FM: Chicago

The Chicago Tribune Literary Awards Ceremony

Gary Sheppard — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:17:17 +0000

Chicago is currently in the midst of the 2008 Chicago Humanities Festival. The culmination of the nearly month-long festival will be the Chicago Tribune Literary Awards. The ceremony annually honors an author who is considered to be at the top of thier field. Past winners have included Arthur Miller, Tom Wolfe, and Margaret Atwood.

This year's ceremony, which will be held at 10 a.m on Sunday November 2 at the Chicago Symphony Center, will honor popular historian David McCullough. Mr. McCullough, the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning 1776 and John Adams. He is one of the nations foremost historians and will surely garner a large crowd for a Sunday morning. Tickets can be obtained for the event here or by calling 312-494-9509.

Mr. McCullough's books can be found here.

Brian Pepper - Lost Days - Album Review

Gary Sheppard — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:10:14 +0000

The first few measures of Brian Pepper’s new album Lost Days (out on Chicago-based start up label Ten-O-Nine!) pull you into an overtly Nashville-influenced sound that pretty much dominates the entire album. Now, as an editor for an online music publication that concentrates mostly on indie rock and indie folk outfits, I do not intend for the Nashville comparison to be an insult. This is not Pitchfork. I am simply trying to describe the album in terms that the majority of readers will understand. If you are into that Nashville brand of country music that pays more attention to professional sound quality than accurate portrayal of the artist or artists in their truest sense, then Lost Days is definitely for you. If it isn’t your particular poison, then you probably won’t like it. Simple as that.

Going a bit further, though, there are a few things that should be known about this album. As stated above, Pepper catches that sensibility of many country singer-songwriters that have come before him on this album. Yes, that means that I think it is derivative. But at least the derivation is done well. In other words, the instrumentation is top quality and Pepper’s voice, aside from a sometimes annoyingly excessive vibrato, really displays an expertise in the genre. He appears to be one of those guys that just have a lot of natural talent. This usually means that he has a lot of work to do as well. That is, unless he wants to end up being one of those gray-haired fellas you see on “Live at the Bluebird Café” on Turner South late night playing songs that they wrote that made other people famous or rich or both.
I think Brian Pepper can easily escape that destiny if he wants. I don’t think he is too far gone. He could just for a little innovation, maybe open himself up for something a bit more protean.

However, there are a few hints in the album that suggest a desire to break out of the typical “country music” mold. These hints are most noticeable in “It’s Been So Long” and “Close Your Eyes.” The rest of the songs suffer from a sort of over-achievement that results in tired metaphor after tired metaphor. Also, and probably more troubling, is that over the course of the ten listens that I gave this album, I rarely believed him. Although he has a decent voice, it lacks conviction and the songs suffer from this as the words drip out as the stuff of mediocre fiction. This unfortunate mediocrity is not a universal for the album, though. He avoids my incredulity, and is consequently at his best, when screaming out his words at the top of his lungs. That is when I believe him the most even though these moments are rare. They are moments that almost seem like he forgets about trying to be a good singer-songwriter and just lets a little passion through. They are great moments, indeed.

All in all, though, this album is more miss than hit. But that is not to say that you should not keep an eye on Pepper. He has the ability and talent to make a great product in the future that could possibly propel him beyond the greatness of Guitar Town-era Steve Earle (the musician he mostly resembles) instead of hovering around the likes of CMT stars and high-priced production studios.

Thoughts on The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Gary Sheppard — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:50:32 +0000

This book traverses some new territory that Mr. McCarthy has been working with within his last couple of books. I believe, starting with Cities of the Plain, his writing has moved, thematically speaking, to an even deeper level of inversion than usual. An even more esoteric diving into realms of apocalypticism and post-apocalypticism that play on our gut reactions and our expectations of fiction and his own fiction in particular. The change may or may not play on the fact that he is getting older and older with every book. Devoted readers of his fiction expect great things from every single book because he has proven himself over and over as a heavy weight in this game. I hope, though, that his latest venture is only a great musing on death in a world that is already dead and not a plunge into the solipsistic pool of Updike and Roth.
Father and son travelling to some safer place are automatically set out as two of the few characters remaing in a troubling remnant of a world after someone finally dropped the big one. Their survival obviously depends on their love for one another and a good plan for living in an ashen world. I will say at first that, as far as I can tell, only two people actually die within these pages which is, to say the least, different from McCarthys other fictions. In fact, there are many more particulars about this novel that are troubling and potentially perplexing in coming to terms with the greatness of this book.
First of all, all devoted fans will be severely intrigued by the fact that McCarthy brings his characters back to the East Tennessee hill region after many longs years of having them toil and die out in a West Texas landscape that, interestingly enough, resembles our shared idea of hell. This move may be McCarthy drawing attention to this book in relation to his earlier novels. But for what? His early ones are riddled with the remnants of Modernism. Statisctially speaking, The Orchard Keeper alone has an overwhelming amount of natural-world archetype and arcane mythology represented so clandestinely by his Faulknerian language that it is difficult to understand what he is actually writing about. The Road employs a sequence that explores Platos cave myth; altough, in this case it is a bit more like a nightmare myth of the cave. The two characters travel long and hard to come to the life-sustaing archetype of the ocean, expecting re-birth but find it muddied with falling ash and wrecked fleeting vessels. It is as if McCarthy is saying that a time will come very soon when these myths and archetypes will not carry as much meaning for us. And to the chagrin of those finding moral directive in McCarthys novels, there will be no such directive in this one due to the hazy cloud of Post-Modernity in the way.
Also, many consider his early novels to be his best. I do not think that he is necesarilly going back to what he does best, but I do think that, with this book, he is reacting to the greatness that everyone places on those novels and attempting to wrap them up. Those books are his picture of a dying world with an indeterminate amount of time left, and this new one is that world dead and gone. He shows that our propensity for evil in this world is so entirely severe that even after the so-called apacolypse the world will still be out of order even though the population has been decimated.
Secondly, there is something interesting (again) in his grammar. He has always followed Faulkner's example in breaking many, many rules of punctuation. With this book, though, he takes it to another level and decides not to punctuate any contractions whether they are included in the dialogue or not. I am not certain as to why he is doing this now. He has always been ready to omit certain rules in the name of his harmonic writing. However, I have two ideas: the first is the obvious. He may be doing this in order to simply plaster the entire book with such a fluidity of cadence that it become necesarry for contractions to appear as stand alone words so as not to break of the flow of poetry. This is viable and beuatifully coincides with the way this novel brings to mind Hemingway's style instead of Faulkner's ( another way in which McCarthy's novels have changed in recent years). The second option may be a bit more of a stretch. The deletion of apostrophes may be enlisted to mirror the setting of the novel. By its very nature, a post-apocalyptic world will begin to regress in terms of its intellect and development just as a pre-apocalyptic world will continually learn and progress up until a certain point. Take Russell Hoban's post-nuclear holocaust novel Riddley Walker, Hoban brilliantly invents a new type of English to narrate the book in, a sort of dummy English. It so intricately displays the type of world in which the characters are living so as to place the reader in a position where there is no doubt that these things have actually happened and that survival will be difficult. Enter a celtic knot of verisimilitude and aestheticism.
However, there is no way that McCarthy can take such a saturated route because he loves his language and his philosophical wanings a bit too much to sacrifice them for the betterment of the books overall aesthetic. This may or may not be a good thing. In conclusion, this is probably one of McCarthys most intresting books to date. It is not the best (at least not yet); though it will be discussed for a while due to its many, many changes. At the very least, this will keep us all busy for a while and, as usual, we wont be recieving any help from McCarthy.

G. F. Sheppard, Jr.
September 18, 2006

Like Medicine Spinning on the Table: A Record Review of Son, Ambulance's Someone Else's Deja Vu

Gary Sheppard — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 07:12:51 +0000

Joe Knapp, the mastermind behind Omaha, Nebraska’s Son, Ambulance, released an album a few years ago called Key. This album hinted at a songwriting genius that was learning how best to deal with the depths of his own talent. Sure, the songs were a little depressing, but, let’s face it, life is depressing sometimes and it is the role of the artist to exploit that depression creatively. This is exactly what took place on Key.
Well, it’s been a while, but Knapp has gathered up enough songs to give us another Son, Ambulance album. And, it turns out that the time off between albums was not taken in vain as Knapp brings us a new album that not only improves on what was being built on Key, but also shows a little more adventure and ambition. Not only does this new release, somewhat lazily titled Someone Else’s Déjà Vu, give us a glimpse of Knapp at the paragon of his creative powers; it is a chronicling of a man carefully sculpting and crafting his idiom. Always an exciting thing to see in a band or musician or collective or whatever.
On first listen, this album feels like it will just be an okay, well-balanced piano-centered album of Midwestern indie music. But, the more you slow down to the album’s pace and deal with it on it’s own time you slowly start to hear what, for Knapp, is a truly remarkable thing. You start to hear what is actually going on with the album. You start to hear a Son, Ambulance that is not content with just creating easily digestible piano rock. You hear a new Son, Ambulance that has finally become comfortable with its own talent. On prior releases, the major downfall was that you could tell how filthily talented Knapp is not only a pianist, but also a songwriter; however, those albums left you with a sense of incompleteness (a feeling that it is never good to leave your audience with). Someone Else’s Déjà Vu, on the other hand, is a very complete and concerted effort.
The key for success on this album: a little bit of ambition and playing outside the box a little. A risky recipe, no doubt, but Knapp pulls it off with precision and style. He proves that in Art, a little ambition goes a long way.
Technically speaking, the thing that’s really impressive on this album is the bouncy, harmony-driven bridges that most effectively that these new songs from meditatively slow to surprisingly ebullient and then back again. All the while the lyrics are poetically expressing some pretty real-life tensions. Each song on the album is so fresh and challenging that it never really lets you just sit there an let it become background music.
The majority of the songs on this album seem like they transition three or four times into different songs, but Knapp is just changing it up for us. On any given song you can feel like you should be trotting down a tree-lined Manhattan street in springtime only to stop and be whisked away to Mexico where you are bowing your head for a Latin American dirge in a minor key (as happens when listening to “Quand Tu Marches Seul”). You don’t really know where the song might take you from measure to measure. Luckily, it always takes you to a great, melodic place.
The percussion gives the album a truly Latin and sometimes tribal dance feel. Its like Knapp takes straight up Americana and infuses it with a sort of tribal melancholy*. That is, until you get to “Horizons.” This is the point where you start to hear Simon & Garfunkel. Not to worry, though. It isn’t a rip-off that you hear or anything remotely derivative. It seems more like a coincidence that Son, Ambulance sounds a little only-living-boy-in-New-Yorkish that anything that might have been attempted by the band.
All praise considered, the album is not without that ostensibly patented Saddle Creek brand of forthright and border-lined mid-puberty era introspective poetry vibe from time to time**. The best example of this is on “Yesterday Morning”***: “This is every letter I never wrote/This is every dream I never told/Every selfish aspiration/Yesterday Morning…”. See?
It is important to note that Knapp has a real knack for being a thematic as he can on these songs. This is something new for him and he pulls it off with astonishing success. You see, normally thematic songs run the risk of being a little cheesy. Knapp avoids this by only giving the listener a taste of the thematic elements in songs like “The Renegade” when Latin guitar riffs that usually announce the presence of Antonio Banderas. It doesn’t seem like he only gives a little taste because of any plan or bullshit detector or anything. It seems like he does it because he can’t sit still long enough to see said thematic elements all the way through. Lucky him if that’s the case.
Overall, the album is an enormous accomplishment for Son, Ambulance. Here is a recording of a band that has a huge Americana tradition and knows exactly how to work with it, adding plenty of noise tracks and analog synths in the mix, and does it with talent in reserve. The album concludes in a sort of psychadelic, earthy pop that shows the staying power of this band. It leaves you lost in a swirling sense of beauty and solitude and community all at once. Hard to explain, but a hint can be found in a few words from “Awakening”: “The smoke went from my mouth went beautiful/Like medicine spinning on the table”. And those are just the lyrics, friends. This album is not a quick or necessarily easy listen, but it is one of the better ones that I have had the pleasure of listening to this year.



* To clear up what exactly tribal melancholy is: think of some Catholic kids from New England sitting around and playing      Hank Williams songs with a ukulele and some conga drums. Tribal Melancholy.
** See The Good Life, early Bright Eyes and, well, Son, Ambulance.
***I am not being negative here. This is a damn good song, and one of my favorite on the album.

Don't Give Your Kids American Names: A Record Review of Sebastien Grainger's American Names EP

Gary Sheppard — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 18:00:27 +0000

Sebastien Grainger, former member of Death From Above 1979, recently released a four song EP named American Names. The one sheet that accompanied the digital download from Saddle Creek mentioned, in so many words, that Grainger does not intend for American Names to be indicative of his upcoming full-length release. Probably a good thing.
Coming from the loud, energetic music of Death From Above 1979, Grainger appears to have taken the opportunity on this EP to sort of re-find or re-define himself. The songs, although laced with pop percussion and distorted guitars, sound as if they were all born as acoustic numbers that Grainger layered and layered and layered and layered with Canadian rock-pop sensibility.
I suppose I should give credit where credit is due, though. At least he didn’t just leave these songs as half-assed acoustic/folk songs. At least he had the decency to work hard on his product, no matter the fact that the end result so completely missed the target. Grainger worked on these four songs only for about a year (according to Saddle Creek). Now now, there is something to be said for the man’s work ethic. However surprising it was to me that this guy worked on nothing but four songs for a year and American Names is what he ended up with, it is nonetheless refreshing to see a musician so dedicated to his craft.
Since this EP is only four songs in length, we have enough time to briefly analyze each song. So, here’s the rundown.
The first and title track, “American Names” starts out with an 80’s hard rock-era piano rhythm that made me cringe the first few times I listened to the tune. Honestly, a physical cringe. That is, until I finally figured out what he was doing with it. From the outset, he is setting the listener up for an EP of straight up pop music and the superfluous piano intro serves best as a sort of pop-hyperbole. The question is: Why does he need to invoke musical heyperbole? The only answer I can think of is to sort of acclimate his fans to his new sound. In this vein, I can sort of respect Grainger for the idea of trying setting his listener up for what is coming and thereby sort of building from the ground up with this song. Unfortunately, the idea only gets you so far before you have to start worrying about execution. And that is where Grainger falls short. He actually has some pretty excellent lyrics in this tune. He explores the themes of finding one’s home and place in the world and shame and guilt and, well, America. Universal themes, for sure, and difficult to articulate in a four-song EP. In a fit of desperation and attempting to get some big idea out in the first song, Grainger belts out the words “Drive forth/Give your kids American names/Give them more than what was given to you.” He almost accomplishes an impressive feat in this song by tackling these huge ideas in a single song, but the fact remains that he would have been better served by crafting an entire full-length album around the themes that constitute this first song.
The second song, “Ways to Come Home”, is also a little troublesome for me. It is a short song and the music is obviously secondary to the unabashed didactic message of dealing with some overwhelming shame in order to go back to where you feel most comfortable, home. The problem I have with it is that lyrically it is split in two parts. The first part is a borderline irresponsible verse that ponders the ability to return home after you become famous. Whereby, Grainger concludes: “It's like skipping class/for a week/just come back and you'll see.” The second part, though, invokes some sort of Pogues-like natural world angst that is actually commendable:
I was there where you roamed
It was like a dream we all shared
But you were gone too long
And when you come down,
Oh
At first, these lyrics sound like generic filler; but, to me, they are the best lyrical expression on the entire EP. Nowhere else on the album does Grainger take his theme (in this case, finding one’s way home while dealing with the woes of fame) and perfectly describe it without giving anything away for free.
Now the third song on the release, and the last one with lyrics, is difficult for me to listen to, and I honestly have not paid it that much attention because there is just something about this song that is lucidly reminiscent of “Helter Skelter.” The vocals sound just like Lennon’s, the piano sounds so perfectly White Album-esque and the fuzzy guitar solo in the middle of the song is bottom-line pornographic. Now, in a White Album-era Beatles and Sebastien Grainger split, you know who I have to go with. The only positive thing I can say about this song in Grainger’s favor is that despite its fully derivative existence, it is perfectly executed and will probably become his most fan-favored song from the EP. However, if The Beatles sound is what he was looking for, he definitely found it. Now, I am very aware that it is kind of lame of me to compare somebody to the Beatles because people do it all the time. But, in my own defense, I will say that the Beatles comparison is usually a laudatory or pejorative. In my case, I invoke the comparison in a purely hortatory manner. In fact, this entire review is hortatory in my eyes.
It is pretty close to soul-wrenching for me to listen to Sebastien Grainger, someone with such obvious talent bleeding from the speakers, take a handful of decent songs and screw them up by trying to do way too much to them. The last song on the album, “Epilogue”, is a three and a half minute instrumental of mediocre quality. I mean, come on. Instrumentals are all good and well (some of my favorite music, in fact), but when you put out a rock EP and the last song is a sleepy instrumental tune, it doesn’t really rev anyone up for the full-length you are about to release. In actuality, it borders on being a rock faux pas. And, yes, there is a such thing as a rock faux pas.
The final result of this review in the form of a rant: I do not support (but I still somehow enjoy) Grainger’s American Names. On the upside, I do look forward to his full length with all expectation. I can only hope that he will put himself forward on the album a little more instead of trying to impress. I think there is a lot more to this Canadian rocker than meets the eye and I will just have to wait like everyone else until this fall when I can listen to Grainger’s full length in order to find what I have been looking for from the guy, maybe what he has been looking for from himself.

My Heart's in a Tunnel Baby, What Can I Do?: A Concert review of No Age

Gary Sheppard — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:40:58 +0000

The night before I packed up a U-haul and made a cross country move to my new home in Chicago, I decided to forego a good night’s sleep for an all ages rock show starring the frequently buzz-receiving noise/punk rock band No Age. Despite living in Jackson for the majority of my life, I had never heard of this venue called simply “121 Millsaps” (the address of the venue). With all of the stress that goes along with planning and executing a cross country move, I was dying for a drink and a smoke by the time I reached the venue that is located in one of the most crime ridden sectors of Jackson’s impoverished West-side. I barreled right through the front (actually the side) doors of the converted warehouse looking for a bar among the throng of hand-stamped teeneagers. There was none. There was no bar because this show, unlike most indie-rock Newcastle-sponsored rock shows was indeed BYOB. Yes, they expected you to bring your own beer.
This would have been fine had the sparse posters around town that advertised the show stated that this is a grimy rock show and you should fill your cooler to the lid with as much Bud Heavy as you can afford. Upon hearing this, my girlfriend and I looked at each other and contemplated running to the liquor store and buying a cheap bottle of wine. Not very rock and roll of us, I know. But, we decided just to deal with no booze and no smokes (since the venue was no-smoking) since the opening act Infinite Body was just beginning.
Infinite Body is a lanky, brunette noise/drone artist from somewhere in California. Unfamiliar with the act, and with the music so loud, most of the scene kids wandered around, paying minimal attention to the music, trying to figure out how to get some booze from older concert-goers. If they had stopped and listened, they would have found an impressive opening act delivering some very organic comps that were as gentle as any minimalist/punk drone comps could be.
Next up was Abe Vigoda. These guys are mainstays of the LA smelly kid rock scene, and an interesting fact about the band: they are named after the actor that you may know best as the Corleone Family caporegime Sal Tessio, or maybe just as the thick eyebrowed grandfather from Look Who’s Talking. Perfectly fulfilling their role as an opeing act by energizing the crowd for the headliner, they hammered out some fairly unique rock tunes while bouncing around the small stage. The quick set gave some of the kids in the audience a chance to dance around in the fashion of those knucklehead frat boys at Widespread Panic shows while Abe Vigoda was showcasing some songs from their new album that, as a fellow concert-attendee aptly described, sounds strikingly like how you would imagine Polynesian Punk sounding.
The end of the Abe Vigoda show left most in the crowd anxious for the next time that they would come back to Jackson, preferably as headliners of their own show. Their exit was followed by perhaps one of the quickest set-changes I have ever witnessed.
Having never seen a picture of the guys from No Age, I was looking around for them to enter from the virtually non-existent backstage area. Instead I saw two guys that I had seen in the crowd during the two opening acts take the stage to set up their guitars and drum kits.
Now, prior to the show, I read enough about the band to know about their DIY style and their intense love of playing live that has driven them, with a complete lack of venue discrimination, to playing a show on the banks of the LA river and a number of basically house concerts. So, I wish I could say that I was surprised when I saw these guys actually having the integrity to stand in the crowd to watch their opening acts. Well, integrity isn’t quite the right notion as it implies that Randy and Dean were doing something that they didn’t really want to do. I guess I should say that it didn’t surprise me to see them enjoying the opening acts with the rest of the crowd.
They came right out of the gates after about a 20-second sound check (that resulted in no vocals in the mix for the first song) with every bit of intensity that you hear on their newest album Nouns. The crowd was into it from the get-go. The front line of teenage guys seemed like they never heard the band before the show. It was no matter, though. They were the most active fans of the whole show, dancing around and slamming into each other as well as guitarist Randy Randall (who, without batting an eye, slammed right back into them). The rest of the crowd that seemed to be fans of the band previous to the show were mere observers until Randy played the brief little intro riff to “Teen Creeps”, one of the more pop/noise rockers on the album.
Both Dean and Randy played seamlessly together but seemed to be more occupied with individually making sure that everyone in the crowd got their $7.00 worth. They did this by playing as hard and as intensely as the Mississippi evening heat would allow them. In between songs, Dean would tell the 75 or so people in the crowd how much he loved Jackson. From any other band, you would thing that these words were a mere platitude, but Dean’s transparent earnestness showed that he actually meant it. This seemed to energize the crowd as much as the music did.
There was a brief caesura in the form of one of the band's guitar-only instrumentals. During this brief time, the audience was witness to Randy’s obvious love for his instrument as he played with the same attentiveness and detail as that of a concert pianist. Dean took this time to step back from his drums for a second to rescue himself from Mississippi’s hellish humidity by pouring a bottle of water on his head. With water dripping off his face and backlit by a pair of blue lights, Dean bowed his head for a moment before jumping back on the drums and leading right out of Randy’s wall of beautiful guitar noise into another thrashed out version of a song from their new album. Toward the end of the song and at the precipice of the evening’s energy, Randy came to from rocking out in his own little world and threw his Gibson SG onto Dean’s drums. Normally, this would be the end of any show, even a punk rock show. But Dean wasn’t finished playing and so he continued to hammer out the rhythm with complete disregard for the fact that he was beating on a guitar instead of his drums.
Once the song finally ended, Dean looked to the concert promoter just off the stage and noted that they were beyond their allotted time as the venue is in the middle of a neighborhood and is subject to a noise curfew and asked for permission to play a little longer. The promoter didn't hesitate. He just nodded his head and smiled. It was clear that the songs they played at this point we not to be confused with an encore. This band doesn’t do encores. They have to much true rock in their bones to even purport to be rock stars and "bless" the crowd with an encore. They were there for the sole purpose of playing some more songs for the crowd as quickly as they could.
The band went right into Nouns single “Eraser.” Instead of ending the song, Randy took the opportunity to thank the fans by jumping into their midst and dancing around with them. Despite the ensuing choppy guitar playing, Dean kept the beat and watched his friend out in the crowd with a smile on his face.
After playing so hard and loud and concsequently blowing some electrical device, the band decided to play their last song of the night sans microphones. This didn’t slow them in the least. Dean sang out the lyrics knowing they would be lost in the volume.
From time to time, you will hear people pondering the state of Rock-and-Roll. They worry about not only about its survival, but its very existence. However, with No Age there should be no question. They are a band dedicated to furthering what rock is and should be. There is really nothing more to this band than anybody could ask for. They are simply a couple of talented, experimental musicians that are clearly in love with their music and their fans. For me, the show was a great reminder of what rock is and where it lives and what it can accomplish. It was, for sure, an honor to spend my last night in my hometown with the likes of No Age

Pitchfork Music Fest '08: One Editor's View

Gary Sheppard — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:38:11 +0000

I attended the third annual Pitchfork Music Festival this past weekend at Union Park in Chicago. Now, I should mention at the get-go that I, in no way, endorse or advocate the reading of Pitchfork’s website. They are, after all, our direct competition here at Fig and Mint. But, since our plans for the first annual Fig and Mint Musc Festival to be held simultaneously in Chicago, Memphis, Washington D.C and New York fell through; I decided to attend the damned festival.
In a somewhat surprising burst of creativity, Pitchfork opens their music fest unlike any other summertime music festival by inviting a few bands of at least mediocre notoriety to perform one of their seminal albums from beginning to end. Last year’s fest saw Sonic Youth performing Daydream Nation in front of a crowd of undeserving scene kids. This year the opening night line-up saw Mission of Burma performing Vs., Sebadoh playing Bubble and Scrape and Public Enemy performing their It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
When buying tickets for the event, I decided it best to be honest with myself as well as the bands that performed on opening night to not buy tickets and therefore not pretend that I was a fan of these albums or, in this case, listened to them at all. Therefore, I will not be boring you with notes on matters I am not equipped to discuss. Instead, I will briefly make note of the shows I attended and the bands that I am thoroughly familiar with.
I started out the festival on Saturday afternoon at the Titus Andronicus show. I have been a proponent of this band's first proper release, The Airing of Grievances (its title a reference to a facet of the Seinfeldian holiday known as Festivus), since it appeared earlier this year. This show (maybe because it was the first show of the festival for me) was one of the best shows I witnessed all weekend. They opened with a cover of Pulp’s “Common People” as a sort of slap in the face of Jarvis “Sucks” Cocker (former lead man of Pulp) who was also playing at the festival. It was an especially notable experience for me later in the day when I visited the merch tent and found, after a months long search, a Vinyl for sale of The Airing of Grievances. To fully appreciate my joy in this find, you should know that they only pressed 500 of this album and I got number 497. What’s more, I ran into Titus’ lead singer Patrick Stickles during The Hold Steady show and complemented him on his performance and asked to have my new vinyl made even more limited edition by his signature. He took the album for a couple of minutes and started writing, stopping only once to look at me and say that he thought The Hold Steady was still playing the same song they opened with, but then noted that it was a different song after all. He finally returned the vinyl and here is what it said (a picture is forthcoming):

To Gary-
Best Wishes
Legalize Murder
Yr Friend,
Patrick Stickles

This odd and somewhat prophetic dedication was followed with a drawing of a puppy dog that says woof. Once you listen to the band you will understand. Moving on.
Going against my better instinct, I braved the crowd for a good seat for new sensations Fleet Foxes. As of their full-length debut, I have not been a huge fan of this band, but I went to the show since a) no one else was playing at that time and b) I have been told that the greatness of Fleet Foxes is found in their live show. Maybe I caught them at the wrong time, but I did not see greatness on the stage. I did not see a band on the make. What I did see was a band that is very proficient at reproducing Bryan Wilson’s harmonies with no discernable creativity added to them. A live sound that was fairly close to excruciating due to the massive amount of reverb and chorus that the band places on each mic and instrument that consequently results in a persistent feedback.
This all was just added evidence for me that Fleet Foxes are a band that have been unjustly been awarded with a fan base upon the release of possibly the most derivative album this year. I mean, lead singer Robin Pecknold even noted from the stage that the band owes the majority of its current fame to the so-called elephant in the room that was Pitchfork Media. I will give the band credit for being man enough to admit that. I will also give them credit for hiring a roadie that looks exactly like Fig and Mint’s own Memphis editor, John Miller. I intended to take a picture of the poor guy for this post, but he never again graced the stage with his bearded face.
The let down that I experienced after the Fleet Foxes show was quickly ameliorated by witnessing Fuck Buttons and Vampire Weekend delivering back to back shows that bordered on perfection. Not exactly a fan of Vampire Weekend, I was caught off guard by how impressive this band is melodically. They also reminded me that fun is not lost in modern rock.
The closer for the day was Animal Collective. And, ladies and gentlemen, please listen to me when I say that they are THE best working band in America. Yes, I realize that I need to defend this statement, but that will have to wait for a different post. I cant remember the last time I was so tautly held captive by a bands performance (yes I can, it was the Radiohead show
earlier this year in DC but that is beside the point). The band played a fair number of tunes off their most recent full-length Strawberry Jam as well as a few covers of Animal Collective member Panda Bear from his magnificent album Person Pitch which hit shelves last year. These guys held 45,000 people captive in their layered compositions of polyrhythm and syncopated instrumentation/vocalization. They already have me checking the internet daily for the next time they will visit Chicago. The only downside to the show was due to Pitchfork’s poor planning. When the clock struck ten, they made the band stop playing due to a noise curfew citing a city ordinance. Lame. When a band like Animal Collective is just warmed up and on the precipice of blowing that many people’s minds, you don’t close the show. You let them play and you deal with whatever fine you receive for breaking a silly city ordinance. But to each his own, I suppose. But, mark my words, that will never happen during a Fig and Mint Music Festival.
The next and final day of the festival saw a weak lineup for the first half of the day and a stacked evening. I guess Pitchfork wanted to go out with a bang. The first band I watched was The Apples in Stereo and they made me wish that I had stayed in bed forty-five minutes longer. I wasn’t to too sad about their poor performance of jangly pop tunes since they left me with a pretty decent seat for Les Savy Fav.
These guys were, by far, the most entertaining band of the weekend. I highly recommend seeing these guys in concert and watching the insanity ensue. I also recommend their exceptional new-ish album, Let’s Stay Friends to anyone that is looking for something interesting and energetic. The only apt description that I can give of the band without really getting into it in length is Freak Punk. After the Les Savy Fav show, a few schedule changes left me watching The Dodos on a nearby stage while maneuvering a good seat for M. Ward.
The Dodos performed an excellent show and proved to be one of the more technically proficient acts I saw all weekend. Their blend of John Butler-esque experimental acoustic numbers displayed a pleasingly dark sensibility without all of the blues and hippy influence of John Butler. The two-piece is by far one of the most sonically intriguing acts I have had the pleasure of listening to lately.
M. Ward followed with a rich set of crowd pleasing tunes mostly from The Transfiguration of Vincent and Post-War. He was as solid an act as you could expect from a quiet folk singer on a stage in front of thousands of hushed people. The best moment of his set was the encore when he came out and sat at the keys to perform his self-proclaimed favorite Daniel Johnston song “The Story of an Artist.” It was a breathtaking performance as he sang out in his low, raspy voice the words “They sit in front of their TV/Saying, ‘Hey! This is fun!’/And they laugh at the artist/Saying, ‘He doesn't know how to have fun.’/The best things in life are truly free/Singing birds and laughing bees/‘You've got me wrong’, says he./‘The sun don't shine in your TV’” over a completely silent crowd as the sun was setting on everyone.
Next was they breathy falsetto of Wisconsin troubadour Bon Iver. I was very excited by this show only to be let down by having to stand in a crowd of sweaty teenagers and left with an almost non-existent view of the stage.
All of that discomfort faded away when the band took the stage and as I saw Justin Vernon just over the tip of some guy’s ear in front of me as the aforementioned falsetto started singing the first words of “Flume”. As great of an artist as Bon Iver is, it is was hard for me to fully enjoy the show given the circumstances. I finally resolved that he is one of those artists that is better enjoyed in a small bar where intimacy doesn’t escape amid food vendors and teenagers scurrying off to go watch Dinosaur Jr.
There were a ton of other bands that I saw for a few moments (Dinosaur Jr., Cut Copy, Spoon, Jarvis Cocker, The Hold Steady, Caribou, Spiritualized to name a few) but the majority of my time was spent with the artists discussed above. All in all, it was a great event that featured great local food vendors and local record stores selling off vinyls at great prices (I was able to procure an original pressing of the now out-of-print Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as well as the new Portishead album Third). The small scale of the venue turned out to be a great thing as well. Usually I disparage weekend festivals like this because they are so large and it turns out not being worth it in the long run, but Pitchfork seems to have been very aware of their limits (not including the Animal Collective snafu that is worthy of the pejorative classification "fuck-up"). This combined with one of the best line-ups that I have been witness to in recent years, it was a great summer festival. I highly recommend that everyone start saving up for plane tickets for next years fest. Who knows, maybe they’ll get Pavement reunite to play the entire Slanted and Enchanted album followed by My Morning Jacket playing Z followed by Neutral Milk Hotel getting back together in one last hurrah to perform In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Then we could all die in peace, right?

Nathan Moomaw and 12 Months Worth of Folk

Gary Sheppard — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 06:17:01 +0000

Okay, here’s my issue with Nathan Moomaw’s new album 26: for centuries artists have been known to openly steal material and motifs from one another, but what separated the great artists from the other guys that you don’t hear about anymore is that the great artists knew their limits. They knew how much they could steal and how best to get away with it so as to best express their own idiom. It is a thin, fine line, for sure. And one that Moomaw has yet to learn how to tread.
The idea behind this album is that the songwriter composed a new folky, Iron & Wine inspired tune each month covering the year of his twenty-sixth birthday. Sound familiar? Well, unless you are one of those people that got sick of listening to Ryan Adams’ mid-career slump of whiny alt-country tunes and gave up listening to him before his exceptional album 29, you should be well aware of what an album that poetically chronicles the American mid-twenty-year-old should accomplish. Whereas Ryan Adams showed us the different stages he went through every year of his twenties and did so with beautiful songwriting to burn, Nathan Moomaw shows us his somehow important twenty-sixth year with airy, ethereal tunes that suffer from poor presentation and lack of immediacy.
Don’t get me wrong, the songs are okay. The problem that I have with them is that there isn’t much that separates them from the growing heap of breathy, Sam Beam inspired folk tunes already out there in abundance. Beam has already pretty much capitalized on this method of folk presentation. So, the end result of this album is a collection or twelve floating folk ballads that reveal an obvious musical talent that suffers from a lack of trailblazing innovation.
Maybe I’m not being quite fair. Nathan Moomaw really is an exacting songwriter with a very soothing voice. There is nothing on this album to suggest that you wouldn’t be satisfied if you purchased this album. There are really no discernable rough spots. Believe me, I scoured this album for negative points and, honestly, I was very hard pressed to find any. Somehow, though, I was discontent with this album of good, safe folk music. Why is that? I am sure that this feeling is fueled by my ever-growing belief that contemporary acoustic-folk music is the dying smokers cough of American music. There are so many folk acts out there that it is becoming more and more difficult to tell them apart.
The acts that are supremely idiomatic and trend setting are few and far between these days. There is only one Iron & Wine. There is only one band of traveling, storytelling scumbags called The Felice Brothers. There is only one Appalachian music revivalist Bonnie “Prince” Billy. They are the artists that are keeping American folk music alive by continuously reinventing it. The important question to ask of Nathan Moomaw (a question that he should ask himself despite his brief hints at innovation) is where exactly he fits in with this company. What does he contribute to this tradition? Is he more an element in the disease that is killing off America’s great folk tradition or is he part of the cure? For now it is hard to tell, but witnessing the talent that is apparent on 26, I would say that he has the tools to build something substantial, but he as got to be willing to play out of bounds a little more.

See Their Skin Glow: A Concise Record(s) Review of Islands

Gary Sheppard — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:24:24 +0000

The number one killer among indie rock bands has got to be that the band’s ambition greatly exceeds their talent. This over-ambition in unskilled hands is kind of like trying to build a Frank Gehry with only a hammer and some sheetrock; you end up with Son Volt’s The Search or The Polyphonic Spree. There are only a handful of bands that actually have the skill to pull this off. Montreal-based Islands is one such band.

From the opening notes of their first album, Return to the Sea, you are hooked into a quasi-creepy song that is just catchy enough to leave you wanting more. Fortunately, they give you more, but not more of the same. As the first song goes on for nine and a half minutes, you pretty much have your fill by the time its over [1] . And so it becomes a testament to the respect the band has for their audience when they completely switch gears on track two for a brass horn addled marching tune.

They go on through the rest of the album like a kid that can’t sit still long enough to write her term paper by bouncing from folk to pop to marching band to trip-hop to rap to Caribbean steel drum outfit to the piano driven “Bucky Little Wing” that is influenced by, yes, that ubiquitous band of Liverpool legends. The simple fact that they can cover all of these different genres isn’t what makes the album successful. After all, diversity is not synonymous with success. What makes it succeed is that the band incorporates its own idiom. Without the unique lyrics and the naïve originality of the band, the songs wouldn’t amount to much more than a mixed tape of American music [2] .

Return to the Sea was a great first album that any band could be proud of making. Lyrically speaking, they found a great via media between dense, guilt-ridden and confused Arcade Fire-like lyrics and the prevailing pop swill of the times. They touched on some serious emotions but never for too long. Although somewhat of a cult success, Return to the Sea is a strong album. On their first attempt, Islands successfully put out an original and accomplished piece of art, but then they faced the hardest thing: a follow-up.

Now, if you appreciate Islands for the same reasons that I do (listed above), you are faced with a fairly simple criterion for judgment: just as every song on Return to the Sea tried to break new ground while avoiding redundancy, will the new album Arm’s Way (kinda sounds like harm’s way, doesn’t it?) break new ground while retaining some semblance of originality without carbon copying Return to the Sea? The correct answer is yes.

First of all, Arm’s Way finds Islands with a better production quality [3] and signed to Los Angeles-based Anti- Records [4] . What it does not find is the same sort of genre hopping on each song that was characteristic of Return to the Sea. Instead, Islands comes off with more of a straight forward collection of indie rock songs that sound more like focused compositions than sonic experiments. A major shift on the new album is the message that Islands is trying to get across. Most of the lyrics on the album work as a commentary on violence and death in particular. The comments they make aren’t veiled either with song titles like “Pieces of You” and lyrics like “Right from the start I was stabbed in the heart/Didn’t know I wasn’t breathing/Didn’t know I had been bleeding/Open my door, thought I was alone but/Someone was hiding in the dark room in my home.”

Even though there isn’t as much new ground being broken on this record, there are still some definite sweet spots that keep the album serious and worthwhile. Parts of the album work as a mouthpiece for a populace that is well aware of its own decline. When you work through the superfluity of adverbage on “Life in Jail” you end up with words nestled in a slow beat and bright tremolo that describe the despondent actions of so many people in the world today: “Pour concrete on me delicately, baby/So I can live my sedimental life sedentarily/ What a life/ I could just sit here for hours and watch TV worthlessly.” The cultural critique doesn’t stop there as the song stops momentarily and then picks back up again, this time with a quicker tempo and bouncy dueling guitar riff that leads to a triumphant bridge with the words “Blow my money on my favorite company/They can blow holes in my ozone/So pour that propane on my clothes/I like it when my skin glows/Besides, there's nothing to live for unless you live a little bit more like you are going to die.” Considering these lyrics, it seems that the words devoted to violent images and death are only a way of expressing the more central theme of the album that can be gleaned from the opening words of “Pieces of You”: “The capillaries of the community are hemorrhaging on everything.”

An impressive addition to this album is a more attractive and intricate guitar work that is, at times, reminiscent of some of the more melodic guitar work of Television circa “Marquee Moon” era. Islands’ guitar work, most notably on “In the Rushes,” makes just enough of the good kind of dissonance to develop an atmosphere that does an impressive job of housing the more sardonic lyrics on the album. From a Daedalian musicianship to a borderline schizo compositional technique, Islands proves to be a top-shelf rock band.

Though not as chock full of ambition as Return to the Sea, Arm’s Way is an exceptional album that serves as some pretty convincing evidence that Islands still has enough talent to get them where they want to go. Even though the direction for this sophomore effort is noticeably more pessimistic and critical, Islands remains at the vanguard of indie pop-rock and is perfectly capable of showcasing an artistic and infectiously catchy bunch of compositions that pique interest enough to leave the listener curiously waiting to see what they can/will do next.

[1] The fact that the band is gutsy enough to start out their first album with a song this long is a pretty fair indication of the band’s ambition.

[2] This would be unfortunate being as the band is Canadian.

[3] This may not be a good thing for some old school fans of Islands and The Unicorns that prefer that stripped-down lo-fi feel. Nonetheless, I like it for the sole reason that it works. It’s not like we are dealing with Ethan Johns producing Simon Joyner or anything. The band still sounds like Islands.

[4] Anti- might be responsible for the beefed up production quality, but not likely when you consider that they are well known for giving their artists almost complete autonomy to record what and how they will.

These Old Broads

Gary Sheppard — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:04:24 +0000

The simple fact is that there’s one born every minute. From the moment they are born they scream: lassie come home while skimming the pages of Jane Eyre. They’ll never find her because she went out to the white cliffs of Dover, just out beyond the National Velvet factory. But honestly, the courage of Lassie is really nothing compared to little Andrew’s life with Father Cynthia. He once was grounded when he returned from a date with Judy all because Julia misbehaves. In retribution and anger, he got drunk and the next morning when he woke, he immediately blamed the little women as the main conspirator of the big hangover that he was experiencing. He grew up to be the father of the bride that he always referred to as father’s little dividend. She ran off from her husband after 14 long minutes of marriage to find a quiet place in the sun where she could finish Quo Vadis. When she was finished, she sat back and sighed to herself: love is better than ever, better than Ivanhoe, too. With natural rhapsody in her ears, she walked out along the old elephant walk to find a new beau, maybe beau Brummell this time. With a seductive ear, she leaned into him and whispered: The last time I saw Paris there was a giant there from raintree country that took me to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, it was quite a fine time. He sat up and told her rather fearfully that suddenly last summer he was taken over by a scent of mystery in the form of reading the jacket of Butterfield 8 with a dancer that went by the name Cleopatra and all of her V.I.P.s. The sandpiper dove onto the set of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Taming of the Shrew. It was awkward. Brummell told her that Doctor Faustus was his hero while sending off reflections in a golden eye. Then came the comedians, boom! They gathered a crowd and performed the secret ceremony in front of Billy Piper and Anne of the Thousand Days. Hey, it was the only game in town. End of story. X, Y and Zee. They kissed under milk wood and sent out announcements that hammersmith is out. As to their current spouses, they would divorce his-divorce hers, simple. He got a job on the night watch that made him work on ash Wednesday. She saved all winter to buy a new identikit so she could perform an autopsy on the blue bird at their wedding. Then the war came. But, the victory at Entebbe provided a little night music so that he could return to the engagement with his head held high and she would pack him a little heat, because, as we all know, winter kills. It turned so cold so fast that the mirror crack’d down at the general hospital, and, between friends, I think that was the beginning of malice in wonderland. He didn’t survive that winter. All they found was his body sans clothes and his horse had run off somewhere. North and South both searched for him for weeks. Scratching their heads, they thought that there must be a pony around here somewhere. It was only fitting that since her whole life was really just a tower of cards, that she became known to the townspeople as Poker Alice. She lived alone with Young Toscanini, a little, Italian, sweet bird of youth that watched The Flintstones all day with the nanny. He grew up with a learning impediment that only allowed him to say: These Old Broads.