Alright, so a couple weeks ago, we sat down with members of the fillmores and The Debut to talk about Punk Rock Prom V: Pretty Shitfaced in Pink, tonight at the Nomad World Pub. It was after rehearsals were done and Pancho Villa had 2-for-1 margaritas going and so as the people around our table grew and the drinks kept coming and my voice recorder taped we had a pretty epic conversation about the Punk Rock Proms, where they come from and why they are fun- essentially, the booze you had to smuggle in to your own prom is all out in the open now and there’s still making out and costumes. I really wish I had taken some better notes because now at the 11th hour I am having a technical (for the most part) breakdown and can’t get to that file and I have failed in my sponsorship duties and feel as downtrodden as a pimply 9th grader.
You know what will cure that? A whole bunch of great music for $6. Seriously, down at the Nomad tonight for Pretty Shitfaced in Pink with Amen & the Hell Yeahs, Reckless Ones, Teenage Moods, Kitten Forever, the Goondas with The Debut and house band the fillmores on the floor playing prom standards and punk classics in between each set- they promised to switch it up for this year too. If you really need an interview, Switchblade Comb has you covered (thanks for picking up the slack!) But seriously- the chance for getting hammered and making your ex-girlfriend jealous about John Hughes zombies and off-key Marvin Gaye? Fucking priceless.
Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman Joseph D’Agostino sometimes goes by Joe Ferocious, a name that pretty well describes D’Agostino’s incendiary, fuzzy guitar talent as well as Cymbal Eat Guitar’s touring schedules. Cymbals Eat Guitars have been tour beast over the last year, ever since their strong debut Why They Are Mountains and an opening spot at the 2009 Pitchfork Festival in Chicago. They already came through the Twin Cities less than a month ago on a tour with Bear in Heaven and Freelance Whales and are slated to make their first Mainroom appearance tonight with Welsh boy-girl rockers Los Campesinos!. As D’Agostino and company set off on their most recent round of road dates, Cake In 15 spoke with the actually quite funny and mild-mannered Ferocious to get the skinny on who he has really admired out on tour, what’s in the works for new recordings and the prospect of meeting his hero, Stephen Malkmus of Pavement.
Cake In 15: So, how is the tour van smelling?
Joseph D’Agostino: We’re only on the second day, so it kind of smells like weed, but that’s it. It’s mostly clean, fresh scent but by the end of the two weeks it’ll be pretty rank, I’m sure.
C15: You’re coming back to Minneapolis after being in St. Paul less than a month ago. How long have you been on the road now?
JD: I started thinking about it. We went on a European tour for all of February and when we got back from that it was six days until we started on our tour with Bear in Heaven and Freelance Whales and then directly after that tour was finished a few weeks ago we were supposed to go right out with Los Campesinos but the elements held up the tour and we got a bunch of dates cancelled but I guess since February, and before that we did more European tours. It’s been pretty constant since last July.
C15: What have you been doing to keep yourself from going crazy our on the road?
JD: Well, I listen to a lot of music, I usually always have my headphones on. [Keybaordist] Brian [Hamilton] works on schematics for pedals and circuit board stuff that I can’t barely understand. He explained it to me but I’m kind of dense when it comes to that and I try and read when it’s possible and no-one’s talking. We used to have internet in the van and that was a pretty steady stream of entertainment but now we don’t, so we have our laptops but we don’t have internet so its kind of impotent.
C15: Who has been your favorite set of tourmates since you’ve been out on the road?
JD: I’m not just being diplomatic when I say I really enjoy every band that we’ve been on tour with. Bear in Heaven was just a real force. Maybe just because they are fresher in my mind, but I don’t think that’s the reason, I mean, Joe [Stickney], their drummer, is just the best drummer I think I’ve ever seen in real life, I mean, actually getting to watch someone. He’s much better than our drummer. [Laughs] They were just consistently pummeling and totally powerful and great every night. It was just great to watch them and get psyched up to play and it was also character building, because they’re so good.
C15: With being on the road so much, are you working on follow up material to Why There Are Mountains?
JD: Yeah, we have five songs right now, four that we’ve been playing live since February and one more that’s kind of in the cooker. Next time we get to rehearse, we’re gonna flesh it out and begin hammering it out. We try and eke out work where we can but on a tour like this when we’re opening we don’t really have really long luxurious sound checks so we don’t really get to play much new material. But I’m always thinking about it and that’s where most of the composing goes on, just thinking and thinking on it and really ruminating on it. That’s what I did with the first record for two and a half, three years. I hope we’ll have four more songs out by next spring and then make a record.
C15: Are you finding that the new material relates to the Why There Are Mountains material or are they separate thoughts?
JD: They are definitely completely independent of each other. The songs from Why There Are Mountains were written over so many years that it’s difficult to compare them because I have written so much material over such a relatively short span, by my own standards, it usually takes three or four months to write a song. I just feel that everything is more focused and I know that when we get in there we won’t be overdubbing for months like the first record. We sound good as four people, maybe an overdub here and there, but it’ll sound more like our live thing, I suppose. The songs are way better, at least I feel that way, they flow a lot better an move more naturally and the lyrics are more dense. I’m really happy with the way things are shaping up so far.
C15: You guys are sharing some festival bills with Pavement this year. Have you figured out what you’re going to say to Stephen Malkmus when you meet him?
JD: That’s a good question. Really, I have been thinking about but every time I think about it, I think, “How can I summarize my life-long, well, half a life-time love of all these songs that have meant so much to me and brought me to the heights of what music can provide?” How can you summarize that? “I love your music it’s so important to me”? I’d have to have a longer conversation with him but I don’t know if I’d be able to keep it together. So I just plan on watching. At Sasquatch, I’m just going to be in the audience enjoying myself. I don’t know.
C15: Then hopefully you can get passed the slack-jawed moments to get it together to figure out a meeting.
JD: I saw him at a festival we played in the Hague, the Crossing Borders Festival and I saw him walking around and he had this furry parka with the hood up and he just kind of looked unapproachable but I’ve heard from many people that he’s really nice. I’ve been reading all the reunion interview and everything, I especially liked the Chuck Klosterman one for GQ, it was really excellent and very funny.
C15: Cool. Safe travels, and we’ll see you in Minneapolis.
JD: We’re really excited to play First Avenue. [Bass player Matt] Whipple pointed out to me that the Wilco documentary [I Am Trying To Break Your Heart], that’s where they’re playing a lot of the live stuff from the Summerteeth tour footage, so yeah.
In the nine years since Joe Denardo and Kevin Doria decamped from Olympia, Washington to Brooklyn, the band known as Growing hasn’t really stopped doing just that. What started as blasting guitar-minimalist noise with the 2003 release The Sky’s Run into the Sea on Kranky morphed into more giant drone with 2006’s Color Wheel and then veered into sample-heavy and accidentally rhythmic constructions through 2008’s All The Way, out on Social Registry. These guys, it seems, can’t settle on a fixed sound, making all their records transitional and curious. They changed it all up again with PUMPS!, out now on Vice Records, with the duo adding DJ/vocalist Sadie Laska into the mix and flipping the drone in favor of full blown beats and sequencers. CakeIn15 caught up with Denardo on the road before their Saturday gig in the 7th Street Entry to talk about not being satisfied with the sound, paying the bills and the world of fine art.
CakeIn15: PUMPS! is a new direction for your sound, with the beats based sound moving away the layers of drone and noise on your previous records. How did that shift come about?
Joe Denardo: Well, I feel like every one of our records move along in some new line, we try to work in some new jams and work in a new direction, so in a way if you listen to all our records they move forward in certain directions and you get a feel fro where the next one might go to. Part of it, a lot was, Sadie’s introduction to the band, it’s the first record she’s on, so a lot of the direction the songs take have to do with her involvement, her sound, where she wants to take things and what she’s doing and our reaction to that, especially in the studio, making new jams.
C15: How did Sadie join the band?
JD: It was nothing we ever sat down and thought about, we never had a discussion and said, let’s get a third member, or we need someone else to bounce things off of. She was a friend of ours for years and we played some shows with the band she was in called I.U.D. and we kind of just felt like she was on the same kind of wavelength as us. Watching her play live, she was interested in the same kind of processing techniques that we are and we played a few shows where I.U.D. played and we would start playing at the end of their set and jam off of what they were doing and then they would go off stage and we would finish our set, so we had a little bit of an introduction to playing with her and one day we just kind of asked her to start playing with us just for fun at our practice space. It went really well considering we had never played together before. We had a tour coming up and we asked her is she wanted to come one the tour with us and we’ll work out what happens and if you like it at the end of the tour you can stay in the band. She was stoked and it went from there.
C15: You mentioned your shared interest in processing techniques, could you talk about what kind of gear you guys are using to get your sound?
JD: Kevin uses just like a Korg Electribe drum machine and he processes with different delay, him and Sadie both have the old Boss Dr. Rhythm samplers, I think Sadie has a newer Roland sampler. A lot of our stuff is samples, vocals with others processed through pitch shifters and tremolos and then she also processes her vocals through a pitch shifter and some delays too. And I work mostly with guitar through another Korg Electribe, like a synthesizer model and a bunch of delays and phasers and that kind of stuff. We use a lot of consumer grade, easy to get stuff, we don’t really have any boutique, specialty effects.
C15: With each album shifting sounds, what do you point to from Growing that you are excited about? How do you describe Growing to somebody?
JD: Maybe just like what the jams are that night, you know? We stick to a fairly strict set each tour, we kind of plan it out and there’s not a lot of variance to it. Every record is one that when we finish it we are very excited about it as it happens and the recording process transforms the songs and playing live will transform the songs again and then making new songs and having them be part of the set can change things. It’s one of those things where we are never finished completely by at the point where were playing them is when we’re most excited about them.
C15: But when you are in the studio you have to try and fix the song in time?
JD: We try and track them the way we think they should feel or sit or be structured but when we start mixing it’s no holds barred, we don’t want to be real strict about how it’s going to end up, we try to be as free as possible and let it go in as many directions as it can go and make it something new.
C15: Are you getting people dancing at the shows now? With some of your previous material I can really only imagine guys standing around nodding their heads.
JD: Yeah, we have a good mix of dancing and concentrating [laughs]. We definitely had some dancers last night, we’ll see, it’s kind of a mix, a mixed group. Some of the newer stuff, the stuff that’s not on PUMPS!, there are a couple songs in there that have a booty-bass sound so we’ll see. I don’t really care what people do, as long as they enjoy it, it doesn’t matter what they want to do.
C15: You have bounced around from a couple record labels, how did you wind up on Vice?
JD: A good friend of Kevin’s is one of the editors of the magazine and they’ve always been pretty, not that he has anything to do with this, but their reviews have been pretty positive of our records. They were one of the labels we asked initially. We financed the record on ourselves, recorded with a friend, so when it was pretty much finished we started talking to everybody and they were one of the more active responses based on the people we talked to and our relationship with the magazine.
C15: You guys just played a show at the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art. Do you do that often and what’s the difference between playing a museum and a club gig?
JD: We’ve done a few, we played in LA in a museum. They’re more apt to set things up the way we want them to, we’ve played a few gallery shows too, it’s a little more free because they see what we do as art instead of just popular music, they are more liable to, they don’t have a PA setup in a certain corner that has to be dealt with the exact same way every night, they’re willing to let us do whatever we want to do, which is nice and free. There’s not one in every town on every tour we go on, so it can be rare, because we want to exist in a pop music setting as well, because that’s more accessible to more people.
C15: Pop music plays the bills but sometimes it’s nice to feel like an artist.
JD: Well, I don’t know if anything pays the bills, at least thus far nothing has really. [Laughs] But it is kind of true, we personally are populist in the way that we go about our lives and we want everyone to feel like this is accessible and easy to be around and exciting so we don’t want to feel above anything and sometimes the fine art community can feel detached.
Less than 24 hours before we get on a plane and get ourselves down to Austin; believe me, we’ve been counting down the hours. But, ’til then, here are the rest of the Spinner.com interviews. You can tell they were getting to the end of assignments with the run of WXY here (I almost got to interview Xzibit, wherein I would have asked him solely about Extreme Home Makeover, but Spinner has a special hip hop site that took care of that) but it was still a good run. These interviews make 17 in total over the last 3 weeks or so which ain’t too shabby- editors, take note.
Woolfy
“But yeah, one of these days, I’m going to write a song, she’s going to love it and leave Spike Jonze, and it’s going to be Woolfy and fucking Karen [O].”
Woodgrain
“Memphis was one of the most insane nights we experienced on that trip. We saw a lot of people get thrown out like battering rams, two car wrecks, it was just amazing. It was super wild.”
XYX
“Suddenly, in Monterrey there were a lot of interesting bands, this was, like, four years ago, five, that suddenly a lot of good bands were emerging from nowhere here in Monterrey but they didn’t have recordings or money to go into a studio, so we got cheap recording equipment and started recording those bands we thought were interesting.”
Yakuza
“Just go down and have a good show and have a good time, meet people, mingle, go out, do stuff. Don’t just hide in your fucking van or hotel room, if you’re fancy enough to have one of those.”
YACHT
“I think that they can expect their personal space to be invaded, direct communication. It is not a one-way show, the audience is very much a part of the show and we expect a lot of them.”
Yelawolf
“It’s not a fallback career at all, it’s all I have. I dropped out of school in 9th or 10th grade, man, the only other jobs I had were throwing bricks, throwing fish, ditch digging, all that shit. Just blue collar. I don’t want to make just ten dollars an hour for the rest of my life.”
Yes Giantess
“We’ve done a lot of official remixes for labels and bands but I would say that our favorite was one night, we were goofing around and we did a remix of ‘Party in the USA’ by Miley Cyrus.”
As I posted up before here and here, I have been doing a number of interviews for South By Southwest sponsor Spinner.com (they are the people bringing you the Smokey Robinson Soul Revue) which have been taking up a lot of planning time over the last weeks. The bands have run the gamut, they are are trying to get every official showcasing band interviewed, so this has been a drop in the bucket, but I have Skyped Ireland for the Minutes, caught up with a 60-year-old alien named Ygarr Ygarrist to talk about his band Zolar X and called across town to chat with Ben Weaver, along with a whole bunch of others. Here is the latest batch, as I scramble on deadline to get that last ones in before heading down to Austin next week. Browse through, for all the variety, some truths remain; we do this because we love it, no one hands it to us and the more fun you can have, the better it sounds.
Christopher & the Souls
“We gave it all we had in terms of pure volume and primitive teenage energy, and I think it has held up pretty well.”
Year Long Disaster
“All the time you spend trying to get drugs you can spend in a much more positive way. Those are lost hours. It’s amazing how much you can get done in a day.”
Amplified Heat
“I have always loved vinyl. On the last tour, some of the cities we went to people didn’t want CDs, they were going to wait til we had it on vinyl.”
Zolar X
“Then I read a book, a rock and roll book from years ago and somewhere in it, it said, “Don’t ever look like your audience.” That and we loved Star Trek.”
Ben Weaver
“I just like to write songs about animals and grocery carts and things. I don’t really know, because I don’t try to describe my music. That’s why I make music.”
The Minutes
“If you’re playing lots of shows, don’t get fucked on the first night. That’s the end. It’s downhill from there. That’s probably the only plan if you’re in a band. If you’re not in a band, go everywhere, drink everything, meet everybody.”
Little Brazil
“Extra cell phone batteries. That was the biggest problem for me in the past couple years. Cell phone batteries and secret stashes of cash that you can keep on your body that maybe the drunk version of you won’t find”
Zlam Dunk
“The U2 comparison came because I use a lot of delay in my guitar riffs. Lostprophets, I don’t know, I don’t know if that person was trying to piss us off or what, but I don’t know where that came from.”
Last year, The Avett Brothers gave CakeIn15 one of their favorite shows of the summer- at the MN Zoo Amphitheater, outdoors, packed in close with a slight drizzle breaking into golden dusk and the perfect cool night, transcendentally American and energetic. Thoreau would be proud. You get the feeling, too, that Thoreau would take a shine to the Avett’s current tourmates, Providence, RI’s The Low Anthem. Starting with their 2007 debut What The Crow Brings and followed up with Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, which was self-released in 2008 and then picked up by Nonesuch Records in 2009, multi-instrumentalists Ben Knox Miller, Jeff Prystowsky and Jocie Adams have worked together to create an intense, shambolic vision deeply rooted in American traditions and nature. Oh My God, Charlie Darwin was recorded on a near-deserted island off the coast of Rhode Island and in late 2009, the band retreated to an empty pasta sauce factory to record, again reveling in the silence and isolation to draw out the melodies. But before any of that hits wax, there is touring to be done, America to see and songs to be sung. The Low Anthem open for The Avett Brothers in the First Avenue Mainroom this Friday, and CakeIn15 shot some e-mails back and forth with Miller to get his take on the importance of naming, solitude and who he likes for the baseball season.
You and Jeff met hosting a graveyard jazz radio show- What were some of the records you bonded over?
Jeff made most of the picks, because I don’t know much about jazz. He’s obsessed with jazz bass, so there was a lot of that on the show. Mingus, Christian McBride, and the best of them all Ray Brown.
You and Jeff went through several different bandmates before Jocie joined- how did she come in to the picture and how did you know it would work?
Yea, when we got serious about the band, we started as a trio with a blues song writer named Dan Lefkowitz from Virginia. He split after a year leaving us as only a duo. That’s when we started learning lot’s of different instruments so we wouldn’t be a bass and guitar songwriter duo. We wanted to have beautiful and deliberate textures for all the songs. Jocie first came along because we asked her to play clarinet on a track of our first record. But she started showing up to shows with her clarinet and we’d invite her to sit in. Before we knew it, she was picking up all sorts of instruments that were on the stage and playing fluently. She’s so very talented.
Unlike many band names “The Low Anthem” feels like a deliberate statement. How did you choose that name?
Not deliberate at all. In fact it was given to us by a childhood friend of mine who played ever so briefly with us in the early days of the band. It wasn’t until years later that we learned the name came from an Ayn Rand book called Anthem. It’s an awful book. Really boring. But what’s in a name anyhow?
From the SXSW Spinner Files, here is an interview with hard-rocking Texan rockabilly broad Rosie Flores. About to turn 60 this year, Flores started making music as a teenager and came up in the 80s with the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett and Lucinda Williams. When I caught up with Flores early one morning, she had just came back from touring New Zealand in support of her most recent record, Girl of the Century. Our conversation lasted well over a half hour, much longer than the interview edited for Spinner, in which she talked about how the Beatles changed everything and how if only Taylor Swift wasn’t under pressure to sell millions of records, she might make something that isn’t just sugar. So she’s sweet, opinionated and plays a wicked guitar which makes her totally Texan and totally rock and roll. Check it all out here.
Leah Redding and Meredith Cain-Nielsen, photo by Ty Sassaman
Some nights just line up really nicely to stay pretty much in a two-block radius and tonight has that on the West Bank. El Perro Del Mar at the Cedar Cultural Center is a great place to be, chased down with Alec Ounsworth at the 400 Bar to slake your musical thirst. But before any of that goes down, get over to the Bedlam Theatre at 6:30 to catch Tonya and Nancy: The Opera. You read it right, and if you think that the ice dancing costumes on NBC are are good as it ridiculously gets, then you ain’t seen nothing yet. This 2006 chamber opera has been getting some under-the-radar traction in art galleries and now Scotty Reynolds of of the Mixed Precipitation company is giving it a twirl, or a triple salchow or a lead pipe special, or what have you. Any which way, it promises to be a well sung spectacle full of intrigue and drama and is a great way to follow up on Mixed Precitpitation’s summer project, Orpheus & Euridyce: A Picnic Operetta. You can read a great interview about that project via the Heavy Table blog here, and unlike Orpheus‘s multi-show run, Tonya and Nancy is only being performed tonight at Bedlam and Thursday at Camp Bar in St. Paul, so skate hard. and get down get a front-row seat of the action.
Also going on tonight, at the 501 Club not too far down from the road from the West Bank is the l’etoile-sponsored celebration New Kidney On The Block, the re-emergence party for Chris Strouth and his new kidney, “William the Conqueror”, selflessly donated by theatre-staple and good-guy-par-excellence Scott Pakudaitis. It’s a feel-good story for the ages, at least for our age, with the two men connecting over Twitter when Strouth posted that he needed a new kidney and it is good to see humanity winning out over mass distraction and apathy. We’re just waiting for the movie with Billy Bob Thornton as Strouth and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Pakudaitis. With a raft of great DJs at the event, a good time for a good reason should be had by all.
Alec Ounsworth, high pitched wailer of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah whose blog-anointed, self-titled 2005 release launched a thousand Brooklyn bands, has struck out for himself. 2009 had him put out two far different-sounding records; the addled, Velvet Underground-dark Skin And Bones put out under the name “Flashy Python” and the rich, deeply funky and soulful Mo Beauty, recorded in New Orleans and put out on the Anti- label. But the records seem far afield only on the surface- both were the results of intense collaborative processes pulling from different pools of musicians. Matt Barrick of The Walkmen drummed on Skin And Bones with members of Dr. Dog and Man Man as well as Ounsworth’s wife rounding out the cast of friends that Ounsworth patched together for the record. Mo Beauty came about differently, helmed by Los Lobos‘ Steve Berlin and backed in the studio by heavy hitters like George Porter Jr. of The Meters and Stanton Moore of Galactic. In the end though, Ounsworth’s own voice is a both a changing force and a constant. The songs are his own (and one, “Obscene Queen Bee #2″, makes vastly different appearances on both discs) and his singing, which might have been pigeonholed from his CYHSY days, finds the adaptability of a man looking for new things in life that excite him. Ounsworth appears at the 400 Bar tonight with Ezra Furman and the Harpoons, a fine folky-rock outfit that whould bring an upbeat energy to open the show. You can read the edited version of the interview we conducted over at the AV Club, or the full transcript, for your edification, is below, in which Ounsworth reveals more about recording in ten days, not sounding like himself and who he really wants to collaborate with.
The first question, the question that leads to why New Orleans and why these songs has to be why Steve Berlin?
It was just a mater of chance really. I ran into Steve when I was in New Orleans and he suggested that we do a record and so it was as simple as that. I say yes to any producer that comes my way and asks to make a record.
You don’t have any criteria for it?
No no, it’s just that if they want to do it I’m up for it you know, let’s go [laughs]. Obviously I knew Steve was in Los Lobos and I had an idea of his credits as a producer and from everyone who I spoke to he seemed like a pretty trustworthy fellow.
Memo from 1996, AOL still exists. It’s true, and whatever else the once-mighty internet monolith may be doing (trying to figure out how to get me to pay for internet hours again?) one of the cool things they do is run a music website called Spinner. It’s a pretty sweet way to stay abreast of what’s happening in the more mainstream music world, with exclusive videos, downloads and behind-the scenes looks at bands, as well as full album streaming. Spinner is also one of the sponsors of the South By Southwest Music Festival, and have embarked on an ambitious project to interview all of the bands that are officially headed to SXSW. As such, they’ve hired a bunch of freelancers to help them cover this gargantuan task, which means I get to work and talk to some artists that I wouldn’t otherwise.
Case in point, Julian Berntzen of Norway, a talented multi-instrumentalist with a penchant for concept albums and theatrical presentations who used to lie about his age to play in jazz clubs as a teenager. I interviewed him as part of the SXSW preview series here, and wouldn’t really have thought to call Norway on a snowy morning if I didn’t know someone was paying me for it, but I’m glad I did and that their education systems are better financed and developed than ours, because there is no way I could have managed in Norwegian. You can check out the full list of interviews as they go up here, and I have a couple more coming down the pipeline, so I will post them up when they are published. Until then, enjoy this awesomely lo-fi special effects video for Berntzen’s track “Rocket Ship Love” and dream of other countries and climates rocking out together.
