands the Weather and the Dynamite Brothers (vocalist Craig Twilley and drummer Scott Turkin, respectively), and what better way to hammer things out than to go on the road? (Some of you may have seen the nascent Birds of Avalon in action opening for Oneida last year at the Hi-Tone Café.)

When it came time to record an album, Birds of Avalon enlisted the sizable talents of North Carolina luminary Mitch Easter, the man behind R.E.M.’s best albums as well as the founder of Let’s Active and overlooked late-’70s/early-’80s power-pop legends the Sneakers. The resulting debut, Bazaar Bazaar, was released this past Tuesday on Volcom Records. Situated in between the F*cking Champs and the not-to-be-missed upstarts Red Fang, Birds of Avalon will fill out a very satisfying evening of rock when the tour makes it to Memphis Saturday night. I recently spoke with the wonderfully amiable Siller about, among other topics, the transition from the Cherry Valence to Birds of Avalon, working with Easter, and Black Oak Arkansas.

Flyer: What led to the decision to exit Cherry Valence? How do you view this band differently?

Paul Siller: This band is definitely spending more time trying to write hooks than being just simply a live experience with mediocre records. We want the live part to be a bonus. We’re trying for a bigger, wider sound, more colorful, and though “pop” can be a bad word sometimes, there’s great pop in a lot of things … early Black Flag and the Ramones, for instance. We want to make something that you can listen to five years from now, and unlike Cherry Valence, this band will cut and slice and rework one song as opposed to making a song a part of the repertoire before it’s ready. Some people, like Jay Reatard or Greg Cartwright, can write a great song in five minutes, but we need to work a little harder than that.

Band names are the first piece of information absorbed by listeners and a vital part of a band’s aesthetic presentation. Where did “Birds of Avalon” originate?

Well, I’m not really sure how we thought of it. I know that we thought long and hard on it, because it’s insanely hard to come up with a name that captures what you’re going for as a band. Still, it’s weird, because if Led Zeppelin somehow turned out to be a bad band, then their name would be considered a bad band name, but because they were a great band, the name fits and seems perfect. Also, we like the “B.O.A.” acronym.

So did it help that Black Oak Arkansas shares the acronym?

Ha, we didn’t think of that at the time, but we’re fans, and it now seems appropriate for the Memphis show.

What’s the story with Volcom?

Well, it’s the music offshoot of the major skatewear/gear manufacturer, which seemed really weird at first, but it’s four very down-to-earth guys who have been given a section of the huge Volcom building to basically do what they want. They’re young enough to be very excited about music, which is refreshing, and being on the label has drawn younger people to the shows. It’s great to add a different demographic to the crowds that I feel like I’ve been playing in front of for years.

What was it like to work with Mitch Easter?

We’ve always wanted to do an entire album with him but couldn’t afford it when Cherry Valence was on Estrus. We’ve stayed close friends with him for around 10 years. He’s got this way about him that’s really comfortable — great storyteller and a great sense of humor.

Tags Birds of Avalon, interview

Music Music Features

Torch and Twang

Post author By Andrew Earles
Post date April 12, 2007

There exist few successful refugees from the “alt-country” movement that was omnipresent in the mid-to-late ’90s. Emerging at the tail end with her 1997 debut (The Virginian), Neko Case has crafted a solo career that, at the core, fits the alt-country classification but has wildly benefited from a creative restlessness that’s found her straying outside the genre’s boundaries, especially as a member of the high-quality power-pop supergroup the New Pornographers. It also helps that Case’s solo work is simply of a much higher quality than her rootsy contemporaries. Not to be overly unkind to her genre of choice, but there’s no shortage of female Americana artists of the acutely introspective ilk, and Case sits firmly at the top of the heap.

Like many indie artists who eventually turned to more folksy, personal concerns, Case got her start in indie and punk-rock bands, specifically in a geographic locale that’s always been very friendly to such music: the Pacific Northwest. She played drums in a few bands and then entered art school across the border in Vancouver. That’s where she hooked up with a scene that would eventually result in her backing band (the Boyfriends), but more importantly, Vancouver would become an underground heavy-hitter, exporting bands such as Destroyer, Zumpano, Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, and Case herself.

While seemingly tailor-made for the alt-country label Bloodshot, The Virginian boasted such sharp songwriting that it positively stuck out from the rest of the genre. The same can be said for the superior follow-up, Furnace Room Lullaby (2000). It should be noted that Case readily shuns the term “alt-country.” And a true confirmation of her skills is the ability to transfer them to a completely different genre, as the Case-written songs in the New Pornographers’ oeuvre proves.

Blacklisted, from 2002, was Case’s last for Bloodshot, and, perhaps appropriately, it signaled a departure from obvious country-music tendencies with a widescreen torch-song feel, something that may have emerged by way of her previous tour supporting Nick Cave. Blacklisted brought Case a deserved new level of exposure. But it would be four years down the road before the next studio album, last year’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (on major-funded “indie” label Anti-). This is easily the best of the best, the place to start with Case.

Case had worked with members of the Sadies and Calexico before (and does again for Fox Confessor) but adds to the creative pool with perfect-fit collaborators Howe Gelb (of Giant Sand) and Garth Hudson (of the Band). Fox Confessor still dips into pure country aspirations yet is so sublime in its utilization of other influences (baroque pop, ’70s singer-songwriter, ’70s country rock) that it denies lazy classification.

Never coming across as a dilettante or slummer, Case seems to actually understand what makes old-school country the cultural force that it is. This is someone who has done her homework and parlayed it into a formidable body of work, as opposed to a rocker who woke up one day and decided to “be country.” With a voice almost uncanny in its perfection, justification is lent to the fact that she requires her shows to be non-smoking.

Case is at a point in her career where she has created what is largely deemed a masterwork (Fox Confessor), accepted and loved by a relatively wide demographic of music fans without succumbing to adult-contemporary brunch-music trappings like a post-modern Norah Jones (Cat Power, I’m looking at you, and now I’m looking at rocks being thrown at me in the streets) or deviating from the fiercely independent agenda that she’s tightly held onto since the beginning of her career.

Neko Case

The Hi-Tone Café

Friday, April 13th

Doors open at 8 p.m.; tickets $20

Tags Hi Tone, live, Music, Neko Case, preview

Music Music Features

AARGH!

Post author By Andrew Earles
Post date March 29, 2007

Medium-profile metal shows still come in big packages, and the one offered Wednesday, April 4th, at the New Daisy Theatre is no exception. Putting Lamb of God, Trivium, Machine Head, and Gojira together on one bill in 2007 gives the fan of extreme and semi-extreme metal a lot to chew on, despite the possible lack of crossover fandom among these four acts. There are glaring differences in sound and background among these bands, but one thing that unites them — particularly Lamb of God and Trivium — is how they illustrate the current metal landscape, which allows acts with noncommercial sounds to achieve unheard-of levels of popularity.

Certainly, 2006 was a good year for Lamb of God. The Richmond, Virginia, foursome released Sacrament, their fourth album and second for a major (Epic), last August. It clocked a respectable 200,000 units before the end of the year. (By comparison, Mastodon’s Blood Mountain did 75,000 in the same amount of time.) Not bad for a band that used to be called Burn the Priest and hasn’t significantly compromised its sound, which mates the thrash of Slayer, the antagonizing, bar-fight swagger of Pantera, and the brutality of true death metal. Those numbers may not amount to much for a mainstream rock act, but this is no mainstream rock act. Without regular radio or MTV2 play, Lamb of God have cultivated a nice grassroots fan base. And, perhaps counterintuitively, the tremors currently rattling the music industry have actually been beneficial to bands like these. With popular artists, major labels are moving such pathetic numbers due to digital piracy and the fall of the big-box retailer that they are turning some attention to the rabid fandom that follow bands such as Lamb of God, along with the similarly minded Mastodon and Shadow’s Fall (both recently signed to majors).

More than any other band on this bill, Orlando’s Trivium are probably the mid-’00s answer to ’90s-style nü-metal, which doesn’t mean they incorporate hip-hop, or wear backward baseball caps, or write lyrics that rival a high school kid’s poetry, or sound anything like Korn. Instead, they incorporate more contemporary trends into the metal template, injecting emo-style singing and slicked-up posturing into a blueprint rife with traditional thrash

Lamb of God

(think early Metallica) and death-metal elements. In the end, they’re not too far from what punk label Victory Records (Comeback Kid, Aiden) is so adept at peddling. With a lack of real underground, long-suffering integrity or a challenging, original sound, Trivium could soon be at the forefront of a movement commercially and credibly similar to the one that desecrated the word “metal” a decade ago.

Machine Head have not always been the band that they are on the newly released The Blackening. Though, in fact, Machine Head were pretty close to being this band in 1992, when their thrashy, borderline death-metal debut, Burn My Eyes, garnered a degree of attention for combining those influences with a subtle salute to the burgeoning modern-rock explosion.

Machine Head were created from the ashes of the highly respected but slightly obscure late-’80s Bay Area thrash troop Vio-Lence. Not a bad set of credentials. But sadly, for a stretch of albums in the mid-’90s, Machine Head took a detour and got lost. They were the antithesis of extreme metal, soon becoming one of the many poster children of numbskull nü-metal. Machine Head even had a massive, awful hit in 1999 with the song “From This Day.” These days, the least convincing thing to read in metal music writing is another tale of an aging band returning to its more brutal roots, but this appears to genuinely be the case with The Blackening. Take out the thick 2007 production qualities and a sissy vocal misstep or two (think poor man’s Tool), and this record manages to capture the feel of classic technical thrash circa 1990, when thrash metal got really heavy and complex, such as with mid-period albums by the highly influential Death (the band) or Slayer’s Seasons in the Abyss.

The relatively unknown and new-ish French band Gojira (the name is French for “Godzilla”) open the New Daisy show with a noise that will either confound or win over the crowds that are there to see the more established acts. With what may be the bill’s most interesting sound, Gojira’s lumbering riffage owes a debt or four to Isis and Neurosis, but the complex time changes speed up and complicate those band’s slower natures, creating a very odd form of technical death metal with serious progressive-rock overtones.

A little something for all fans of heavy and intense? Well, if your threshold for “heavy” and “intense” stops at the Deftones, Static-X, or System of a Down, you should know that this cross-section of modern metal is a step up in terms of quality and volume — so maybe it’s time to take a step up.

Tags album, Lamb of God, metal, Music, record, Review, Thrash

Music Music Features

Another Look

Post author By Andrew Earles
Post date March 22, 2007

My initial reason for attending the South By Southwest Music Festival this year had nothing to do with covering the event. I tend to stay away from these industry-heavy, sycophantic cluster-you-know-whats.

I was invited to speak on a panel called “Comedy on the Music Circuit” Friday afternoon but arrived Thursday night and hit Beerland to catch some of the showcase being held by Memphis punk labels Goner and Shattered. For the two one-man-bands of the evening, the King Louie One Man Band and Yuma Territorial Prison Guards, the sound was turned down so low that it felt like a show in someone’s living room. After saying my hellos to various Memphis people, I made my way down the street to be hit by the wall of volume offered by Jesu, who, it should be noted, were PLAYING IN A TENT. Jesu is a rare case where volume and emotional force override the need to move around on stage to ensure a good live show. When the opening chords of “Friends Are Evil” commenced, it moved the fabric walls of the venue.

Later, back at Beerland, Memphis’ Jay Reatard played to a thick crowd, and this time, the sound was at an appropriate level. Though Reatard didn’t need any help, his performance benefited from the truncated SXSW set times by making more concise his newer selection of frantic pop. Strangely, one of Reatard’s SXSW appearances was a Saturday afternoon acoustic set at the Convention Center trade-show day stage.

My panel appearance was moderated by Commercial Appeal music writer Bob Mehr. It featured comedians David Cross and Zach Galifianakis, among others. I was the token “who the hell is that?” guy, chosen due to some comically incendiary columns that I write for a couple of music magazines and for the fact that, barring any major hiccups, my 2002 comedy CD Just Farr a Laugh will be reissued by Matador Records this summer with a second CD of unreleased material and a massive booklet. Despite my unknown status, I got some good cracks in and some good promotion.

On Saturday, it became even harder to trudge through the insanely thick crowds (in the streets and in the bars). Being St. Paddy’s Day, it was a bizarre combination of drunken redneck idiots in giant green foam hats and a hipster saturation that looked as if someone airlifted Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue and dumped it into the downtown streets of Austin. I saw some uninspired sets, but an excellent one was by Pink Nasty with the Black (playing Memphis at the Buccaneer on April 12th).

It was recovery mode Sunday afternoon. The 6 Degrees of Memphis showcase scheduled for the afternoon at the Flamingo Cantina sporadically suffered from the fact that most SXSW attendees were either in cars or on planes heading home. To illustrate the difference, imagine shoulder-to-shoulder confusion reduced to a post-attack street scene from The Day After. The crowd was unfortunately sparse during Jump Back Jake’s set of convincing Tony Joe White worship but bulked up during Antenna Shoes’ wonderful performance of dense pop. Antenna Shoes is the result of Memphian/Austinite Tim Regan (pictured, above right) being surrounded by his favorite Memphis musicians, including Paul Taylor on drums, Steve Selvidge (pictured, above left) on guitar, and members of Snowglobe and the Coach and Four. The crowd flagged at times but returned in full force for Snowglobe’s closing set. Despite the good times, I relish returning to the open arms of Memphis.

Tags live, Music, Review, Six Degrees of Memphis, South by Southwest Music Festival, SXSW

Music Record Reviews

Conqueror-Jesu

Post author By Andrew Earles
Post date March 8, 2007

Justin K. Broadrick has quite the resume. He formed grindcore pioneers Napalm Death at the ripe old age of 15, then defected to lead the loudest, most pummeling industrial rock band of all time, Godflesh. Broadrick accented his main avenue with countless solo side projects, and Jesu appears to be the band in which he has finally found a superior voice. Combining the obscenely loud, chugging industrial metal of Jesu’s eponymous 2005 debut with the heavy My Bloody Valentine influence of last year’s Silver EP, Conqueror shows Broadrick as the latest to wear a particular crown: an artist who has successfully married impenetrable, pulverizing noise with transcendent pop hooks. The album opener “Conqueror,” the hair-raising “Old Year,” and the career highpoint “Medicine” provide the rare occasions when extreme metal can be considered beautiful. — Andrew EarlesGrade: A

Tags album, Jesu, Review

Music Music Features

Back From the Black

Post author By Andrew Earles
Post date February 8, 2007

The Lemonheads were a great band on many levels, but their music was always overshadowed by the outsized persona of their frontman, Evan Dando. In the band’s rise to fame in the early ’90s, Dando came to adorn the bedroom walls of the hipper teen girls, while his band seemed to perpetually be featured in Sassy‘s Cute Band Alert! Then came the much-publicized drug spiral which had Dando latching onto Oasis as a fifth wheel and admitting to the British press that he had recently smoked enough crack to temporarily destroy his voice.

The son of a dentist and a fashion model, Dando formed what would become the Lemonheads (then known as the Whelps) during his last year at the upper-crust Commonwealth High School in Boston. Following graduation and a failed stint at Skidmore College, Dando and co-founder Ben Deily changed the band’s name to the Lemonheads and released an EP titled Laughing All the Way to the Cleaners.

At this point, the band was pulling the Hüsker Dü trick of injecting post-hardcore with a lot of pop. Boston’s token independent label at the time, Taang!, took notice and signed the band. The resulting debut album, Hate Your Friends (1987), plus its follow-up, Creator (1988), found the Lemonheads taking a fantastic run at the frantic sound that Boston underground bands such as Mission of Burma and the Moving Targets were known for. In fact, Creator‘s “Clang Bang Clang” is the best Mission of Burma rewrite to come from the countless attempts of bands influenced by the Boston legends. The Lemonheads’ third album, 1989’s Lick, piled on even more pop, as well as some acoustic leanings, and attained brief notoriety for its full-throttle cover of Suzanne Vega’s hit “Luka.” Deily then lost a spotlight power struggle and departed, leaving Dando to steer the band to higher-profile pastures.

Bettina Richards, who would go on to form Chicago’s Thrill Jockey Records, was a major-label A&R rep in 1990 and got the Lemonheads signed to Atlantic a full year before the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” feeding frenzy would gorge on the indie underground, awarding scores of lesser-known bands with big advances and even bigger debts.

Lovey, released the same year, did not make the Lemonheads a household name but did showcase Dando’s further moves away from volume and speed and into country pop, culminating in a cover of his hero Gram Parson’s “Brass Buttons.” Two years later, when the band’s It’s a Shame About Ray was stacking up favorable attention in the Nirvana-saturated, alternative-friendly world of underground rock, a non-album cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” (recorded to coincide with the video release of The Graduate) would make the band, and especially the photogenic Dando, big stars. Reportedly disdainful of the track, the band nonetheless begrudgingly added it as the last track on a second version of Ray in 1992.

Dando hung out with stars (Johnny Depp), dated stars, became Gen-X’s pin-up boy (People magazine voted him one of 1993’s “Sexiest Men Alive”), and was even the negative muse for the short-lived fanzine I Hate Evan Dando. That yardstick of morality, Courtney Love, offered one of her more hilarious interview moments when she admitted to “having impure thoughts” when Dando once stayed at the Cobain household.

To say the least, the Lemonheads were poised for serious stardom with the release of 1993’s Come On Feel the Lemonheads. That didn’t happen. Despite “Into Your Arms” scratching at the back door of the Top 40, the frontman’s problems were beginning to sabotage the band’s ascent. Drugs had become an issue, and Dando’s erratic behavior, like showing up unannounced at other artists’ shows with guitar in hand and incoherent mumbles at the ready, were all working to accelerate the singer’s downward spiral. Dando went solo and toured with Epic Soundtracks in 1995 but was booed from the stage at the Glastonbury Festival for showing up several hours late. A drug meltdown in an Australian airport capped off his two-and-a-half-year lost weekend, and Dando then attempted sobriety for one final Lemonheads record, 1996’s good but neglected Car Button Cloth (with Dinosaur Jr. drummer Murph on board).

Despite going into self-imposed exile until 2001, when he launched a solo world tour (Live at the Brattle Theater/Griffith Sunset was released the same year as a tour document), Dando has been fairly active since. His first proper solo album, Baby I’m Bored, appeared in 2003, and the newly focused songwriter embarked on a couple of disparate collaborations: one with the reunited MC5 and the other as a songwriting helping hand for the Dandy Warhols. Last year, it was announced that the Lemonheads name would be used for a project fronted by Dando with, interestingly enough, Karl Alvarez and Bill Stephenson of the Descendents/All backing him up.

Signed to Vagrant Records, this revamped Lemonheads produced a self-titled album that avoids the straightforward pop-punk the line-up (and label) might have suggested in favor of a rocking, mature version of something the band could have easily done in the late ’80s. The expert hook-writing that Dando was always known for is, at least most of the time, in effect here, and the album is aided by the guest guitar wailings of longtime buddy J. Mascis (“No Backbone” and “Steve’s Boy”), though Gibby Haynes’ noise intro on the otherwise great “Rule of Three” seems like an afterthought. Considering that 1996 (the year of the last Lemonheads album) could have easily been the last peep from Dando, Lemonheads is an honorable return to form that will delight old fans and possibly win new ones who weren’t even born when Hate Your Friends was released.

Tags album, Evan Dando, Lemonheads, live music, Review

Music Music Features

Pop Prospectors

Post author By Andrew Earles
Post date February 1, 2007

Let’s say you’re Oxford Collapse in the year 2002, thus making you a newly formed band from Brooklyn, where, like today, there were no shortage of newly formed bands. You find yourself in a quagmire of innumerable local outfits naming themselves after a plural noun and mining the very last morsels of worth from the first wave of angular post-punk and ’80s electro-pop.

How do you stand out in this mess? Well, you gain some attention with two albums (2004’s Some Wilderness and 2005’s A Good Ground) of the well-crafted post-punk that your neighbors are also producing. Then, when it comes time to hit your stride, instead of ripping off the Gang of Four, Wire, or Television, you instead unveil a sound based on your true love of late-’80s/early-’90s indie rock.

The Oxford Collapse hit this stride with 2006’s focused Remember the Night Parties, an album that just might launch a resurgence of interest in un-hip gold like late-’80s Homestead outfits the Volcano Suns and Big Dipper, the heyday of New Zealand’s Flying Nun label (the Clean, the Verlaines, the Bats), and the poppier early days of Sub Pop, the very label the band now calls home.

“We all came of age during a time when you found out about more obscure or underground bands through reading fanzines, going to shows, watching movies, or hearing about stuff from older kids,” says Oxford Collapse vocalist and guitarist Michael Pace. It was all about the “thrill of the hunt.”

So true, so true. Today’s indie nerd can simply jump on the Internet, absorb some select blogs and sites, watch The O.C., and spend a month or two downloading a complete frame of reference, whereas the older fanatics had to actually enter record shops and purchase music sound-unheard after dirtying their knees (not that way, perv!) pulling out cheap LPs that wooed us simply because they were on a trusted label.

“Even though people were starting to get into America Online or whatever by the mid-’90s, there were no Internet resources for this kind of stuff, at least to my knowledge,” Pace says. “There was no instant gratification of hearing about some band and then just downloading a song to find out if you like it. The payoff was that much sweeter when you finally found that record you’d been hearing about or if you just stumbled across a diamond in the rough in the bargain bin.”

Remember the Night Parties is the perfect medicine for those who lament the lack of guitar-heavy indie greatness that was once so prevalent. Aside from ethereal album-opener “He’ll Paint While We Play,” synths are largely absent from the affair (they played a more prominent role on Oxford Collapse’s two previous full-lengths) and appropriate producer John Agnello (Jawbox, Buffalo Tom, Sonic Youth, the Hold Steady) lends his know-how to the best update of 1992 we’re likely to enjoy all year.

It might sound like I’m waxing nostalgic on sounds that have been swept under the rug, but the forgotten sonic adventurism of 15 years ago will most certainly be a hot topic in no time. I predict that reissues will be saturating the horizon and gobbled up incessantly. For this precise moment, however, Remember the Night Parties will offer a fix for those who have been known to drunkenly exhume beat-up Archers of Loaf LPs. (Take a gander at Remember‘s “Molasses.”)

Touring with Oxford Collapse is Thunderbirds Are Now!, a band incorrectly referred to as “Detroit freak-out artists” on Allmusic.com. (They got the Detroit part right.) Their songs are very short, if that qualifies as “freaking out,” and in contrast to Oxford Collapse, they do in fact create music that is heavily influenced by angular post-punk, but they do it right by making memorable, breathless girl-boy one- and two-minute blasts. Prolific since 2002, with four albums in as many years, Thunderbirds Are Now! put a loud and hyperactive spin on post-punk, which is no easy task in 2007.

Tags album, Oxford Collapse, Review