Hey guys, this is the first post from our newest writer and good friend, a young lady who happens to be the newly famous anonymous writer and founder of Sorry-mom, a nasty little website that some people think is the most important 3rd wave feminist blog to come out in like the past month, at least. Our pal will be writing regular posts for us concerning some of the more interesting things she encounters in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and below is her first little piece about the recent wave of, uh, Wavves shows in NYC this past weekend. She kind of has a shitty, know-it-all attitude, so don't cry about it. --SR
Nathan Williams is one grumpy little turd. It's his fourth New York show in 48 hrs and after what we're sure was a few nights heavy on beer and light on sleep, his throat is killing him and his speaking voice is reduced to not much more than a croaky whisper. However, I can imagine why else he might be grumpy: The New York fucking Times was at his packed show the previous night, Pitchfork is this close to licking his dick, little art school girls everywhere are sweating his shitty haircut (big time) and here he is in the basement of an Upper West Side coffee house (which, for the record, did not sell coffee) in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. What the hell are we doing here? Despite the shitty locale and the bands showing up a tad late, the tiny room is packed with Columbia students and hungover Brooklyn kids who made the hour + trek to see Nodzzz, Woods and Wavves play. By the time Wavves went on, the audience was shiftless but eerily quiet, standing awkwardly close to each other and whispering after being directed by show booker/Dad-figure Todd P to move closer to the encyclopedia-sized stage. Despite his drummer going missing for the first half of his first song, which he ultimately cut short half-way through due to his tired voice struggling to maintain his trademark hooting, Williams quickly perked back up, bopping enthusiastically through about a half dozen songs. Though he winced dramatically between songs and inexplicably deep throated his Corona instead of letting the bottle's opening meet his mouth like any regular human would (seriously. What?), no one seemed to notice when he tore through crowd favorites "Wavves," "California Goth" and "No Hope Kids" - the diminutive Williams even obliged when Dad P encouraged him to do an encore –after yelling out 3 song titles he had already performed, woops!
Photo of Nathan Williams at Market Hotel show by Joe Perez
According to back of the jacket, this record is “a collection of ritualistic space chants, battle hymns and stellar songs of praise as used by the family clan of Hawkwind on their epic journey to the fabled land of Thorasin.” Even Astal, High Priestess of Xenon Mentet 12753 had this to say about it : “La beslas pan hrak lelo hrakasosas kamavor na.”
This is Hawkwind’s third album, but the first featuring the ‘classic’ lineup with the new rhythm section of Lemmy on bass and Simon King on drums. This change seemed to make the jazz influence of the previous records a little less obvious while emphasizing the driving rock aspect of the group’s sound. Recordings of a few shows from the tour supporting this album resulted in Hawkwind’s masterpiece, and arguably the greatest live album ever, 1973’s double lp Space Ritual.
I recommend bong rips and excessive volume, as I’ve yet to find a person that didn’t dig this record under these circumstances!
As we inch closer and closer to SXSW, those of us who are hosting day parties and participating in other festival related activities tend to receive a lot of "pitches" from a lot of PR agents concerning why such and such band should join our "totally rad" day show line up. I can think of one band that certainly will NOT be permitted to play a "chill" acoustic set at our show, even if they happen to be kinda cute. My fave is "Alex." Who's yours?
I know this came out decades ago in "cool music blogger time" and DL said it sucked the other day and shit, but it was one of my favorite pop singles from all of last year, so watch it again, Todd P:
SHOWS OF NOTE THIS WEEK
TUE: Cattle Decapitation/Psyopus/Book of Black Earth/Gigan (The Lounge) TUE: Devotchka/Crooked Fingers (House of Blues) TUE: Yes (House of Blues) WED: Loney, Dear/Matthew and the Arrogant Sea/Sunnybrook (Hailey's) FRI: Darktown Strutters/Rival Gang/Punk Bunny (Mable Peabody's) FRI: Dropdead/hatred surge/kill the client/hercules/unit 21 (1919 Hemphill) FRI: Gregg Ginn (Club Dada) SAT: Hands Up Valentines Party with The Party (the Loft) SAT: Red Faced Laughter/Holy Wave (the Knight House)
Don Caballero | DD/MM/YYYY | Hawk vs. Dove | Magnets (Rubber Gloves) Oh, I hate writing about Don Cab shows. It's 2008! You peaked in '97 or '98, I can't even remember. It's weird because I remember around that time, seeing little dudes with shorter girlfriends haunting Bruce Hall, and they'd both be really scruffy, and one of them would have the Don Cab "fist" shirt on. I see the exact same couple now in Denton, and they are totally wearing Deerhunter shirts. Funny. Anyways, this band has one of the greatest drummers ever, Damon Che, yet, I was always very suspicious of this style of music. He went ahead and proved me right by just replacing his entire band with metal-heads. I KNEW IT!
Will Johnson | Cory Branan (Double Wide) I'm not that much of a Centro-matic person to be honest, but Will Johnson's solo shows, of which I've seen two in the past year, are certainly everything that a Centro-matic fan would hope for.
Slobberbone | The O's (Dan's Silverleaf) Everyone reading this blog probably already knows enough about Slobberbone to avoid having to talk about them, but the O's, John Pedigo's new project and the latest Idol Records signees, are a relatively new group that has sort of become the Observer's latest "buzz" band over the past couple of months in addition to making it on to the cover of Quick recently, meaning that they've received about as much local ink as one band possibly could short of having a top 40 single or something. After listening to the O's brand of No Depression-era twang infused indie folk/pop/rock, it's pretty unsurprising that they have become darlings of the local music media-- this is just the kind of music that the Dallas music establishment has been embracing since the early 90's, and will probably continue to embrace for the foreseeable future. This certainly doesn't make it BAD music per se, even if it does set up something of a barrier for anyone who has grown suspicious of successful Dallas bands over the years. Truth be told, The O's are competent and do what they do quite well, and anyone who's ever had an Uncle Tupelo or Gram Parsons fetish will probably enjoy this music. Nothing earth shattering or particularly forward looking, even for their genre, but that doesn't appear to be the intent here, and you'll probably get exactly what you're expecting to from these guys.
SATURDAY
Au | Florene | Hawk vs. Dove (The Lounge) Portland's Au has consisted of many different members in its history, presently including personnel from Jackie O Motherfucker, and their music, falling somewhere between Animal Collective and a marching band, contains exactly the kinds of musical risks, atmospherics and true unhinged enthusiasm that would probably make Mount Righteous ten times better. Pretty interesting stuff.
Steel Hook Protheses | A Smile Full Of Ale / Ashes / Yatagarasu | No Music Plays In Hospitals | Necronomycunt (Wasted Words House, 2404 S. Fielder Rd., Arlington) Loud, harsh show in Arlington at a place I'm completely unfamiliar with. Yeah, I know driving out to somewhere like Arlington sucks, but honestly, sometimes shows like this are the most fun of all... when you have no expectations whatsoever.
Etacarinae | Akkolyte | Division of Power | Deskonocidos (Exploding House) The two out-of-town acts sing mainly in Spanish, only Etacarinae has come all the way from Spain to play The Exploding House. You have got to admire that. Personally, I love it. It really makes me question what I'm doing with my life. As in, why am I not hanging out in Barcelona's version of The Exploding House rather than taking the DART Rail to a brutal little building with no windows everyday. Anyways, Etacarinae plays a kind of anthemic style of crust that I'm not so big on, but they probably make up for their shortcomings in energy, as do many bands in this genre.
Deskonocidos is a little closer to more effective, basic, hardcore with less long-intros and other melodic punk unnecessities. Akkolyte and Division of Power are the locals here, and for some reason DOP being on the bill pisses some people off. What doesn't piss you guys off? We're just trying to hang out with you guys and be cool. Why does everyone have to be so mean to us? :(
This year we decided to get together with our friend Chris Cantalini from Gorilla vs Bear to plan a day show that we're extremely excited about, and we're pretty sure you'll be into it too. We'll have a lot more info as we get closer to the date in question, but for now we can tell you this:
Gorilla vs Bear and We Shot J.R. SXSW Day Show
Friday, March 20th @ Quacks' Bakery (1400 E. 38th 1/2 St., Austin,TX) FREE
Appleseed Cast | Burning Hotels | True Widow (Lola's) I was about to talk about how Appleseed Cast is one of those bands I hate simply for their name, but then I found out that they used to be called December's Tragic Drive, and I thought maybe I should lay off since they made a slight improvement. Anyway, Appleseed Cast is one of those bands that makes EXPERIMENTAL music, my man. Think you can handle that? Oh, and the Burning Hotels call themselves "indie" on their Myspace page. Cool man.
Sun Club (Rubber Gloves) Sun Club is a new regular night centered around a DJ collective consisting of Fur (Bryce Isbell), Teamwork and Sid Spinoza. The group will spin rare disco, house and old school electro, and the guest DJs this week will be Females. Sounds like it could be one of the more daring and quality DJ nights you'll find around here these days.
Billingham's Defense System w/ guest Blixaboy (Fallout Lounge) Blixaboy will be spinning mostly original remix material tonight, focusing on dance floor beats as BDS's guest DJ.
L.A. Guns (the Lounge) I remember when I was like in third grade, I really wanted to start getting into "heavy metal" even though I really didn't know what the hell it was or how someone became a "metal head." All I knew was that Metal was rad, and my previous purchases of Bon Jovi tapes had certainly not served as a proper introduction to the genre. So one afternoon I went to a stand alone Sam Goody with my dad (remember when those actually existed?) and I started looking through all the heavy metal tapes. My dad said he'd get me a tape as long as it wasn't "Satanic," and this created quite a dilemma for me-- basically, I had to find the most metal as fuck looking tape cover I could without getting something that appeared to involve Devil worship because my dad would never buy it. This, of course meant that Slayer and Iron Maiden (the two I really wanted) were totally out of the question, and I had to find some middle ground: tougher looking than Bon Jovi but not as evil as Slayer. I came across an L.A. Guns tape (the cover is basically pictured to the right), and I thought-- ok, this looks pretty metal but not Satanic. My dad apparently agreed and decided to get it for me (despite the fact that the cover featured guns, a real threat, as opposed to Satan, a fake threat). I think I thought it sucked at first and then started to like it until my friend taped me a copy of Kill Em All and I stopped giving a shit about bands like L.A. Guns for the rest of my life. The End.
Dallas Art Fair (Fashion Industry Gallery) This is the very first annual Dallas Art Fair, with 30 national art dealers presenting modern and contemporary paintings, photographs, sculpture, prints, and drawings. And wait...is that a Henry Darger painting on their website? And Chuck Close? The price of admission is a little steep- $20 for a day pass, $40 for a three-day pass- but it sounds like it will be totally worth it.
Jeff Elrod (The Modern) Part of the Modern's Focus series, which just featured the Ranjani Shettar scuptures. Elrod's paintings start as drawings on a simple computer graphics program which he transfers to canvas by hand, a kind of mix between new media art and postwar abstraction.
