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Pink Mountaintops
I can't keep them straight. The sub-class of indie bands with some variance of mountains in their name is ever evolving, ever revolving and expanding beyond the comprehension of my mind. Take for example, Pink Mountaintops. This band was founded by Vancouver's Stephen McBean, who is also in a group called Black Mountain. As far as I know, there are no mountain goats to be found here and there are definitely not nine black alps.
McBean, in the guise of Pink Mountaintops is preparing to release his second album, titled Axis of Evol on March 7, via Jagjaguwar in the U.S. The album is a compelling seven-song collection of drifter's blues and discordant soul. Two particular tracks immediately grabbed me, perhaps at first for resemblances to Spiritualized. Certainly on the gospel drone of "Lord, Let Us Shine" and the pleading, wasted "How We Can Get Free" there is a kinship of stoned vibes between McBean and Jason Pierce, even if their methods of expressing the mood are distinct. Where Pierce succeeds with layers of overwhelming sound, McBean is just effective with a minimalist's touch. Axis of Evol is stripped bare, but it is not thin or hollow.
Pink Mountaintops begins a tour of the Western U.S. in March, including an unspecified number of SXSW gigs. According to Jagjaguwar: "Most firmly, Pink Mountaintops will be performing as part of the Jagjaguwar/Secretly Canadian SXSW showcase on Saturday, March 18th, the venue of which is to be determined, and as part of an Insound day show on Friday, March 17th, the exact time and place of which is still to be determined."
Sam Riley is Ian Curtis
Do good things happen in threes? Ray Charles, Johnny Cash...Ian Curtis. Ray, Walk The Line...Control? It's Joy Division and Ian Curtis' turn to get the big screen biopic treatment, but unlike other recent films about famous musicians, this one won't have a happy ending or a big Hollywood cast. What it will have in common is great music. And hopefully stellar acting too. Oscar nominations? We'll see.
It's been known for awhile now that Anton Corbijn, famed photographer and music director will direct Control, the film based on Deborah Curtis' (Ian's widow) book Touching From A Distance. Today more casting details were revealed and the news is good. Jude Law will not play Ian Curtis. Instead, Sam Riley will portray the doomed singer. I did some searching for Sam Riley and didn't find much. The beautiful Alexandra Maria Lara, a Romanian-born, German raised actress will portray Curtis' lover Annik Honore. Lara is also a relative newcomer to films. She had a leading role as one of Hitler's secretaries in the excellent The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich. Finally, Samantha Morton will play Deborah Curtis.
As reported by NME, New Order, neé Joy Division, will record new live sex show material for the film's soundtrack. Says Peter Hook: "We were asked to do the soundtrack to the film which I thought was a fucking great idea, for Joy Division to do the music for a Joy Division film because we've never really done a soundtrack before. The soundtrack could include new stuff. Basically Anton wants to use certain songs by Joy Division so that each song becomes a video. Like the way the 'Atmosphere' video was filmed, he wants to write videos that appear in the film."
This will be Corbijn's first film, but given his talent for capturing Curtis and Joy Division's raw beauty and sadness, he seems to be the right choice. His 1988 video for Joy Division's epic dirge "Atmosphere" remains one of my personal all time favorites. Watch the video above, courtesy of You Tube.
Quick Takes - The Chrysler
Everything keeps coming up Swedish. It seems nearly every interesting new band I hear, from The Knife, Love is All, to South Ambulance has some roots in this Nordic country. Besides the new music, I'm still fighting off a rather acute case of Abba obsession (the ubiquity of Madonna's Abba-sampling "Hung Up" isn't helping me either). And now there's The Chrysler, a band I would have guessed was from a small Midwestern American town or perhaps a bucolic little village in England. No, they're from Sweden.
The band's output measures two albums, Failures and Sparks (2003, released in the U.S. in September 2005) and Cold War Classics (2005), and three EPs. The latest, First Blood, was released in December by Flora and Fauna. Admittedly I've only heard Failures and Sparks, but the strength of this album has my curiosity piqued.
The Chrysler's songs are delicate, laden with a wistful, low-key melancholy. The instrumentation is simple yet colorful, the tempos gentle. The band uses brilliant little touches, like sighing accordions or tinkling chimes to add complexity and charm. "This Swedish group has created a landscape that is both fun and introspective, innocent and worldly..the album feels like Nick Drake meets the Byrds-Sweethearts of the Rodeo," writes Ed G. for 75 or Less. Listen for the mixing of the sad and the sweet on the delightful "When Sarah Came To Town" (MP3)".
"At its best the album has a quiet epic quality to it," Tim Sendra writes for All Music. "A sort of mellow grandeur that serves as a welcome contrast to bands like Coldplay and Snow Patrol who seem to be coming from a similar angle but overplay and overblow every last note. The Chrysler underplay every note beautifully."
The Presets - Beams
It's my guess that attention for the Presets, the Sydney duo of Julian Hamilton and Kim Moyes, will rocket from nil to near overkill in the next month, at least in New York. Modular Records, the Presets' label, along with the addVice team are promoting the band with NYC events planned in early March. These dates are just part of a national sweep, including two SXSW stops and appearances in L.A. and Miami. All of this leads up to the April U.S. release of Beams, the Presets first album.
Is Beams worth the forthcoming hype? The albums skips with such frenzy across genres, from thumping house to gloomy electroclash, that it's hard to formulate an overall opinion. Either the style jumping is a sign of impressive versatility or the lack of an identity. I suppose it depends on how well you think they pull off each style.
The album's first two singles, "Are You The One?" and "Down Down Down", showcase the Presets' metallic electro edge. Julian Hamilton's voice snarls like a possessed Tom Vek, drawing out syllables with dramatic flair. These tracks are enjoyable enough, but the album becomes truly compelling for me as it nears its end, beginning with the electrifying "I Go Hard, I Go Home".
Says Kim about the track, "We wrote this one the day after Bang Gang's first birthday party. When we weren't dancing like demons we were talking on the dancefloor about how simple club music has to be to be really pounding."
As soon as the pounding stops, the Presets head for LCD Soundsystem territory with the funky, yet forlorn "Bad Up Your Betterness" and then just because they can, end the album with the looping, easy-listening instrumental title track.
"Beams of light are very sexy - they're bright and strong," Julian Hamilton says. "Yet so fragile you can cut them with your hand. Spotlight beams always catch the bad guy, laser beams from aliens eyes burn through human flesh, beams from an archaeologist's torch light up cave paintings that haven't been viewed for five thousand years, an infra-red beam from your remote control means you don't have to get up to change the Adult Cams channel."
Flat Duo Jets
I recently watched the 1986 music documentary Athens, Georgia: Inside/Out for the first time. Ostensibly I was interested in the film to learn more about scene in Athens and see historical footage of the bands I knew well, R.E.M., Love Tractor, and the B-52's. But one featured band left an indelible impression on me and required investigation. That band was Flat Duo Jets.
When I grasped Flat Duo Jets were just two people, maniacal guitarist Dexter Romweber and a drummer simply called Crow, I had an epiphany. This is origins of The White Stripes! Romweber and Crow were down in Chapel Hill, North Carolina spewing out eviscerating blues and rockabilly long before Jack and Meg sprang out of Detroit with matching outfits and a fully baked mythology.
Update: To his credit, Jack White has acknowledged the role Flat Duo Jets played in his musical development. This Jack White quote comes from Matt's comment to this post: "I started listening to the Cramps and Flat Duo Jets," says White. "Then I discovered the old bluesmen, like Son House and Robert Johnson and I just fell in love with that. That was the big revelation for me. That's when I really started to love music."
"While their music was certainly inspired by the rock-n-roll of the 1950's, one got the feeling that nothing was calculated," Jeff Arndt wrote for Perfect Sound Forever. "There was no marketing ploy on anyone's part to capitalize on a trend or movement at the time. Dex and Crow brought the music to life with such vitality and passion that the styles did not seem antiquated in their hands. This was the genuine article. This music was alive and well."
Flat Duo Jets were born sometime in the early-to-mid `80s and didn't release their first album until 1990. "Whether they're playing frantic rockabilly, crooning "ladies' choice" romantic numbers, conjuring up pseudo-exotic instrumentals, or ripping into some old-school jazz standards," writes Mark Deming in his All Music review of Flat Duo Jets' self-titled debut. "Flat Duo Jets sound tight without the slightest veneer of slickness, and work up a sweat even when they turn down the tempos."
Five albums followed, all released on independent labels Skyclad or Norton. The band didn't sign with a major until their last album, Lucky Eye, released in 1998 by Outpost. Flat Duo Jets parted soon afterwards. Dexter continued to write music, releasing two albums under his own name, Chased By Martians (2001) and Blues That Defy My Soul (2004).
Back When NME Was Fab? Highlights From C81
I was but a nine year-old lad in 1981, listening to Randy Stonehill and Larry Norman records on the home hi-fi, so I have no personal recollections of NME's C81 compilation or even its more famous offspring, C86. The C81 comp was a cassette released by NME and Rough Trade records to, in the words of Wikipedia "Mark the first 5 years of the independent label movement in the UK record industry and Rough Trade itself, it was the first in a series of many cassette releases from the paper."
Perusing the C81 tracklisting I wonder, Would NME champion such a variety of genres today? It's easy to make generalizations for the sake of an argument, but based on the wide range of styles found on the comp in comparison to the acts the magazine heavily promotes currently, my immediate answer is No.I also have to speculate, Has NME lowered itself to shilling bland pap (in my opinion) solely to shift more units or is it just a mirror, reflecting the state of popular British indie music? In my opinion equal diversity exists today, but would NME have the guts to promote it?
C81 captured the dying of one movement - "post punk's swan song" said Simon Reynolds, and the emergence of another - "new pop", according to Pitchfork's Jess Harvell. What movements would a C2006 summarize? In 25 years, how will the bands in the headlines today be viewed? Sorry, I have lots of questions!
Loose Ends
Congrats to the winners of our Kelley Polar tickets! Once again, the show is on March 8 at the Knitting Factory, and it'll actually be Kelley's live debut. Live sets early in the curve sometimes make me nervous (see: M.I.A., Annie), but this one should be great - coming from Julliard, I think Kelley knows what he's doing. Here's the flyer for the gig. Also - I just learned that Matthew Herbert will be at the Canal Room that same night. He won't be going on till late, so it should make for an excellent double bill.
If you keep close tabs on things here, you might be wondering why I haven't mentioned Optimo's set at Motherfucker on Sunday night yet. I guess it's because there's really not a whole lot to say. I've sort of avoided MF parties in the past because I've always gotten a weird vibe from them - they seem much more about the scene than the music, and not really my thing. I've always been curious though, and Optimo being there last weekend was what it finally took to get me to one. Alas the party was about what I expected, and the Optimo set never really got off the ground. The crowd seemed somewhat into it at first, but I think they wanted more rock, or more hits, or both, and things never quite picked up. Optimo's set was pretty electronic - even more so than usual, I think - and that may have been partly the issue. But I think it was more just that people weren't really there to dance - and without much energy in the room, it fell flat. It's too bad, because I thought the Optimo set was great! It was nothing like the Friday Don Hill's insanity though, so hopefully they'll be back there soon.
As for the New York Dolls, I don't know them so well and didn't think much of them one way or the other. I ended up checking out after a few songs upon realizing that Tim Sweeney was spinning in the next room. I think I spent more time in the coatcheck line, quite possibly the longest I've ever seen.
As for Avalon, I really hope their new run of parties does well. They seem to have fresh clout with their booking, and I'd love to see what they could do with some time and a following. Just within the next month or so, they're hosting Vitalic (3/16), Ellen Allien and Black Strobe (3/18), The Glimmers (nice!) and FC Kahuna (3/25), and M.A.N.D.Y. and Booka Shade (4/01). I heard last month's Perlon party there sounded great but was slightly surreal. Will be interesting to see how the rest of this bunch go.
One more event to take note of - Derrick May will be at Cielo on March 6, at Deep Space with Francois K. The two of them were together responsible for my favorite P.S. 1 Warm Up of 2004, so this is sure to be a good time.
The Bush Tetras are going to totally slay at the Tonic tonight.