Only in Williamsburg can one find the back of an otherwise unassuming café housing, somewhat surreptitiously, an unexpectedly excellent art and music venue. And that was precisely the case on Sunday night, when the “Noncerts” series kicked off its inaugural show at Cameo Gallery, located off North Sixth Street behind the Lovin’ Cup Café. (“Noncerts,” naturally, describing the new nonprofit string of concerts, the first of which benefited Brooklyn public schools.)
The brainchild of Dave Godowsky (who performs as John Shade), Noncerts’ mission may seem high-minded, but the proof is in the (concert) pudding: The show took on an otherworldly air, rendering quiet the rapt, capacity crowd. The ethereality of the show was further spurred on by the flawlessness of an all-star backing house band (the likes of which have played with everyone from Jay-Z to Lou Reed).
Considering its use as a catch-all for music originating in the general “not North America or Western Europe” region, the “world music” label, while technically accurate, is arguably the laziest addition to the English language since Martha Stewart coined “fixer-upper” in 1914 (a title challenged in recent years as Twitter spawned The Verb That Shall Never Appear Herein).
If the sprawling genre should apply to any musical production, though, it would be to that of Thievery Corporation: Sure, Beltway stalwarts Eric Hilton and Rob Garza serve as the group’s core, but a revolving, polyglotic galaxy of guest contributors define the Corporation’s identity. From Anoushka Shankar to Seu Jorge, the collection has drawn from disparate corners of the globe over the past 15 years, mixing genres to oftentimes brilliant effect. Loyalists laud the mega-collab as groundbreaking in its synthesis of foreign sounds and cultures; detractors accuse the band of aspiring to a Starbucks-worthy brand of vapid backpacker trip-hop. Last weekend, it scarcely mattered: Thievery Corporation brought its lush consonance to San Francisco’s annual “Sea of Dreams” New Year’s festival, and 7,000 revelers converged to greet 2011 as one pulsing, euphoric mass of Day-Glo.
This isn’t to suggest, however, that the conglomerate played alone: Berlin’s Modeselektor and gypsy-punk-evolved Balkan Beat Box topped the roster of nearly two dozen acts on four stages. Thievery, in fact, effectively opened for brash SoCal DJ MiMOSA, whose 70 minutes of “crunk-step dub-hop” (his words) shut down the venue before an entranced crowd that thinned only minimally after Thievery stepped off. The throngs jiggled through a vast maze of stages, sideshows, vendors, and recovery stations, with throwback candyravers, goths, and all sorts in between ogling an impressive assortment of hanging jumbo neon constellations and other visual treats. Elaborately-bearded tea mavens from San Francisco’s OmShanTea served up hot refreshments in a Bedouin tent-like environment, while upstairs, UC-Santa Cruz grads and other mellow-outers vied for prime puffing position in the aptly named Hookahdome Lounge.
Thievery Corporation, which took the stage shortly after midnight and played well past 2 am, ran through a host of standards (yes, “Lebanese Blonde” included), drawing heavily from its latest and most political album, 2008’s Radio Retaliation (playing “Vampires,” “Sweet Tides” and “33 Degree,” to name a few). Co-founders Hilton and Garza — still the band’s only official members — presided over the stage behind twin turntables as longtime vocal mainstays LouLou (France), Sleepy Wonder (Jamaica) and Emiliana Torrini (Iceland) swapped turns in the spotlight with several other toasters, funksters and songstresses. Meanwhile, a DC-heavy collection of instrumentalists layered sitar upon sax, trumpet upon guitar, bass upon bongoes until the roof of the main hall, wracked from beyond by a howling winter’s storm and from within by relentless and rolling basslines and the heat of many thousands of sweating bodies, could take no more and dropped the first raindrops of 2011 onto the heads of the revelers below.
Never before has a leaking roof been welcomed with such enthusiasm.
Nick “Diamonds” Thorburn and Honus Honus share vocal duties for nascent indie super-conglom Mister Heavenly when they’re not fronting Islands and Man Man, respectively. (Yes, the same band that features Modest Mouse’s Joe Plummer and (for now) Michael Cera.) We caught up with them after their show last week at San Francisco’s Cafe du Nord. Among much malarkey and nonsense emerged these nuggets: Mister Heavenly’s as-yet-untitled debut album should come out around the end of next year (a new Islands album is also slated for release around the same time). Their current sound is “doom wop”; the ultimate goal is “reed-based jazz” (this means NO flügelhorn), and everybody respects everybody. Just watch the damn video already. Full transcription below.
Dunce Cap Quarterly: So tell us how this came to be — how you guys got together. Tell us the genesis.
Nick Diamonds: Mutual friendship. Just mutual friendship.
DCQ: And it’s been a few months in the works, right?
ND: Yeah, it’s been about a year. We came up a year ago, and we said we wanted to make a song or two together, and we ended up making a whole album, and we just mutually respect each others’ work.
DCQ: And you’re still doing the Islands thing, right?
ND: Still doing the Islands thing. Gonna make an Islands album in January. I think it’ll come out at the end of the year. The Mister Heavenly album will probably come out at the end of the year, too — the end of next year.
DCQ (referencing Cera): How does that Hollywood guy, the actor guy? I forget his name. He did he get involved?
ND: Oh, Keanu Reeves.
DCQ: Yeah. How’d you get him in the band? How does that work?
ND: We were just big friends of Bill & Ted’s, and The Matrix, and we just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if Bill — or Ted — played bass for us?’ It was bogus, but…Bill was our first choice, but we got Ted, and…
DCQ: And the rest is history.
ND: …take what you can get, you know?
DCQ: This is a typical musical pseudo-journalism question, but what sound are you going for?
ND: Jazz. We’re trying to make a really authentic jazz record.
DCQ: Jazz? You seem like you might be a little bit…off.
ND: We’re working on it. I think it might take a couple records to get it to completely jazz. Right now what we’ve settled on is doom-wop, and that’s our genre. Doom-wop.
DCQ: Doom-wop.
ND: Doom. Wop.
DCQ: Describe that.
ND: Well, it’s doo-wop with doom-like subcultures. Sub…subcultures? Subtexts.
DCQ: Sub-something…
ND: Lyrically it’s doomy, but with a doo-wop aftertaste.
DCQ: Gotcha.
ND: But what we really are all into is clarinet-based jazz. Reed-based. Anything with a reed in it. So bass clarinet, clarinet, saxophone…
DCQ: Well, we’re looking forward to it…And what’ll this album be called?
ND: I don’t wanna scoop too much, but…we haven’t settled on a title yet. But Mister Heavenly is the band — that we know. Sub Pop is the label — we’re contractually obligated to put (that) out. And (the rest)…we’ll figure it out.
(irrelevant non-sequiturious banter, cut to credits)
We also got ahold of the set list from one of Mister Heavenly’s earlier shows (not sure if this is from Portland or Seattle). Some guy told us that the track “Charlyne” was an ode to Michael Cera’s ex-girlfriend, but we have no way of verifying this, and, what’s more, nobody really cares. Song names, courtesy of Honus Honus:
Remember BMG? When they offered “Ten CDs for the Price of One,” they must have assumed that most of the kids who enlisted were too hopped up on Pogs and Big League Chew to mail back the overprints they tried to foist upon you with every delivery. I was no such mark. I monitored the mailbox religiously and ‘returned to sender’ with abandon, collecting my ten damn CDs for the low damn price of one, just like the good folks at BMG had promised. Never mind the fact that I spent the next year scrawling ever-more-threatening letters in an ultimately successful campaign to make them stop sending me Kenny Loggins compilations — I had my treasure trove, and among the trendy (Nirvana’s In Utero), obligatory (Marley’s Legend), educational (The Cream of Clapton), peculiar (Green Jellÿ’s Cereal Killer Soundtrack), and Sinbad-ish (Heavy D’s Peaceful Journey), I uncovered an album that would influence my adolescence more than any other: Bad Religion’s Stranger than Fiction.
At turns uptempo and anthemic, the album is defined by Greg Graffin’s relentless, scathing vocals and driving guitar work led by Brett Gurewitz in his premature swan song with the band (he famously split with the band to lead Epitaph Records’ evolution into a major indie force). Half punk, half thrash, half rock opera (yes, this shit gets three halves), Stranger than Fiction recruited kids like me and my friends on pure aesthetics, with singles like “Infected” featuring singalong hooks conveying vague malcontent and others, like “Hooray for Me,” issuing messages that no youngster would reject: “Can you imagine for a second/Doing anything just ‘cuz you want to/Well that’s just what I do/So hooray for me…and fuck you!”
But the extent of Stranger than Fiction’s impact only began to reveal itself once “21st Century Digital Boy” got stale around the 30th repeat and we started listening carefully to the rest of the album: I would wager good greenbacks that Americans born between 1980 and 1985 learned more middle-school vocab from this album than from the oeuvres of Twain, Steinbeck and Judy Fucking Blume combined. This from “Inner Logic,” as told to a 12-year-old more accustomed to the diction of Penthouse Forum: “Graduated mentors stroll in marbled brick porticos/ In sagacious dialog they despise their average ways/ Betraying pomp and discipline, they mold their institution/ Where they practice exclusion on the masses every day.”
My discovery of Stranger than Fiction laid the groundwork for exploration of many sorts, from exhaustive encyclopedia research on all things “-theism” to the rest of Bad Religion’s work. Frustratingly, my efforts to complete the former were thwarted by the band’s expansion of the latter throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s as they continued to mine such common themes as oppression and alienation in the context of contemporary events (notably those of the political variety). Along the way there were moments of creative paralysis and subsequent rebirth (Gurewitz’s return in 2001 seen by some as a flash point in the band’s return to form). But no album, to my mind, has come close to eclipsing Stranger than Fiction.
So, then, it was to my great pleasure that Bad Religion, while touring to support their 15th studio album, Dissent of Man, dipped well into the past as it played a sold-out Regency Center in San Francisco last Friday night. In addition to early staples such as “Fuck Armageddon…This is Hell,” the band played a handful of Stranger than Fiction cuts for the heaving crowd, most of which was significantly younger than the artists (though a sprinkling of grayhairs lurked in the rafters, heads bobbing). Graffin stoked EssEff pride by launching into the ambiguously-spirited “Los Angeles is Burning,” eliciting middle fingers and hearty “Fuck LA” chants not long after proclaiming San Francisco the band’s “second city” and describing how he was once accosted by a transvestite here during an early tour. The singer, less physical a performer than he was in his salad days, nevertheless exhibited the same moxie that impressed so many young people a quarter-lifetime ago (and clearly continues to lure new generations), charging through 25-plus songs in the two-hour set and leaving the audience screaming for more even after a second encore.
I was trying to think of a clever closing line, but it’s 5:50 a.m., and goddammit, I have to get up at Doesn’t Matter tomorrow, so just enjoy these crappy videos and pipe down already:
Evidence — sweet, indisputable evidence: Worst-case scenario, they’re long-lost brothers. Best-case scenario, they’re two large men, one even larger body. Two minds, one heart. Four eyes, four ears, two arms, two impeccably manicured soul-tees. Half Overweight Lover, half Oh, That Guy. And one pair of sunglasses until the next unemployment check arrives.
“If you stick with us now, you’ll get all the shit you want later!” advised Murray Lightburn, lead singer of Montreal-based group The Dears, at the beginning of their show at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory on Wednesday. He was referring, of course, to the fact that The Dears were playing their new unreleased album, Degeneration Street, in its entirety. Frankly, playing a full album is as a live show is an ambitious — and sometimes risky — maneuver when it’s one that people actually are familiar with. So to play a new and unheard album in full is ambitious indeed — but The Dears, it seems, are the ones to pull it off.
So what does such an undertaking take?:
… first of all, charisma and confidence, which thankfully, the band has in droves. Lightburn commanded the stage clad in a black leather jacket, black dress shirt and black tie, leading the Dears troops into a musical battle not for the faint of heart (or for haters of ’80s — although their music isn’t retro, some touches, like the keytar, are). If you wanted to know what happened to catharsis in music, it’s right here.
…secondly, a very solid album. Check that one: Onstage, the new record came out of the gate with a high-octane opener (single “Omega Dog”) that segued into the rest of the show. While not every song was as high-energy (“Galactic Tides,” for one, took its time building into not a climax but an edgy cresendo), nothing felt remotely diluted.
And true to his word, Lightburn, after playing the full new album (free set lists of the new album were available at the merch table, so frantic bloggers didn’t have to guess), lit on the fan favorites, including “The Second Part,” “You and I Are a Gang of Losers,” “Hate Then Love,” “Lost in the Plot” and “22: The Death of all Romance.”
Besides putting on one powerhouse of a show, Lightburn and crew provided an opportunity for a study in aesthetics: In Williamsburg on a weekday — a sometimes extremely homogenous (read: white and flanneled) zone — it’s nice to see a band take the stage that doesn’t conform to the white, pasty, tipping-the-scales-at-90-pounds-soaking-wet standard. Amazing, in fact.
At the Hoboken rock institution Maxwell’s last Saturday night, Lou Barlow is onstage telling us that he’s 44. While the baby-faced singer doesn’t look it, it’s a difficult detail to wrap one’s mind around. After all, the incarnations of bands and projects the rock legend has been involved in over the years seem as though they must add up to a full lifetime’s worth of work. The man responsible for Dinosaur Jr., Folk Implosion and Sebadoh certainly must be hovering around 77 due solely to his sheer prolificness, right? Apparently not, but that bodes well for fans — if he keeps this pace up, he may end up leaving behind a Library of Congress-sized catalog of music.
Maxwell’s is already an intimate venue, but Barlow’s opening with a solo acoustic set made it even more so. Leading off with “The Ballad of Daykitty,” Barlow thanked the hushed audience, explaining that he’d tried to do acoustic songs in previous shows, only to be met with audience rumblings.
“That was humbling. Apparently I hadn’t been humbled quite enough yet,” he joked.
The Missingmen joined Barlow onstage after his solo set, charting the night down a decidedly harder-rocking course. The three-piece didn’t cut any corners, putting on a tight set that managed to avoid feeling overly spare. If there’s such a thing as understated showmanship — a great sense of performance that manages not to cross over into ostentatiousness — Lou and the Missingmen have cornered the market.
However, due to the somewhat overlong set by openers Wye Oak, Barlow’s set seemed shorter than it should have been. When he checked his phone and seemed surprised that it was already 9:30 (Maxwell’s books two shows a night, including a late one), the crowd cajoled the band to keep playing. They obliged, taking the set up until doors were opening for the next show.
Barlow fans know that the only downside of seeing a live show is that you’ll never end up getting more than a cross-section of his expansive repertoire in any given concert. Somehow though, after being genuinely thanked for helping end the tour on a positive note, you can handle the trade-off of an abundant discography.
If there’s one word that would accurately describe Casiokids, it’d probably be funkalicious. Not in a strictly Parliament kind of way, mind you — in a way that’s distinctively all their own. Marrying more-than-danceable beats with instrumentation that often manages to sound like it came from an excellent mid-‘80s pre-programmed keyboard loop, the Norwegian kids (okay, the ruse is up — they’re hardly Smoosh) puts such a union to its best use possible — getting the prim to dance, getting the pedantic hipster off his feet. In short, Casiokids may arguably be the best thing to come out of Norway since the Jotunheimen mountains.
The ‘Kids, fronted by Jesse Eisenberg doppelgänger Ketil Kinden Endresen and backed by several other talented Scandinavians with lots of k’s and bisected o’s in their names, brought their lo-fi Atari sound to San Francisco’s Cafe du Nord last Thursday, where Mission kids, Castro queens and European art school students witnessed a typically raucous performance: By the time a six-foot-tall dancing chimp helped the band closed its set with an extended version of hit single “Fot i Hose” — the same monkey, it would appear, spotted onstage when we caught Casiokids last summer at Manhattan’s South Street Seaport — the band that recently won a cool million kroner from Norwegian legends a-ha had employed a keytar, cowbells and a set of pineapple maracas, in addition to their trio of eponymous throwback keyboards.
Yeah, those ones there.
Thanks to Best Buy and its borderline-felonious warranty policy, DCQ’s vaunted West Coast A/V department is working with limited resources at the moment, so please excuse the tinnitus-inducing sound quality and grainy, jerky video in this camera-phone recording of “Verdens Største Land.” In other words, you’d be a fool not to watch:
We’ve conducted a company-wide poll (yes, all three bi-coastal, night-lit, wi-fi-capable, dumbwaiter-equipped offices) and concluded that Telefon Tel Aviv needs to release more records (a LOT more!) and tour more (a LOT more!), and almost everyone else needs shut it down completely, today, right now.
Joshua Eustis, the surviving half of the original TTA, was last spotted at Manhattan’s Mercury Lounge and is apparently still under contract with Berlin music label BPitch Control, which released the former duo’s last album, Immolate Yourself, which was, and remains, utterly fantastic. BPitch Control’s website lists only one upcoming show, and it’s at some dump called Berghain, which could only be somewhere in central Europe and, thus, nowhere near where it needs to be.
Josh, we need you to bring the road show back to your home country. You have fans here. You sold out the Merc Lounge — on a warm late summer Saturday night, mind you, when New Yorkers had about seven trillion other entertainment options made all the more attractive by the looming six-month deep-freeze — and you know you have loyal followings in other American locales.
We need you now more than ever. Yeah, there’s some okay music coming out here and there. But it’s a seller’s market if we’ve ever seen one: The radio waves have been hijacked by some R. Kelly/Weezy hybrid and a floozy who used lezploitation to get big when Jesus didn’t pan out. People in San Francisco are so desperate for a new jolt they’re paying scalpers $100 a pop to see Die Antwoord, those South African chavs behind the “I’m a Ninja” web video that made the rounds a couple years ago, while in New York, the same ‘zef’ (we looked it up, too) jokers were anointed the new Gogol Bordello after their Governor’s Island show yesterday. Officially. Michael Cera and Dash Snow Terry Richardson presided.
So come back, Telefon Tel Aviv, and play a 70-city U.S. tour and drop three albums before next spring. Our collective sanity depends on it.
by Jon Toulouse
edited list via Big Boi’s official 
