Detroit Live Music Journal

Concert Gallery: Cut Copy @ Royal Oak Music Theater

2011-07-10T11:49:00.000-07:00

Concert Review & Gallery: Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., Prussia, Danny Brown

2011-06-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

Saturday night the Ferndale duo of Josh Epstein and Daniel Zott , better known as Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. returned home to usher in the release of their debut album It's A Corporate World. If you're unfamiliar with the Jr. Jr. then check out MT Arts & Culture Editor Travis R. Wright's profile of the band heading out west last November. The Saturday show also featured two other of Detroit's best, indie rockers Prussia and rapper Danny Brown, who also have seen some ink here at MT, and seem to get better each show.

For their return to Detroit, just as they have this whole tour, Jr. Jr. came out and shed their Nascar jumpsuits for the slick corporate look to accompany the new album, which they played almost all of. Early highlights were the opening drones of "Morning Thought" to kick the show off and the smooth transition of their original "If It Wasn't You" into Dolly Parton's (or more famously Whitney Houston's) "I Will Always Love You" complete with a sax solo from Epstein.

Other covers included the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" and a slamming run through of Gil-Scott Heron's "We Almost Lost Detroit" that featured a few bars from SelfSays. Joining for "Skeletons" were MT cover couple Phantasmagoria, who added some percussion to the bouncy drum-heavy tune.

After about an hour, the duo came back for a loving encore, starting with a crowd pleasing rendition of Steve Winwood's "Higher Love" and closing with their own "Nothing But Our Love."

Jr. Jr. will hit Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza later this summer.

Check the video below of "Vocal Chords" from guyzeyez and listen to a run through of the Winwood jam from earlier this year in New York.

To view pictures from Saturday's show click the diagonals for a full screen view.

Concert Gallery: Hall & Oates @ Motor City Casino

2011-06-24T11:39:00.000-07:00

Concert Gallery: R. Stevie Moore @ The Magic Stick

2011-06-20T11:41:00.000-07:00

Motorhead @ ROMT - Royal Oak

2011-02-24T20:14:00.000-08:00

Lemmy @ ROMT

Rock icons Motörhead brought their signature prototype metal thrash to the Royal Oak Music Theater last night. Just as they promise, it was everything louder than everything else. The roughly hour and half set punched through early Motörhead classics and a few new tunes like "Get Back in Line" from the band's 20th release The Wörld Is Yours. The newer tunes however would be sparse as Motörhead after 36 years knows how to slam a show to a close--with quite possibly the two best songs in heavy metal history-- "Ace of Spades" and the encore of "Overkill." MT's Brett Callwood recently talked singer/bassist/general baddest man left on the planet Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister. Click the arrows for a fullscreen slide show of pictures from last nights show. Also check the trailer of Lemmy, which profiles the prolific frontman and only static member of one of rock's greatest acts.

Motörhead

Concert Gallery: Pretty Lights @ The Filmore

2010-11-14T20:16:00.000-08:00

Roger Waters @ The Palace of Auburn Hills

2010-10-25T20:10:00.000-07:00

Sunday night Roger Waters brought his elaborate re-imagining of The Wall to the Palace of Auburn Hills. The current tour marks the 30th anniversary of the original Wall tour which lasted from February of 1980 to July of 1981. Check out “Outside The Wall” in the video below. Much like the classic 1980s tour, the current tour featured a two set theatrical performance of the classic Floyd album which featured a larger than life plane crash, inflatables floats of the cartoonish teacher, preying mantis vagina woman, a floating blimp pig and of course the gigantic wall.

At points the stage seemed a bit barren with only Waters at the forefront. Points standing in front of the large wall turned video screen which stretched the width of the Palace. In guitar heavy songs it would be an awkward two man replacement of Waters former partner in crime, David Gilmour, as a spotlight would show the replacement singer taking Gilmour’s vocal lead atop the wall only to dim and pop back up on the guitarist ripping through the solo of “Comfortably Numb.” However, Waters throughout the show was noticeably excited throwing his 67-year-old arms in the air hyping the sold out crow. The band among others featured Waters' son Harry on keyboards, as well as former Pink Floyd collaborator Jon Carin and the somehow still around G.E. Smith. I thought when Saturday Night Live reruns went off the air so did he, ah well at least you couldn't see his faces soloing... Check below to watch a collection put together by a Floyd fan on youtube and see photos from last night in the slideshow.

This is our third installment in The New Psychedelic. The new is old and the old is new. . Read earlier interviews with Umphrey's McGee's Jake Cinninger and Dr. Dog's Scott McMicken.

Jon Carin

Live Review & Photos: Dr. Dog @ The Crofoot

2010-10-22T20:09:00.000-07:00

It’s always nice when you can stand at the back of a room and still feel the foot stomp shiver sent through the floor as the band pounds on the stage. That always seems to be with the case with Dr. Dog, who's guitarist Scott McMicken we interviewed for our MC5 this week. The Philly sextet returned to Metro Detroit for the 3rd time this year as they again found themselves at The Crofoot Ballroom after heading to The Blind Pig in April.
Dr. Dog - Nobody Knows Who You Are by Metro Times Music

With their most recent album Shame,Shame (their first effort on Anti-) now gliding off into the rearview mirror, the band has finally got to do what they wanted to do in the studio with these songs, and that’s play the shit out of them to tweak and fine tune them just like they like. Songs like opening “The Stranger” start out with the signature bassline bounce from Toby Leaman as he leads through the chorus “I do believe there’s no more tricks up my sleeves” while all six musicians lock into a whirl of soft vocal harmonies, grinding organ and slashing dual guitars. Along with a strong dose of songs from Shame, Shame and 2008's Fate—the raucous encore of "Rabbit Bat & The Reindeer"—Dr. Dog also offered some old tunes like We All Belong's campfire jangle of "Worst Trip" alongside their newly digitally released songs like “Black-Red.” Check out the photos by clicking the arrows for a fullscreen immersive view.

Interview & Concert Gallery - Umphrey's McGee's Jake Cinninger

2010-10-21T20:02:00.000-07:00

Cinninger at Rothbury Festival 2009
For our second installment in our exploration in The New Psychedelic we had a chance to talk with Umphrey's McGee guitarist Jake Cinninger, who talked about late nights spent at Tiger Stadium, some Detroit rock and metal, and how Pink Floyd influences Umphrey's McGee. Cinninger who was born on the left side of Michigan in Niles joined Umphrey's McGee in 2001 and the six-piece kept rolling with innovative crowd interaction at shows and uniquely marketed albums ever since. Read the full interview with Jake and check back for pictures and a review from their show in Kalamazoo.

MT: What are some of your initial thoughts or memories of coming to Detroit through the years?

Jake Cinninger: My great uncle actually used to announce for the Tigers, George Kell. He was a Hall of Famer, him and Al Kaline used to announce for the Tigers all throughout the 80s. So when I was a kid, I’d always take trips in with the family and see Tigers’ games during like the 84 season when they were the champs and whatnot. Those were the most memorable Detroit memories all the time at the old stadium. (Mlive talked with Ernie Harwell after Kell's passing read it here.)
(l-r)Ernie Harwell, George Kell & Al Kaline
MT: Small world, how about any Detroit musical memories?

Cinninger: Ohh yea, of course, actually to cap it off, I saw the last show at Tiger Stadium, the KISS comeback show with makeup. It was Alice and Chains’ second to last show and (along with Sponge) opened up for KISS. It was a phenomenal show. That entire side of town was just blowing up because everyone was like “KISS is coming back with makeup, it’s all the original members!” It was a frenzy, it was crazy.

MT: You guys have played a slew of venues across Detroit, what are some of your favorites to play?

Cinninger: St. Andrew's Hall is always a memorable spot just because of the history of that place. Every legendary band has graced those halls. The MC5, Iggy & The Stooges. I love the Michigan/Detroit garage rock, which was like the first proto-metal of all time. I love the history of that place and all my favorites have played there.

MT: What were some of your favorite albums growing up?

Cinninger: I was, and still am, a huge Iggy and The Stooges Raw Power fan. That’s a seminal record for me of just brutal angst and anger. It’s cool to hear that coming out of the middle of nowhere Michigan. It’s great. It really foreshadowed what New York, LA and England were trying to do after the fact. Detroit’s definitely a seminal rock and roll territory.

MT: Any current Detroit acts that you’ve been digging as of late?

Cinninger: I’m a big fan of Black Dahlia Murder, they are more into the black metal/ progressive black metal. I really think those guys are some of the most banging musicians to come out of the metal scene in a while.

MT: Let’s talk about Umphrey’s live show. You guys take a different approach to improvisation called “Jimmy Stewart.” How would you describe what you do for someone that’s never seen Umphrey’s before?

Cinninger: Well generally we have a lot of stuff that’s pre-written, very thoroughly composed kind of like classical music but played in a rock and roll format. So when it comes time to do a full improvisation we rely on a set of hand signals, almost baseball cues where we can throw a cue and the whole band can react in the moment where it sounds like we’re actually doing a musical change instead of just hoping for the best or using ESP. We’re trying to make a logical change in the improvisation. That’s where we set apart from a lot of other improvisational bands.

MT: Kind of building off that you guys have these “Stew Art” or “S2” events, (recently profiled in Time Magazine) one of which you’re doing in Kalamazoo, can you tell us about that?

Cinninger: It’s based on the way that we improv, where everything is kind of thrown at us. We have people text in, so in that moment they appear on a screen just adjacent to the stage. So when they pop up on the screen we have to react to it. Say for instance someone texts “Bob Marley meets James Hetfield” we’ll try to react as the six of us to that statement and make up some sort of equation. It’s putting us in a cage and seeing if we can get out with each phrase.

MT: So with your last album Mantis (2009) you garnered some praise for the innovation of the record. (Hand packaged special editions and 12 months of bonus online content were both extra incentives aimed to encourage fans to buy physical copies.) Can we talk about Mantis and what’s in store for the next album?

Cinninger: With Mantis we wanted to make sort of like a conceptual big idea, rather than just have a bunch of random songs on a record. We wanted the whole project to sound a certain way just like the old records back in the 70s that we all love and cherish. We wanted to harken back to the old progressive 70s vibe of a record. What we’re doing next is sort of getting away from that and possibly doing stylistically different EP’s rather than doing just a bunch of songs on a disc, we’d want each piece sort of have a story or a style. Like one would be a party record. One might be a heavier metal record. One might be sort of a funky thing, something might be sort of a jazzy oriented thing. It’d be kind of cool to touch on the different styles

MT: So would they come all packaged together or staggered?

Cinninger: We’re not really sure quite yet. We might release them one at a time, and then at the end of it have some sort of big bonus material package deal.

MT: Any other producers or engineers that you guys are thinking of working with?

Cinninger: For the next record I would love to get someone in the producer’s seat. We’re at a point where it might be cool to have someone else’s ear involved. Maybe a guy like Joe Berassi (Tool, Bad Religion, Queens of The Stone Age)or Joe Chicarelli (Frank Zappa, The Shins, White Stripes/Raconteurs) Some of the newer heavier metal stuff that has a really sweet and warm production rather than a I high-end sizzling type of thing.

MT: So we’re talking about sort of resurgence of psychedelic music in recent years, have you been seeing that in the past few years?

Cinninger: Yea, I think the idea of psychedelic music is that it should embrace all styles. The idea of being psychedelic is to go into uncharted territory. I think the idea is to imply jazz, metal, reggae, country, classical…all those things wrapped into one should be the future of psychedelic music.

MT: Do you want to talk about some of the influences for Umphrey’s that might not be as apparent to listeners at first?

Cinninger: A lot of what we dig into is a lot of the unsung heroes of the studio of our favorite recordings. Luckily Google exists, so you can Google your favorite recording session and figure out who is playing what and then research those musicians further. It’s beautiful to have resources to find out who those killer players are on those classic recordings. The Steve Gadd’s of the drums, the Larry Carlton’s of the guitar, the Chuck Reiney’s of the bass, the list goes on. Kinda like those Steely Dan guys, who are those guys? It’s based around Walter Becker and Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, but the list of musicians is just endless.

MT: A cornerstone of early psychedelic is Pink Floyd and I know you guys have done your fair share of Pink Floyd covers. Roger Waters is heading to The Palace of Auburn Hills on Sunday, could you talk about how Pink Floyd has influenced Umphrey’s?

Cinninger: Floyd has a direct connection with Umphrey’s. The idea is that they could be very emotional and not cheesy. There’s a big thing that Pink Floyd developed because it’s hard to sing about a thing like love and something sensitive and come off genuine. The psychedelic side of love and Pink Floyd is very emotional and that’s the beauty in it. it brought emotion to rock and roll it wasn’t about just having a good time. it was about finding bits and pieces of your life in the music.

Umphrey's performing Shine On You Crazy Diamond earlier this year in Indianapolis with a natural lightning light show.

Friday Oct. 22nd, 8:30p.m. Kalamazoo State Theater, 404 South Burdick, Kalamazoo, Michigan

Umphrey's McGee is the second installment in our multi-part exploration of The New Psychedelic. Check back to more including Roger Waters. The first installment with Dr. Dog's Scott McMicken can be found here.

Interview W/ Dr. Dog's Scott McMicken

2010-10-20T20:05:00.000-07:00

"Dr. Dog @ The Blind Pig"

Dr. Dog singer/songwriter/guitarist Scott McMicken recently sat down to chat with MT Music Blog for this week's MC5 . McMicken, aside from a few of his favorite things in Detroit, talked about the band's always-growing catalog, their ties to psychedelic music and the creation of their own alphabet. The Philly quintet released their sixth studio album Shame, Shame earlier this year and also knocked out a few tracks for this upcoming tour where they head to Pontiac's Crofoot Ballroom tonight with Here We Go Magic & Prussia. Check it below for the full interview.

MT: I know you guys have opened up for The Raconteurs, and played at The Magic Stick in the past along with a few other venues around Detroit and Ann Arbor. What are some of your favorite things that you associate with coming to Detroit to play a show? What do you like about coming back to Detroit each time?

McMicken: Is Pontiac considered Detroit?

MT: It’d be considered the greater Metro Detroit area. About 20-30 minutes away from downtown.

McMicken: Ahhh gotcha. Well I always like, I dunno have a certain image of Detroit I guess. I like The Magic Stick a lot, I like when we play there we get to go bowling and stuff. My own memories are playing there with Bobby Bare Jr. and Jeffrey Lewis. I like to think about The High Strung [former Park The Van label mates] because they’re from Detroit. Always gets me thinking about lots of Motown music and all that Detroit garage-y rock, The Gories and all that kind of stuff.

I like the feel of Detroit’s history and I like that it seems to somehow, from what I understand about the music, to work with the present state of the city. There’s a sense of urgency behind everything there, I like that a lot. I have a lot family there, so that’s always cool. I used to love the Detroit Tigers a lot when I was a kid. I liked how when we first started going [to Detroit] we were real afraid, because people were telling us that people in Detroit are real hecklers and aggressive, but I like how every time we go it’s not really the case.

MT: We aren’t too bad. Are there any other Detroit musicians that you have been digging lately?

McMicken: I like Jack White a lot. I don’t really listen to much of his music, but I think he’s pretty awesome, he always seems to keep working real hard all the time. Nolan Strong and The Diablos. They are actually the thing I’ve been listening to the most. They kind of slipped through the cracks and just sort of resurfaced as this real gem for me. They’re one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time, I could easily put them at the top of my list of Detroit music. I like Iggy Pop a lot. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know about, I’m always psyched to find out more about Detroit. I mean of course, the whole phenomenon of Motown music.

MT: did you guys blow out a tire last time leaving Pontiac?

McMicken: We did have a blow out there, and actually I ended up going to the hospital that day too! I went to the emergency room. I had a real weird show because I couldn’t hear anything, I had to have everybody else turn my amp on and adjust the sound and stuff because I had no perspective on sound of things. We were with The Growlers, they were so good.

"McMicken In Pontiac"

MT: Yea, they actually were just here at a loft in Mexicantown for another cool little show a few weeks back. Why don’t we talk about your the last two albums you guys have put out. In 2008 there was Fate, and this last year was Shame, Shame your debut on Anti-.

McMicken: Fate seems to have this weird phenomenon around it for a lot of folks, and for sure for own experience. It kind of took on this slightly larger than life air about it, as soon as we started throwing ideas about it. It was wow. Even in our experience making it, the sheer amount of impact it was having on us, and the things we were reacting to seemed as much out of our control as in of our control. There were a lot of things, I don’t mean this in any kind of pious way or anything, it was one of those points in time where things were aligned well enough to be able to be expressed almost without trying. Where we were at, what the songs were about, how we were recording and of course what we were interested in that very particular moment. So to react to particular things and draw them out that will always be a fond document of a period of time for us as well, so it’s cool that it translates to our listeners.

MT: I personally saw a few people fall in love with Dr. Dog on that album served as their introduction to you guys.

McMicken: I’ve felt like that was probably the best like… that album definitely got us going a lot more. Maybe our other albums before that, some people liked them and stuff, but maybe they were a little too inaccessible for some types of listeners. I feel like Fate just kind of came into focus a little more. We’re always learning about the recording process as we record ourselves. Each album we learn how to present things more clearly and concisely. I still really like all the old albums. Probably for a lot of people who don’t really listen to a lot of weirder music or anything, not that it’s the weirdest shit around or anything…but it’s got sort of an air of homespun or a lo-fi take on how to get stuff done. A lot of people probably aren’t maybe used to that, the weird sounds on the voices, the lack of guitars, things like that.

MT: So Fate, like all the albums before it, was mixed and engineered entirely by you guys and on Shame, Shame it was the first time you worked with an engineer and producer?

McMicken: Yea we wanted to try that whole way of doing things finally. We felt like we were ready to try it because we felt like we were getting better as a live band. So we thought we could put the songs together as a live band and then just try to find some real skilled engineers and producers to help us record them in a more live fashion. For all the experience we have making our own records and stuff we don’t really know anything about how to mic up a whole band and get it sounding good live in the studio. It was time to try that. It didn’t work out ideally. In the end, we ended up spending a month doing that…in theory we were supposed to be done in that month, but we were nowhere near done when it came to the end of the month. We spent two more months on our own back at our studio with the tapes trying to do them the way we normally do them. It’s kind of a combination of working with a producer and an engineer for the first time and then having a good solid two months with the tapes all on our own to do our thing. It worked out pretty good as far as just stepping outside of the boundaries of how we typically work for long enough to get some cool basic tracks and also get some new insight on a different way of recording and then kind of go back home and apply that to own type of way of doing things. It was good. It was kind of one foot in the door. It wasn’t a full on success in that way of working. But definitely one step in the right direction, and that’s something that we’ve continued to experiment with and will continue to do into the next record.

Dr. Dog In Pontiac[/caption]

MT: So are you looking for another producer/engineer set or back to recording on your own?

McMicken: The plan as it stands is to do it on our own, but not in our own studio. What we realized is that we don’t really need a producer, we just need a really good engineer. We’ve been producing records on our own for so long that there’s no shortage of ideas and no shortage of confidence at this point of how to arrange a tune and put it together. But we just need somebody who’s a better engineer so we can experiment with better/more subtle/richer tones, that’s where our shortcomings are still really prevalent. The next record is where we just recorded 4 songs this summer that were done in a studio in Philly called Minor Street (spelling). It’s run by an old friend of ours and we went in there to try it out and it worked out great. They have great engineers and we were able to be a live band but also experiment with things. It’s a perfect marriage of the old Dr. Dog and the new Dr. Dog. It felt really good, it felt like we could exercise our chops as live musicians with the feel and the groove but also feel free to rip it all apart and experiment with it, just be a lot more playful. Not just 5 guys clicking off and go and there’s your song. We were able to then sort of take it apart or manipulate it a lot which is something we’ve always enjoyed. It was all happening so fast thanks to these really great engineers, so it was kind of perfect. The plan is just to do it there the same way we did these four tunes this summer. There are also so many options, there are definitely still producers we’re still talking to.

MT: You were talking about psychedelic music before, I had read an interview where you had mentioned an accompanying album to go with your first album, The Psychedelic Swamp, which now out of print, is that still in the works?

McMicken: It’s in the works as far as; we’re definitely going to do it. It’s just a matter of time. It wouldn’t be very hard to find the time to do it. It wouldn’t be very hard because what’s required of us to complete it is conceptually built in to be very simple and kind of live rock and roll without any bells and whistles or tricks, without any psychedelia really, that’s the idea. The accompanying record to The Psychedelic Swamp would be a very very straightforward and direct, not psychedelic, translation of the whole garbled psychedelic record into just garage rock basically, that’s sort of the reason of what the whole about is about. It’s kind of a long story behind that record, but in a nutshell the idea behind it is that we didn’t make it. Dr. Dog didn’t make The Psychedelic Swamp. It was sent to us by a character named Phrases, who used to live on Earth, but escaped Earth and escaped all his woes to go to the psychedelic swamp as a means of release from all the troubles he was having in life. Then he gets there and at first he’s really excited and wowed and amazed at the lack of logic and lack of order to the universe. But he shortly thereafter realizes that the same issues and same problems persist. That his choice to just escape reality was not by any means a solution. He starts to get desperate and realizes this mistake he’s made but at the same time he’s spending all this time there and losing perspective on how to communicate with his former self and the former world that he was apart of. So the record becomes increasingly more and more incoherent. But he has this strong message that he really wants to spread to people so he chooses Dr. Dog to be the band to take this album that he’s made, it’s not even like an album, it’s kind of like a document of his experience in the swamp.

MT: At points it feels like a radio show, there’s a DJ leading you through these places.

McMicken: Exactly, it’s kind of this multimedia experience you’re hearing of the psychedelic swampland. You’re hearing what it’s like to listen to the radio there. You’re hearing advertisements. You’re hearing sort of the ambience of him being at work. You’re hearing the news. Yea. A lot of it is interspersed with sort of narrative songs. So he chooses Dr. Dog to translate this mess into an American pop context, so that his message could be heard and understood. So now we just have to do the thing of taking all the songs that are on there and like I said playing them very straightforward and recording them very simply so that they’re not manipulated at all, just straight to the point. When we do that prophecy will be fulfilled, and our job will have been done and we can release it. It seems silly for us to release it before we can do that because it’s a part of the whole concept. Also there are kind of pipe dreams about a movie. If we could ever one day turn it into a movie, that would be so great. Aside from the logistical nightmare of making a movie, it’d be pretty easy. The narrative is all there. In our heads it’s so fleshed out from point A to point B. It’s so visual in how involved we were getting into it at the time, talking about it and watching the story unfold before our very eyes on the 4-track. It’s all kind of there. It would just be a matter of getting involved with people who know about making movies and could help translate it. It’s still a work in progress. It’s something that we definitely still intend to get done one day it just becomes a question of when.

MT: Keeping with the psychedelic weirdness, it seems the first reference points that come to mind when people are talking about Dr. Dog are a the classic rock psychedelic pop three B’s, (The Beatles, The Beach Boys and The Band) what are there other artists that influence Dr. Dog that people might not hear right away?

McMicken: There’s so many. It’s interesting I often find myself coming back to this same problem. Obviously I know linguistically what you attach the term psychedelic to, but really in my experience listening to music, you take something like early Pink Floyd or something that is obviously psychedelic music. You listen to it, and you feel a certain way, and you get that kind of joy of that expansive color palette and that strange imaginary and surreal sonic landscape to transport you to some other place while you’re listening. I can get that same sensation listening things that you wouldn’t as easily call psychedelic music. I guess what I’m trying to say the term is really amorphous to me. It’s less a description of a type of sound, or a trend in a particular type of sound and more a type of perspective adopted when listening to music. It can be John Coltrane, it can be Louis Armstrong, it can be James Taylor for Christ sake! If your mind is open and willing to react to the sounds in a proactive way Joan Baez is psychedelic or Dylan. You look at Dylan and his words take you off in places like that. The sounds are so rooted, but the words are so loss-y. So psychedelic as a term for me often has more to do with how I’m listening than what I’m listening to. All that crap being said, there’s so much stuff that has an influence on the band that I guess you could call more psychedelic like R. Stevie Moore, Ariel Pink or even Tom Waits is psychedelic in his own way. He uses this palette of real grounded earthy-ness and raw emotive primitive type of feel, but it’s just as blown out of proportion as Dark Side of The Moon, it’s just as unrealistic. Tom Waits is real great music for your imagination. I always listen to Os Mutantes and feel like they are super psychedelic. Jimi Hendrix being a more classic example. Punk rock is a big influence on the band. The Clash is a big influence, I don’t know if that’s very apparent very often. Some of that kind of the new wave stuff like Television and The Talking Heads come up a lot in my understanding of subtle aspects of our tunes. Hip-hop has a lot to do with what we’ve been doing lately. I don’t know, the band has always been pretty wide open with what influences members want to bring to it. We don’t have a particular direction or course that we have to stay. I’ve been listening to a lot of Wu-Tang and Dr. Dre and there’s such cool atmosphere and tone and the rhythm to the phrasing. This is where all the sudden Wu-Tang has a lot in common with Bob Dylan, just rhythmic phrasing in a vocal performance whether it be a folk song or a modern hip-hop song is super compelling. Really just the application of rhythm to everything, rhythm in the drums, rhythm in the guitar playing. That’s where you can listen to African pop music and get so excited by the full on headstrong devotion to rhythmic feel in every instrument that’s being played and no longer is there just a guitar bashing away to fill space and make it feel large. You can achieve largeness through much smaller level expressions of very refined ideas in rhythm. The biggest thing lately for us has been the pursuit of off rhythms. So that applies to so much stuff, African pop music, oldies music in such a subtle way. If you pick up your instruments and try to play “Goin’ to the Chapel” or something, if you don’t know what you’re doing, even though it’s so simple, you’ll just sound like some white boy ska band or something. It’s all about the looseness and the feel of the ability to be cohesive with one another to make it feel that natural. It turns out that’s so hard. The simplest things are so hard sometimes.

MT: Is there anything else you’ve got planned with this upcoming tour?

McMicken: We’ve got a new double 7” that’ll be at our show. There are four new tunes with a whole new language that we’ve made up. We invented a new alphabet and the whole record is written in the new alphabet that you have to decode and figure out. It’s pretty sweet lookin’. It’s something.

MT: You guys always have some unique hard physical copies of your records.

McMicken: For us that part of the process is always so fun. Coming up with fun ideas and stuff, wherever there’s an outlet of doing some kind of fun idea and playing around with it we always can’t help ourselves.

Oct. 20^th 8p.m. Dr. Dog wsg Prussia & Here We Go Magic, The Crofoot Ballroom, Pontiac,

This is the first installment in our multi-part exploration of The New Psychedelic. Look for more from Umphrey’s McGee and their new school of improvisation and Roger Waters’ re-imagining of The Wall.

Gorillaz @ The Fox Theater Detroit

2010-10-14T19:59:00.000-07:00

Last night found the world's biggest virtual band at the ornate Fox Theater. MT Music Blog was there for former Blur frontman Damon Albarn's latest incarnation of The Gorillaz which featured Mick Jones & Paul Simonen of The Clash. After the opening N.E.R.D, Albarn lead the charge of the massive band that included the eight-piece Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Swedish dream-pop outfit Little Dragon, De La Soul and Bobby Womack along with a seven-piece symphonic backing and six Arab-American musicians for a few tunes.

Womack brought his soul punch on "Stylo" early in the show and Little Dragon joined on the churning of "Empire Ants." Throughout the long set Albarn took time to sit back and revel in not only the slews of different musicians sharing the stage, but the ornate Fox Theater telling the Detroit crowd that they had "quite the thea-ate-er here." With an encore of a few Gorillaz favorites both "Feel Good Inc." (which someone already threw a youtube video up below) and "Clint Eastwood" sent the Fox Theater crowd back into the rainy streets with a smile. While Gorillaz performances this tour are vastly different from years past--the massive screens blocking the musicians are gone-- the full band was truly a sight to behold as the rich textures created on the album exploded onstage with the gigantic band.

Check it out below for pictures and video from last night's show. Click the diagonal arrows for a fullscreen view and click a picture to begin a slideshow.

"Glitter Freeze"

"Feel Good Inc."

of Montreal & Janelle Monae @ ROMT Royal Oak

2010-09-21T19:56:00.000-07:00

So every once in a while you think you've seen almost everything. But I can honestly say that before last night, I had never seen a crossdressing man dry hump and molest a woman in a pig mask while paper-mache fire-headed guards hold back her pig husband. So. Yea. Cross that shit off the bucket list after of Montreal last night at The Royal Oak Music Theater.

In addition to the quasi beastiality weirdness and overally theatricality of the two acts, it's clear that Janelle Monae is firing on all cylinders from her fiery hour long opening set. If you haven't heard Ms. Monae yet, get on it, this is a young singer in her prime. of Montreal's roughly two-hour set showcased much of the material from their most recent False Priest, and a crowd sing-a-long encore of a Michael Jackson medley of "Thriller>Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'>Pretty Young Thing" as Monae and her band joined as well. Hit after the jump for pictures and a video from a steady concert goer on the youtubes. We here at MT had a chance to talk with frontman Kevin Barnes about growing up outside Detroit and the record last week check it here.

Click the diagonal arrows for a fullscreen immersive PicLens photowall, and click an image to enlarge and hit the play button to begin a slideshow.

MJ Medley

Eminem & Jay-Z In Detroit

2010-09-02T19:45:00.000-07:00

As the first half of Eminem and Jay-Z's four night "Home & Home Tour" wrapped up last night here in Detroit, we here at The Metro Times Music Blog bring you some photos from the groundbreaking hip-hop showcase. Fans flocked to the city from all over the globe, Norway, Miami and Afghanistan...and that was just a 10 person section in the front row. To say that it was a major event downtown would be an understatement.

After being away for a bit, Eminem is seemingly back and recharged, as he almost stomped a hole through the stage jumping ferociously through the two nights. It was a look of childlike satisfaction painted on his face whenever he took a step back to gaze out at the pulsing crowd. That look of pure joy slapped across his face looking onto his hometown.

The list of guest appearances started to look like a laundry list of hip-hop as Dr. Dre, the remaining members of D12, Young Jeezy, 50 Cent, Lloyd Banks, Detroit's own Trick Trick and opening acts B.O.B & Liz Rodriguez all found their way onstage in the star studded two-nights. The stadium was abuzz with celebrities and athletes, my personal highlight was sighting none other than motherfuckin' Dave Coulier. Bam! Gaga, you ain't got shit on Coulier.

The duo finishes up next week in New York City with two nights at Yankee Stadium on September 13th and 14th. Head down after the jump for some for pictures from Eminem and Jay-Z historic concerts at Comerica Park. Click here to view the slideshow in full screen or feel free to view as the photowall by clicking the two arrows in the bottom right corner for a fullscreen immersive PicLens.

Click the video for the panoramic phone view of Comerica Park before the show...^

Click the two arrows in the bottom right corner for fullscreen view.

Police trying to move people standing outside on Montcalm looking into Comerica Park...they didn't have much luck as people shut out from the show peered in through every side of the Comerica Park gates.

Please leave a comment to share your experiences or any pictures from these two historic nights in Detroit.

Detroit At Bonnaroo 2010 Videos for MetroTimes.com

2010-06-11T19:44:00.000-07:00

Frontier Ruckus takes their backcountry show to the camp grounds of Bonnaroo and Mayer Hawthorne introduces the rowdy crowd to "Maybe So, Maybe No."

As I return from yet another exhausting Bonnaroo and attempt to recharge my batteries, it's half heartedly that I say next year will be a tough one to attend. Each year the common complaint among those in the live music scene is that it is by far the "most corporate" festival on the circuit, however, I've always asserted if you're standing around wondering what Garnier Fructis is doing there, instead of going to see music, you've officially fucked up. What keeps Bonnaroo alive every year is that it is a challenge to self proclaimed music fans. It is an open invitation to come discover new music, and every year they put out a lineup with so much diversity that it's impossible not to find artists you'll like as well as to discover some new ones.

It was great to see so many Detroit and Michigan area artists make their mark down in Tennessee, as the festival has grown to mythic proportions, and is a great notch on any band's resume. Frontier Ruckus, Mayer Hawthorne & The County, Jessica Hernandez & The Deltas, and Mike Posner all seemed to grab some new fans who happily stumbled across their shows.

Coming back to Michigan, I can't help but be reminiscent of Rothbury — which unfortunately was put on hold this year, but plans to return in 2011— the 4th of July weekend festival on the west side of Michigan which set out with extremely ambitious sustainability goals and truly catered to the concert patron in one of the best festivals I've ever been to. Bonnaroo now in it's 9th year, could easily have invested more into their site as Rothbury did, but at the same time they are still going strong while Rothbury is reeling. Also with this year being the first Bonnaroo finally plugged into the local electrical grid (i.e. not running on generators) they are still moving in the right direction as far as greening. A final look at my pictures.

Detroit At Bonnaroo 2010 Days 3-4 for MetroTimes.com

2010-06-11T19:41:00.000-07:00

The two biggest acts from Detroit took the main What Stage yesterday back to back as Jack White's The Dead Weather's set was fueled by lead singer Alison Mosshart's animalistic antics, but Stevie Wonder would easily prove to be the show of the entire weekend.

Stevie started things off with some funky keytar as he sauntered on stage grinning ear to ear. Then he dove into classics such as "Uptight Alright," and "Higher Ground" before delivering a bouncy interlude via "Heard It Through The Grapevine," and "Signed, Sealed, Delivered." For the most part, Wonder would mostly stick with his "classics," as he ran a singing clinic (literally at points) with a line by line instructional sing-a-long of "Living For The City." For the final two songs of his roughly two-hour set, Wonder's 13-piece band ballooned to over 40, as a 16 person choir and nine tribal percussionists joined he and his band on stage to the delight of the crowd (tribal percussion is some sort of Bonnaroo aphrodisiac, you know?).

Awful heat and humidity made for early mornings, but daytime sets with reggae legend Jimmy Cliff made the heat a bit easier to bear.

Other acts delivering top notch sets were Americana torch bearer John Prine, comedian Conan O'Brien (responsible for a 12-hour wait at the Comedy Tent), Weezer, and Jeff Beck. Raucous late night shows from Jay-Z, Gwar, Deadmau5 and Thievery Corporation brought night into day, and an early sunrise performance with The Disco Biscuits, who took the stage at 6 a.m. recycled the insanity.

With the closing of another Bonnaroo, we say goodbye to another weekend of drug addled psychedelia and impromptu nakedness. We were all treated to more bare Gwar butt than anyone ever should see, and we can't unsee it.

Comedian Jeff Ross said Friday, "There's some amazing choices at Bonnaroo, for instance, I don't know if I'm going to see Dave Matthews Band…or take an Ambien."

On tap for Detroit bands on the final day of the festival are Jessica Hernandez & The Deltas, who takes to the Ford Fiesta Tent once more, and Southfield native Mike Posner, who finds himself at Café Where.

Look for pictures from The Dead Weather from fellow photographer Ben Slayter, along with Hernandez and Posner's sets and some post festival ruminations sometime tomorrow, after the acid wears of...

Detroit At Bonnaroo 2010 Days 1-2 for MetroTimes.com

2010-06-11T19:39:00.000-07:00

With spotty wi-fi, hot mud, stinky hippies and a flow of overwhelming mediocrity from The Kings of Leon on the main stage, here are day 1 and 2 updates on Detroit's brightest at Bonnaroo.

As one of the trio of acts to start the festivities Thursday afternoon, rollicking folk act Frontier Ruckus pulled a surprisingly big crowd at small tent in Centeroo, bucking some of the trend that opening crowds are fairly inattentive (and sometimes in single-digits) as roughly 200 people found their way to Metro Detroit quintet's 45-minute set.

Despite not being a Detroiter, we'll give Diane Birch a little love as she was born in Michigan before moving to South Africa. Birch led the crowd in a bouncy version of Hall (who is playing the festival tomorrow) & Oates' "Rich Girl," closing out her set at That Tent.

However, it was Mayer Hawthorne & The County who took the reins into the evening, as the real party starts as the sun goes down. Hawthorne, dressed to the nines, worked the jumpy late night crowd of This Tent with his "Maybe So, Maybe No," a take on Electric Light Orchestra's "Mr. Blue Sky," and an interlude hip-hop test with the incomparable Biz Markie, and some trace J-Dilla beats scattered throughout the set with a shout out to the late-great producer from Hawthorne himself. In my Jim Leyland jersey, a new found fan ofHawthorne slapped me on the back saying, "Alls you gotta do is put a little L.A. spit shine on you Detroit boys, and you clean right up don'tcha?"

No comment.

Early on Friday, Detroit's new jangle 'n' swoon sensation, Jessica Hernandez & The Deltas, played their first of two sets of the weekend at The Ford Fiesta Tent, and Frontier Ruckus treated campers to an impromptu performance at a crowded street corner in the massive campground.

Detroit At Bonnaroo 2010 Preview for MetroTimes.com

2010-06-11T19:38:00.000-07:00

New this week here at The Metro Times Music Blog, we'll be bringing you the latest on all of the Detroit area's finest who are making the trek down to Manchester, Tennessee's annual Bonnaroo Music Festival. We'll wade through the sea of the two hips--the patcholi stinking hippies and PBR schwilling hipsters--to bring updates on Detroit heavy hitters like Stevie Wonder and The Dead Weather, as well as smaller bands like Frontier Ruckus, Mayer Hawthorne & The County (both named in Rolling Stone's essential sets) Mike Posner,Diane Burch and Jessica Hernandez & The Deltas. I'll do my best to keep everyone updated with daily pictures and videos...hopefully. Stay tuned!

While this year we'll be focusing on all things Detroit at the Bonnaroo, this will be my fifth straight year heading to one of the largest music festivals in the US, and each year proves to be as chock full of surprises as the last. So check out a few of my photos from previous Bonnaroo's with Pearl Jam, Phish with guest Bruce Springsteen, David Byrne, My Morning Jacket and whatever the hell else people seem to get their hands on, in the slideshow below. If you're heading down, or have been to the festival before share your experiences below...

Dr. Dog at The Blind Pig - Ann Arbor

2010-04-15T23:24:00.000-07:00

With Shame, Shame Dr. Dog take a step into themselves. We are getting more of the voice of modern working class psychedelia with Dr. Dog. With every album, it’s not so much the cliché that they are moving forward as they are exploring different aspects of the music they create. Lo-fi records, hi-fi records, indie, pop, psychedelic. Whatever the fuck you want to call it, Dr. Dog can do it, and they do it very well. There won’t be any synthesizers, but you’ll a band squeeze every ounce out of the instruments they have.
On it’s face, Shame, Shame is a simpler approach than their previous effort Fate, nodding more to earlier albums We All Belong and Easy Beat. But deeper, Shame, Shame is a beautiful mix of these contradictions. It keeps the grit, but stays as intricate as Fate accomplishing the complexity with one of the most challenging tasks in music, making an album that sounds honestly natural while still retaining all of the depth. The album marks a contemplative, inward look into the music Dr. Dog creates.[1]
Like the sleigh bells signaling the jump on Shame, Shame, the jingle of “Stranger” that would begin the night as Philadelphia’s Dr. Dog came to Ann Arbor’s Blind Pig. What makes the latest batch of songs from Shame, Shame so lively in concert is, despite the barebones production the songs are still so full, that live, with the additions of all the nuances of all their live arsenal: varied harmonies, an acoustic guitar here, a shaker there, the songs take on a whole new life as they are almost overflowing. It’s almost as if they are finally getting to put their final stamp of approval on them with a searing live performance.

Also joining the five regular members of Dr. Dog was Dimitri Manos, who played on percussion and guitar occasionally, and the addition of a stripped down, but attentive light show. Small things, like the simplistic whirling organ of Zach Miller and echo laden guitar of Scott McMicken while the band is bathed in all blue light during “I Only Wear Blue,” make for little ties to pull the whole show together. All six seem to fluently flow through these songs, limbs swirling around the stage.
Although he, for the most part, left some of his howl off Shame, Shame, bassist Toby Leaman hasn’t lost that quick snarl and skin curling scream that he executes so beautifully on songs like “Army of Ancients.”
Thematic chaotic light chases during “Mirror Mirror” are…well…mirrored on stage by the band thrashing through the small dingy club’s mirrored side walls as they are immersed in the washes of light. The waving caroms of the guitar harmonies of’ “The Ark” saunter up and down before leading into one of only two songs of the evening that we written before 2008’s Fate, with We All Belong’s “The Way The Lazy Do.

“The Rabbit, The Bat and The Reindeer,” a guaranteed high energy, usual closing song, landed squarely in the middle of gentle interlude to wind up the energy through the roof, as it was bookended by the slower “Station” and “Someday,” both of which highlight the quiet, softer aspects of Leaman’s vocal range with a smooth high and low wave.
Another warm whirl of the organ from Miller leads into “Where’d All The Time Go?” lead by McMicken’s vocal line, before it is capped with an absolutely fucking loaded solo from guitarist Frank McElroy that fuels the crashing end climax before the thud into the slow churn of “The Beach.” Leaman’s retches out notes, with his snarl cuts just as quick on the slow chunky tune.
Next “Hang On,” would again be driven by Miller’s flailing across his keyboards before “Shadow People” started starkly with McMicken’s voice over an acoustic strum finally building into an undeniable humming rattle before exploding into the piano saunter and surf guitar ping. “Shadow People” wasn’t particularly a song that stuck out before the show, but like most of the songs of the night Dr. Dog played it leaving you no other option but to fall in love with it. To close the hour and half set, they sprinkled in their only other older track closing with the road weary travel diary of We All Belong’s “Worst Trip.”

After a quick break, the six-piece returned for an encore to wrap up the entire show, blending the endings to their last two albums. “Jackie Wants A Black Eye” and the closing title track of Shame, Shame, both led into the weaving “My Friend,” Fate’s closing track. “Jackie” is sparse live, accented with merely a chorus of hand claps and McMicken’s lone acoustic guitar leading smoothly into the slide guitar amble of “Shame, Shame.” To close the show, “My Friend,” intertwines the themes coursing though the evenings trailing psychedelic levels.
The Philly psych rockers seem so effortlessly locked into the basics of these songs that they are able to pinpoint what they want to add live at will. As guitarist Scott McMicken told Glide earlier, “…what that always comes down to --and I realize this more and more we're a band--is your level of performance. It can be a song of three instruments, if you can really hone that part, and play off everybody else, and really find your space, the song will lack nothing.”
They, for simplistic emphasis, play the fuck out of these songs. They make you love the new songs as much as they do because they put everything they have into these songs live.

Scroll down for complete setlist & more photos.

Dr. Dog
The Blind Pig, Ann Arbor, Mi
4/15/10

The Stranger
I Only Wear Blue
The Old Days
Army of Ancients
The Breeze
Mirror, Mirror
The Ark
The Way The Lazy Do
Station
Rabbit, Bat & The Reindeer
Someday
Where’d All The Time Go?
The Beach
Unbearable Why
Hang On
From
Later
Shadow People
Worst Trip
-----------
Jackie Wants A Black Eye
Shame, Shame
My Friend

[1]“This band also carries a strong element of sickness in their music, a crazed quaking of uncertainty, an errant foolishness that effectively mirrors the absurdity and desperation of the times, but I believe that they also carry a strong element of cure, a post-derangement sanity. And I also believe that their music is as important as the product of any rock group working today, although you better never call it art or you may end up with a deluxe pie in the face. What it is, instead, is what rock and roll at heart is and always has been, beneath the stylistic distortions that last few years have wrought. This band is not for the ages—nothing created now is—but they are most implicitly for today and tomorrow and the traditions of two decades of beautifully bopping, manic, simplistic jive.” – Lester Bangs wrote this in 1970. Obviously he wasn’t writing about Dr. Dog, but he might as well have been. Their music is timeless traditional rock and roll in all its beauty. Tinges of punk, psych and blues all intermingle seamlessly. For those of us who will always love it, it never went away.

Pietro C. Truba

click to enlarge or view as a SLIDESHOW HERE...

Julian Casablancas at St. Andrew's Hall

2010-04-05T22:57:00.000-07:00

To say that Julian Casablancas has had a conventional rock and roll road would be a bit of a stretch. With no number off hand, it’s probably fairly safe to say the total of models turned rock lead singers are few and far between. The Strokes lead singer came to Detroit’s St. Andrew’s Hall with his solo band on a humid Monday night and his the show would prove to be anything but ordinary, whether or not that is a good thing can be your decision.

Casablancas opened up his show in dark, aside from a sparse blue can aimed down around the back of the stage it would remain fairly dark throughout the roughly 45-minute set. Casablancas sauntered on stage drink in had as he wavered back and forth during the swirling noise of the six-piece band behind him before going into “Ludlow Street,” to open the show. Casablancas’ band featured a drummer and percussionist, two guitarists, and two keyboard players, both of whom occasionally played guitars as well. Casablancas who took only vocal duties ala The Strokes, but this still made for a wall of sound coming from the dark stage, which wasn’t always a good thing. Some of the nuances of the album were lost as the occasional trio of guitars wouldn’t always mesh with the pinpoint accuracy they had on the album. The short set, only 8 songs, was taken from Casablancas’ recently released Phazes for The Young, save a take on The Strokes “Hard to Explain” which had the crowd thrashing up and down, and a slow keyboard duo of the B-side “I’ll Try Anything Once.”

The set closed with “Left & Right In The Dark” which characterized the short set, guitars and synthesizers mashing over one and other, occasionally syncing up but mostly overpowering each other in a hot mess with some raspy effect laden from Casablancas before he walked off stage letting he band slam to the end of the song. For an encore the band returned for the slow crashes of “4 Chords of The Apocalypse,” which actually had to be restarted from the drum break, but what followed was a bizarre ending to a show. A cover Casablancas has done before of Saturday Night Live’s “I Wish It Was Christmas Today.” Before starting the odd tune, Casablancas seemed poise to explain it’s placement, that he had recorded it previously, but instead brushed his hair back joking, “I’m not going to do my schpiel, I’m just going to act like it’s no big deal to do a Christmas song.” He then ran off stage again and the house lights sent the crowd out just as quickly the front man had bolted off stage.

The show was short, bizarre and visually unentertaining because it was so dark, none of which really seemed to match the airy bounce of the synthesizers and harmonized guitars that were so heavy throughout the album versions of Phazes. Maybe some effort into a stage show, possibly more than one light may help. Casablancas voice was fairly good, when he wasn’t mumbling or stumbling around the stage, but the set barely got going before it was over. It was also a bit odd to leave the crowd with a goofball cover after playing under an hour of music, seems like a kush gig.

Casablancas could potentially capture the depressed dance floor saunter he goes for on the album, the feel of the 1980’s house party movie band, think Oingo Boingo with “It’s A Dead Man’s Party” crooning while Rodney Dangerfield straightens his longfellow in a hot tub. A load of synthesizers, an implied self-aura of holier than thou trendiness, coupled with a cold snarl and some sort of Indian tail dangley-down, Casablancas could have the potential to guide you through that bar fight scene with Robert Downey’s mohawk, but he needs to actually put on a live performance that is worth a shit before he attempts the Triple Lundy. Feels great to work that reference in there so fuck you if you don't like it. Maybe the latest revival of The Strokes will spark a fire under Casablancas with a slot at Lollapalooza.

Hiromi at The Detroit Institute of Arts

2010-03-19T22:50:00.000-07:00

Hiromi can’t be happier as she talks about her family’s actual “Green Tea Farm” in Shizuoka, Japan. “I’m not trying to push my family business on you. But green tea is very good for you,” she laughs before she starts the soothing song of the same name. Hiromi stayed mostly with material off of her newest album Place To Be, which attempt to create the various places the lifelong pianist has encountered to get to where she is today among jazz’s elite. Now 30, Hiromi did a few recital shows before she embarks on a long summer. The next few months will find Hiromi with an 18-show cross country tour with Stanly Clark, a stint at the Marciac Jazz Festival in Paris, and a residency at The Blue Note in New York.
Hiromi came to one of Detroit’s best places to be for art, as The Detroit Institute of Arts welcomed Hiromi to their cathedral style showroom, Kresge Court.

The late show of the evening kept with mostly songs from Hiromi’s latest, but also ventured to her first album with “Old castle, by the river, in the middle of the forest.” She joked before the song, saying a painting of the same name had inspired the song, so she just couldn’t bear to change the name.
A closing trio of songs showed Hiromi’s musical depth as it hopped styles and paces frantically. Hiromi’s Vegas suite featured three sections of 24-hours in the desert balm of Las Vegas. “Show city, Show girl” bounces from a playful jitter, spreading melodies as we stumble backstage through a seedy casino show. Sleek and slithering desert tappings gaze up at the circus that surrounds you churning from every angle. Slowly it bleeds into the sun stroked midday, which slows the playfulness into a crawl under the beating sun. A spinning klink of the lights and buzzes leads back into “The Gambler” and their resulting wins or loses with a suspenseful musical jackpot or bankruptcy. Frantic chases up and down the keyboard find Hiromi’s hands battling each other, tearing across the grand piano meandering the hotel maze as she throws her tiny frame into the gigantic piano. A light dancing around “The Tom and Jerry Theme” leaves Hiromi grinning ear to ear as she romps across her keys.

Her energy borderline summons Elaine Bene’s crazy legs, beaming in her seat, “limbs flailing, arms akimbo, feet kicking up dust…” Now, let’s not get things confused here, Elaine lacked any musical semblance, Hiromi’s musical voice exudes through every movement that went through body and out her fingertips into the piano. She plays with the reckless abandon like nobody is watching, having the time of her life, but still remains disciplined to execute her complex chases with beautiful precision. Her fingers and palms slam on the ivories as much as her elbows, as at one point in the night she reached inside the piano strumming and slapping the strings. Hiromi’s energy is contagious as she creates these vivid landscapes of sound with only her piano filling the entire room.
Hiromi has definitely found her place in jazz’s elite, and this summer will be yet another chance for her to showcase it to the world and continue to push herself. After showcasing what she can do with merely a grand piano, it will definitely be another task to see her with a full arsenal of keyboards.

by Pietro C. Truba

click to enlarge or view the SLIDESHOW HERE...

RJD2 wsg Adam Dietch’s Break Science at The Magic Stick, Detroit, Mi

2010-03-12T22:46:00.000-08:00

“That’s what I love about Detroit. You don’t care if it’s electro, hip-hop, funk or rock. You just want to get down.” RJD2 said following his set at The Magic Stick in Detroit, last week.
RJD2, Ramble John "RJ" Krohn, has built quite a unique following. His music has found multiple niches in snowboarding feature films, in the live music scene playing opening sets for Umphrey’s McGee and The Disco Biscuits and with hip-hop emcees. After more than a decade, he now has own label and with all his collaborations and mixes has more than 15 albums and EP’s. Playing live as both a more traditional DJ and a full band, his live shows bring out the diversity and the breadth of his musical palette. He came to Detroit, the self-proclaimed birthplace of techno, and it was a sweaty sold out dance party in Motown on a Friday night.
Opening the evening was New York’s Break Science featuring drummer Adam Dietch and keyboard player Borahm Lee. Dietch and Lee’s resumes read like a who’s who of recent stars in hip-hop and pop-art. Break Science earned a solid foothold in Michigan with brain-melting late night set at Rothbury’s Tripolee Dome last year and they would provide a raucous opening set for the sold out crowd. Their set started with a bit of Lee Scratch Perry, but ran the gamut all over jazz, psychedelia, techno and onto hip-hop with homage to one Detroit’s greatest producers, the late J-Dilla. Break Science toyed around playing “Lightworks” and a few other nuggets from Dilla’s Donuts to rile the Detroit crowd with a hometown hero. Lee and Dietch lock in perfectly as Dietch’s schizophrenic drum changing is matched by Lee’s arsenal of keyboard abilities. Break Science is definitely hard to pin down, but that makes them all the more interesting as they sonically roll around inside your head.
RJD2 then took the stage to the now feisty crowd as “Commissioner Crotchbuttons.” A bejeweled jumpsuit completely with a crotch mounted wireless pad. See him explain it here. RJD2 channeled his inner MacGyver as he slapped an old Lazy Susan together with an MPC, (Music/Midi Production Center) and attached them both at his crotch of the wireless suit. RJ gets all Daft Punk on everybody’s ass, as a robotic voice in his welding mask echoes to froth the packed crowd before jumping back to his turntable set ups to start the show.
The whole night would transition from RJD2 in his “Commissioner” suit to his more traditional DJ set up with a mix with his four piece live band with drummer Sam Brown, and multi-instrumentalists Derek Dicenzo and Happy Chincester. Sometimes he would be behind the turntables with one or two of his band mates, sometimes alone. He wouldn’t stay in one place for too long as he bounced grinning ear to ear from his electric guitar, to bass and back to his turntable set up as he blended music from across his mounting catalogue including his recently re-released first album, Your Face or Your Kneecaps, a soulful trip through vintage funk, and his latest The Colossus.
RJD2 takes his varied material, funk, jazz, hip-hop, electronic and all in between, and slashes it apart to rebuild it live. Production laden DJ numbers are changed and thrown to full band instrumentation, and vice versa, for a motley and unrestrained take on his material.
The closing medley provides a glimpse into the night as loud thunderous builds came from older production heavy songs like “The Horror>Ghostwriter,” are then balanced by calmer material from the full band with three part harmonies. The sirens and samples crashing through “The Horror” are soon bottomed out, as RJ slides from behind the turntables and a soft acoustic guitar strum from Chinchester starts “Ghostwriter.” The full band slowly builds to a slamming climax horn section with the return to “Ghostwriter” as RJ, dressed in his Commissioner Crotchbutton’s attire, crashes through the ending of the song.
The slow crawl of the encore “Making Days Longer” slowed things down for a bit but soon RJ brought things to a thrashing close with a wide-eyed grin as he ripped his final guitar solo. The wavy ups and downs of the evening were also mirrored on a movie screen onstage speckled with various eye candy for the crowd to enjoy.
RJD2 is on tour supporting The Colossus, and is well worth heading to check out, with most shows under $20, including smoking openers Break Science for the next two Midwest shows before heading to Colorado and out west. Break Science will also be touring with throughout the south with The Pnuma Trio.

by Pietro C. Truba

click to enlarge or view the SLIDESHOW HERE...

Bela Fleck: The Africa Project

2010-02-17T22:28:00.000-08:00

Bela Fleck: The Africa Project

Feat. Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba, Anania Ngolgia & John Kitime

The Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Mi

As Malian ngoni player Bassekou Kouyate said simply, “Bela play American banjo…I play African banjo.” As Bela Fleck started the first of two sets of his Africa Project tour, with some solo material, he took the stage alone, with his weapon of choice, the banjo. The entire, two-set, roughly two hour show was fueled with flavorings from Bela’s trips through Africa playing with, among others, players of the Ngoni, an African ancestor of the banjo.

The Africa Project which Bela started during time off from The Flecktones in 2004, has since given birth to Grammy award winning album Throw Down Your Heart and an award winning documentary (of the same name) chronicling the trip in which Bela visited a slew of different African and Malian locations. However, joining Bela on stage were just a small sampling of the artists, as two groups for joined Bela for the 33-city run of college towns in support of the release of more tracks from the project. Anania Ngoglia and John Kitime took the stage as Bela left them for two solo songs. Ngoglia, a mult-instrumentalist from Tanzania would play the Wagogo thumb piano, or ilimba for the evening. Kitime, also from Tanzania, played acoustic guitar, and also is one of the film’s producers.
Bela would then join Ngoglia and Kitime for two songs, one of which was speckled with chicken noises from Ngoglia to resemble his girlfriend, who Bela comically said “…Apparently she sometimes she sounds like a chicken. Sometimes she does not.” Bela and Ngoglia would duel back and forth as Ngoglia left Bela grinning ear to ear as they played back and forth at each other.

Taking the stage next to replace the trio would be an ensemble of Malian musicians, Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba (The Big Ngoni.) Bassekou was joined by seven other musicians, including three other ngoni players, Fousseyni Kouyate on ngoni ba, Barou Kouyate on ngoni and Moussa Bah on bass ngoni. Also Ngoni Ba were Malian vocalists Amy Sacko and Ma Soumano, as well as percussionists Alou Coulibaly and Moussa Sissoko. Bela looked back at the percussive drum that looked, in his words, like a very big bald man’s head poking up in the air. The drum looked like a globe and was played like a djembe, or any hand drum, as knuckles and palms created different beats and raps on the hard shell. The eight piece group would take the stage alone led by Bassekou who would provide a most charismatic front man. Bassekou’s fingers flew across the tiny fretboard of the ngoni as he either horsed down on a wah pedal to give the ngoni a quick jolt, or was at the stage front propping his foot on an amp leading the band. Bela would join as the two would recount stories of Bela’s travels to Africa and battle a few multi-lingual hecklers before playing one more song before a short intermission.
The second set would feature a slew of combinations of the musicians on stage in an hour of stellar, tag-team wrestling style musical creation. Bela would lead the different groups through the myriad of styles, blending the banjo in seamlessly with the two different regions of African music, which for lack of a better expression, created one extremely unique and entertaining experience. The second set and encore also featured fiddle player Casey Driessen, from Bela’s Sparrow Quartet. With the addition of Dreissen, the trios, quartets, octets, howevermanytets rotated on and off stage creating diverse combinations of players feeding off one an other. All twelve musicians finally were on stage for the final song of the set and the encore of the Grammy award winning title track of the project “Throw Down Your Heart.”

The surprisingly long show, just over two hours, was fueled by lots of improvisation and on the fly setlist creation, all with the ever changing musical chairs setup that led to some incendiary musical moments. This tour is a great glimpse into Bela’s ambitious project and the subsequent melding of world music into his playing style, all well worth the price of admission. Show dates are on Bela Fleck’s website www.belafleck.com and screening dates on www.throwdownyourheart.com.

click to enlarge or view the SLIDESHOW HERE...

by Pietro C. Truba
originally for Relix.com

Dr. Dog w/ The Growlers at The Crofoot Ballroom

2010-02-03T22:38:00.000-08:00

With their 2008’s Fate in the rear view mirror and Shame, Shame still a few months away, Dr. Dog has been building an impressive catalogue of perfectly pop saavy rock and roll tunes. The five piece from Philadelphia straddled albums and endured the harsh Michigan winter in Pontiac’s Crofoot Ballroom.

Opening the night were The Growlers, a six piece from California, were a pleasant surprise as vocalist Brooks Nielson crooning created a wall of sound as if he was conjuring the ghost of Jim Morrison molesting a guitar made of old surfboards. Neilsen’s vocal bends and pitches blended perfectly with the surf-laden rockabilly behind him for an opening act that was well worth the time.
Shortly after, Dr. Dog took the stage at the roughly 250 person bar with “The Old Days,” to pull the crowd in with the raucous uptempo version as the band slammed into the choruses. The depth and vibrance of the studio wasn’t gone, but sped up and replaced with a raw energy to jump start the crowd. String melodies and other nuances from the studio were filled live throughout the night by both the thrashing dual guitars of Scott McMicken and Frank McElroy, and the spacey keyboard work of Zach Miller. Mixing in almost all the tracks from 2008’s Fate, the band skillfully creates a different, but still sonically lush landscape of the complex album.
Harnessing their vocal depth and variety kept the crowd on their toes as bassist Toby Lehman’s screeching and wildly unrestrained screams provided the perfect compliment for McMicken’s more conventional softer singing. The band also harmonizes vocally, instrumentally and physically incredibly well live, as they jump, twist and bounce in unison to country tinged stomping tunes like “The Pretender.”

Dr. Dog also peppered a few new offerings from April’s upcoming Shame, Shame. “Mirror, Mirror,” the first of the new songs, gave a sign that it would be delightfully more of the same from the Philly five piece, which is not in any way a bad thing. The short barely three minute song, is another perfectly rollicking, bouncy tune to add to the already impressive Dr. Dog catalogue. Other new songs were scattered through the show, with crashing melodies across the set to create an ebb and flow of softer songs before slamming full speed ahead on “My Friend” and the closing “The Rabbit, The Bat & The Reindeer.” Both of which had the band and crowd bouncing the floor like a trampoline. As the band set their equipment down for an encore break McMicken looked around quickly realizing the only for the band to leave was through the shoulder to shoulder crowd at the front of the stage. “Well, let’s just be reasonable about this...you want us to play more songs right?” McMicken said jokingly as the band started again. After the fluttery keyboard laden “Ain’t It Strange,” it was Leaman’s screeches beautifully paired with the harmonizing guitar squeals of “Died In Your Arms,” and the closing thrash of “Oh No.”

It’s easy to forget how badly it sucks to be shoulder to shoulder in a sweaty crowd bouncing the floor of a dingy club. But it’s even easier to remember why anyone would endure these menial inconveniences, to hear musicians pour their souls out into tiny dimly lit shithole bars. That is why it’s a treat to see rock and roll shows and that is what Dr. Dog reminds their audience of each show.

by Pietro C. Truba
originally for Relix Magazine

Phish Comes to Cobo Hall

2009-11-18T11:27:00.000-08:00

“I want to tell you, Detroit, that you done set me up for a comeback,” former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said after he was forced to resign last year. Echoing the words of the infamous Detroit mayor, Phish returned for a comeback of their own in the Motor City for this year’s fall tour opener, however, delivering on the comeback would be a different story. Save a few bright spots, (Down With Disease>Free and 46 Days) the show sounded like the first show of a tour, a bit rusty and apprehensive.

The quartet came out to a barrage of roses from someone hopeful for Ween’s Roses Are Free, that unfortunately didn’t come. Most of the first set was fairly straightforward as nothing really found a perfect fit. With the newer songs Stealing Time From The Faulty Plan and Kill Devil Falls, guitarist Trey Anastasio’s, for lack of a better word, Joy, was apparent as he played these new compositions just as noticeably eager as he was the past summer to push the crowd to enjoy them as much as he seems to.
It’s Ice made for an interesting highlight of the first set, but most of the opening stanza was filled with slower tunes such as Mist. Things got slightly more upbeat with Poor Heart and 46 Days would branch out a bit, with Trey pinging notes over a spacey pulsing background soundscape while lighting director Chris Kuroda covered the side walls of Cobo Hall during the ambient improv. Slowly, the space in 46 Days fizzled into silence before it got to any real interesting territory.

With the hit of drummer Jon Fishman’s hi-hat, David Bowie attempted to give the first set a closing shot in the arm. However, the four members of Phish never really got in sync as the ending of Bowie sounded frantic and disconnected and never reached full throttle to finish the first set.

The second set would open up with a few bright spots, namely Runaway Jim and the highlight of the evening - Down With Disease -> Free. Trey would drive the jam out of Disease jumping around the stage as, for the first time in the night, all four members clicked in and barreled forward as Kuroda pulsed lights around the legendary venue.

Soon Trey started fluttering chops across his Languedoc to slowly sneak into Free. The rest of the second set, however, went back to slower tunes. Waste, Taste, Bug and Wading In The Velvet Sea found a lot of people sitting down as a quiet cloud of chatter hung over the crowd.
Mike’s Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove brought most of the crowd back to their feet. McConnell crunched a dark dirty organ in Mike’s Song for a change of pace, while Trey searched across the fretboard with slamming chords before going back into the verse of Mike’s. After the tender Hydrogen and a short Weekapaug, the second set ended with a predictable and standard Cavern.
Overall the show never found much, if any, solid coherence between all four members to create anything spectacular, but a certain amount of that is expected for a tour opener. A relatively inattentive and somewhat undersold crowd also didn’t help matters any. Here’s hoping the rest of the tour will find the band taking more chances and pulling out more surprises than they did in Detroit.

Scroll down for pictures and setlist. click thumbnails to enlarge.

Phish

November 18, 2009

Cobo Arena

Detroit, MI

Set 1: AC/DC Bag, Foam, Stealing Time From The Faulty Plan, Bouncing Around The Room, Sample In A Jar, Kill Devil Falls, It’s Ice, Horn. Mountains In The Mist, Poor Heart, 46 Days, David Bowie
Set 2: Runaway Jim, Down With Disease -> Free, Waste, Taste, Bug, Wading In The Velvet Sea, Mike’s Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove, Cavern
Encore: Character Zero

by Pietro C. Truba

originally for Glidemagazine.com

The Fiery Furnaces at The Magic Bag

2009-11-11T10:48:00.000-08:00

After The Fiery Furnaces left the stage on Veteran’s Day, I couldn’t help but think that their live show wasn’t what I had imagined going in, only slightly familiar with their catalog. With their latest studio work that featured a rollicking keyboard laden, post modern soundscape to allow singer Eleanor Friedberger to be the group’s centerpiece, I assumed there be someone behind the ivories at some point. However, as The Fiery Furnaces took the stage at The Magic Bag on November 11th, their set up was noticeably stripped down. Not to say this is a bad thing.
The duo of siblings Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, were joined by bassist Jason Lowenstein and drummer Bob D’Amico. Signature keyboard lines were taken by Matthew on guitar, who was armed with merely one effect pedal to add select noise to his vintage telecaster. Eleanor’s voice which laid so heavily over the layers of sound on the last record I’m Going Away, was occasionally lost in the energy of the power trio thrashing away behind her.
With a clear cut effort to replace the studio keyboard work with just guitar the choice made for some unique and different interpretations. The opening “Rub-Alcohol Blues” replaced the calming, smooth keyboard backing with prickly guitar pings from Matthew. On other songs Matthew’s guitar added some extra speed as he punched out riffs on songs like “Keep Me In The Dark,” which was given a shot of energy. The trio of instruments stripped the songs down to their bare bones, and on occasion it caused a few of them to blend together, sounding very similar. D’Amico and Lowenstein create a throttling rhythm section for Matthew to accent. The short set was complete with an encore featuring a few crowd requests as Eleanor sheepishly said, “We’ve got a lot of songs under our belt, so hopefully we can make someone happy…” as a fan screamed for “Japanese Slippers.”
Overall the show, despite being a hair over an hour including the encore, was above all entertaining. To see the two siblings rework their songs created some endearing and unique moments, while it proved that the group is set on mixing older and newer material into an amalgamation of the most basic sounds of the band that have endured through their entire catalog.

Click the thumbnails to enlarge.

by Pietro C. Truba