New music : American Princes

A couple years ago, in my post collegial search for employment, I interviewed for a PR job with Yep Roc Records. I didn't get it (no hard feelings, I was completely unqualified), but I was given a quick tour of the label's office and warehouse, during which I was given an album by a band called American Princes, whose new album Less and Less Yep Roc was about to release. I ended up really liking it: I went in expecting countryish indie rock, which was certainly there, but the band had some major post-punk influences too, and stylistically the album was all over the place: "The Replacements meets the Dismemberment Plan in My Morning Jacket's grain silo"I think I wrote in an email to Yep Roc further imploring them to hire me (they still didn't). In short, Less and Less was a pretty great record, and definitely one that has stood up fairly well, and that I return to pretty often.
Anyway, American Princes just put out a new album, Other People. I was psyched to see the band heartily endorsed in Noel Murray's great Popless column on the AV Club, but beyond that, they've been pretty ignored critically (at least where I'm looking). I was even more distressed to find that I couldn't find this record at a couple of different local independent record stores. Perhaps somebody at Yep Roc isn't doing their job so well . . . (call me guys!).
Its too bad, because Other People is pretty great. Its not quite as diverse as Less and Less, and their slight alt-country vibe has been scaled back some, instead with the focus now being on a more New Wave meets southern rock sound. Still, the band has three songwriters and singers, so things never get samey, and their execution remains excellent.
I highly recommend it.

On A Friday, pt. 2

Last Friday, the 9th, I went to see Radiohead in Charlotte.




I was a bit hesitant at first. I saw on Pitchfork or Stereogum or something that the band was playing there, but initially I didn't intend on going. Not sure why not. As I said, I wasn't as enthusiastic about Radiohead as I used to be, and I don't know, just wasn't inclined to do it.
Only after my friend Tradd offered me a ticket did I reconsider and go for it. I probably got screwed a bit for my hesitance-I paid 96 dollars for my ticket (thirdhand), instead however much it might have been had I bought it right from the band. But whatevs. When the offer came up, I was in the midst of a resolution to get out more and do more stuff and say YES, so I went for it.

The day of the show, I was much more excited than I expected to be. Last Friday morning, I woke up and it dawned on me that, yes, I was going to see Radiohead! I was about to do what I'd have given a toe for not too long ago, and indeed, something I thought I wouldn't ever do. For years, the band had been so prickly and toured so irregularly that I had already consigned them to my "oh well" file of acts I'd never get to see.
But by four-thirty that afternoon, I found myself on the way to Charlotte in the back of a big van with Tradd and three other dudes I'd never met before.

I'm not complaining here (really!) but it wasn't how I imagined I'd go see Radiohead way back when. Not sure how I pictured it-maybe as a date with a girl with glasses (my girl with glasses stayed home, alas), but it certainly wasn't in such a Dazed and Confused kind of way. Its just indicative, I guess, of the way things rarely play out the way you expect them to, not to mention how the public perception of Radiohead had seemingly changed in the last several years.

But anyway, on to the show! After a stop-off at Arby's (not nearly as gross as I remembered it being, though I was possibly aided this time by my wise decision to order a chicken sandwich instead of the horror that is the Big Montana), we got to Charlotte. The excitement was palpable.

Soon we'd be seeing Radiohead!

But first, there was traffic. A lot of traffic. About two miles of stopped cars traffic. All filled with other people on the way to the concert, because as best as I could tell, there was only one road to the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre. Nice civil engineering there, Charlotte.

As there were no options, we waited it out. Scalpers walked up and down the shoulder. People hopped out of their cars to go pee in the woods, or would run into a gas station to get drinks, only to come out a moment later and find that the traffic had moved, and they'd have to run to catch up (though of course, by the time they got to their cars, the traffic was stopped again). Time passed on and on, and before long it was a bit before nine o'clock, about when we guestimated Radiohead would be taking the stage.

Eventually, we got up to the parking lot, and with the van windows down, we could tell the concert had indeed started. "There There" was playing in the distance. We took the first space we could find, and hurried in, while the band played "Airbag."

We had lawn tickets and . . . I'm a small club kind of dude I think. I mean, we walked down as close as we could get to the actual amphitheatre area, but I still felt incredibly far away, and the sound was never quite loud enough to really envelope me in the way a concert should.

As always, I had some issues with the crowd. I mean, for the most part it was fine (huge though, I can't remember the last time I was a concert where so many people seemed packed in so tightly). I, however, almost always have the bad luck of finding a nice spot to stand right next to someone who MUST DANCE in the most dramatic way possible, and with the least respect for anyone else's personal space. Usually its a hippie girl, but this time, it was a dread-locked white dude who bore a suspicious resemblance to Zach de la Rocha. Rarely do I so wish to be in the possession of a taser than I do at a crowded concert. Anyway, lil' la Rocha may or may not have been with another group of jumping, near moshing morons a few feet away, who were led by some hyperactive kid who, after every song, shouted "I hope they play 'Just!'" and then proceeded to shout that chorus. As terrific as it would have been to see "Just" played live (it's a killer song), I was hoping pretty much the whole time that the band would not play it (they didn't). Slightly less annoying were the couple behind me, who seemed to be on a first or second date; the dude kept telling his girlfriend what the song was within a few seconds of it starting, but was completely wrong every time.

Anyway, the show then! I do have to say Radiohead's stage set up and lighting were pretty incredible. A fairly standard but excellently light display accompanied every song, and cameras were trained on each band member, their images projected behind them so that their video images became an essential part of the lighting effects. The best visual moment was on "You and Whose Army," in which all the lights and cameras cut out, except a camera mounted on Thom Yorke's piano, so opening quiet part of the song was performed with Thom's eye staring at the crowd. Thom hammed it up, drawing back and sneer-smiling, and it was pretty damn great.

The set list was . . . ok. Reasonably diverse selections, though the focus was on newer stuff. I was pissed to miss "There There" and "Airbag," but did get plenty of other good stuff. "Idioteque" was incredible-not much different than the album version, but still near perfect. "Optimistic" was introduced as an older song (sort of, I guess) but it sounded great. The only selection from The Bends was "Planet Telex," but that was a major highlight: loud and anthemic, with a nifty purple and yellow light show to boot. It was a good choice, since that song sounds much more in keeping with their newer stuff than say, "Bones", while bringing in some of the big guitars and solos that defined their 90's era. New song "Bangers and Mash" sounded great, and the too brief moment when the almost suffocating tension and reserve in "Morning Bell" lets loose was executed perfectly. The underrated "Where I End and You Begin" was a monster, fast and intense. And "Paranoid Android" was a hell of an awesome and crowd pleasing choice.
Still, the band seemed a bit subdued overall. Part of it may have been being out on the lawn, but the setlist had a pretty large number of ballads and mid-tempo stuff. "Nude" and "Sail to the Moon" back to back? "Sail to the Moon" at all? "Reckoner" seemed like a bit of an odd choice for a set closer too, but that may just be me, since I'm pretty lukewarm on that song.

Anyway, after the show we found our way out of the auditorium (whose staff was kind of enough to give out free cups of water), and I decided against sinking 40 bucks into a t-shirt (which seemed to be some kind of polyester-esque fabric that may not have been flattering on my doughy frame) or a Radiohead sheet (which just looked like dark tie-dye). We hung out playing frisbee in the parking lot for awhile while the traffic cleared, then went on home.

And that's all I've got right now.

PS-being far away made it tough to for me to figure out what parts Ed was playing. Still worried about that guy!

On A Friday, pt. 1

Radiohead were the first band I loved.

Or at least, the first band I loved obsessively. Certainly the first band I loved whose music I sought out myself.

I had kind of a weird musical upbringing, in that for most of my childhood and early teen years, I just wasn’t that interested in music. I mean, I liked it, but I couldn’t imagine sitting in my room alone listening to something, and when I was in the car with my mom (where most of my early music listening happened), we listened generally to what she chose-namely older r & b (lots of Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin), adult contemporary pop (again usually with some r & b lite attributes, like Jon Secada or something), and for some reason, British synth-pop superstars Erasure. We also listened a lot to Electronic, a mostly forgotten synth-pop collaboration between Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr, which I dug a lot (it remains worth a listen), though at the time I had no idea of its two principles’ significance.

Furthermore, I didn’t have any older siblings to pass things on to me, though I do remember being in the car once with my cousins Desna and Max when they put on the Gin Blossoms’ (still great) “Hey Jealousy” and being kind of blown away by the sheer rebellious audacity of a singer talking happily about being chased by the cops.

Anyway, back then, I also wasn’t the type of kid to listen to much music socially, mostly because I was a weird, introverted only-child who was mostly content to spend most of the time alone (though not unhappy). That combined with the fact that my mom had an odd no-MTV policy made it so that listening to whatever was popular at the time never really entered my world.

I mean, I did sneak MTV sometimes, and I was at least somewhat aware of what was popular and cool (I did have friends, if I didn’t usually do much with them outside of school). I remember really liking Oasis, and thinking Bush’s “Glycerine” was great, and I liked Blues Traveler and Live a lot too. But it wasn’t until I was about fifteen, and facing soon driving myself around and having that independence that the notion of choosing my own soundtrack for my life became a possibility.

By that time, I was watching MTV much more, and could easily have gotten into what was popular then (what was popular in 1997-98? Had nu-metal begun its rise to prominence?). But I was already something of a young elitist, determined to find music that struck me as different than most of the stuff I was seeing on MTV. This led me to . . . Dave Matthews (come on, what other band on MTV back then had a violinist and saxophonist? Also, to be fair to myself, none of my friends at the time were listening to Dave Matthews, at least as far as I knew. Poor naïve Josh thought Dave Matthews was such a rarefied choice that upon seeing a Dave Matthews sticker on the car of a major crush, he believed it was a sure sign of a future connection!)

Of course, actually listening to the Dave Matthews CD I bought (Before These Crowded Streets) was luckily enough to push me away from that scene, and even better, my dedication to finding things that were different led me other weirder and more interesting stuff, like Portishead and Pulp. And Radiohead.

At the time what drew me to Radiohead, I guess, was the videos. Back then, the videos for "Paranoid Android" and "Karma Police" were getting semi-regular rotation, and I liked them immediately. "Karma Police" remains one of the greatest music videos ever shot, I think, and the videos for "Just" and "Street Spirit" are classics as well (I liked it at the time, but I haven't seen "Paranoid Android" in years, though I suspect it might not have aged as well).

Anyway, I got Ok Computer, and loved it, and pretty soon after I picked up The Bends. (I actually never got around to buying Pablo Honey--I think I convinced myself that it was something juvenile and unnecessary). And suddenly I, whose previous strongest musical likes were hitched to the Sega CD classic Lunar, had a favorite band. I would take long drives on weekends just to listen to the albums. I was drawn online, and started looking for reviews and media about Radiohead, wanting to find out more and more, wanting to figure out what it all meant. I watched footage of the band on TV, playing at outdoor festivals in England, thrilled as all hell that the live version of "Creep" replaced the mild adjective "very" with the much more rockin' "fuckin'." I developed an odd obsession with Ed (which remains), worrying that he didn't get enough to do. I watched the misery inducing / joy snuffing / sunshine murdering tour documentary Meeting People Is Easy and convinced myself it was good. I wore a t-shirt that said "We hope that you choke" on it to school, and was mildly rebuffed by a history teacher.

I felt cooler listening to Radiohead-not only was this loud, angry, and rebellious music (well sometimes--"My Iron Lung" got a lot of play), but it was smarter and more interesting and dare I say it, more profound than all the nu-metal everybody was listening too. Thom Yorke didn't just yell about his pain like, I don't know, Jonathan Davis or something, he spat out lyrics about chemical reactions and polyeurethane! The band members weren't a bunch of bald, tattooed mooks, but thin, artsy looking dudes, dudes who looked cool in a very particular way, like I wanted look.

And most importantly, for the most part I was the only one listening to Radiohead, at least amongst my own group of friends. I knew some older kids were into it, and there were a few guys in my class who were into Radiohead and Limp Bizkit (they claimed to appreciate Wes Borland's guitar effects), but for the most part, I felt like listening to Radiohead was something that made me stand out, that made me different (of course, later, in college, it became apparent that every Radiohead fan--and there are A LOT at college--felt the exact same way). And what can I say--it added to the appeal.

It wasn't to last forever, of course, my love affair with Radiohead. As much as I loved The Bends and Ok Computer (and the awesome Airbag / How Am I Driving? ep, which I was thrilled to discover at a Borders one fateful day--"A Reminder" remains one of my favorite Radiohead tracks), I needed other stuff to listen to also, and Radiohead actually proved vital in leading me to new things. Sure, I already had Portishead, Pulp, and Eels from MTV and MTV2, but it was on some Radiohead fansite that somebody compared Blur's just released 13 (an underrated, excellent album) to Ok Computer. So I picked it up, and that opened up a world of Britpop greatness (Oasis, The Verve, Manic Street Preachers, Mansun, to a much much lesser extent, Travis). Then, a little later, after I'd moved to North Carolina and started eleventh grade, I kept reading about this band Pavement, whose latest album was produced by Nigel Godrich (and even featured Jonny Greenwood on harmonica!). So I checked that out, and suddenly found myself an indie rock fan. (This went down about a week before Pavement played in Raleigh, on what would be their last tour. If I had just found that album a tiny bit earlier!)

Pretty soon, Pavement supplanted Radiohead in my mind as my favorite band. I was as pysched as everybody when Kid A came out in 2000, but it didn't occupy nearly as much time in my CD player as those earlier albums (though I do think that Kid A is the band's greatest achievement). And then when the weak and generally pretty boring Amnesiac came out a few months later, my former favorite band was suddenly fallible. Old news even.

I continued to love Radiohead as I went to college. I even had a Bends era poster on my freshman year dorm room wall, though this was partially in response to my roomate's Boys' Gospel Choir poster (don't ask). But at a time when lots of my peers were discovering Radiohead for the first time, for me the magic was already gone. Was that in part because by then lots of people, lots of my peers even, were Radiohead fans? Yes, maybe, I don't know.

I still bought and liked the ridiculously titled Hail to the Thief. And I was online with everybody else last year downloading In Rainbows (I paid five dollars!), which I liked, though not as much as lots of other folks. And I'll probably get whatever the band puts out in the future. And when a Radiohead song comes up on my Ipod, I usually enjoy it (unless it's "Knives Out"-as I cleverly thought to myself at the time, its Radiohead aping The Smiths, and coming up with something that misses everything that's good about either), even if the glass-breaking guitar solo in "Climbing up the Walls" doesn't blow my mind like it once did. The fact remains that my Radiohead fandom was pretty instrumental in making me the music obsessive that I am today, which is a pretty big part of who I am today. So that's worth something, I think.

coming soon-the second part of this Radioheaderific postathon, in which I discuss seeing Radiohead live in a context as far removed from my original experience with the band as possible!

So a bunch of months back, Laura and I were at Edward McKay's (a used book / movies / music) store when I discovered in the bargain section a movie entitled Funky Monkey.
I know. Amazing.
So of course I bought it. And though we've not had the strength to watch it yet, the cover alone has brought me more joy than just about anything else I've ever paid four dollars for.
Anyway, I took the existence of this movie as proof that if Homer Simpson himself had not somehow come into reality and instantly gotten a job as a studio executive, then at the very least studio executives were looking for inspiration from the noted fan of Hail to the Chimp and other such high concept entertainments.
Now, though, I think there is definitive proof that someone somewhere is snagging all of their ideas from quick throwaway gags on The Simpsons. Namely: Hot Tub Time Machine. Even the description sounds like something Homer would say: "combine hot tub debauchery and the complications of time travel."
Seriously, if future reports reveal that a talking pie is somehow involved, Homer and Ron Howard should contact their lawyers.

movie review: Iron Man (2008)

Iron Man (2008) - Without a doubt, one of the most breezy and enjoyable big summer movies in awhile. After last summer, when every big action movie was a three-hour monster with plots as dense as Greek mythology, its terrificly satisfying to get a movie that competently, happily, and enjoyably delivers what it promises (that being a robots, explosions, and Robert Downey Jr.). Downey is pretty much as good as all the reviews have promised-he pretty much makes the movie. As with most of his recent roles (in the excellent Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Zodiac for example), Downey gives the impression that he's the smartest guy in the room, and is well aware of it, but is having so much fun that he might as well include you to. The rest of the cast is pretty good too: Gwyneth Paltrow reminded me why she used to be a crushworthy actress (plus I recently rewatched The Royal Tenenbaums); furthermore, her character is the first superhero-movie girl to not be incredibly annoying, whiny, and selfish-instead, she's the protagonist's intellectual equal, holding her own with some decent banter and a sense of fun. I liked Jeff Bridges in the villain role also (I'm sorry, that's not a spoiler-just look at his sinister beard!). He's good actor, and he doesn't appear in nearly enough stuff, and its nice to have a bad guy who usually acts like a relatively typical, sane human being instead of a twitchy weirdo (no disrespect to Willem Dafoe). Terrence Howard had the most boring role known to man, and didn't make much of an impression, but I suppose he'll pay off in the sequals.
Though the special effects are pretty flawless, the action is admittedly just so-so. The first big action bit, where Tony Stark escapes his terrorist captors (more on that below) in a primitive iron suit is pretty good, but the ensuing action scenes are kind of bland, and awfully short. The big finale fight in particular is kind of damp-the robots just punch each other for a few minutes, then shout at each other, then there's a light show, then it's done. (To be fair though, none of the big superhero movies have managed to have really successful action - the fight scenes in the very good Batman Begins for example look like one dude shook the camera while another dude in a black sleeve waved his arm in front of it).
Ok, then there's the politics. So every review I've seen of this comments, usually negatively about the politics of having Iron Man battle some middle eastern terrorists. Hmpf. I get where they are coming from, kind of, but I'm not sure I buy it. I mean, you could argue that's its jingoism or wish fulfillment or whatever, but I'm not sure the evidence is there to support it. As many of the reviews point out, the original comic book of Iron Man had Tony Stark being kidnapped by the Viet Cong (it came out in the 60's.) It sucks, but then the Viet Cong were the U.S.'s most well known enemies, and today Middle Eastern terrorists are a most well known enemies. It's a story of its time, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. And yes, having a white hero fighting savage brown people is maybe reductive, but I'm not sure how to get around it here.
Interestingly, the movie actually goes to pretty great lengths to make its terrorists apolitical. Sure, they're middle eastern and hang out in caves, but their bad guy leader (who is as hairless as a Star Trek alien) is constantly yammering about being like Genghis Khan and conquering Asia(?). I know some critics have argued that this sort of cowardice is a fault and a hypocrisy (and again, I understand), but, still, I can't help but feel like they're reading too much into things. Or at the very least, faulting the movie for being a product of its time, which it can't really help.