SFBG: Noise

Sigur Ros' latest evokes ice palaces, processionals

2008-07-22T18:35:46Z

SIGUR ROS
Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust
(XL)

By Ian Ferguson

Almost a decade has passed since Sigur Ros’ 1999 release Ágætis Byrjun (Fat Cat/Smekkleysa) established itself as a masterful work. Arriving after two other acclaimed albums, the band's Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust (XL), sounds like its most celebratory release to date - a triumphant recording fittingly produced by a group whose name translates as “Victory Rose.”

The first track boldly opens the disc. Evoking images of a Roman military parade, four guitar chords, panned alternately across the right then left speaker, count down to youths cartwheeling and dancing in pristine white togas, singing “lalalala” in high falsetto. Picture them spreading flower petals for the approaching processional, as Sigur Ros delivers a hard-driving drum pulse and soldiers, fists beaten against shields, boots stamped in time upon the ground, march double-time. Lead vocalist Jon Thor Birgisson sings above all this -- the returning hero, chariot-borne, composed, able to silence his soldiers, or excite their enthusiasm. The sound supports him as much as a parade would its hero, home to claim his triumph.

The following track, “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur,” continues the theme, opening with an Olympic horn fanfare sample taken from faded analog tape so pale that the first track, “Gobbledigook,” stands out in brilliant contrast. The first song sounds so gloriously triumphant that it speaks more to the band’s past achievements than to the rest of the album, which establishes the timbre of its voice in the second track. Appropriate to Sigur Ros' homeland, it's a timbre of ice.

Ice. So complex a solid. Able to sink ships and extend the outer reaches of a continent as unquestionably as earthen ground. The drums, mixed to a background volume, discreetly support the falsetto-voiced snowfall. Ice: fragile, clear, pristine. The remaining songs resemble delicate, crystal sculptures; Birgisson’s voice, a ray of light refracting spectral harmonics, his breath condensed, a wave of sound frozen into ringing clarity. Alternating between forceful, glacial rock and sacred hymns resounding in fjordic ice-cathedrals, Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust's arrangements cohere perfectly.

SIGUR ROS
Oct. 3, 8 p.m., $42.50
Greek Theatre
UC Berk., Hearst and Gayley, Berk.
www.anotherplanetent.com

Janet Jackson's 'wardrobe malfunction' revisited

2008-07-21T23:32:22Z

A clip of Janet Jackson's offending "malfunction."

By Laura Mojonnier

Associated Press reported today that a US federal appeals court dismissed a $550,000 indecency fine issued to CBS after Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during the 2004 Superbowl halftime show.

According to the AP, the three-judge panel ruled earlier today that the Federal Communications Commission "acted arbitrarily and capriciously" when issuing the fine, as "CBS's broadcast of a nine-sixteenths of one second glimpse of a bare female breast" did not meet the commission's long held standards for "actionable indecency."

Beauty is the new Joan the Policewoman

2008-07-21T17:29:27Z

JOAN AS POLICEWOMAN
To Survive
(Cheap Lullaby/ Reveal)

By Todd Lavoie

Joan Wasser, the heartstring-hitting sharpshooter behind the Joan as Policewoman tag, has offered a simple but irrefutable platform for the elegant, emotionally direct songwriting, one that made her 2006 debut, Real Life (Reveal), such a blindsiding experience: “Beauty is the new punk rock.”

It’s an ear-tugging slogan, to be sure, but the album’s ravishing arrangements and carefully nuanced confessionals offered the goods to back up her capital-lettered claim. Whirling bits of soul music, punk and post-punk attitude, and AM-radio singer-songwriter pop into shimmering string-and-piano-centered structures that felt comfortingly familiar and yet still difficult to compare, Wasser easily won over seekers of challenging, interactive pop music with swooners such as “Feed The Light” and “We Don’t Own It.”

With relatively few contemporaries guided by a similar aesthetic, the easiest point of comparison might be Antony and the Johnsons. In fact, the aforementioned’s Antony Hegarty even joined Wasser on what could arguably be Real Life’s most riveting highlight, the fiery duet “I Defy.” Otherwise, the list of artists who could truly be considered kindred spirits is a mighty short one; fittingly enough, two of them, fellow sensitive souls Rufus Wainwright and David Sylvian, both appear on To Survive, the latest Joan as Policewoman venture.

For those who surrendered freely to the soul-baring charms of Real Life, tears and all, good news: To Survive serves up plenty more of the same. Or, not exactly: while its predecessor was essentially one tremendous letting-go, Joan as Policewoman’s newest isn’t quite as seismic in its outpouring of emotion, focusing slightly less on loss and ill-fated love in favor of expanding further upon Real Life’s occasional flashes of wet-skinned sensuality.

Ultimately, To Survive - despite the desperation one might infer from the title - could very well be the more hopeful of the two albums, thanks to what to these ears feels like greater appreciation for the redemptive possibilities of love. This isn’t to say that Wasser ever bubbles over with the exuberance of, say, Bjork, at the “zing! boom!” of falling head over heels in “Like Someone In Love”: most of her admissions of excitement at the heart’s capacity for love are countered by warts-and-all avowals of vulnerability. Still, it is in these moments of conflicted emotion - wherein Wasser sounds simultaneously seductive and fragile - that the album remains the most potent. If Real Life was more about the struggle through the darkest of days, To Survive is the keep-on-keeping-on afterward, with one eye gazing back at the shadows and the other firmly leveled upon the bright light in the distance.

The recording opens with “Honor Wishes," a slow-burning late-night conversation between two lovers; Wasser is the brittle-hearted hopeful reaching out to her man, while guest vocalist David Sylvian - best known as the leader of the suave synth-pop glammers Japan before embarking on an endlessly fascinating solo career of experimental ambient songcraft - croons ghostly “ooh” and “oh” harmonies that are equal parts arousing and unsettling. Is he reaching back? Is he pulling away? I’m not sure.

Based largely around minimalist piano repetitions, brushed drums, and what sounds like the insistent lap of waves upon the beach, the track orchestrates a great deal of smoldering, noir-ish drama from relatively simple components. The addition of Sylvian is a particular coup, as the singer’s flair for smooth understatement meshes well with Wasser’s bluesy delivery. “Would you love me and not my need to be loved?” she cries. “Would you honor my wishes?”

Wasser’s voice is even more controlled and carefully expressive here than it was on Real Life, bristling with open-wound vulnerability in one moment only to swing into a confident jazzy stride in the next. At times, she recalls Roberta Flack in her phrasing; in other moments, I hear echoes of early Joni Mitchell.

“Holiday," for example, arrives as a modern-day cross between the folk-jazz of Mitchell’s Court and Spark and the cool smokiness of her Hejira (both Asylum/Elektra), thanks to Wasser’s soaring vocals and the pairing of hypnotic brushed-drum rhythms and an insistent strummed guitar pattern.

A similar spirit runs through the bright-eyed “Magpies," a borderline-playful romp rolled along by jazzy piano runs and call-and-response saxophone passages. Here, the possibility of love is almost too much, but Wasser confronts her discomforts head on: “In your face I see my life unfolding / but we have so many fears / Let’s gather them today and let them fly away.” When the nearly-giddy male falsetto chorus comes swooping in, things definitely seem to be looking up for our narrator…

Perhaps the most quietly overpowering - or, in the Joan as Policewoman vernacular, the “most punk rock” - moment of To Survive is found in the urgent simplicity of “To Be Lonely,” an ear-whisperingly intimate yearning for everlasting love sighed over lush strings and a tender piano melody.

Here, Wasser measures out each admission of naked vulnerability as if it were a teary-eyed mantra, hoping for dear life that the loneliness has at last come to pass. Listeners currently unlucky in love might find the fragility of the lyrics enough to send them a-fetching their hankies, but trust me, it’s worth it. Slap on those headphones, and you can feel the slow heave drifting out between these words: “This is the one / O just know it / This is the one / I want to show it / This is the one / I would die for.”

For an album so concerned with detailing the complications of life, with steering clear of black-and-white oversimplifications in favor of dipping deep into the grays, it’s entirely appropriate that To Survive ends with the complex “To America,” an astonishing slice of mixed-feeling melodrama featuring Rufus Wainwright. Noticeably pained and yet still strangely uplifting, the song opens with simple piano chords and understated woodwinds laying a tearful foundation for Wasser’s and Wainwright’s desperate exchange. “Love will save you,” Wasser begs in choked tones. “Try not to starve yourself of love.” Wainwright’s response arrives equally troubled: “Is it right, my love, is it right? It’s a question with no reply.”

Then, about halfway in, the most unexpected thing happens: suddenly the drums kick in, as does a rousing horn section. Along comes an anthemic slow build, as does a spirited chorus that defies the bitter core of its lyrical thrust: “To America / Alone alone alarm alive.” Though the full-length focuses more on sexual politics than anything on the international level, it’s tough absorbing these words outside of the context of current affairs - and yet right there in the eager delivery, one can detect the glimmers of hope. The juxtaposition is a powerful one, and as the tune drifts off into the distance with the soar and pop of fireworks crackling up above, I couldn’t help but cheer for Wasser’s dauntlessness.

Here’s the video for To Survive’s first single, “To Be Loved”:

JOAN AS POLICEWOMAN
Sept. 17, 9 p.m., $14
Café du Nord
2170 Market, SF
(415) 861-5016

Ta-ta and smack-smack, Trannyshack

2008-07-19T23:29:22Z

As many if not all know by now, Trannyshack, revered weekly trash-drag temple of glittery gore from the planet Thrift Town, is ending after 12 years of tranny antics (trantics?). Head honchette Heklina revealed to me the exact reasons why in a candid interview back in early February -- and I didn't even have to score her any hot sex with quadriplegic Desert Storm veterans in return! She's magnanimous. I'm scoopy. We traded memories.

Right now, Trannyshack's counting down to its close with a series of four command performance nights featuring fave messy queens from the present and past. That will be followed by a ginormous, absolutely ginormous, Trannyshack Kiss-Off Party at the Regency Center on August 23. This shindig will double as this year's famed Trannyshack Pageant as well, and will encompass appearances by Lady Bunny, Justin Bond, Lady Miss Kier, Ana Matronic, and more. I smell glorious disas-tears.

Let's leave this off with the incredible Glamamore's (NSFW maybe!) performance of Bjork's "Pagan Poetry."

Erykah Badu: 'Kiss my placenta!'

2008-07-18T18:36:20Z

Scribbling scion Erykah Badu. Photo by Marc Baptiste.

By Jamilah King

Miss Erykah Badu recently wrote those fabulously succinct words to anyone who had the nerve to question the honor of her motherhood. Amid rumors that she's pregnant for a third time, this time by Jay Electronica, (Andre 3000 and DOC were the fathers of her first two), some folks threw criticism her way for having a third child "out of wedlock." (What the fuck does this mean, anyway?)

Badu sounded off on Okayplayer, saying:

"HOW DARE YOU DISRESPECT THE QUEENDOM...AND MY CHILDREN AND MY INTELLIGENCE. What is Marriage? Who Is The Judge? i am an excellent mother and resent all of the negative comments and insults on my character. I AM COMPLETE WITH OR WITHOUT A PARTNER AND WILL ALWAYS BE ...I PUT MUCH TIME AND THOUGHT INTO HAVING AND RAISING MY CHILDREN. IVE HAD THE HONORS OF HAVING 2 HOME BIRTHS AND 2 WONDERFUL PARTNERS BY MY SIDE... F*CK OFF… WHO NEEDS YOU ….CERTAINLY NOT ME … KICK ROCKS … CALL TYRONE … PACK LIGHT …. BITE ME...and if this post is not clear, kiss my placenta"

Read the entire response here. It doesn't surprise me at all that one of the most innovative mainstream musicians of our time - who happens to have dated and/or had children with similarly skilled artists - gets attacked because she's a black woman who dates black men and creates hip-hop. She has two kids who are never paraded around in the media, a relatively quiet private life and continues to make dope ass music. Funny how white celebrities like Angelina Jolie can adopt brown babies from orphanages around the world, move to so-called exotic countries to give birth to biological kids, put out a slew of lackluster films, and be heralded as Wonder Mom.

Grupo Fantasma sounds gold to us

2008-07-17T17:50:32Z

GRUPO FANTASMA
Sonidos Gold
(Aire Sol/ High Wire Music)

By Todd Lavoie

Freshly sparkled with Prince's glittering purple seal of approval, Austin's tireless Latin funk orchestra Grupo Fantasma pushes onward with their crowd-amassing trajectory on Sonidos Gold, a floor-burning 12-track collection of hip-shakers and provocative grooves.

Having recently enjoyed a much-deserved surge of international exposure - thanks largely to Prince's ringing endorsement and the high-profile supporting-band gigs that followed - the 10-member soul machine arrives more confident than ever on this, their fourth album. The disc might also be the most faithful in capturing the joyous, body-liberating ebullience of the band's live performances. (And while we're on the subject of their shows: You must see them, case closed. I caught Grupo with a former Austinite friend at Slim's here back in February, and they were complete and utter sweat-soaking bliss.)

Sonidos Gold exudes plenty of room-filling warmth, and guitarist Adrian Quesada's production plunks the listener directly on the dancefloor, right in the sweet spot between the hot-pepper horn section and the mighty rumble of congas and timbales. While I'm sure these folks picked up some tricks from Prince on the road, I'm beginning to wonder if maybe the Purple One himself might be taking a few notes as well…

Drawing upon timeless Latin song forms such as cumbia, salsa, and meringue, but frequently expanding the roots to include elements of funk, dub, and psychedelia, Grupo Fantasma aren't strict traditionalists per se. Even a casual listener could easily pick up the occasional similarities to War or old-school Santana, for example - and as classic as both artists might sound today, it's worth remembering that they were quite revolutionary at the time for their genre-splicing. Still, unlike contemporaries such as Ozomatli, the band does not seem overly beholden to the idea of sounding uber-modern or "of the now" - there are no rappers or turntablists or post-hip hop songwriting structures on Sonidos Gold, in other words.

The fact is, most of the disc sounds like a long-lost artifact from the '60s or '70s - a quality certain to delight any true-blue lover of soul and funk, as those two decades form the pinnacle for such sounds. One frequent point of comparison Grupo is likely to garner, particularly thanks to the new record: the unbelievably funky Latin jazz/boogaloo juggernaut the Fania All-Stars, an ever-rotating crew of largely New York-based groove superstars from the flawless Fania label, including Ray Barretto, Willie Colón, Johnny Pacheco, and pianist-arranger Larry Harlow. The resemblance is helped by the addition of Harlow as an auxiliary member on Sonidos Gold: his piano and keyboard work here keeps the album rooted in the golden age of Latin funk. If you've ever fallen prey to the fast and furious grind of the Fania sound, this one should hit you just as hard.

As one should probably expect, almost all of Sonidos Gold is sung in Spanish - and while knowledge of the language obviously doesn't hurt, it also need not be a prerequisite, considering the wonder of the grooves contained within. If dance music truly does transcend all language barriers - and I honestly believe it does - then the inability to follow along to the words shouldn't really preclude anyone from succumbing to Grupo Fantasma's seductive rhythms. Sure, maybe those without any fluency in Spanish might not be able to shout along to the chanted vocals of roof-raisers such as "Levantate" with the same levels of bravado, but there are plenty of other ways to feel equally connected to the music - the group's intricate polyrhythms practically scream for crowd participation, thanks to the layers of congas and timbales pounding away here. And while knowing that the ensemble is actually singing, "The eyes are going to see / the body is pleasure" doesn't hurt, there's something implicit in the song's sultry horn-filled pulse that conveys the same message without speaking a single word.

"Levantate" also offers a few flashes of carefully measured dub echo heaped upon the guitar, in order to ratchet up the drama before exploding into electrifying unison-vocal and horn duels over timbalero Jose Galeano's blazing rhythms. The technique is deployed to tremendous effect on "Bacalao Con Pan," a stretched-out eight-minute rave-up that imagines a collaboration between early Funkadelic and the Fania roster, thanks to inspired use of echo as well as some wonderfully head-floating keyboard work from Harlow.

There's a similar space-jazz key-twinkling on Arroz Con Frijoles", and it pairs tremendously with the thick blankets of reverb applied to the easily learned chorus of "Aah, aah, ahh, arroz con frijoles." About three-quarters of the way into the song, the rhythm suddenly shifts - double-time, triple-time! Screaming horns, battling congas and timbales - total dancefloor emancipation, to be sure.

Those seeking to relive the fiery majesty of early Santana will be well served by the frantic "Rumba y Guaganco," a traditional Yoruba chant given a splendid wah-wah guitar and funk-keyboard makeover, while the addition of invincible saxophonist Maceo Parker on "Gimme Some" delivers a bit of JB's groove to the song's delirious hip-wiggling War shuffle. That irresistible scrape of the guiro, a thumping woodblock rhythm, a feisty low-end rumble, and choppy electric guitar - it's a potent combination, and when the combo gives a quick little shout-out to Latin jazz maestro Willie Bobo's 1965 anthem "Spanish Grease," the dam busts wide open, kids. Genius.

Lastly, here's hoping album closer "Perso Fra i Mesquites" points to further explorations for Grupo Fantasma: the moody cha cha cha travelogue of reverb-heavy surf guitar, tearful violins, and drifting accordion left me scanning the liner notes for Angelo Badalamenti songwriting credits, only to end up even more impressed with the band than before, once I discovered it was a Grupo Fantasma composition. By the track's breathless mariachi horn climax, I couldn't possibly have felt more caught up in my own personal big-screen melodrama. I'm wowed.

Here's a clip of Grupo performing "Gimme Some":

Sonic Reducer Overage: Long Winters, Edgetone, Martin Luther's Rebel Soul, the Buckets, and more

2008-07-16T20:59:42Z

The Long Winters try on a nouvelle vague guise.

What to do, when not sailing down a Mission Creek or taking a shine to Diamond Days? A few more shows for you...

The Buckets
'Member alt-country? Well, it remembers you. And one of SF's '90s-era main proponents the Buckets returns with a double CD to celebrate. With the Great Auk and Sister Exister. Thurs/17, 8:30 p.m., $10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market St., SF. (415) 861-5016.

The Long Winters
The new Putting the Days to Bed (Barsuk) dares to reach for the epic amid country-rock guitars. Thurs/17, 9 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. (415) 771-1422.

Joseph Arthur
Author, Arthur! You can’t stop the music: the singer-songwriter has unleashed four EPs leading up to the forthcoming album, Temporary People (Lonely Astronaut). Fri/18, 9 p.m., $20. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 885-0750.

Edgetone Music Summit
"Touch the Gear" and learn the ins and outs of a pirate radio station - and check out such noise, industrial, and experimental music makers as Mute Socialite, Say Bok Gwai, COMA, Thickness/Mono-Layer, Birgit Ulher Trio with Gino Robair and Tim Perkis. Sun/20-July 26. San Francisco Community Music Center, 544 Capp, SF, and other locations. For more info, go to www.edgetonemusicsummit.org

Cody Chestnutt by way of Michel Gondry.

Rebel Soul Summer Music Fest
The label gets up a stellar lineup at this benefit for the Omega Boys Club: Martin Luther, Cody Chestnutt, Res, and the Kev Choice Ensemble. Sun/20, 8 p.m., $15-$20. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. (415) 626-1409.

Pacifika
Smooth, beat-driven global pop is the sound of Peruvian native Silvana Kane's trio - their new Asunción arrives from Six Degrees. Mon/21, 8 and 10 p.m., $10-$16. Yoshi's, 1330 Fillmore, SF. (415) 655-5600.

Shining a light on the Diamond Days '08 music fest

2008-07-16T07:00:37Z

Heeb mag's Diamond Days - just what brings it to the Bay from Brooklyn? There's no denying that the lineup is doozy, including Audacity, Fences, Glitter Wizard, Thee Makeout Party, Tiny Vipers, Ellen Mary McGee, and Young Animals, as well as a slew of local talents. I traded e-mails with Heeb magazine publisher Josh Neuman and associate editor Amy Westervelt to find out more.

SFBG: How did Diamond Days originate?

Amy Westervelt: It started last year in Brooklyn as sort of a throw-back to music shows you and your friends might have put together in high school or college. One of Heeb's contributing editors, Jay Diamond, grew up in the ‘burbs of Chicago playing in bands and putting together shows and he wanted to recreate that fun, but focus it on really great local bands in Brooklyn. After the first fest, we really wanted to recreate it in different parts of the country.

Josh Neuman: The fest is partially named in honor of Jay, and partially an homage to a Vashti Bunyan song, which is everything a summer song should be.

SFBG: Why did it move from Brooklyn to Oakland this year?

JN: Diamond Days premiered in Brooklyn last year. Over a thousand people attended. These Are Powers, Marissa Nadler, and Psychedelic Horseshit were all quite under the radar at the time. It was a great fest for people who truly like music: Nick from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Jared from the Black Lips and TV on the Radio all came to watch.

Oakland is sort of the Brooklyn of the West. Geographically it's a similar set-up -- near the city, but you have to cross a body of water to get there. Also, it's less expensive so a lot of younger, creative types tend to live there, which has resulted in a handful of galleries, cafes, independent music clubs, and the like cropping up. It's also got a thriving music scene and a similar indie vibe to Brooklyn. We've been looking to expand in the Bay Area and this was the perfect opportunity.

SFBG: What's the concept or goal behind the programming?

JN: First of all, our goal isn't to showcase Jewish musicians (we couldn't care less if the musicians are “Jewish”) or "Jewish music" (a murky moniker that generally signifies some sort of backwards gaze at a mythical, "authentic" past). Like the magazine, the goal of the fest is to showcase emerging talent for an audience that identifies at some level as being Jewish. Heeb has been throwing events like this for years.

AW: I asked Jay about this, and here's what he said, "When I was much younger I became obsessed with listening to the radio, listening to older rock ‘n’ roll, blues, etc. I also played music when I was a kid, and got really into jazz, and that started opening me up to different music and ideas. Then I started getting into punk rock, and everything sort of meshed together. Somehow all of the artists I invite to play Diamond Days are sort of a continuation of all that. I like to base the idea of the fest not on the bigger Lollapalooza/Coachella idea, more on the underground hardcore festivals I used to go to when I was younger. That feeling of community is really amazing."

SFBG: Does anything tie the performers together?

AW: Here's what Jay says, " While I really don't think Diamond Days has a set genre that is focused on, all of the artists invited push some sort of creative boundary that interests me. I hold onto the belief that all of the bands involved really love what they are doing, and it's a total honor to me that they would spend a day playing this fest."

JN: They're just emerging bands we like and, by extension, that we think Jews should like.

SFBG: By chance, Mission Creek Music Festival is also happening the week of July 17 and the two fests share a few performers -- any worries about overlapping audiences?

AW: I can't believe those copycats! Kidding, of course. Nah, we're happy that these bands are getting more exposure, and if folks miss them at one fest, they can catch them at the other, which is pretty much in keeping with the whole community idea behind Diamond Days.

JN: They may share some of our performers, but do they have a "pork cook-off"? In all seriousness, we held last year's fest the same weekend as the Siren Music Fest, and if anything, it helped us find our audience.

SFBG: Will future Diamond Days fests be held in the Bay Area or move on to other cities?

JN: Probably another city -- we're wandering Jews.

DIAMOND DAYS
Thurs/17, early jam at Mama Buzz Cafe, 2318 Telegraph, Oakl.
Mist and Mast (Oakland),  Ben Becker (Los Angeles), and Emily Jane White (San Francisco)

Thurs/17, 7 p.m. show at Ghost Town Gallery, 2519 San Pablo, Oakl.
 Whalebones (Seattle),  Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound (San Francisco), Sleepy Sun (San Francisco), Jeff (Los Angeles),  Cult of Youth (Brooklyn), Ellen Mary McGee (London), Young Animals (California), and the Broads (San Francisco)

  Fri/18, 7 p.m., Ghost Town Gallery
Thee Makeout Party (Anaheim),  the Moon Upstairs (Los Angeles),  Tiny Vipers (Seattle), Princeton (Eagle Rock), Fences (Seattle),  Greg Ashley (Oakland),  No Bunny (Oakland), Mountainhood (San Francisco),  Lazarus (San Francisco),  Audacity (LA), and Damon and the Heathens (Oakland). Plus a pork cook-off with Chow.com   

Sat/19, 5 p.m., Ghost Town Gallery
Ancestors (Los Angeles), Tweak Bird (Los Angeles),  Aleks and the Drummer (Chicago), Ojos Rojos (Claremont), the Fucking Wrath (Ventura), What Cheer? Brigade (Providence, R.I.),  Im a Gun (Seattle),  Bridez (San Francisco),  Loving Thunder (Seattle),  Glitter Wizard (Oakland), and Lotto Ball Show (Chicago)

Sun/20, Mama Buzz Cafe
The Chapin Sisters (Los Angeles),  Ruthann Friedman (Los Angeles),  Night Canopy (Seattle/Los Angeles), and Garrett Pierce (San Francisco)

Aimee Mann's '@#%&*! Smilers' is @#%& great

2008-07-15T16:50:35Z

AIMEE MANN
@#%&*! Smilers
(SuperEgo)

By Todd Lavoie

"Turn that frown upside down! Smile! Be happy!"

Aarggh, I can't stand phony happy-smiley types, either, Aimee. This isn't to say I'm in a constant state of mopeyness - perish the thought! - but I don't exactly see the point in refusing to acknowledge a little melancholia when it sets in from time to time. Why deny it if I'm feeling it? I used to work with someone who would carp and crow away - practically shouting up into the sound system overhead - in response to every song which failed to blow rainbow-pony kisses for its entire three-minute duration. Upon hearing even the faintest allusion to sadness or anger or frustration, away she'd go with cries of, "Oh, why can't you just be happy!" See, it's as simple as that: paint on a smile and greet the world grinning from ear to ear. Flick of the switch. Life as one endless loop of Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine."

Mann's new album, @#%&*! Smilers, probably won't win the heart of my former co-worker - wherever she may be, blinders on and her frown firmly fixed upside down - but it probably will do all sorts of fiendishly wonderful things to the hearts of those who aren't afraid to recognize the scrapes, stumbles, and scabby knees of life. The title alone should be a tip-off - a snide, willfully rude poke with a sharp stick into the eyes of ever-cheerful folks who insist upon everyone smiling along with them, it practically revels in antagonizing the superficial shiny-happy pop song.

Aimee Mann takes the "Freeway."

The kicker, as it has always been in Mann's career, is this: for all of their confessions of weakness and self-sabotage, her songs are perfectly formed little toe-tappers, flush with hooks and blood-rushing bridges and choruses worthy of jealous rages from lesser tunesmiths. Yes, Mann has long specialized in charting the murkier waters of the emotional spectrum, from her '80s days as the leader of 'Til Tuesday through her Magnolia soundtrack breakthrough and onwards to her 2006 boxing/addiction-themed concept album, The Forgotten Arm (SuperEgo) - and so news of her latest recording continuing the tradition could hardly be considered revelatory. What can be considered as such, however, are the 13 songs contained within. For all of the strengths of her already-formidable canon, @#%&*! Smilers feels like the most cohesive, most carefully-crafted album of her career.

Perhaps much of the glorious inspiration behind Smilers - as it will heretofore be called, not out of concern for propriety but rather to spare me from fussing with funky punctuation - came from the "no electric guitars" mandate laid down by Mann and producer Paul Bryan at the outset of recording.

Whether or not these songs were written before the decision, I don't know, but the results are fascinating, particularly in consideration of the pivotal role the guitar has always played in her songwriting. Imagine fan favorite "Deathly" without its frenzied electric wind-up at the end, for example - bet you can't do it. Temporarily shelving her beloved instrument appears to have opened up these songs in intriguing ways, focusing instead upon twinkling pianos, heavily processed keyboards, and bubbling Moogs. Mann hasn't re-positioned herself as the singer-songwriter Stereolab, but she has introduced an entirely new trick bag of sounds into her craft, and the addition of so many winsome whirs and chirps only sweetens the punch in the gut when she drops yet another devastating couplet. While acoustic guitar does find its way into the mix, the instrument is largely relegated to a percussive role.

Bryan's bass work, however, assumes a dominant position, frequently moving beyond mere rhythm-making and taking charge of melody and mood: nowhere does this ring more clearly than on album opener "Freeway," a startlingly catchy number powered by a loping, head-bobbing bass line. Throw in some deliciously squelchy synth burps straight out of the Cars' "Let's Go" and a love-at-first-listen chorus ("you've got a lot of money but you can't afford the freeway"), and the results make for a serious contender for Mann's finest pop anthem moment.

Mann also has experienced a tremendous leap forward as a songwriter - not too shabby, considering that her work has been regularly praised by everyone from Elvis Costello to Andy Partridge. While her songs have always been clever in their construction, at times they have also been somewhat overt about calling attention to their ingenuity. Not so with Smilers: here, most songs (with the breathless immediacy of "Freeway" being one possible exception), continue to reveal their depth of intricacy after an endless number of listens.

There is something more subtle to the songcraft this time 'round - not that these aren't quickly hummable pop nuggets. They are. But even after multiple spins, they still seem to produce moments of genuine "Wow! I didn't notice that before."

I'm finding this observation to hold especially true for the emotional-knockout of "Little Tornado," a haunted soundscape of eerie synth "strings," slow-crawling piano, and thumping percussion (timpani?) over which Mann delivers a troubling refrain: "Make it go faster/ baby go faster/make it go twice the speed of you and me." With each listen, I notice another nuance to the aching murmur of her command; the song is a sterling example of Mann's increased attention to sharp, delicate delivery, a bold contrast from her former reliance on a more deadpan, sardonic vocal style. "Little Tornado" is the polar opposite of emotional detachment, and the drama is only intensified by the Ennio Morricone-recalling instrumental arrangement - a comparison helped along by the lonesome high-desert whistle contributed by…celebrated San Francisco author Dave Eggers. Who knew?

As one would expect, Mann's latest batch of songs is mostly inhabited by hard-luck types: the unlucky-in-love, the dysfunctional, the self-inflicted-gunshot variety. Familiar turf for the songwriter, to be sure, but hardly just more of the same. Her pursuit of getting to the heart of what forces the hand of fuck-up-ery continues to push her craft, and Smilers serves up good reason to believe Mann should carry on with her unblinking explorations.

The album offers plenty of wry humor in its occasionally wincingly accurate character studies. "31 Today," a synth-churning transmission of 30-something angst from a birthday girl who persuades herself that her best years are already behind her, seems to poke fun at the melodrama of such a conviction: "I thought my life would be different somehow / I thought my life would be better by now…but it's not." The "girl, puh-lease" thrust of her delivery might be understated, but it's tough not to miss.

And yes, glimmers of hope do indeed drift through from time to time: "The Great Beyond" tenders words of encouragement to a young hopeful stuck in a dead-end town. After a now-or-never piano introduction sets the scene, the drama gives way to rumbling bass gurgles and slow-rolling percussion - underwater Western music, perhaps. Synthesizers whistle occasionally above the ocean-floor trundle, and Mann imparts advice with the wisdom of someone who's been there: "Go honey go / if I were you I would leave this neighborhood / away from people who never treat you like they should." Whether these words speak from experience, I cannot say, but if anyone could convince me that fiction was fact, it probably would be Mann. Yes, @#%&*! Smilers is that @#%&*! good.

All Emmylou Harris intends to be

2008-07-14T21:32:56Z

EMMYLOU HARRIS
All I Intended to Be
(Nonesuch)

A little context before launching into a rush of superlatives over Emmylou Harris' new stunner, All I Intended to Be: back in 1995, Harris made an abrupt - and enormously successful - career turn with the release of her classic Wrecking Ball (Elektra), a haunting, endlessly layered collection of shimmers and swirls deeply steeped in atmosphere by producer Daniel Lanois. Largely gone was the country traditionalism associated with her most well-known work, and instead she'd offered up one of the decade's boldest, most compellingly adventurous torch-carriers for the "cosmic American music" tag coined by former collaborator Gram Parsons several decades before.

While obviously drawing heavily from folk and country, Wrecking Ball could never fit the purist's definition of either. Rather, this was something truly deserving of the label "visionary," having re-positioned roots music out of the farms and the forests and into the heavens. Nothing else sounded quite like it, and the album not only solidified Harris' standing as a peerless interpreter - refer to her covers of Jimi Hendrix's "May This Be Love" and the Neil Young-penned title track if you need reminding - but it also marked the start of a tremendous creative burst for the artist, both as a songwriter and as a collaborator.

The albums that followed - 2000's Red Dirt Girl and 2003's Stumble Into Grace (both Nonesuch) - showed no let-up in Harris' inspired momentum, serving up considerably fewer cover songs in favor of adventurous, highly personal songwriting. (One obvious highlight: Red Dirt Girl's "Bang The Drum Slowly," a grand, ethereal weeper written for her father, who had passed away around the time of Wrecking Ball.) Teaming up with Luscious Jackson's Jill Cunniff proved to be a particular left-field triumph, as evidenced by the hypnotic groove of 2000's "J'Ai Fait Tout." Meanwhile, both albums carried on with a refined vision of Wrecking Ball's lush whirl-and-eddy aesthetic, with producer Malcolm Burn inserting the occasional drum loop and world-music element into the mix to tremendous effect. In short, the past decade-plus of Harris' career should be considered nothing less than a renaissance - quite wowing, considering the breadth of her catalog, but entirely true. If anything, the vocalist is enjoying a higher profile now than she ever has before.

Which brings us to the recently released All I Intended to Be, with its similar front-cover offering of Harris as the silver-haired spectral goddess, much like we saw on its three predecessors. Tellingly, however, here we see the vocalist - in gorgeous black-and-white tones - walking through the woods on what appears to be the least sunny day of the year. It's an interesting contrast from the artsy interior shots and/or airy interpretations adorning the fronts of the Daniel Lanois/Malcolm Burn trio of albums, and an entirely fitting one. All I Intended to Be is by far the earthiest, most obviously rootsy album she has done in quite some time, and so back to the woods we go, back to trying to keep both feet in the dirt rather than aiming for the heavens. "Try" being the operative word in that sentence, Harris remains quite the celestial presence, and so here we have roots music that billows with atmosphere, thanks to the subtle blend of gossamer vocals with delicate room-filling acoustic textures.

Overall, the album feels simultaneously like a reaction against its three precursors and a further distillation of the triptych's mood-making hoodoo. Having temporarily bid goodbye to the sonic whooshes and ringing ambience of her recent work, she draws readily upon the more traditionally minded folk and country flavors of her earlier years of recording, thus switching the rock sensibilities and genre-splicing production for a stripped-down, less ornamental production. Harris clearly has kept the lessons of the Lanois/Burn collaborations in mind - her latest continues to celebrate the heavenly, frequently otherworldly fluttering properties of her voice with a production that provides appropriately ghost-evoking sonic backdrops for the fragile, heartfelt storytelling at work here. Sure, there's less studio trickery to speak of, but listeners will get just as many goosebumps as ever upon tumbling into the disc's pristine mise-en-scene.

Much of the success should be attributed to Brian Ahern's carefully restrained, luxuriously rustic production; while hardly as blatant about the drive to create moods as Lanois or Burn, he certainly appears just as motivated by such concerns, having treated every acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and mandolin to a glimmering sheen worthy of Harris' glorious voice. Ahern, it should be noted, is not only Harris' ex-husband but also the producer of her first 11 albums - including 1975's essential twin-juggernaut of Elite Hotel and Pieces of the Sky and 1977's equally revered Luxury Liner (all Reprise/ Warner Brothers) - and All I Intended to Be feels like a logical continuation of where the collaboration last left off all those years ago.

Still, listeners familiar with the Ahern/Harris years shouldn't expect much in the way of that illustrious union's honky-tonk kick-ups. There's no boozy older-sister counterpart to "Ooh Las Vegas" or "Bluebird Wine" here, but instead the album remains firmly rooted in gradually unfolding slow or mid-tempo numbers, and nearly all are quite introspective in nature. Generally speaking, Harris' latest shows more similarity to early-years tearjerkers such as "Boulder to Birmingham" and "Til I Gain Control Again" than any of the boot-stomping Gram Parsons/Flying Burrito Brothers homages she offered up during that phase of her career. Generally speaking, it's a quietly elegant, controlled record, full of rivetingly-expressed heartbreak and thoughtful meditations on mortality. In this sense, it very much can be considered an extension of what she has accomplished over the course of her last three full-lengths.

As much as Harris has grown magnificently as a songwriter - more on that later - she has also shown herself to be not only a flawless interpreter, but just as importantly a wise selector of which songs to cover in the first place. Again, the largely covers Wrecking Ball presents compelling evidence of her knack for choosing songs that she can truly inhabit, but consider some of her other inspired takes over the years: the Louvin Brothers' "If I Could Only Win Your Love," the Beatles' "Here There and Everywhere," and Dolly Parton's "To Daddy," for example. Here, her choices are equally stimulating.

The recording opens with a stirring version of the Jack Wesley Routh-written "Shores of White Sand," a keep-your-chin-up rumination on carrying on again after heartbreak. A slowly cascading track pushed along by thumping drum rolls evocative of waves crashing upon the beach, the song is particularly interesting in Harris' use of the instrumental backdrop from an earlier version, recorded in 1982 by Nashville vocalist Karen Brooks. Obviously impressed with the power of Brooks' take, she decided to keep the instrumental track - surging with electric guitar ripples and floated skyward with haunting tin whistle melodies - and then simply built upon it, even inviting Brooks into the studio to provide ravishing harmonies. A mere 20 seconds into the album, Harris' first hello arrives with the words "here I go again / back to that feeling," delivered in a curiously wavering mix of choked-up-edness and head-held-high positive affirmation. Such a simple turn of phrase, on paper or computer screen, but she doles the words out with such a forceful imperative that it's little wonder the song was selected to open All I Intended to Be.

Elsewhere, Patty Griffin's "Moon Song" is soaked in a warm bath of accordions and graceful mandolins, with Harris floating the tender plea, "Time, go easy on me tonight." Her makeover of Mark Germino's "Broken Man's Lament" - the heart-ripping tale of a mechanic whose wife and mother of his children runs off "to sing like Patsy Cline" - is probably the hugest number, a momentum-gathering five-minute domestic drama in which brushed drums and simple guitar strums give way to a pounding rhythm, whirring electric piano, and full-throated harmonies before easing back into careful restraint, only to ramp up the levels once again at the end. Thanks to such grand gestures, the song could easily fit amongst the atmospheric heroics of Wrecking Ball. Personally, I'm quite eager to hear how it might be conveyed live.

Tracy Chapman's "All That You Have Is Your Soul" is total spectral-folk satisfaction, all shimmering, glistening guitars, and twinkling keyboards over understated percussion. "Don't be tempted by the shiny-happy," Harris warns in her best been-there-done-that sigh. "Don't you eat of the bitter fruit." Spoken with such moral authority, she wrings so much emotion from the lyrics that the voice-of-experience point of view never comes across as pedantic, but rather the rueful confession of someone who's not afraid to admitting her mistakes. Unassumingly powerful stuff.

Harris' songwriting on All I Intended to Be is a mighty force as well. Her two collaborations with Kate and Anna McGarrigle, "How Could She Sing the Wildwood Flower" and "Sailing Round the Room," are the latest swoon-worthy results of what has proven to be a marvelously fertile alliance. The former, a pastoral folk number augmented by alluring banjo textures and resplendent harmonies from the McGarrigles, contains some of the full-length's most affecting moments of sweet ache, thanks to Harris' occasionally choked-up turns of phrase.

"Sailing Round the Room" - sung from the vantage point of a woman leaving her body as she passes away - deftly handles the subject matter at hand without succumbing to New Age-y cliché or clunky exposition. Rather, it's loaded with elegant, lovingly-rendered images of freedom, effortlessly revealed over subdued washes of accordion and soft chimes of mandolin. "Gonna lay my burden down, take a bird's-eye look around," she announces after saying farewell to loved ones, before heading off to go "sailing around the room," and what could've ended up in sappy territory instead manages to result in one of the most beautiful songs about mortality I have ever heard.

Top marks, however, go to "Gold," a devastating Harris-penned ballad brimming with regret and loss. Over crying pedal steel guitar, Harris and Dolly Parton harmonize to knee-buckling effect on the apologetic chorus, "No matter how bright I glitter, baby / I could never be gold." Parton's signature trills are used in marvelously sob-worthy measures here, but the real punch in the gut comes when Vince Gill steps in to fill out the song's three-way harmonies, particularly on the following broken confession: "I'd finally gave up counting the ways you said I let you down / when I fell into that river of no return and you watched me drown."

EMMYLOU HARRIS
With Jimmy Gaudreau and Moondie Klein
July 26, 8 p.m., $35-$75
Nob Hill Masonic Auditorium
1111 California, SF

Gear stolen from Maria Taylor and Taylor Hollingsworth

2008-07-11T22:53:43Z

Looking for help: Maria Taylor.

This just in from Taylor Hollingsworth's people:

"Taylor Hollingsworth, sideman for Maria Taylor, had some of his and Maria's gear stolen on Thursday, July 10, on tour promoting Maria's newest EP, Savanna Drive. The band were tucked in for the night in San Francisco when some folks busted out the back window of Maria's van and stole six guitars, two suitcases, two pedals, and some boxes filled with copies of Maria’s newest EP. Luckily, the band recovered one of the bass guitars at a local pawnshop. Here is a list of all the stolen goods:

- Left-handed Red Gretsch Tennessee Rose Guitar.
- Left-handed Martin Acoustic Guitar.
- Right-handed Purple Fender Jazz Bass guitar.
- Right-handed 1976 Black Les Paul Deluxe.
- Right-handed Alvarez acoustic guitar (Hand painted white w/ black swirls. Guitar strap is nailed on.)
- Boss Tuner Pedal.
- Boss Distortion Pedal.

"If you have any information regarding the items listed above, please contact info@saddle-creek.com, jeff@saddle-creek.com, or publicity@teamclermont.com. In the meantime, Maria plans to finish up the last two dates of her tour; one show in LA and one in Sonoma."

Stirring Matmos: a chat with the ex-SF duo

2008-07-11T20:37:09Z

Excitable: Matmos' "Exciter Lamp and the Variable Band" from their new album, Supreme Balloon (Matador).

While you were dozing, the rabidly talented Matmos quietly slipped out of town, relocating to Baltimore, MD., from their longtime home in San Francisco's Mission District. I recently caught up with MC (Martin) Schmidt and Drew Daniel as they drove through the Northwest on their current US tour, which stops in SF on July 12 at Great American Music Hall.

SFBG: I've been enjoying the record - it has this great Wendy Carlos/Switched on Bach quality to it, which is a departure, no?

Martin Schmidt: We take turns being in charge of the record – and this was my turn. I wanted to go away from our shtick – like we’re the goofy sound band - and I thought a simple short cut to that would be to make the rule that we would use no microphones. It quickly turned into a synthesizer record from there. We love, love, love, love Wendy Carlos, and I don’t mean just Switched on Bach, we love her compositions as well, like Sonic Seasonings and the Clockwork Orange stuff and so on, so we figured we couldn’t do this without a nod to her.

SFBG: So the Carlos influence was very conscious...?

MS: We’re not DFA but I must admit I think a lot of our music is the result of wearing our record collections on our sleeve. I don’t mean DFA, I mean that guy in LCD Soundysystem. He's the most, "I took all my records and boiled them down…" I think we’re a little like that, too. Guilty, guilty…

Matmos perform "Rainbow Flag" from Supreme Balloon in Baltimore on Feb. 9.

So for the next question I'm going to pass it to Drew.

SFBG: How is it going?

Drew Daniel: Very well. We had a very fun show last night in Seattle. The day before that we improvised on the radio, so it seems like juices are flowing on the US path of this two-month tour we’re doing.

SFBG: What's the current show like?

DD: It's been a challenge because pushing off from Supreme Balloon, we didn’t want to repeat ourselves. The tour for The Rose Had Teeth involved a lot of objects, playing roses, playing ice, a lot of things that were quite theatrical and spectacular for us, I guess - it's not the Roman games or the Cirque du Soleil, but we try.

But in this case trying to play electronic music in way that feels live for the audience is difficult. How do you make it gestural? How do you make it something that includes them, so they just don’t stare at the word Korg or Roland for an hour? One thing we sort of thought about was ways to start out treating sounds that’s a little bit mysterious. We start with a piece where we playing flashlights. But I don’t want to explain exactly how we turn flashlights into sound. Don’t want to give everything away. But suffice to say there are some moments that are genuinely confusing to people.

SFBG: So it's not an all-synthesizer performance like the new record?

DD: No, no, no, by all means. One of the cool things is that we have J Lesser in the band for this tour. And J is one of the first people we toured with back when we lived in San Francisco. Our first tour was with J Lesser, and shortly after that tour we had this record called The West. Its just been reissued, so having J in the band means we can come back and play songs from 10 years ago that we never played live. We came up with arrangements of that material and we’ve been playing that as well.

One piece sort of involves Bo Diddley's music as well, and that’s something we figured out we wanted to do before he died. But it felt a little apt given his death. So theres a little bit of Wendy Carlos, a little bit of Bo Diddley. All your faves. We’re a cover band basically.

Matmos at Festival Villette Sonique in Paris, June 24, 2006.

SFBG: So how has it been moving to Baltimore and working at John Hopkins?

DD: Yeah, we left San Francisco to go to Baltimore, and that was really strange. When I would meet people the first week I was there and I told them I just moved from San Francisco, pretty much everyone universally would say, "Why?!" with a look of horror. Like, why the hell would you ever leave San Francisco for Baltimore.

But the truth is I really love being a professor. I love my job. And I've been learning to love Baltimore - there's such a wild-ass prickly noise scene in Baltimore that’s been really friendly to us. So I think we seem possibly a bit bourgie and a bit gay for Baltimore, but y'know, they're reaching out. We’re playing Whartscape – this guy Dan Deacon invited us to play at the Wham City festival in Baltimore this summer. And that’s on my birthday - I'll be turning 37 onstage. That’s a show with Nautical Almanac who are sort of the grandparents of the whole Baltimore circuit-bending noise scene. So I feel very welcomed by things like that, y'know. That they would invite us.

SFBG: Most professors I know don't seem to have much time to do more than...profess. Write, research, teach, get tenure. How do you work being in a band in there?

DD: That’s something I have to actively figure out, y'know. I'm only a year into this job, and I'm realizing to do it at the level that it needs to be done, if I'm going to be worth their time, it takes all of your resources. So I have to be very strategic about what I say yes to and what I say no to. We get a lot of juicy offers: "Come to Brazil and play a few shows and lay out in the sun." But I have to say no because I have to grade 18-year-old's essays about Macbeth, so it’s a matter of priorities. I think the scary thing is that my colleagues will be working on their books this summer, while I'm swanning around Slovenia doing noise shows. So we’ll see. We’ll see how it does affect productivity. I was able to publish the book in first semester: the Throbbing Gristle book. So I feel like there has to be a way to do this and I'm figuring out how that works.

SFBG: Would you say your academic approach plays into the music at all? The last album was yours, right?

DD: The Rose Had Teeth was mine. The reason I don’t see a conflict between two sides in my life is I know for a first-hand experience that research is creative. That these divisions of, well, some things are scholarly and historical and some stuff is about art-making... I know all kinds of creative decisions are made when you decide what's relevant and what isn’t when you decide to tell the story of something. That’s a creative act.

I'm not saying that scholarship and music aren’t different - there are huge differences - but for me, the conceptual, research-based orientation in creating a record like The Rose Had Teeth is also driven by the same thing that gives me a lot of joy when I'm trying to gather elements of 16th century literature that I care about into an argument worth making. In both cases you have a duty to the past - when you're making biographical songs about real people, you have a certain kind of obligation to them but you also have an obligation to your art to make something that’s your own and is valid now. I think the same anxieties about reuse of found material or anachronism - like a lot of the sensibilities that I like in renaissance writing - are also perhaps present in the records that we make. Maybe that’s a pretentious thing to say - so I don’t know.

SFBG: Your dissertation was on Renaissance literature?

DD: Yes, I wrote a dissertation on melancholy in 16th century literature and painting and medical writing.

SFBG: Since this is Martin's record, what did you bring to it?

DD: Well, I think I took the idea that I couldn’t use found sounds or found recordings - and often I was starting with things that were tones - as my opportunity to go back to music camp, and figure out what are notes and cords, anyway. Something I pretty much blithely ignore when I'm just chopping up the sound of human fat! I just assume if you stack things in octaves, then harmonics will take care of itself.

We were doing a family thing going through Nevada City and bought a little book there, Your Guide to the Chords of a Piano, and I proceeded to figure out what chords were and wrote some Mac patches that were basically like autoharp. I could just control with a Nintendo game controller, every chord progression, so that’s how the song "Polychords" was created. I guess that’s my main contribution to the album. It’s a solo track I made myself while Martin was away. I just got really into the idea of chords as blocks you could string together, and the result was sort of the opposite of what Matmos generally is. I guess generally we have primitive melodies and quite elaborate rhythms, and on purpose "Polychords" was made to be a really boring, basic, military marching beat and really florid, ridiculous melody. So it was totally fun for me, y'know.

SFBG: What inspired the title?

DD: There's a little sound into light and sound and color correspondence riff going on in a lot of the titles of this record. Like "Rainbow Flag" was a reference to the spectrum of pitches going up and down, and "Exciter Lamp and the Variable Band" is based on samples of optical sound, like drawing on the optical track of film because that can create pitches. So the idea of light becoming sound and sound becoming light was in my mind and when I thought about polychromatic as a word referring to rainbows, I just thought of polychord as the chord rainbow. Some people represent the circle of fifth as a color spectrum, and with some of my Mac patches, I use the color picker, the swathe of colors, as a way to generate frequencies, because that software is really easy to turn visual things into sound and vice versa. So that was kind of hiding in the background of a lot of this music.

SFBG: What about "Supreme Balloon"?

DD: Oh, "Supreme Balloon" is Martin's fault so I'm gong to pass it back to him.

SFBG: So, 23 minutes, eh?

MS: Y'know, we jammed it out, man! And it was long, and I like in the long run that it makes a thing that has nothing to do with iTunes. It's just the opposite of the kind of song that you could listen to 30 seconds of and know whether you liked it or not. But it wasn’t that we made it on purpose for that reason, but I like that byproduct. You could listen to the first 30 seconds of it and have no idea what was coming.

But let's see, the name, we were stuck for a name for this. We wanted something buoyant. I mean it sounds absurd but we really did. I bought one of those Taschen books of advertising from the '30s, and there was a Firestone ad – when tires had inner tubes, and it was the name of one of their inner tube products, and it was called the Supreme Balloon, and there was this fantastic, florid advertisement for this thing. So we owe it to some ad copywriter from the 1930s.

SFBG: You've collected plenty of synthesizers over years?

MS: I have. I've been doing this stuff since, oh, god, 1986 or something. I don’t know how I originally got into synthesizers - I think because all my other friends were rockers and I wanted to balance it. So I was like, "Oh, I'll be keyboard nerd." I think at the time I had no better reason than I had piano lessons when I was 11 or 12, and they all played bass and drums and so on. It just stuck and now I'm a grownup with an income and stuff, it's all synthesizer crazy. It's not like when I was a kid when I would just have wet dreams about them. Now I can actually buy them if I want them. And that is good.

SFBG: There's been such a revival in them.

MS: Definitely. The '90s were the peak of it. Unfortunately the keyboard companies have only in the last few years really gotten the idea that what people wanted was…a lot of knobs. And I think the peak of it has died out. Now all the keyboard companies are all making crazy, million-knob machines, and well, I'm very happy. I love all the new designs. There's a resurgence in interest in all the analog modular synthesizers, too. There's all these garage-based mom and pop synthesizer companies now. it’s a beautiful thing.

SFBG: What was the most unusual synthesizer used for the album?

MS: We have one from 1971, called an ARP 2600 - it has no keyboard, so it's really not like a musical instrument so much - you can hook a keyboard up to it but it still fights back. And Drew uses a brand new machine called the Flame - it's made by a small German company that only works with speech synthesis chips, and god knows, I can't figure that thing out. It's responsible for all the sort of talking sounds that are in the last quarter of Supreme Balloon. Absolutely no microphones were used in the making of this album! We like that idea because it’s the opposite of...remember Queen used to write on their albums, "No synthesizers were used in the making of this album"? I like that absolutely no microphones were used on this album.

SFBG: What do you have against microphones?

MS: Oh, nothing. I think we loved them too much, was the problem. We’re clean and sober now. Oh, it's not true. We will go back to our sampling antics for the next one, for sure.

SFBG: What are you doing in Baltimore these days?

MS: Y'know, [Drew] makes enough money now so that I'm a homemaker. And I really try to do it. I try to cook at least two meals a day. He wears nice clothes every day, so I iron and sew and wash. Because of the financial difference between San Francisco and Baltimore, for same price we were paying for a one-bedroom apartment, we have a four-bedroom house in Baltimore with a front yard and back yard. It's amazing, and it is actually, like, work to keep it clean.

SFBG: So you're happy about the move.

MS: I'm pretty happy. I think my biggest fear was winter - I lived in SF for 22 years. And, well, we don’t have much of a winter there. What I didn’t realize was that houses in places other than San Francisco are actually built to withstand weather. Y'know in our SF apartment we had a window that was painted open - just permanently. And in the winter, it was like, "Oh, a little chilly." If you had that in Baltimore you'd die! So the house has double-paned glass and all these things that in SF at least we never had. Winter wasn’t so bad. It was kind of fun.

SFBG: The album wasn't a product of the move, going toward older musics, older parts of the country?

MS: Honestly we started that record in SF. We really just finished it in Baltimore - it’s an SF and Baltimore hybrid.

But yeah, I do feel evil. I spent years maligning the East Coast, and well, there I live now. I'll tell you, the food doesn’t hold a candle. Baltimore is so poor that theres pretty much no immigrant population, because there aren’t any jobs. I mean, there are really no jobs. So there isn’t the amazing food that a South American immigrant population brings. No Chinese food. Some Korean – it's OK. The poor people are still stuck General Cho’s chicken level of Chinese food, I'm sorry to say. It breaks my heart daily, I tell you.

SFBG: What else is going on?

MS: Golly, our next album is based on psychic research. Drew is in charge of it so it's an insanely elaborate concept album. We’re reproducing the Ganzfeld psychic experiment, where Drew sits in another room, and the recipient test subject is in yet a separate room and they have ping-pong balls on their eyes, they're listening to white noise, and they're instructed to speak out loud any visions or sounds they make, see, or hear. And then I think the idea, is we’ll reproduce what they describe, of what they have psychically picked up.

I think he's riffing on the idea on “concept,” like it will really be sheerly a concept album. It will be made only out of concepts.

SFBG: Why did you include your new Baltimore address on the album?

MS: Oh, we always tried to put our SF address on the other ones. We like it when we have people write us letters and send us weird things.

SFBG: Do you get many stalkers?

MS: When we worked with Bjork we had a couple come over and literally – it's so sad – knock on our door and say, "Is Bjork there?" You're like, "No, actually, she's not over at the moment."

We had some kids come over some time that were doing a photo project for school and they were taking pictures of musicians' hands. That was cool.

I don’t think we’re famous at the level of stalkers. Possibly, if anyone tries to stalk us we bore them to death. We repel stalkers by being more creepy than them.

SFBG: On that note...

MS: On that note, I apologize for everything I said!

MATMOS
With Wobbly
Sat/12, 8 p.m., $17
Great American Music Hall
859 O'Farrell, SF
www.gamh.com

Stevie Wonder satisfies onboard the Sleep Train

2008-07-11T17:13:55Z

Don't you worry 'bout a thing: Stevie Wonder, circa the '70s.

By Joshua Rotter

When two travel four hours to see one of their all-time favorite artists, Stevie Wonder, perform at a venue that should have been a 40-minute drive away - the usual journey from San Francisco - a simple outing becomes a vision quest.

En route to Wonder's Sleep Train Pavilion show in Concord on Tuesday, July 8, amid triple digit temperature, and dehydrated and dampened by sweat in my friend's passenger seat, I was convinced that we would never see the legendary R&B performer. Car accidents and heat-induced area power outages seemed to conspire against us. San Francisco may have been as hot as July elsewhere in the county, but Concord was hotter than hell. We inched closer and closer, but the venue, obscured by rolling hills, wasn't even in eye shot, much less the eighth Wonder of the world.

Whether it was the excess of heat, the lack of liquids and nicotine, or being hopped up on myriad packs of sugary gum, an image of the vocalist suddenly appeared in my mind's eye, and I was set adrift on memory's bliss, imagining much of his career, from the innocent tracks of his early Motown period - "Uptight (Everything's Alright)," "My Cherie Amour," "For Once in My Life" - to his '70s consciousness-spreading classics "Superstition," "Living for the City," and "Higher Ground," through the Stevie of my youth - "I Just Called to Say I Love You," "Part Time Lover," and "That's What Friends Are For," as well as his guest-starring role on The Cosby Show, in which he invites the Huxtables to join him in the studio after his driver hits two in a fender bender. But traffic was too stalled at this point for any such luck to befall me.

When we finally arrived, only half an hour into what would be an impressive two-hour-and-20-minute career set, the 58-year-old vocalist, sporting his trademark braids dotted with pukka shells and sunglasses, was settling into the relaxed, Afro-Cuban-tinged "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing." If Wonder appeared as a mirage, then the Caribbean-inflected music turned the amphitheatre into a tropical oasis. All that was missing was my fruity cocktail. Oh yeah, that's what friends are for.

Wonder, subsisting only on sips of green tea to soothe his dry throat, made worse by the arid heat, veered from his Hohner clavinet to his Yamaha piano, accompanied by a well-orchestrated 12-piece band and back-ups. The career-spanning set included the ballads "Ribbon in the Sky," "Gold Lady," and the audience sing-a-long "My Cherie Amore," and a short but sweet medley of "Signed Sealed Delivered," "I Wish," and "Do I Do." One extra-precious moment occurred when Wonder serenaded his daughter and backing vocalist Aisha Morris with "Isn't She Lovely," the song he penned for her more than 30 years ago.

Still, the sweetest thing on my mind was the frozen strawberry Rockin' Rita that my friend was then procuring, which would beat the heat and soothe the nerves as two Jimmy Buffet look-alikes, seated behind me, provided running commentary throughout the show.

But the real action soon happened offstage when one presumably drunk and heat-stroked audience member face-planted on the aisle. As he lay unconscious for almost 10 minutes, I was having inner visions of Kate Hudson's overdose scene to the same song in the film Almost Famous. Worse yet, my friend, blocked by EMT personnel, couldn't rescue me with my margarita until it had become a melted mess.

But the romance returned with my drink as Wonder turned up the heat with a new, totally adequate downtempo track "Through the Eyes of Wonder" about being "so in love, you can't see straight" and part of an upcoming R&B album that the songwriter plans to release (along with a gospel disc, inspired by his recently departed mother Lula Mae Hardaway) next year, to coincide with a tour.

The necessity of love on a wider scale was stressed with the socially aware and still topical classic "Living for the City," where Wonder croons, "I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow and that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow," followed by a sermon to the crowd: "We must be color free," the vocalist said. "All diseases can be cured...those who are deaf and blind, all those things are possible if we come together and love in the spirit of oneness."

Unfortunately the only color I was concerned with at that moment was the orange cheese sauce from some concert-goer's earlier nacho spillage that I had unknowingly stood on throughout the show. As the concert closed with the classic "Superstition," on which Wonder's mohawked, 6-year-old grandson guested, the weather was cooling down and all was right in the world. So by the time that the two old fogies behind me, relying on dated urban slang, concluded with, "Yeah -- that was bad," I had fortunately learned the lesson that the messianic melody-maker had in store for me: to take all margaritas - errr, people - with a grain of salt, and kept my own prejudices against the drunken, old, chatter-boxes to myself.

Youth gone wild: Black Tide

2008-07-11T02:43:12Z

Who better to embody the spirit of mayhem than a posse of rock-crazed teenaged boys? Especially if it's capital-M Mayhem, which happens to be the name of a package tour of metal bands sponsored by crack-tastic Rockstar Energy Drink?

The show, which hits the Shoreline on Saturday, July 12, with a roster of bands both horns-worthy (Mastodon!) and ehhh (Five Finger Death Punch?), signals the local debut of Black Tide, a quartet whose chief source of notoriety thus far is that they're fronted by a 15-year-old (their oldest member just turned 20). Yep, you read that right: though they're the same age you were when you got your first job at Jamba Juice, this gang of Miami whippersnappers has a deal with Interscope Records and are currently touring the world to promote their new album, Light from Above. What gives? Do we have a metal Hanson on our hands, or what? And would they kill me for suggesting as much (duh)? I called up bassist Zakk Sandler mere hours after Black Tide played their first Mayhem set at tour's kickoff in Seattle, Wash.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: How's the tour going so far?

Zakk Sandler: It's the first day, and we played about an hour and a half ago. It was just fuckin' insane.

SFBG: Was there a big crowd?

ZS: Yeah, huge. They have it set up so no bands overlap, so everybody focuses their attention [on who's playing]. We were the first band on today, because the stages rotate [of who plays first], so it just set the tone for the day. It was awesome.

SFBG: Is it weird playing in the middle of the day in the bright sunshine?

ZS: Actually, I kind of like it a little bit. You don't have to deal with, like, lighting guys, or being tired from traveling. I like this daytime thing. It works for me.

SFBG: Black Tide just got finished touring Europe. What was the best part of that experience?

ZS: Over there, we're legal to do whatever we want.

SFBG: How old are you?

ZS: I'm 19.

SFBG: Are you the oldest member?

ZS: No, our drummer has me beat by a few months. He just turned 20 -- he's the old guy. We told him, when he can grow a full beard he's out.

SFBG: Do you guys find that your ages are an advantage, or is it a hindrance?

ZS: Total advantage. I mean, think about it. We have a jump start on everything. We're young, and we can go on tour for a year and a half straight and never take a break and still feel very good.

SFBG: How are you perceived by the other bands -- the older bands?

ZS: Most of them like us. They're all really cool. They find it fun to hang out with us, because we're young and just, chill as fuck.

SFBG: How did you guys go from high school to touring the world? How did that meteoric rise happen?

ZS: You know, you put a song out, people dig it, you get people to help hook you up, put you on a good tour, get a good booking agent. It just goes, you know. If the kids don't like it, it's going nowhere. It's as simple as that. Nobody can make people like you.

SFBG: Do you already have a pretty big fan base? Do people know the words to your songs?

ZS: Oh yeah. There's parts where we can stop singing and let other people sing, which is awesome.

SFBG: Who are you most excited to be on this tour with?

ZS: Me personally? Airbourne, Slipknot, Mastodon. I was a fan of most of the bands [before the tour]. It's awesome to know that every day I can just wake up, play my set, go eat something, and go watch one of my favorite bands onstage.

SFBG: Do you get tired of people commenting on how young you guys are?

ZS: Yeah, and no. I mean, there's days when I'm like, "If I fuckin' hear one more person mention it, I'm gonna kill somebody. But then there's days when I'm like, "Whatever. I know this has to be asked."

SFBG: What do you guys do when you have downtime?

ZS: Run around, skateboard, blow shit up, try to get chicks -- same shit any other 19-year-old would be doing.

Black Tide
Mayhem Fest
Sat/12, 2 p.m., $25-$55
Shoreline Amphitheater, One Amphitheater Pkwy, Mtn View
www.livenation.com

Sonic Reducer Overage: Police cuff Elvis, Sun City Girls gather kudos, Flobots love those "Handlebars,' and more

2008-07-09T08:37:41Z

The Sun City Girls also rise.

Too much time on your hands? Guitar Hero III and Gossip Girl not doing it for you? Have I got some high-quality musical fun for you.

Maria Taylor
The Omaha, Neb., songstress strips it all down for her latest release, the digital EP Savannah Drive, while teaming with Now It's Overhead's Andy LeMaster. Wed/9, 9 p.m., $12-$14. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455.

Sun City Girls and Charles Gocher Tribute
Alan and Richard Bishop keep picking up kudos for their acoustic performances - Will Oldham recently praised their recent Slim's show. This time around they present a 40-minute film of Charles Gocher’s videos, The Handsome Stranger. Thurs/10, 9:30 p.m., $13-$15. Maxwell’s, 341 13th St., Oakl. www.maxwellslounge.com

Flobots
Poppy hip-hop with a distinctly Anticon-influenced approach from a Denver, Colo., combo that mixes earthbound verses with violin, trumpet, and a live rhythm section. Who knows, they might even let you ride on their "Handlebars." Sun/13, 8 p.m., $13-$15. Slim's, 333 11th St., SF. (415) 255-0333.

The Police and Elvis Costello and the Imposters
Oh, the fussing, the fighting, the feuding. If you're a Police fan, you take a breath and then race to see the reunited cops of the pops. And is it a crying shame that Elvis Costello is opening for the Police - or does it mean a must-see? Mon/14, 7:30 p.m., $40.50-$225.50. Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View. (650) 541-0800. July 16, 7:30 p.m., $40.50-$225.50. Sleep Train Pavilion, 2000 Kirker Pass, Concord. www.ticketmaster.com