Work issues made me miss an It List Post today... but thats ok, because there isn't a lot going on this Monday night, except for a really solid little jazz night going on at the Amsterdam bar. We've been hitting this up on and off for a long time, and the musicians that come in and out of the place on this night are almost all very solid and quite entertaining. Always a good time.

see you tomorrow.

Forgot about this one:

Single Frame | Red Monroe | Faceless Werewolves | Cartright | Emil Rapstine are all at the Cavern tonight. I'm quite impressed with what I've heard from Single Frame, and the Faceless Werewolves are certainly a fun band, and often pretty good too. Red Monroe, Cartright and Emil Rapstine are all local highlights, and if any of the Cartright army is out at the show tonight, you'll probably see why we had so much fun watching him for the first time at Yellow House. Should be good times, and I really think Single Frame is going to kill it on stage.

FRIDAY

The Theater Fire (Lee Harvey's)
The Theater Fire will be playing two free sets at Lee Harvey's tonight, with the first starting around 830 and the second ending around midnight. A good chance to see a great local band for nothin'.

Flashlight Party will be playing some records starting at midnight over Hailey's. Their set will follow a performance by Merge Records' White Whale, who I like quite a bit based on the quick listen I've given their album over the past couple of hours. There certainly seems to be a streak of glam in their songwriting, but it gets played down quite a bit by their lo fi recording techniques and mostly pretty, lush arrangements. Actually, the more I listen, the better their record WWI sounds... check out "whats an ocean for" and "the admiral" on their myspace page to se what I mean: intense, but dreamy. I bet this will be a really good show. And if you don't feel like paying, you can go after midnight, when admission to Hailey's will apparently be free. At least thats the word on the street.

Happy Bullets | Doug Burr | George Neal | Chao | Glen Farris (The Cavern)

Spitfire Tumbleweeds | Bridges and Blinking Lights | Hogpig | Oso Closo | Lo Fi Chorus (Rubber Gloves FREE Week)

SATURDAY

The Undoing of David Wright | The Great Tyrant | Night Game Cult | Fra Pandolf | Eat Avery's Bones (Rubber Gloves FREE Week)
Probably don't have to tell you that this is the must see show of the weekend. There hasn't been a better all local line up in a long time, and there certainly hasn't been a better free show in for fucking ever. Get there early to beat the crowds. Someone at the Observer called this show New Weird Denton 101, and I would say that is pretty fitting, just because I know how much all of you like "scenes." This is really going to be a fun show.

Metrognome Collective will be participating in the Fort Worth Fall Gallery night, and will feature a Polaroid show called "Instants" from 6-10. The after party will start at 10, and features Jana Hunter, 100 Damned Guns, Tame... Tame and Quiet, and Black Lights. Its five bucks, and it sounds like it will be a really good time, just like Metrognome usually is. Not the biggest fan of all these acts, but seeing Tame Tame is worth the price of admission alone, not to mention just hanging out with all the great people that populate Metrognome on a regular basis.

Also from 6-10, Art Prostitute will be showing some work by Jophen Stein, Evan B. Harris, Will Rhoten and Mark Nelson. The best part is that its free, and Dj Nature and Select will be spinning. Good chance to see the new Art Prostitute if you haven't already.

After than, you can head over to the Amsterdam Bar for the Lost Generation Make Out party, featuring sets by DJ Nature, Wanz, Bexarametric, and others.

Finally, there will be a house party at 2207 Glencoe off lower Greenville, featuring sets by Liquid Bounce and DJ Rebel. We've seen stuff about this party posted all over the place, so we thought we'd share. Will probably be a really good time. Liquid Bounce reminds me of GangStarr and old Roots, which is a good thing. Call 214-577-4234 or 214-498-2980 for more info.

Below is a track from Undoing of David Wright's new record, which they just finished recording with John Congleton of the Paper Chase. The album is a concept record about a group of explorers traveling to the 8th Continent, a frightening fictional land of adventure (or a concert venue, depending on who you ask). The tracks I've heard are all quite good (you can hear a few more on their Myspace page), and this one, "In which Captain Finn Defiantly Makes His Second Voyage to the Eighth Continent," is probably my favorite. It sounds as if John Congleton knew exactly how to record these guys, and the band appears to be shifting its focus here to a more electronic sound with a rewarding emphasis on rhythm. You'll hear all kinds of influences on this track (Gary Numan, early Liars, Contortions, Yes to name a few), but it really sounds like none of those alone. This is sure to please Undoing's rabid fanbase, and gain them some new fans as well. Good stuff. We're really looking forward to seeing these guys perform the new stuff live, which truly must be experienced by anyone that still goes to concerts to have fun (to quote an anon playa hata).

"...8th Continent" MP3

Nice Factory Records style poster to the left. Dig it. And I don't have a lot of time today, but its cool because you probably already know a little bit about most of the stuff going on tonight. Check it:

Shiny Around the Edges | Sarah Reddington | Man Factory | Current Leaves and don't foget the Wonderful Frank Hejl(Rubber Gloves- FREE)
Another great line up at Rubber Gloves tonight. Apparently, the super cute Joanna Newsom showed up at the Smog show last night at Rubber Gloves (bonus!) and tonight's line up will provide a great look at some of the better bands in Denton right now, with the exception of Man Factory, who I just can't get down with. This will be a good show to check out if you happen to be one of the many new readers that we have picked up over the past couple of weeks, and are interested in seeing some of the bands we like. I guess the anon army will probably want to stay home, but I'm starting to think that everything they hate is actually good, so normal people might want to give this show a shot. Show up early, because Rubber Gloves has been filling up fast all week.

Zoo (Cavern upstairs)
One of the hidden gems of the Dallas scene right now. Videos in a bar really doesn't sound like a good idea until you go to a Zoo night and realize how fucking eclectic and interesting their tastes are. There is something for everyone, and almost all of it is really cool both musically and visually. They'll also be giving away Flaming Lips and Massive Attack concert tickets tonight too if you're interested.

Dj G is doing his 80's dance night at Haileys, and

as always, Slip Inn will be in full effect for hip hop night.

Check back with us tonight for a good local MP3 and other posts too.

The best documentaries usually leave the audience with more questions than answers. Sure, the good ones are typically packed with information on the subject matter at hand, and often offer audiences an expanded knowledge base as a launching pad from which they can develop more and better questions in the future. But the filmmakers that realize the limitations of their medium are usually the ones that fare the best, since creating a complete and all encompassing document of a particular subject in a scripted hour and thirty minute film is simply impossible most of the time. Like a college professor, posing a set of challenging questions, a review of possible answers, and the proper information with which to ask better questions is about all that a documentary filmmaker can hope to do, and it is all that an audience can truly expect if they are seeking a sophisticated view of the subject at hand, rather than a shallow quick fix of easy answers.

Kill Your Idols, a documentary about the New York No Wave scene of the late 70's and early 80's, ends with a series of shots showing blank expressions on the faces of a number of its interview subjects, all pondering the possibilities of what the next important movement (after the early 00's New York cool) in popular music will be. Arto Lindsay finally says "I don't know" just before the credits appear, which seems to be the proper way to end a film that paints in broad strokes and presents a lot of questions rather than answers. The beginning of the film provides a brief history of the lower east side/soho New York No Wave movement, covering bands such as Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA, Suicide and Theoretical Girls. Of course, they leave out several other important groups from that era (they barely mention Contortions, and don't mention Liquid Liquid, ESG and Mars among others), and don't go into a great deal of detail about the dynamics of the scene and the visual art infrastructure that held much of it together (for a much more detailed look at No Wave, I would suggest Simon Reynolds' book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984). But what makes the film interesting is its use of interviews with Arto Lindsay, Lydia Lunch, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo as a segue into a brief look at the lower east side "scene" of 2002, just as Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and ARE Weapons were starting to gain national media attention in the wake of the Strokes/Interpol craze of that year. Seeing these relatively new bands compared with some of the original No Wave acts was interesting for two reasons, although the film didn't directly touch on either in any obvious manner.

The first was the simple fact that a film has been made about the early 00's New York bands at all, considering how recently their sounds and style emerged in the national conscience. Seeing even a brief historical document of that time provided a very tangible notion that the reign of those New York bands and their sound is over, and that the early 00's, much like the early 90's, are now considered history, and will forever be analyzed as such by critics and rock historians. Witnessing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs being interviewed before they had a deal ,and seeing The Strokes "2002 Band of the Year" Spin Magazine cover with the benefit of hindsight revealed how equally silly and exciting those years were. Like it or not, the Strokes, Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, Radio 4 and others played a very big role in ushering in a sea change in independent and underground music, bringing post punk influences to the forefront, and putting names such as Television, Gang of Four, Joy Division, Human League, Soft Cell and others on the lips of people that didn't know much about that music before they heard Is This It. Regardless of what you think of these bands and their music, this is certainly a very noteworthy development, and one that you could say had a much smaller but somewhat comparable effect to that which Nirvana, Sub Pop and "college rock" had on American culture ten years before. This isn't to say that nothing else happened during this time, or that all or any of these changes were necessarily good, but they are changes, and quite noticeable ones at that. Urban Outfitters, white belts, mass marketed 20 dollar thrift store shirts, Vice Magazine (at least its current incarnation) and a wide range of other styles in music, fashion, and perhaps even visual art can all be connected back to the early 00's New York scene, and you can thank the Strokes for The Killers and The Bravery as much as you can thank Nirvana for Creed and Candlebox.

The second interesting aspect of the film revolves around Arto Lindsay's comment that the bands of his era "didn't have an industry selling us back to ourselves." In the film, Lee Ranaldo recalls being on tour in Japan (I believe) in 2001 and getting all kinds of questions from fans about the great new New York band The Strokes. The problem was that he had never heard of them, and felt like he didn't even know who they were until some time after people all over the country had heard their music, implying that much of the mystique surrounding the Strokes as this great underground New York band was basically manufactured. Looking back, this kind of makes sense. You don't hear much about the Strokes and Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs building up an audience in the city before catching on elsewhere, and when you look at how quickly all of those bands got big deals (and yes, Matador counts as a "big" deal), one starts to wonder how this New York/Brooklyn "scene" actually came about, and if it was really anything at all. The fact is that much of contemporary underground and/or "indie" music is supported by a profitable infrastructure that didn't exist during the No Wave days, and didn't even exist during the beginning of the Seattle grunge thing. Today, the kind of edgy, "arty" urban culture that the early 00's New York bands represented is something that can be mass marketed extremely quickly, and major corporations have discovered that it is quite profitable too. Again, this isn't to say that these developments are entirely bad. After all, I'm sure most musicians and artists welcome the increased opportunities to make money doing what they do, and its nice that you don't have to live in places like New York to quickly discover new music and art. All of these developments have been brought on by a myriad of other factors (with technology as the primary catalyst), but the current incarnation of "indie cool" has been influenced by these bands and the marketing that has driven them on to magazine covers. It seems like a natural progression from the awkward beginnings that corporate media encountered when they tried to market the Melvins, Jesus Lizard and Pavement, failing miserably in the process. They've clearly figured out how to do it now, however, and the interaction between mainstream corporate media culture and the underground is as lively as ever, and probably here to stay. In fact, the lines have become so completely blurred that no one seems to know the difference between an indie and a major, a marketing gimmick and true artistic movements. Maybe its the world as Andy Warhol always saw it, and there is no difference between any of those things when you get down to it. Or maybe corporate media has taken the life out of art and independent music, and Andy Warhol was just a dick.

Despite what seemed to be an attempt to make the Yeah Yeah Yeah and Liars look silly, the film does an equally good job making people like Lydia Lunch seem pretty ridiculous too (not to mention ARE Weapons, who seem sofa king we todd it throughout the film that it has to be a joke), because the two time periods are so different that it is impossible to compare them or make many important value judgments as many of the film's no wave interview subjects attempt to do when asked about bands like The Strokes. DNA made music in a crime infested Lower East Side with no expectation to ever even get noticed by the Village Voice. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs made music in a gentrified Lower East Side knowing that their music could very well be picked up and marketed by a record company that could generate enough money to make them rich and famous. I'm not sure if things in New York in the late 70's would have been quite the same if the environment had been similar to the one that Karen O encountered. And that is something that we'll never know.

Either way, that time has come, and by many indications, its going to be gone in the not too distant future. Meanwhile, American pop music seems to be in a period of limbo, with many wondering what the next movement will be, where it will come from, and how it might compare to the movements of the past, or influence the movements of the future. The good news is that the possibilities are endless, and there is a chance that the American underground might one day do it right. Who Knows? Apparently, no one does.

NOTE: Crowds are apparently already starting to form in front of Rubber Gloves tonight for the show, so if you're planning on going, I would suggest getting up there ASAP.

(Smog) | Howling Hex/ JC (Rubber Gloves- FREE)
Yet another great evening of music during Rubber Gloves free week. This time, its an exciting and surprising performance from Bill Callahan, the visionary singer songwriter behind the lo fi underground legend Smog. One can't help but notice the wide ranging influence that Smog has had on many of the chic indietastic songwriters that have been gaining favor with the Pitchfork crowd over the past few years. His songs are quiet, dark, introspective, unsettling and often gorgeous. The two albums I am most familiar with are Red Apple Falls and Wild Love, and I think both will one day be considered quite important if they aren't already. Acoustic guitars, banjos, lush pianos, and bits of pedal steel and even some synths all wrap themselves around Callahan's poetic tales, which he sings in a country tinged Iggy Popesque dry baritone that always seems just about perfect in delivery. Rubber Gloves should really be given some props for getting him here for free, and anyone reading this should be in Denton tonight to take advantage of this rare opportunity. Howling Hex is Neil Haggerty of Royal Trux, who I'm not actually the biggest fan of, but I know a lot of people that read this are probably into them, so there you go. You might dig it. Click here to sample some stuff.

100 Damned Guns | Current Leaves | Meat Radio DJs (Club Dada)
Current Leaves begins their residency in Dallas tonight, and I would suggest you check them out before the rest of Dallas starts talking about them, which I promise will start happening before the end of the month. The Grits N Gravy guys from Meat Radio will be spinning old soul/mod/rock selections starting at 6pm, and Current Leaves will go on at 9, leaving the working stiffs with no excuse.

This is Radio Clash(Hailey's)
The Flashlight Party DJs will be doing their weekly party at Hailey's tonight with Wanz as special guest. Flashlight Party has a pretty big crew going up in Denton right now, so their shows in little d are always a lot of fun. Wanz will surely spice things up a bit too, so Hailey's should be a great place to stop by before and/or after Rubber Gloves tonight.

Adds:
1 RICHARD BUCKNER Meadow
2 XIU XIU The Air Force
3 TORTOISE A Lazarus Taxon
4 AKRON/FAMILY Meek Warrior
5 BOB DYLAN Modern Times

Charts:
1 PAJO 1968
2 SEBADOH III
3 MOUNTAIN GOATS Get Lonely
4 WIRE 154
5 GRIZZLY BEAR Yellow House
6 SNOWDEN Anti-Anti
7 KAKI KING Until We Felt Red
8 THERMALS The Body, The Blood, The Machine
9 YO LA TENGO I'm Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass
10 BOAT Songs That You Might Not Like
11 PINBACK Nautical Antiques
12 RATATAT Classics
13 COMPILATION SUICIDE SQUEEZE: SLAYING SINCE 1996
14 CHANNEL Tales From The Two Hill Heart/Sibylline Machine
15 LEE BABY SIMMS Mystery Loves Company
16 TV ON THE RADIO Return To Cookie Mountain
17 J DILLA The Shining
18 GOLDEN SMOG Another Fine Day
19 M. WARD Post-War
20 SIGUR ROS Saeglopur
21 THE TYDE Three's Co.
22 ONEIDA Happy New Year
23 DELGADOS The Complete BBC Peel Sessions
24 INSTRUMENTAL QUARTER Traffic Jam
25 HEADLIGHTS Kill Them With Kindness
26 DUPLOMACY All These Long Drives
27 LAMBCHOP Damaged
28 POSITIONS Bliss!
29 JIM NOIR Tower Of Love
30 CORDALENE The Star Ledger

The new Grizzly Bear is really goddamn good if you haven't heard it yet.

then you hate freedom and the troops and various other things that are good. Read what Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black had to say on the matter in a 1960 Supreme Court case that declared it unconstitutional for a state to require anonymous writers to reveal their identities:

"Anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have
played an important role in the progress of mankind. Persecuted
groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able
to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not
at all. The obnoxious press licensing law of England, which was also
enforced on the Colonies was due in part to the knowledge that
exposure of the names of printers, writers and distributors would
lessen the circulation of literature critical of the government. The
old seditious libel cases in England show the lengths to which
government had to go to find out who was responsible for books that
were obnoxious to the rulers. John Lilburne was whipped, pilloried
and fined for refusing to answer questions designed to get evidence
to convict him or someone else for the secret distribution of books
in England. Two Puritan Ministers, John Penry and John Udal, were
sentenced to death on charges that they were responsible for writing,
printing or publishing books. n6 Before the Revolutionary War
colonial patriots frequently had to conceal their authorship or
distribution of literature that easily could have brought down on
them prosecutions by English-controlled courts. Along about that
time the Letters of Junius were written and the identity of their
author is unknown to this day. n7 Even the Federalist Papers, written
in favor of the adoption of our Constitution, were published under
fictitious names. It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been
assumed for the most constructive purposes."

You see that, we're heroes! So in the spirit of helping mankind progress, all I have to say is Boo yeah motherfucker!

The word of the day is "free," because both shows on the list today are free. You know what do right? Whenever anyone says the word "free," scream real loud! Ok, lets try it:

1. Lost Generation Concert Series (The Cavern)
Tonight is a special edition of the Lost Generation. Upstairs, Wanz will be Djing for most of the night with the Flashlight Party crew, which means that you should get a pretty nice dose of dance floor electro pop/disco punk along with Wanz' usual brand of hard to find tracks that no one else in north Texas plays in public. Downstairs will be a free (aahhh!) concert featuring Wanz doing some solo stuff (not sure exactly what kind of stuff this will be), along with performances from Silk Stocking, Plexus Loom, Sean Kirkpatrick and Daniel Huffman. We've been curious about Plexus Loom for the past week or two, ever since we briefly discussed their performance at the Amsterdam Bar. The band (it looks like a two person outfit) plays a strange, eerie blend of goth influenced outsider folk, and the Nick Cave influences discussed on their Myspace page are probably fair. Sean Kirkpatrick has to be one of the more interesting songwriters in Dallas right now, and lately I'm digging his stuff far more than the recent Paper Chase material. Quite pretty piano based songs that are dark and disconcerting at times, and probably recorded just the right way to capture the spirit of his material. And I can't find anything on Daniel Huffman other than the fact that he used to be a member of Day of the Double Agent, so maybe someone can share some info in the comments if you have any. And actually, I've never heard Day of the Double Agent either, so I have no idea what to expect. I've heard good things, but that doesn't really help me.

2. The Advantage | Fishboy | Jonathan Meiburg/ Swedish Teens (Rubber Gloves)
Another free (aaahhh!) show tonight, part of the Rubber Gloves Free (aaahhh!) Week. The Advantage plays covers of Nintendo soundtrack songs, which is an idea that I absolutely hated until I heard their music. Listening to The Advantage makes you realize how complex and difficult some of the old Nintendo music is, and how completely prog meets surf rock a lot of it sounds. I am going to go ahead and promise that the Advantage are a great live band, and if I'm wrong, its free (aaahhh!) so fuck it! On a different note, I read today that Fishboy is opening up for Spoon at Emo's later this month. Good for him. Sounds like a big gig.

And I promise to never do a Pee Wee themed list again.

1. The Polyphonic Spree - Wait
2. Red Monroe - Red Monroe
3. M. Ward - Post-War
4. Sorta - Strange and Sad But True
5. Midlake - The Trials of Van Occupanther
6. Bob Dylan - Modern Times
7. Nobody & Mystic Chords of Memory - Tree Colored See
8. Ratatat - Classics
9. The Thermals - The Body The Blood The Machine
10. Ray Lamontagne - Till The Sun Turns Black
11. Broadcast - Future Crayon
12. Beirut - Gulag Orkestar
13. Snowden - Anti-Anti
14. Mountain Goats - Get Lonely
15. Chad Vangaalen - Skelliconnection
16. Pete Yorn - Nightcrawler
17. Headlights - Kill Them With Kindness
18. Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
19. Vetiver - To Find Me Gone
20. My Brightest Diamond - Bring Me The Workhorse

If you haven't heard the Broadcast B sides collection sitting at the #11 spot, you should really give it a listen. Most of its tracks don't really sound like "B sides" at all because they are simply too good for that label. They are sort of like most Pavement B sides, which often make you wonder exactly why they weren't included on an album in the first place. Some of them are immediate enough to have been singles too.

Also, I don't know about you, but the Beirut record has really been growing on me over the past couple of months or so. Its funny that Beirut sounds completely original in many respects, despite the fact that much of the music on the album is inspired by traditional eastern folk that is about ten times older than rock n roll and even blues. Does that say something about the xenophobia of the typical American music fan, or does it just demonstrate how boring Sound Team is?

And finally, I just can't get into that new Thermals record. Anyone else heard it? It seems that they've had it on autopilot since their brilliant debut, which was a true lo fi pop punk masterpiece. Maybe I just need to listen a little more, but I only had to listen to the first Thermals record once to get hooked.

1. Record Hop | Tha Bracelets | Mescalero | Sleezus Fist and the Latter Day Taints | Sunday Drive (Rubber Gloves)

I'm going to be brief since I've already had to work on Labor Day. Record Hop is playing a free show at Rubber Gloves tonight as part of "Free Week". This is an excellent opportunity to catch one of the area's best straight ahead rock bands and one of my favorite lead vocalists. I've heard that Tha Bracelets are a good poppy live act and they seem okay but I have not heard them enough to form an opinion. Please let us know what you think. I know you can be really shy about that. All I can tell you about the other bands is that they make this one of the strangest lineups I've seen for a local show in recent memory.

One thing going tonight:

Wild in The Streets @ Hailey's: here is what is going down tonight:

In a bit of last-minute news, I'll be joined in the booth at Hailey's this evening by Chad of Denton's new, cool music/book/video store Strawberry Fields. The store's great, and all the employees are nice and knowledgeable. Here's a little info on what they've got up their subversive sleeves:

Specalizing in media that your parents warned you about and what your uncle secretly stashes underneath his bed, Strawberry Fields is here to provide you with media dealing with counter culture, activisim, arts, alternative lifestyles, trash, left of center, shlock, radical, queer, erotic, artsy, fartsy, artsy-fartsy, forgotten, hidden, recently recovered, activism and what ever else you can think of that they dont sell at Barnes and Nobles.

So come out and dance/drink to some good music (60's & beyond garage, international pop, soul, soundtracks, instrumentals & more) ... some of us (ahem) don't have to work tomorrow, which is definitely cause to celebrate! No cover for 21 & up; $2 wells and domestics. 10p-2a.

Should be good times on your extra night of fun. Thats all. We're going to have a ton of stuff this week, so get ready.