Strong pitches (for songs, to batters).

The word that the next Yep Roc album from roots- & soul- rockers Marah will have songs titled “Bruce Sutter,” “Gaylord Perry,” and “Phil Neikro” (sic) provides more oomph to two beliefs that I hold to be true about baseball songs. First, I contend that there are more songs about pitchers than the other eight positions combined. (Designated hitter is not a position, and who’d write a song about a DH anyway? It’s not like anything rhymes with “Travis Hafner.”) For instance, former Pittsburgh Pirates hurler Dock Ellis has been the subject of two songs, one by the Barbara Manning-led SF Seals and one by Chuck Brodsky (more on him later). Throwing a no-hitter on acid? Now that’s something a songwriter can work with. There have also been two recordings about John Rocker, so apparently being a lunkhead is also prime song fodder.

Others that spring to mind are Jonathan Richman’s “Walter Johnson,” “The Ballad of Denny McClain” from those diamond-loving SF Seals, and the late Warren Zevon’s tribute to the Spaceman, “Bill Lee.” Even Dylan has written a song about a pitcher: “Catfish,” his ode to Jim Hunter, a tune that Hunter famously couldn’t stand. For various reasons, there have been songs about Satchel Paige (simply one of the coolest guys ever), Vida Blue (fun name), Hoyt Wilhelm (old knuckleballer) and Ron Guidry (Cajun). If there haven’t been songs written about Mark “The Bird” Fidrych and Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky, then a couple writers are missing perfect opportunities to, um, step up to the plate. And one of the ten baseball-themed CDs from the DC-based organization Hungry for Music (www.hungryformusic.com) was released to coincide with Nolan Ryan’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and it featured several songs about the fireballer.

Belief two is that North Carolina is Baseball Song Central. Two of the pitchers mentioned above are North Carolinians: Catfish Hunter is from Perquimans County and Williamston’s spitball wizard is Gaylord Perry. (It’s worth noting that a 45 titled “The King of the Old Rawhide (The Ballad of Gaylord Perry)” came out of eastern North Carolina long ago, beating Marah to the punch by some 30 years.) Raleigh’s Kenny Roby has penned two bittersweet, and outstanding, baseball songs, “Ace, My Radio & Baseball” and “The Sweep.” The latter is the tale of a fictitious Jewish ballplayer, and it plays out like Ring Lardner backed by The Band. With references to the House of David team and Hank Greenberg, Roby shows he knows his national pastime lore, and with lines like “Used to sing hallelujah, and often I would sing/ Had a sweetheart a long time ago, but we wanted different rings,” he demonstrates, as always, that he knows his way around a chorus. Another one of my favorites is “Big Foot in the Door,” written and sung by Greensboro artist Bruce Piephoff about Greensboro ballplayer Tom Alston, the first black player on the St. Louis Cardinals.

But making North Carolina the center of the baseball song universe is Chuck Brodsky, a folk-leaning singer/songwriter who was raised in Philly and now lives in Asheville. Brodsky’s been called “baseball’s troubadour poet laureate” by Tim Wiles of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, earning that praise for his wonderful Baseball Ballads, an album that sounds like it was recorded by the light of a transistor radio tuned to a Phillies game. In addition to his Dock Ellis number, Brodsky has songs about catcher/spy Moe Berg, white Negro League player Eddie Klepp, and the star-crossed Eddie Waitkus, the inspiration for the fictional Roy Hobbs. And you can be damn sure that he knows how to spell Phil Niekro’s last name.

Slint? July 19? Cradle? OK!

(Thanks, David.)

What beautiful smiles.

American Idol’s 2-hour season finale airs Wednesday at 8 p.m., and we’re down to the wonderfully talented Jordin and Blake. Only one of them can be our nation’s next pop idol, and your vote could be the final blow in this arduous aural battle. The nation is almost split 50/50, but exit polls suggest…

American Idol sucks. Lost rules.

Lost’s 2-hour season finale airs Wednesday at 9 p.m.

Maybe loves Death Cab for Cutie.

“You know, I’ve never been a big fan of alternative music, but these guys rocked the house!” —Ian Ziering, 1993.

I’m not trying to make you feel old or make me look young, but it’s bound to happen right here. Chances are, most people reading remember Ian Ziering’s above immortal words better than I do: I was 10 years old when Ziering commended The Flaming Lips at his high school dance on Beverly Hills 90210. I was probably still hoping some freckle-faced girl with braces was going to love me back, much too concerned with reality to worry about the gravity of what had just happened on a few million televisions across the world. But, then and now, that was mainstream America trying awkwardly to show it understood its cool youth, even if that meant going slightly underground and only quasi-commercial. The Flaming Lips were just a weird band from Oklahoma with one novelty hit about jelly and Vaseline and oranges and a vastly unheard back catalogue. For the average adult, The Lips or Ziering’s fawning weren’t going to make 90210 better, but they did try to prove one thing with that infamous appearance: The show and its characters—and, much more importantly, its writers—were probably the coolest people on the planet with high-paying jobs.

BUG.

Raleigh’s Annuals have been stuck in perpetual-buzz motion since tracks from their debut, Be He Me, started leaking last summer. Pitchfork jumped all over single “Brother” and rightly fell cold on the album. Several bloggers worshiped at the band’s altar, while Nick Sylvester called Be He Me “the worst album I’ve heard in six months.” This year, they went back to South by Southwest and met mixed reviews, and now they’re part of this WTF car-and-clothes-sponsored national tour of one-offs benefiting college radio stations. Their peers include Dinosaur Jr.,Tapes ’ Tapes, Man Man and The Rapture. Weird crowd, eh? Tonight, they play Urban Outfitters in Durham at 7 p.m., but the real draw may be above—the debut of a Yaris designed by Dinosaur. This is what J. Mascis has become, and that is awesome.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Drink The Cool Aid
New York’s Skeletons and the Kings of all Cities write music that I’m no good at describing (I’ve tried before, I’ll try later, and I will fail). Anyway, their records come out on Ghostly International, a label that almost exclusively releases big-deal electronic music. Skeletons (whose last album, Git, was released under the name Skeletons and the Girl Faced Boys) get love from the sorta music mags like XLR8R (where, in a few months, you’ll be able to read a piece I wrote about ‘em), but they have about as much to do with the dance-party poster people in the endlessly featured Ed Banger crue as they do with milk-in-the-veins pop stars like John Mayer. NOTHING.

Their latest album, Lucas, is an ultra-loose concept record about a boy, his hair and some sort of magical journey. It doesn’t exactly add up, and lead singer Matt Mehlan is first to admit it: basically, he says, it’s all for the press. Music like this, it would seem, needs an angle. But I still haven’t tried—music like what? Lucas is firstly exotic and secondly pop. It’s somewhere between lush and barren. Simple, simple songs deceivingly loaded with sounds, all kinds of ‘em—stand up bass, trunkloads of aux percussion, vibraphones, nylon strings, skronking saxes, afrobeat guitars (like the Benga playing on last year’s Extra Golden album, but wobbly, treated and all wrong in a good way).

Matt, a legit music guy who studied at Oberlin, receives his fair share of Arthur Russell comparisons. And I can see it, strings being such a focus here nd all. And there’s an almost funky, beat-oriented (never quite disco, but you know) quality to every track on the record. Yet each is tempered and kept in check by something beautiful—the supple Sufjan-style brass and string stuff that glides on top of “Don’t Worry,” the vibes and G-thang synth whirr over “Sickness,” the dreamy, 3-buttons-undone tiki torch sonics of “Let it Out.”

I saw Skeletons for the first time a few weeks ago. Big smiles, big hair, big glasses, big songs. When they began playing, it sounded nothing like the record. Live, Skeletons (4 of them) are the hero of Bonaroo, and then a tropicalia version of the Locust, and then Sun Ra and Orthrelm and Phish and Animal Collective and Tzadik and Ipecac all at once.

I love this album. I love this band. They deserve more than I’m capable of. I’m sorry.

Dan Deacon, well-loved by me,  plays at Local 506 tomorrow night, and he’s looking for your enthusiastic men and women to join him onstage as part of the Wham City choir. To join, e-mail dandeaconchoir@gmail.com on the quick.

The 20th Durham Blues Festival is going to be huge: They’ve added a Thursday night concert this year, a show honoring the legends of Piedmont and Carolina blues. Guy Davis and Carolina Chocolate Drops are on the bill. On Friday, Buddy Guy and Percy Sledge will join Li’l Malcolm Walker, Janiva Magness and Raleigh’s own Big Rick & the Bombers. Saturday looks good to me: Booker T. & the MGs (who killed at SXSW), Shamekia Copeland, Watermelon Slim & the Workers, Big Bill Morganfield and Betty Pride & the BP Ride Blues Band.

You still like ice cream, right?

Ten Reasons That Grown-Ups Should Go to the Justin Roberts Show
(11 a.m. on Saturday, May 12 at the Carrboro ArtsCenter)

1. Grown-ups are always complaining that shows start too late. This one starts at 11:00—in the morning.




2. Justin Roberts belongs in the Kids Music Royal Triumvirate with Farmer Jason and Dan Zanes. And the grown-up band in which Roberts cut his teeth (Pimentos for Gus) is way more cult than the Scorchers or Del Fuegos.




3. Roberts’ cohort Liam Davis was the co-leader of the Chicago-based outfit Frisbie, whose The Subversive Sounds of Love is one of the top ten power-pop records of the ‘00s.




4. Roberts’ verbal dexterity is enough to wow even the most grumpy grown-up, and he even offers the occasional wink in our direction. Case in point, the title track of his most recent release, Meltdown!, ends with “I’d stop the world and meltdown with you.”




5. Roberts is the only kids music artist who’s ever shown up on one of my year-end best of CDs, courtesy of his epic tale of thievery and gluttony “One Little Cookie,” which careens out of the speakers like a Rockpile-era Nick Lowe.




6. Roberts’ song “Get Me Some Glasses” was featured in a profile of the Tigers’ bespectacled hurler Nate Robertson during last year’s World Series.




7. Sure, kids music isn’t a competition; it’s about the craft. But, that said, Roberts has a mantle full of Parents Choice Gold Awards.




8. He writes about topics that grown-ups can still relate to some 30 or 40 years after the fact: school pictures, day camps, night lights, brontosauruses with sweet teeth. OK, maybe not so much that last one.




9. In the past year, I’ve heard three grown-ups say, unnecessarily sheepishly (I mean, it’s not like confessing that you have the complete first season of “Full House” on DVD), “Sometimes I listen to my son’s Justin Roberts CDs when he’s not even in the car.” That’s absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Roberts’ music isn’t watered down for kiddie consumption; it’s real music with real horn parts and pop hooks and killer harmonies and Violent Femmes energy and all that good stuff for young and old.




10. You’ve just got to witness the kiddie mosh pit that forms halfway through the second song.

Good love for The Rosebuds in Brooklyn Vegan today, following their packed show at The Bowery Ballroom last night. I’ve seen them three times in the past week, and they’re certainly at a different place live than they were over two months ago. They seem confident and believable again, and that’s more than fine by me. Let’s hope Ivan’s knee holds up.

This annual exploration of the latticework that ties music, dance and the human spirit should be on the radar of any adventurous folk out there. Nowadays, it seems like everybody in the underground wants to be considered an “experimental” artist, but few truly want to try new things, chipping off little bites of some ancient avant garde work and trying to make it their own.

Thankfully, the Soundscapers host folks who choreograph their own dance, meld electronic and acoustic music to some physical action or inhabit some sphere of new work (video plays a role too, natch). The Triangle is home to many dance collectives and working dancers and choreographers, and lucky to have regular performances by some of the world’s best visiting our state. But to see fresh, challenging work a few feet away, in a snug venue like Nightlight in Chapel Hill just doesn’t happen that often.

The activities run through both Friday and Saturday nights, kicking off appropriately with a structured musical improvisation with several local hotshots. Musicians include: Crowmeat Bob, Ethan Clauset, Randy Pelosi, Chuck Johnson, and dancers Michal Osterweil, Wendell Cooper, Alexis Mastromichalis, Charlie St. Clair. The its off into the night, which includes “Human Anatomy,” video by Laura Thomasson, NYC’s Transport, aka Wendell Cooper, who started out as a break-dancer and got into deeper exploration of dance, and Bird Names, a tripped-out Chicago band. DJ One Duran caps it off, and gets things limber for the next night. It’s a movement festival, after all. Get in there.

About an hour ago, I was standing in a crowd of about 30, looking directly at Frog Eyes frontman Carey Mercer, who was kind of drunk and kind of sick and really good. His head is like a small rectangle sitting on top of a long square as tall as his frame. Between songs, Mercer fits that space perfectly, all straight lines and right angles, his no-part, brow-bangs brown hair the framing and underlining emphasis for the rest of his somatic structure. But when he plays those big, spewing rock songs full of tumbling words and emphatic phrases and tremolo-bar guitars, he gets all hurled headlong into this warping vortex that makes him fit inside a crooked box 85% the size of the original. He scrunches and shakes and writhes, everything about him tense and constricted and spewing. When that happens, Mercer’s not just singing songs: He’s exorcising them, I think.

I watched one girl who wasn’t a fan when the show started stare incredulously at this bustle of a square man, an oddity who became a mis-shape when every song started. Her mouth was open, but, then, smiling. By the end of the show, she was clapping as a convert. Mercer’s songs mostly mirror his onstage physique, everything big funneled into a smaller package and blistering perception with welcome overload when it comes crashing out of the frame for second-and-third parties like me and you. It mostly takes me a day to get a sliver of definite meaning out of one of Mercer’s claustrophobic scenes. Like tonight, that’s time well spent.

Maybe “Banned in D.C.” on the next one?

The second in what’s threatening to become a recurring series of Paul Westerberg-related musings….

Jesse Malin’s Glitter in the Gutter, with its guitars set on anthem and its hooks visible from space, has turned out to be the perfect record to usher in the windows-down days of spring. It appears to have the staying power to keep it in heavy rotation all the way through the beachward days of summer, its shout-along choruses cutting through the wind roar generated by 80 on 40. (Tell me that’s not a Sammy Hagar song ready to happen.) Glitter’s “Prisoner of Paradise” is one of the two best straight-ahead, meat-lovers rockers so far this year, alongside Two Cow Garage’s “Camo Jacket.”

Near the end of Glitter in the Gutter is a cover of “Bastards of Young.” I understand its role on the album as both a change of pace and acknowledgment, but, piano driven and hushed, it’s a bit of a momentum killer. (Do not fear it too much, though: as piano songs go, in Westerbergian terms, it’s more “Androgynous” than “Silver Naked Ladies” in execution.”) That said, the pared-down delivery does serve to spotlight one of Westerberg’s greatest moments of corner-bar poetry: “The ones who love us best are the ones we’ll lay to rest/ And visit their graves on holidays at best/ The ones who love us least are the ones we’ll die to please/If it’s any consolation, I don’t begin to understand.” For me, that’s second only to “I used to live at home, now I stay at the house” when it comes to regular-Joe poignancy and heat-seeking accuracy.

As the lights came up after Westerberg finished wowing a Cradle full of acolytes on his couch tour several years back, John Howie was heard to offer, as if just remembering a once cherished belief, “Oh yeah, that’s right. He’s a genius.” Periodic reminders are always appreciated.

How could any self-respecting metal artist draw something this cool for these guys?

Doom and black metal met the peak of their hipsterization last year. It ruffled some longhairs’ feathers, but they’re calming as the posers slowly abandon their kvlt favorites. But something new is awry, something far more upsetting than Williamsburg 20-somethings discovering Candlemass and Darkthrone via Southern Lord. Grind and death metal have been adopted by the lowest of the low: Internet scene kids with no regard for history or the ugly metalheads that come with it. This 14-to-19-year-old niche (you know, the hair) is praising faux death metal with the same enthusiasm with which they praised A Static Lullaby last year. Case in point: Job For A Cowboy.

I work at a record store where I’m considered the “metal guy.” That title may not sit right with the true leather-jacketed brutes, especially when you consider that I’m a Belle & Sebastian completist, but so what? I like Death, Kreator and Carcass as much as the next person. Who cares about particular subgenres, really? Good metal is good metal. So when someone comes into the store and asks about metal bands I haven’t heard, I get interested. That is, unless that person is buying Norma Jean or some other flavor-of-the-year crap, as was the case with some band called Job For A Cowboy. Almost every week for the past six months, a customer has come in asking to order the Job For a Cowboy CD, but considering the other purchases, I brushed it off with an air of metal superiority. This Monday, as I was filling the racks with the next day’s new releases, I finally spotted my first Job For A Cowboy CD. It looked a lot like a Cattle Decapitation album. It sounded a lot like Cattle Decapitation, too. Job For A Cowboy is MySpace metal. These young men will desecrate a perfectly fine genre for the next few months (or however long it takes until they change their style to keep up with the Internet) with mediocrity and a scene-hopping smirk. Check them out before they went metal…and after.

But here is the real question: How the fuck does this band have 150,000 friends on MySpace? I mean, are there really 150,000 people that like this stuff? Are 150,000 people going to buy this album? Is Job For A Cowboy breaking some metal ground that’s just invisible to me? The answer to the last question is, painfully, “Well, sort of.” All 150,000 of Job For A Cowboy’s MySpace friends aren’t metal fans. The majority are other faux metal bands, their good-for-nothing labels and fictional 18-year-old girls trying to sell access to porn sites. Still, that leaves more than a few thousand people that are truly into this Job For A Cowboy stuff. I guess I shouldn’t be too worried about these people pissing all over grind and death metal, though. As I said before, they’ll be out of it sooner than later. Still, it stings a little.

Silly critics!

Upon browsing a recent MySpace bulletin from Chaz “Bull City Records” Martenstein, I discovered what very well might become my new favorite band: Violet Vector and the Lovely Lovelies. Why, oh why had I not heard of this band before now? They play pop (my favorite genre), they live in Chapel Hill (20 minutes away) and they all look like extras from some classic Jean-Luc Godard film (awesome). David Menconi made a blog post about them in February, but I somehow skipped right over that paragraph and bright pink photo to peruse the pretensions of Pitchforkers Grayson Currin and Brian Howe. Hell, there was even a decent-sized Indy article that same month highlighting their superior fashion sense. Surely I would see that? Nope. Nevertheless, I have finally found them.

VVLL (cute, huh?) play addictive knee-high psych pop, and the three tracks on their MySpace page warrant the quintet a spot alongside current indie pop heavies like Camera Obscura, Saturday Looks Good to Me and The Postmarks. “Serva Ad Manum” and “Can You Dig It” are heavenly bubblegum mod rockers infused with enough sweet organ backbone, mid-paced Fender riffage and handclapping delight to make saddest of Sallies slip a smile. The cover of Bonny St. Claire’s lost classic, “Tame Me Tiger,” is spectacular, too. It swings like the original, but boasts way more wicked glockenspiel action than Ms. St. Claire could ever possibly handle.
The group physically displays its penchant for paisley, but I don’t doubt the presence of a few C86 anoraks in the closet. (Check out the Talulah Gosh collection on K Records for more info there.)

Anyway, Violet Vector and the Lovely Lovelies are my favorite new beauty shop quintet. If drummer Matt McCallus has a problem with me calling them that, he can take it up with me at their May 9 Nightlight show. I’ll probably be in the front.