The Independent Weekly’s words+ on music
Tonight at Slim’s, one of the best, The Kingsbury Manx, joins Inspector 22 for a benefit show for a friend with cystic fibrosis. I received this note Wednesday afternoon, after our print preview hit the racks.
Grayson,
Thanks for getting this weekend’s The Kingsbury Manx benefit show into this week’s Indy. It is very much appreciated. Our friend is getting the lung transplant as I type this.
Eugene Wheeler
See you there, I hope.
Big news from California and for Carolina today: Local orchestral indie band has signed to Lost in the Trees for a re-recorded take on last year’s All Alone in an Empty House. We’ll bring you an interview with the band about the deal tomorrow, and look for the full story in Wednesday’s print edition of the Independent Weekly.
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Good news for Schooner a few hours ahead of their release party behind the Duck Kee Sessions: Despite only mailing the minimum of 150 promo copies of the EP to radio stations nationwide, the disc has broken the CMJ Top 200. Landing at No. 99, just behind Merge’s Shout Out Louds and 10 spots ahead of the new Xiu Xiu record, this is the EP’s first week on the charts. The big show starts tonight at The Pinhook at 10 p.m. For more, see our review of Duck Kee Sessions this week.
"Fraggle rock your four-figure watch/ I clock ninety-nine cent wristbands/ And still know the time when your record flops"
Way back in August 2008, just when Raleigh’s The Rosebuds were about to released their fourth album, Life Like, Chicago mash-up duo The Hood Internet pitted “Get Up, Get Out,” the hit from The Rosebuds’ prior album, against “None Shall Pass,” the title track from the fifth album by mechanical-mouthed rap slayer Aesop Rock. (That album also featured Durham dude John Darnielle, of The Mountain Goats.)
The Internet seems to have mostly missed that mash-up, though, and paid more attention to the subsequent Hood Internet take on The Rosebuds, which put the duo up against, uhh, T-Pain. But “None Shall Get Up Get Out” is, in the end, the winning take of the two, washing Aesop’s strings of syllables—”To my people who keep an impressive wingspan/ Even when the cubicle shrink/ You gotta pull up the intruder by the root of the weed”–against Kelly Crisp’s waves of synthesizers. And when Aesop crawls into his diorama of a chorus, Ivan Howard is right there with him, singing his song’s title just as the rapper repeats his.
On Monday, the blog Earmilk posted the old mix with about a dozen others, and, surprisingly, “None Shall Get Up Get Out” has taken a new life: This morning, the song climbed to No. 4 on the Hype Machine’s weekly charts, alongside a bunch of remixes and well ahead of “Odessa,” the new tune from Merge labelmates Caribou. It’s odd but appropriate, given that, you know, it’s a pretty good look for both songs.
As for new material from either The Rosebuds or Aesop Rock, that’s all up in the air: The Rosebuds are, indeed, working on new songs, and we’ve heard talk of a release later this year. Kelly Crisp mentioned it via Twitter earlier this week: “My horoscope= Feb 27 biggest day in 10 years for career. Ivan’s= Feb 27 “crowning jewel” for his career. Make a record right now?!?!?” Meanwhile, Aesop Rock seems to be an ace without a label. Def Jux closed its shop doors earlier this month, and he’s yet to announce future plans. Again, to your source for news, Twitter: “HUGE thanks to everyone inquiring about future Aesop Rock releases. The ifs, whens, whats, and wheres, are difficult to answer at this time.”
Show me a better band photo this year, and I won't kill your parents.
This afternoon, big-time Indiana indie label Jagjaguwar finally dropped the official word on Gayngs, the psychedelic soul collaboration between all of Megafaun, Ivan Howard of The Rosebuds, Justin Vernon and Mike Noyce of Bon Iver and a slew of Minnesota and Wisconsin musicians culled from bands like P.O.S., Solid Gold and Andrew Bird’s touring unit. And that was a long sentence. We mentioned the project last summer, and Megafaun and Howard even unveiled the album’s sublime, surreal closer, “The Last Prom on Earth,” at last year’s TRKFest. But the band’s debut LP, Relayted, now has a release date of May 11 and a cover of, uhh, an intertwined pot leaf and vagina.
Helmed by Twin Cities beat man Ryan Olson, Relayted’s 11 tracks—all set at 69 beats per minute—cum flooded with stacked keyboards, thick bass and at least one shocking sax solo. There’s soul-singing, spectral harmonies and a Bone Thugs rap from Vernon. Meanwhile, the interludes that link the tracks lift all of it to a sort of rarefied Miles Davis Get Up With It space. It’s a project without a lot of precedents, especially given the music on which most of those involved have built their reputations. And as silly and preposterous as it might sound, it somehow works, thanks in large part to the excellent playing and surprising singing and its consistent, slowly unfurling aesthetic.
At any rate, it should be interesting to see the public’s response to Gayngs: Can what began mostly as a joke become one of the weird successes of music this year? Maybe.
After playing a few games of basketball in Raleigh last night, I climbed in the car, turned on the radio and headed to a meeting across town. Sirius XMU, billed as being “like hearing college radio but never having to go to class,” was spinning Hot Chip’s “One Life Stand,” a college station standard of late. But when the DJ followed with “Lazy Lessons,” a track from the not-yet-released The Limbs EP by Chapel Hill’s Organos, I wondered if I’d actually switched the dial to WKNC 88.1 FM. After all, bandleader Maria Albani did all the press and radio mailing for her solo project’s new EP, and unlike Hot Chip or the next band, The National, an act like Organos and a label like Pox World Empire don’t have sizable PR budgets to pursue national DJs.
But it was indeed Sirius XMU, and, indeed, the non-traditional charms of the songwriting on The Limbs EP, described here, seem to be sticking. Pox officially releases the EP Tuesday, Feb. 23, though you can pick it up at the band’s CD release party tomorrow night at The Pinhook. To hear the song, and read the story behind the set, see this week’s newspaper.
Yim? Jim? My Morning Jacket.
The grizzled bros of My Morning Jacket will play Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary April 30 with The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, after a tour-anchoring stop in New Orleans for Jazzfest. MMJ frontman Jim James (Yim Yames?) recently recorded two tracks for PHJB’s new album, PRESERVATION: An Album To Benefit Preservation Hall & The Preservation Hall Music Outreach Program. The nine-show run starts in Alabama and ends two weeks later in Ohio.
It seems 2009 was largely a regrouping one for Raleigh six-piece Annuals: Such Fun, the band’s second album and first for major-label imprint Canvasback Music, was released in 2008 to mixed reviews and comparatively low sales. According to Nielsen Soundscan, Such Fun sold only 7,341 copies, compared to their debut’s 17,999. And Canvasback was cooling on Annuals’ former blog-buzz property, even as the band was working on new material back in Raleigh.
“We found out that our deal with Canvasback was getting messed up over the summer,” says Annuals bassist Mike Robinson. “So, we decided, ‘Let’s do an EP and have it out in November.’”
And they mostly hit their mark: The upcoming five-track EP, Sweet Sister, due now on March 23, has been mostly finished since October. That same month, though, Canvasback announced that it would be inking a deal with Atlantic Records at the end of its three-year contract with Columbia. So the EP, like the band, didn’t have a home. Ace Fu, who issued Annuals’ 2006 debut, Be He Me, to much acclaim and strong indie sales, contemplated releasing the EP, though the label hadn’t released anything new since 2007. That didn’t happen, and Robinson didn’t want to issue Sweet Sister on his own Terpsikhore imprint because he didn’t think the label—essentially staffed by himself—had the proper resources to devote to it when Annuals were touring.
So Banter Media, a new label run by Matt Halverson, formerly an Ace Fu intern, offered help. Annuals are the fifth band on the startup’s roster.
Robinson says, “It’ll be really different, for sure, but it seems everything we do is on a different record label, so why not? It’s exciting to have a fresh start on a modest-sized label that can still do good work.”
Robinson feels good about the work the band did on this EP, too, something that wasn’t always the case with the second album, the sarcastically titled Such Fun. It often took frontman Adam Baker out of his comfort zone—which is to say, late nights with pedals and gear, and long hours of fussing over mixes and adding quirks and textures to songs. The band recorded much of Such Fun in Asheville’s grand Echo Mountain studio, with high-dollar producer Jacquire King.
“Adam never seemed satisfied about it because he never got to put on his finishing touches, the weird stuff that a lot of people like,” says Robinson. “This is Adam, though. He’s back into being in full control of things. He reassumed his role on how everything goes, and I think these songs are much more of a return to the weirdness and quirkiness on the first album.”
Sweet Sister was recorded at Terpsikhore’s studios in Raleigh and at Flying Tiger Sound with B.J. Burton. Ian Schreier, who also worked on Such Fun, mixed the music at Osceola Recording Studios. The EP ends with “Flesh and Blood,” a Johnny Cash cover that Annuals originally cut for Hear Here: The Triangle, the great Terpsikhore compilation of local tunes released last year. It was first scrapped from the collection because the band hadn’t gained the proper permissions.
Meanwhile, whispers have been floating through Raleigh that Anna Spence, the band’s keyboardist, was leaving the band. After all, she sat out a tour late last year, originally booked to promote the ultimately delayed Sweet Sister. Robinson says there’s nothing to those rumors aside from a tour that simply conflicted with Spence’s college schedule.
“Anna’s still in the band. She had to finish up college, and she’s now done,” Robinson says. “We’re hoping to get back on the horse this year pretty quickly.”
N.C. State’s student-run radio station, WKNC 88.1 FM, announced the lineup for its seventh annual Double Barrel Benefit this morning: The vintage pop of Max Indian will headline the first night of the two-show weekend on Friday, Feb. 5, with The Light Pines, Veelee and Bellafea in the opening slots. Ex-Chapel Hill, current-Nashville album rock enthusiasts Roman Candle headline Saturday, Feb. 6, with The Tender Fruit, Midtown Dickens and Spider Bags opening.
This year’s Double Barrel represents a logical and somewhat necessary shift for the station, away from some of the bigger names that have headlined or opened in recent years—Birds of Avalon, Bowerbirds, Polvo, The Old Ceremony, Annuals, The Mountain Goats, Megafaun—and toward the Triangle’s rich crop of young but hitherto less nationally prominent acts. After all, Double Barrel has only presented six bands more than once in its seven-year run, so the pool is somewhat constricted.
But, Roman Candle excepted, what this lineup might lack in history it makes up for with plans and promise: Led by the yearning Southern warble of Christy Smith, The Tender Fruit, for instance, is currently cutting an LP with Megafaun’s Phil Cook. Veelee’s only get one self-released, three-song EP to its name, but the duo’s intricate, winding miniatures offer plenty of intrigue, and they’re set to record more this year. Same for The Light Pines, the doppelganger of The Love Language: Led by Josh Pope and backed by his fellow Love Language members, The Pines debuted with an ecstatic, engaging show in Portland, Ore., late last year for Musicfest Northwest. This will be their full-on local premiere. And they sometimes share members with Max Indian, who, like The Light Pines, are part of a Chapel Hill band network called Drughorse. And, as I said here, look for big things from that gangly collective in 2010.
So, yeah, no “stars” this year, but plenty of reasons to listen—and for cheap, too: Tickets are $7-$9 for each night, and the music starts at 9 p.m.
So this makes Anna Kendrick who?
Raekwon the Chef was due at Lincoln Theatre Thursday, Jan. 14, while American Idol ex Elliott Yamin was expected at Cat’s Cradle on the same date. They’ve both canceled their appearances. No reason has been given for the missed gigs, but if you’ve seen Up in the Air, perhaps Raekwon is Vera Farmiga to Yamin’s George Clooney? Scandalous.
