”One thing that was great about Dirty Martini was that it shifted my writing to a darker place and it changed my singing to a bit more understated than before,” says Schneiderman. “I learned so much musically and otherwise in that band across the four years we were really active.”
If you can’t wait that long to see Ms. Schneiderman on stage, she’s appearing at Muddy Boot Organic Festival this Sunday. Schneiderman will be followed by headliner and fellow Portland artists, Weinland.
“There’s something distinctly old-school Austin about DNN: It keeps it loose and casual, then cleans up the mess with gusto.” – The Austin Chronicle
Darling New Neighbors is a three-piece band out of Austin, Texas. Their second L.P., Rocket (2009, self-released) will be available October 15 online and in record stores.
Rocket is filled with contributions from the dense orbit of talented players that make Austin, Austin. The album features mastering by Billy Stull (Okkervil River, Daniel Johnston), mixing by Jeff Hoskins (Foot Patrol, Cactus Cafe), and pedal-steel tracks by Gary Newcomb (Bruce Robison, Li’l Cap’n Travis).
Rocket is a pop shapeshifter with tracks like the sprawling “Electrolux,” the wry, masochistic and Latin-flavored “Tango,” the dirty-talk thrash of “Take It” and the psychedelic, girl-group layers of “Stars.”
The Allman Brothers Band and Widespread Panic are out on tour together, ripping it up wherever they go. Sadly, they’re coming nowhere near the West Coast, so I guess I’ll just have to hear about it (live recordings are available after each performance) and read about it in the local newspapers.
The Allman Brothers continue to evolve. Saturday’s dial-a-jam saw them bring every member of the opening band, Widespread Panic, onstage at one point or another for jam sessions. And Rochester’s pedal-steel guitar star, Chuck Campbell of the Campbell Brothers, added that sacred-steel gospel to the night on “Soul Serenade,” and then again on the encore, Campbell getting high-fives and hugs from the band for his wailing solo on “Southbound.” It was midnight before all possibilities had been exhausted.
LiveWidespreadPanic.com has the Panic’s set form Canadaigua available now. HittintheNote will carry the “Instant Live” recording of ABB’s set at a later date.
Breathe Owl Breathe is a great name for a band and it fits the earthy trio from Northern Michigan who goes by that name particularly well.
Breathe Owl Breathe is Trevor Hobbs on percussion, Micah Middaugh on vocals and guitar and Andrea Moreno-Beals on cello, vocals and assorted other instruments. The three are friends who spend part of the year living together in a remote cabin. This summer they’ve been on the road in Alaska and more recently in Oregon. They played Pickathon last weekend and Tuesday we drove out to Hillsboro to see them perform for free at McMenamin’s Cornelius Pass Roadhouse.
Upon hearing the first few songs, Everybody Fields and The Avett Brothers came to mind. But Breathe Owl Breathe has their own thing going, that’s for sure.
Amy Fletcher of the Juneau Empire describes their music:
In lyrics that are at once vivid and obscure, Breathe Owl Breathe sings of mastodons and glaciers, toboggans and boats, evoking landscapes through their music that would be easy enough to imagine were formed right here in Southeast Alaska. However, Northern Michigan is their base, another place where winter encourages creativity.
Micah Middaugh’s deep bass voice and Andrea Moreno-Beals’ gentle soprano describe few coherent pictures but rather hint at images and states. Backed by Middaugh’s guitar, Moreno-Beals’ cello and Trevor Hobbs’ gentle percussion, the three produce unusual songs that linger in the imagination.
Linger they do. We own both Ghost Glacier and Ghost Glacier the EP and we’ve been playing them this week in anticipation of the band’s performance and as a reminder of it.
[MP3 Offering] “Last Dance” by Breathe Owl Breathe
We tried to go to one a while back in Atlanta, but our flight from Savannah was canceled and we missed the show and ate the tickets. No such obstacles stood in our way last night. We sailed out I-84 to Troutdale and easily found a sweet spot to pitch our lawn chairs. We started tipping back wine and handcrafted brews care of our Edgefield hosts and generally speaking “got our show on.” And a great show it was.
The Decemberists pulled off a combination perhaps only the Decemberists could pull off. They blistered an hour-long fantastical song cycle, followed it with a collection of favorites and the baddest cover of a Heart song ever.
Because if you’re going to have Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark, and My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden on tour (playing the forest queen and the lovely Margaret), you damn well better do “Crazy On You.”
But let’s discuss the night’s centerpiece. “The Hazards of Love” is pretentious, and it does demand attention, and it’s as unlikely a major-label release as you’ll find in 2009. It’s as unlikely a release as you’ll find, period.
These aren’t bad things. If this is the age of the nerd, as John Hodgman would have us believe, here’s the soundtrack.
I’m not going to refute the nerd rock label, but I will add that The Decemberists’ music could serve as the soundtrack for several other movements, including almost anything nautical (take “The Deadliest Catch,” for instance). The band is also waving a flag for art and theater, for Portland and for indie rock.
I don’t know the band’s work well enough to say what it all means—the cyclical lyrics and their theatrical, sometimes comical, live performance. But I know enough to say I love it when post-modern nerd rock meets, however briefly, something resembling Black Sabbath. Those dark chords from decades past give the band’s heady music something steady to lean on. Which is a good thing when you’re a band with costumes, charisma, something to say and the ambition and talent to make it all come together.
Nau is a Portland-based active wear company that makes gear for “artists, athletes and activists out to unfuck the world.” I would have chosen a different way of expressing that sentiment, but I do hear what Nau is saying and I count myself among the people they’re trying to reach.
When you visit Nau’s Web site and click on “Collective Stories,” you’ll find an archive of videos that showcase the concerns of Nau employees and their customers. For example, here’s a piece on Salmon Nation and Salmon Nation Artists Project CD:
I like how Alexa Wiley Pengelly, one of the CD’s producers says, “Culture is alive. It is found within experiences and moments passed down and shared by our elders, civic leaders and creative communities, connecting people to the land.”
I also love the paintings of the mighty fish by Mimi Matsuda.
Next Tuesday when, Murdering Oscar and Other Love Songs is released on Rush St. Records, Patterson Hood will see one of his earliest projects come to fruition some 15 years after its inception.
On his MySpace, Hood explains:
I moved to Athens, GA on Aprils Fools Day, 1994. Perhaps I thought I was kidding myself, just stopping in on my way to the bigger city an hour to the Southwest. I moved into a little house on Ruth St. with my new friend, Brandon. We had panhandlers in our driveway and had a crack head that frequently banged on our door at four thirty in the morning. I had a shitty job and only knew two other people in town. I was alive with the fresh opportunities posed by moving to a town with an actual music scene and clubs to conquer. I wrote an album’s worth of songs and called it Murdering Oscar (and other love songs).
Unfortunately, I didn’t have any money for studio time, much less financing or support to actually release it. I also didn’t have a band and didn’t know any of the hundreds of musicians residing in my new hometown. Instead, I recorded all of the songs on a boom box in Brandon’s bedroom (it had better acoustics than my room) and began dubbing cassette copies to give to anyone I met. I probably gave away about 500 of those suckers that year.
Hood moved on from his solo material, and Drive-By Truckers born. ten years later, in 2004, while DBT was taking some time off, Hood found one of the old cassettes, dusted off the old material and wrote some new songs as counterpoints to his former mood. In 2005, he took the songs into the David Barbe’s Chase Park Transduction Studios and recorded the majority of this album.
Keep It Hid is not a retreat from the sonic explorations Auerbach undertook on Attack and Release, it is an expansion of them. The songs stretch out with that familiar multi-tracked guitar base, augmented throughout with the often subtle employment of organ, banjo and bass. This work unquestionably signals a step forward in Auerbach’s rapidly evolving style.
Auerbach is not aping classic riffs so much as they seem to sweat out of his pores. It’s all up there, in his head, and he is channeling it into his own vision in a manner that is consistent and convincing.
