NO APOLOGIES “We tour so little that it’s a total fucking blast for us, and we make those shows count,” says Albini (right, with Todd Trainer and Bob Weston).
“It seems, in a sense, like we can get away with murder.” I’m talking on the phone with Steve Albini as he relaxes during a rare respite from his engineering duties at the studio he owns and operates, Chicago’s Electrical Audio, and he’s describing how things operate with Shellac, the band for whom he’s played guitar and sung since the early ’90s. His statement is made in the context of how much leeway the band’s audiences have given them. But the murder that Shellac have gotten away with isn’t confined to the stage — for almost two decades, Albini and company have been showing the world that it is possible to do, as a band, whatever you want to do, entirely on your own terms, and still come out on top.
Of course, it helps that they formed on a wave of underground hype. When Big Black, the controversial punk/industrial hybrid Albini had formed with two friends and a drum machine when he was in college, broke up in 1987, they were at the peak of their popularity. Their farewell disc, Songs About Fucking, remains a pinnacle of post-punk ferocity. Albini’s explanation at the time was that they broke up “to prevent us from overstaying our welcome.” But the truth is that the legend of Big Black ballooned only in their absence — and that legend wasn’t just about the music’s relentless pummeling but also about the irascible and scabrous mind of Albini, as a musician, a pundit, and a recording engineer.
By the early ’90s, Albini had become an in-demand studio engineer (a term he preferred to “producer”), recording high-profile albums for the Pixies, Slint, and the Jesus Lizard while also engineering countless sessions for more-obscure acts. He put Shellac together as an act that would be able to work on the sidelines of his burgeoning day job. That suited the other members just fine: bassist and Waltham native Bob Weston was and is himself a successful engineer, and drummer Todd Trainer managed a warehousing and shipping company in Minneapolis. The band’s plan was simple: play only the shows they wanted to play, put out records only when they felt like it, and divorce themselves from the co-opting of underground culture by major labels and mainstream media.
“The thinking, at the time,” says Albini, “was that bands should want to play for as many people and as big an audience as possible, and that kind of thinking was used to justify all kinds of boorish behavior and pandering. And our thinking was that music culture isn’t necessarily better when you lay it on with a ladle and spatter every potential person with your band. I know from my own existence as a fan that the bands I have loved the most and the longest have been bands I found on my own, not bands that were sprayed at me. So I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with doing your thing and letting your natural audience find you.”
The Shellac plan was genius when you consider the high demand for all things Albini (and that especially after his engineering of Nirvana’s 1994 album In Utero). But it didn’t hurt that the music itself was revelatory: while ’90s guitar rock was drowning in baggy shorts and limp-noodle over-compression, Shellac were providing a no-nonsense treble fest, with crisp, dry recordings of their caustic yet hypnotic blasts. Live, they cut an unusual figure: Albini and Weston both sporting aluminum Travis Bean guitars run through gigantic homemade amplifiers; Trainer hitting the skins with the precision of a gymnast, the power of a rhino, and the mad grin of a lobotomized chimp. The band’s first statement of intent took the form of the 1993 seven-inch releases The Rude Gesture: A Pictorial History and Uranus. Both are essential post-punk platters, combining Trainer’s ungodly thud with the band’s skronky yet sinuous guitar attack, the whole pinned down by Albini’s trademark raspy howl, at times shrieking and wounded, at others a plaintive voice of reason amid the din.
Shellac released their debut album, At Action Park, in 1994, but they’ve since spaced out their releases, causing agonizing waits. It was four years till their follow-up, Terraform, and the gap between 2000′s 1000 Hurts and their most recent album, Excellent Italian Greyhound, was seven years (all on venerable Chicago indie Touch and Go). They tour only sporadically, often playing bizarre locales rather than making grueling cross-country treks. “I feel like a lot of bands tour so much that they come to resent it,” Albini explains. “And then they’re capable of throwing off perfunctory shows — whereas we tour so little that it’s a total fucking blast for us, and we make those shows count. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with being reserved with how much you play.”
In a lot of ways, it’s this reserve that makes the band so intriguing, especially when juxtaposed with the unreserved belligerence of their music. What comes through, whether live or on record, is their sheer exuberance — and the fact that they’re doing it their way. “Look,” Albini concludes, “it’s not as if being in a band is so rewarding financially or culturally or in terms of status. Basically, the only reason to do it is because it’s awesome. Being in a band is essentially its own reward, and I can’t fathom it any other way.”
SHELLAC + HELEN MONEY | Middle East downstairs, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | September 6 at 9 pm | $18 | 617.864.3278 or mideastclub.com
WORLD’S FORGOTTEN BOYS: Millions now bow to Raw Power’s majesty, but in 1973, it and the Stooges were considered a flop.
It’s hard to fathom now, when their music has achieved such godhead status, but in 1971, Ann Arbor’s legendary Stooges had dissolved in ignominy, dropped by Elektra after the seemingly indulgent commercial failure that was 1970’s howling Fun House. Ron Asheton (canonized by Rolling Stone shortly before his passing in 2009 as #29 on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time) and his drumming brother Scott languished at home. The new second guitarist, James Williamson, was back in Detroit, marveling at his brief foray with the late band. And ringleader Iggy Pop was in New York, hustling for a solo record deal.
What happened next is rock scripture: Pop, with the backing of some new rock superstar named David Bowie, would convene a slightly reconfigured Stooges to record a third album that would atomize even their previous two earthshakers. It is immaterial that the album failed to get noticed outside of an enlightened few, even though its failure led swiftly to the Stooges’ demise. Its legend has mushroomed since, and millions now bow to the altar ofRaw Power majesty.
When I spoke to Williamson over the phone, on the eve of the reunited Stooges’ tour (it comes to the House of Blues on Tuesday) to celebrate that 1973 disc in all its glory, I was expecting him to view the triumph of the record as bittersweet, given that it was so unheralded in its day and was created amid such turmoil. I was wrong.
“No no no, ‘bittersweet’ is not a word that I would use at all,” he says. “I think that, in fact, we all thought that time was very sweet. We were working, we had a record deal, and so I see those times as being very special.”
It was a particularly special time for Williamson: when Pop got a record contract (CBS) and a management deal (Bowie’s MainMan), he took Williamson with him to England to draft a new rhythm section. They auditioned scores of foppish glammed-out rockers, but Williamson wasn’t impressed. “You really can’t play music that’s any good with people you don’t like. That’s just a fact! Everyone in those days was all flowery shirts and poofy frilly hair and all, and I just couldn’t relate to these guys. Iggy may have seen it differently, but in the end, I said to him, ‘You know, I think we oughtta just call up Ron and Scott’ — and he didn’t disagree.”
The Asheton brothers were enthusiastic, but they had to adjust to the new rules: Ron Asheton moved from guitar to bass, and this time out, Iggy was the star. Williamson views the whole thing pragmatically: “You know, the fact is that Iggy has always been a dynamic performer. And whoever was managing us, or whoever the record company was, they always wanted to make Iggy a star, and the band was secondary. Luckily, Iggy never looked at it that way, at least not during Raw Power.”
Williamson’s contribution to the Raw Power sound cannot be understated — whereas the group’s prior incarnation was notable for its primitivism, the 34 minutes that make up this album see lunkhead riffs getting replaced with serpentine friction and hip-moving thunder, and the Stooges re-emerging far sexier and darker. Sinewy shakers like “Death Trip” and “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” erupt with Motown violence, Williamson’s guitar spewing endless mirror shards all over the proceedings.
The title track and “Search and Destroy” are now the kind of canonized rockers that infants play along to on Rock Band — but in 1973, this was dangerous stuff, in some ways too dangerous for the music business to know what to do with. The album, like Fun House, was deemed unlistenable. “Back then, if you couldn’t sell records, you couldn’t survive. And no one bought the record. When we made the record, we didn’t care — because we were completely delusional!”
That delusion may have fueled the album’s creation, but its head-on collision with reality meant the death of the band in 1974. Williamson went on to work with Pop on projects that included 1977’s Kill City and 1979’s New Values. But the end of the ‘70s saw him leave the music business — at least until Iggy extended an invitation to revisit RawPower one more time.
“The thing about that album is that it’s so far ahead of its time,” Williamson reflects. “And it’s amazing to me to see how many people sort of imitated the style and sound — so much so that now the album sounds contemporary. In those days, it didn’t sound like anything else around. So it’s satisfying, definitely — I like to say that the album was a success, it just took a while!”
IGGY & THE STOOGES | House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St, Boston | August 31 at 8 pm | $45–$65 | 888.693.2583 or hob.com/boston
PUNK’S NOT DEAD, IT’S JUST HIDING IN ELECTRO “We’ve always believed in being selfish and doing whatever we want to do,” says Ethan Kath.
“With our songs, with our band, we’re always really selfish.” I’m talking to Ethan Kath of Toronto synth-stab duo Crystal Castles, who at the moment is sharing a crucial piece of honesty regarding how he and co-conspirator/screamer Alice Glass managed to turn their home-demo project of a few years back into a lit fuse beneath the electronic and punk subcultures. “We’ve always believed in being selfish and doing whatever we want to do,” Kath admits. “Because if you try to please anyone else, you just can’t be proud of those moments. It shouldn’t matter what anyone thinks as long as you know that you did it for yourself.”
What Kath and Glass — who come to the House of Blues on Tuesday to headline the dance-tastic HARD Festival with UK-based producer Sinden and Mad Decent dubstepper Rusko — have done is transform glitchy glowstick electronica into visceral punk and soaring shoegazy songcraft, first with their video-game-sampling debut two years ago, and now with their homonymous sophomore outing, which sees them toning down the skronk of tunes like “Xxzxcuzx Me” in favor of the occasional stab at haunting atmospheric beauty, like new-album highlights “Celestica” and “Baptism.”
Well, maybe “toning down” isn’t quite accurate, since the new album is still packed with moments of bracing distortion and stutter-step beat meltdowns. “Some people want to say that this album is a maturation,” Kath acknowledges, “but that wasn’t something we were going for. It was just us being true to ourselves and not caring about anything going on around us, or any expectations that there might be.”
Crystal Castles was a pretty immediate phenomenon, a long-gestating studio solo project of Kath’s that quickly ignited once he found his perfect counterpart in Glass’s punk-chanteuse persona. “I remember when I first saw her, she was 15, singing for this Toronto punk band. I walked into the club, and she was on stage. All the old punks were telling her to fuck off, and she was spitting beer in their faces and calling them pussies. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, she was so powerful, even though she was this tiny teenager sticking up for herself and not giving a shit about the consequences. She was just this insane 15-year-old poet on stage, and I knew then that I needed to get an audio file of her voice on my tracks.”
Kath posted a rough track of Glass doing a mic check with his backing music on his MySpace page in 2005. “Alice Practice,” as it came to be known, became the band’s first single, selling out reprint after reprint of its initial seven-inch run. Most singers might bristle at a mic-level check’s being released as a single, but Alice Glass is not most singers, and Crystal Castles are unusual in terms of their songwriting method. In the band’s infant stages, Kath would hand Glass a CD of some instrumentals he had worked on and she’d return with a CD of the songs with vocals on top.
This detached collaboration is still the way they work, with neither having any input into the other’s process. “It’s a kind of unspoken trust,” Kath admits. “She doesn’t know the stories behind each song or why I’m doing what, she just knows that there’s a feeling in the music. And what I love so much about working with her is that she finds a way to extend that emotion in unexpected ways. She does her thing on top, and I love the songs even more. It’s a lot of trust, yeah, but we wouldn’t do it any other way.”
HARD SUMMER TOUR FEATURING CRYSTAL CASTLES + RUSKO + SINDEN + DESTRUCTO | House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St, Boston | August 17 at 6:30 pm | $25-$35 | 617.693.2583 or hob.com/boston
HIP ZEF-I: They call their music “zef,” a slang term referring to the culture surrounding the gangster-ridden Cape Flats, a mix of English and Afrikaans, black and white, urban and destitute.
Die Antwoord have hit the sweet spot. A year and a half after they made their presence known and went from zero to instant worldwide Internet sensation, head-scratching curiosity has curdled into full-blown mania. As their world tour brings them to Royale tonight (July 22) with Sleigh Bells, they are poised to obliterate the minds of unsuspecting Yanks with their truly peculiar, self-styled, next-level South African rap rave.
“Die antwoord” is Afrikaans for “the answer.” But at this point, the question is whether this crew will morph into a real-life sensation or flame out like so many Internet memes once the initial guffaws and ROFLs fade away.
Die Antwoord would seem, on the surface, a tough sell to a world audience. Their Cape Town swagger is a strange mix of dated and foreign musical and cultural references, with a bizarre rap delivery that is half English and half Afrikaans. Leader Ninja is a tall lanky fellow who carries Die Antwoord’s tunes with ball-swinging bravado. The Flavor Flav to his Chuck D is Yo-Landi Vi$$er, a pint-sized hype chick whose eerie voice and smutty lyrical bent add a certain WTF element to the band’s already-bizarre façade.
They call their music “zef,” a slang term referring to the culture surrounding the gangster-ridden Cape Flats, a mix of English and Afrikaans, black and white, urban and destitute. Ninja himself sums it up at the beginning of their breakthrough single/video “Enter the Ninja“: “I represent South African culture. Blacks, whites, colored, English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu. I’m like all these different things . . . fucked into one.” Ninja and Yo-Landi don’t spin tales so much as make elaborate allegories out of Cape Flats life, each song’s ringtone rave spilling over with sex, violence, and strange allusions and out-of-date references. If this is all starting to sound like a train-wreck collision of appropriated styles and tacky music — well, on some level it is.
But it’s become an Internet rubbernecking explosion. In the middle breakdown of “Enter the Ninja,” Ninja proclaims, “Look at me now/All up in the Interweb/Worldwide!” As it turns out, this wasn’t an idle boast — the February 2009 YouTube debut of the two-minute “Zef Side” film (which introduced the band and zef culture with snippets of Die Antwoord performing “Beat Boy,” an epic tale of sex and surrealism that needs to be heard to be believed) coincided with the release, for free, of their $O$ album on their Web site. Still, it was the YouTube posting of “Enter the Ninja,” on January 14 of this year, that took Die Antwoord global. Within days, message boards and music-related Web sites were abuzz with this strange group who’d appeared out of nowhere. Millions of views and downloads later, the hype explosion resulted in a major-label signing and a world tour.
Of course, it wasn’t long before the façade of Die Antwoord was revealed to be, well, somewhat artificial. The “Zef Side” video shows Ninja describing himself as just a guy living with his parents. In real life, he’s the fortysomething Watkin Tudor Jones, more commonly known as Waddy in the Cape Town rap scene, where for a decade and a half he has toiled under numerous aliases. In the mid ’90s, he fronted the Original Evergreens, a major-label act that at the time was seen as South Africa’s answer to Cypress Hill. After the Evergreens, his groups became more conceptual: first with Max Normal, then with the Constructus Corporation, and then with Max Normal.tv, a hip-hop group with a corporate structure who mixed live rap with the tropes of a motivational speaker (including live PowerPoint presentations).
In some ways, then, Die Antwoord are Waddy coming back to reality — his move toward a more gangster sound makes sense when you consider the violence that’s marred his life. His father was murdered in a carjacking; his brother committed suicide. After the dissolution of Max Normal.tv, Waddy had an epiphany, hearing a banging beat thumping from a car barreling out of the flats. Soon after, he started hanging out with gangsters, got himself prison tattoos, and gave himself the cheesiest nom de guerre he could think of. Ninja and Die Antwoord were born.
Oh, and Yo-Landi is not only his rap sparring partner but also his wife and the mother of his daughter. To many, Die Antwoord’s intentional obfuscation of their personal life and appropriation of Cape Town gangster culture seems almost Ali G–ish. But perhaps it’s less of a culture-jacking and more about bridging white Afrikaner hardcore with “coloured” musical culture — a move that probably seems a lot bolder if you’re from South Africa. As it is, the band’s global audience can only stop and stare.
But that audience can also throw its hands in the air at Die Antwoord’s stupendous live act. All those years in the trenches have made Ninja and Yo-Landi into a force to be reckoned with, capable of pummeling audiences with their boundless finger-in-a-light-socket energy and hyperkinetic flow. Anyone approaching a Die Antwoord gig expecting to see a joke band fake their way through a performance will be set straight by their full-on lyrical assault. They are, in a sense, making themselves real after a long period of Web stunting: $O$ will be released on Interscope in October, and Ninja and Yo-Landi already have a five-album plan. Yes, it could all fall flat if no one cares, or if everyone moves on to the next Internet sensation. But forget the speculation: this is the moment to savor the phenomenon of Die Antwoord, as they perhaps make the transition from curiosity to genuine global musical force.
DIE ANTWOORD + SLEIGH BELLS | Royale, 279 Tremont St, Boston | July 22 at 7 pm | $20 | 617.338.7699 or royaleboston.com
UNSTOPPABLE: After barnstorming the ’80s and ’90s with the Flat Duo Jets, Romweber now plays with his older sister, Let’s Active drummer Sara.
Many would argue that, in the world of creativity, there is a fine line between genius and insanity. The best artists, so the argument goes, usually straddle the line, often relying on the latter to achieve the former. Now, I’m not going to claim that John Michael Dexter Romweber is insane, but let’s put it this way: if he has achieved genius, it wasn’t by being level-headed. “Well, being in a rock-and-roll band, traveling around, playing around, I guess people see it as being pretty wild,” is the way Dex puts it. “But when I started, I was just so young. To me it’s always just been about finding inspiration, and trying to learn and grow.”
Romweber, who comes to T.T. the Bear’s on Wednesday, is what you’d call a natural — someone who never had to agonize over musical direction or inspiration. Over a three-decade career, both with his first band, the influential ’80s two-piece Flat Duo Jets, and subsequently with his solo work, Dex has shown that songs and music just flow from him. Most would peg his music as rockabilly, or at least roots — and they’d be right, to an extent. It’s as if his whole musical existence had been hermetically sealed from contemporary trends — all the better for him to marinate in his traditional influences.
Growing up in Carrboro, North Carolina, pre-teen Dex was obsessed with his family’s extensive ’50s record collection. He eventually moved into a detached garage behind the house that he named “The Mausoleum.” There, in the “Maus,” amid the trash, cigarette butts, and stacks of classic records, he formed — with drummer Chris “Crow” Smith — Flat Duo Jets.
The Jets played hyper-energetic rock music that managed to stay entirely within the domain of ’50s rock and rollwithout pandering or being dated. This was due in part to the telepathic mania of Crow’s trap hitting, but mostly to Dex’s magnetism. As a singer, he was a thousand different voices all within one teenage mouth, whether he was hollering hellward or sweetly crooning. As a guitarist, he took advantage of the space afforded him by the duo format: with just a beat-up Silvertone and a modest combo amp, he was able to sound larger and more frenetic than any shoegaze band with an army of pedals and stacks.
“We didn’t really know what we were doing,” he says over the phone from North Carolina. “It was pure accident how we started, with people sitting in here or there until it was just me and Crow. And now it becomes ‘in’!” Indeed, but at the time it was novel, though Dex maintains that there’s nothing really new about the duo in the history of rock. “I love the duo format, in part because drums and guitar are just the basis of rock and roll. When we started, it was tricky for me as a guitarist, because I had to learn to play chord solos and stuff, playing leads and chords at the same time, that sort of thing.”
The key to the Jets was their sheer abandon — stripped of cultural signifiers, their music was never really retro, even though it was based so much on the past. But that didn’t prevent them from getting lumped in with any throwback craze that came along, whether it was the Stray Cats–led rockabilly trend of the ’80s or the inexplicable swing-band mania of the early ’90s. “You know, a lot of those rockabilly guys didn’t come to our shows, because we were just a little too weird! We were never part of that scene. I kind of went through that whole neo-rockabilly thing really young, when I was 14, 15 — and then I promptly got out of it!”
Unfortunately, Dex got out of the Flat Duo Jets as well, when the band flamed out acrimoniously in the late ’90s. He spent the next decade trying out various solo guises, among them a fascinating phase in the mid ’00s when he put out Piano, an album of solo-piano originals inspired by classical romantics. For the last few years, however, he has had his act together. The Dexter Romweber Duo, comprising himself and his older sister Sara (who drummed for early-’80s new-wave notables Let’s Active and Snatches of Pink), has seen Dex busier than ever. Last year the Duo released their first album, Ruins of Berlin (Bloodshot), a powerful collection that showcases Dex’s darker lyrical bent as he mixes his trademark traditional stomp with a wistful pre-rock crooning style.
“I guess, with my voice, I’ve always been just under the influence of different times. But now I’m just trying to be Dex, whatever that is, you know?” Part of being Dex is finding inspiration in the dark and insane aspects of his world, both external and internal. “I’m influenced by old places, old streets, Robert Mitchum movies, churches, out-of-the-way places, smoky-nightclub music, saxophone, stuff that’s sort of hard to find nowadays. But I’ll tell you, when you stumble along these American streets late at night, after a gig or something, you really are back in that place, either in your head or the way the whole town looks at that hour. And that feeling, that way of seeing things, it’s something that hasn’t left me.” Here’s hoping it never does.
DEX ROMWEBER DUO + JITTERY JACK + THE COBRAMATICS | T.T. the Bear’s Place, 10 Brookline St, Cambridge | June 30 | $10 | 617.492.BEAR or ttthebears.com
A BLAST! Gaga has covered Madonna’s first decade in a tenth of the time.
No, it’s not your imagination: things are getting smaller. Or at least, it seems that way in the funhouse-mirror world of modern music, where the semi-demise of the major-label factory has colluded with the anti-star obsession of the underground to produce a chasing of microgenres into mazes of musical self-selection. The result? An ever-narrowing list of stadium-striding superstars as we replace our pop demigods and worship at the altar of thousands of obscure deities, each with its own bizarre rituals and rites. Granted, the ridiculous excess of the rock-and-roll era was one whose time may have come. After all, it’s hard to build a mythology of trashing hotel rooms and other assorted debaucheries when you’re Twittering the whole thing. But are we all really ready to let go of the whole music-biz machine and adorn our teenage walls with the likeness of any minstrel who managed to shift a few thousand virtual copies last week?
Even with their mastery of both hooks and hype, newer acts like MGMT (this year’s Best National Act) must be all too aware of the already crowded market they’re entering. That said, the overcrowding is also a by-product of the music biz’s growing efficiency — bands no longer need to stagnate for years before hitting the big time. Both MGMT and fellow National Act nominee (and Best National Album winner) VAMPIRE WEEKEND were barely ideas in their members’ minds half a decade ago. Now they’re blowing up stadiums, just like rock’s royalty of yore.
Speaking of marketplace hegemony: this year, we threw a bit of a curve on the ballot by creating the category “Best Pop Shit,” but you, dear readers, in your infinite knowledge, understood — correctly — that this was not a pejorative and rushed to do the right thing. Thus, Best National Pop Shit: LADY GAGA. A mere two or three years ago, she was just a struggling NYC boho playing piano bar, but since then, in just a tenth of the time, she’s condensed Madonna’s first decade — pop hits and fashion bits alike — into a blast on the popular consciousness. And let’s not even get into the strange career of Adam Young, a/k/a OWL CITY (National Pop Shit nominee), who took just two years to turn his basement synth-pop project into a #1 single and album — and all by pilfering the sound of the not-yet-cold corpse of the Postal Service.
So the underground is now the mainstream, with its domination in metal (Best National Metal winners MASTODON, and indeed all of the runners-up, are decidedly non-Ozzfest material) and rap (MOS DEF and the runners-up: “Jay-who?”). And few acts in recent memory have gone as far with as few concessions to what’s expected of an above-ground rock sensation as the dour, minimalist xx (Best National Breakthrough).
So, as the old gods are unmasked and made human thanks to 24/7 technology and splintering genre wars, we must come to grips with a change in scale in our pop mythology. Sure, you could put together all the outrageous rock-star antics of ALICIA KEYS (Best National R&B Act), WILCO (Best National Roots Act), and KINGS OF LEON (WFNX Song of the Year), count them on one hand, and still have some fingers left to play “Use Somebody” with. But in the new economy of pop, those old antics just don’t have the same currency. And if the concern is that everything is getting smaller, rest assured that it’s also getting far weirder than even the fevered psychedelic dreams of previous generations. Here’s to facing the strange for years to come.
Best National Act: MGMT
“You’ll never be as good as the Rolling Stones” is an actual line from “Flash Delirium,” the lead single from MGMT’s new headscratcher, Congratulations(Sony). It’s an odd moment of self-depreciation, but you’d be forgiven for having missed it, since it gets whispered atop the distorted bleats and aggressive zaps of the song — which proved to be as purposely inscrutable as the rest of the hotly anticipated follow-up to 2007′s Oracular Spectacular. Perhaps most of the votes in this category come from fans of MGMT’s earlier, peppier singles, like “Kids” and “Time To Pretend,” which were hammered into our skulls by commercial radio and movie trailers for a good two years. But even when they try to be the opposite of what people want, MGMT’s talent for a sharp hook and a jaunty mood unzigs every zag they try to pull. So they win the crown despite themselves.
Runners-up:
2. The Decemberists
3. Vampire Weekend
4. Phoenix
Best National Electronic/Dance Act: Hot Chip
Machine-made music designed for dancing often plays down the real-live-flesh artists behind the scenes. Which means that those who hang on long enough to assert their individuality often wind up shedding the very electro/dance trappings that made them notable in the first place. Such is the case with Hot Chip, who’ve turned quite a few heads with the success of One Life Stand (Astralwerks) — a collection that sacrifices the giddy whumping pleasure principle of older hits like “Over and Over” and “Ready for the Floor” for the vulnerability and seriousness of “Thieves in the Night” and “Take It In.” As the evolution of the genre pushes onward and outward, it’ll be acts like Hot Chip — with memorable tunes and demonstrable heart — who’ll rise to the top.
Runners-up
2. La Roux
3. Four Tet
4. Fever Ray
Best National Female Vocalist: Neko Case
Cast your mind back to a time when it was commercial poison to put a female voice on the radio, and contrast it to now, when female artists are everywhere. And yet, at least according to you all, none of those newcomers could dethrone the force of nature that is Neko Case. Last year, she had just released Middle Cyclone(Anti-) when she took this category. Since then, Ms. Case has been touring and riding a wave of accolades for that song cycle, which has seen her branch farther from the roots rock of her past into torch songs, pop, and pure banshee weirdness, all with the same confident grace.
Runners-up
2. Annie Clark [St. Vincent]
3. Florence Welch [Florence and the Machine]
4. Victoria Legrand [Beach House]
Best National Metal Act: Mastodon
Mastodon might seem an unlikely act to be sitting atop the metal heap, what with their arty leanings and un-metal concept-album approach. Then again, their brutal reassemblage of the best moments of the discographies of Neurosis, Melvins, and assorted stoner/sludge-rockers amounts to a realignment of what is considered good metal after the doldrums of late-’90s/early-’00s nü-metal. Like Vikings hitting virgin shores, the bearded burly-men of Mastodon have been rampaging through the world of metal, taking the aggression of more underground acts and polishing it to a sheen in a way that endears them to year-end lists — as well as the car stereos of heshers worldwide. The result is a band who can rock international stadiums without having to wear stupid top hats or dress like clowns —thus earning the gratitude of serious metalheads everywhere for elevating the genre to within a fraction of respectability.
Runners-up
2. High on Fire
3. Sunn O)))
4. Baroness
Best National Pop Shit: Lady Gaga
Kings of Leon and Black Eyed Peas both scraped their way to the top through a long process of refining their appeal — but neither has captured the lightning-in-a-bottle combination of weirdness and newness that is the international pop-shit phenomenon Lady Gaga. At this point, her two-year campaign of shock and awe is beginning to wear out even her most faithful followers — but that only means that she’s dug past the topsoil into the deeper ground that is the casual music listener. Last year, said listeners were snapping their fingers inattentively to a radio hit; this year, they’re dressing up like maniacs and following her around. Eventually, the world will tire of her unbounded need to impress — but that doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon.
Runners-up
2. Kings of Leon
3. Black Eyed Peas
4. Owl City
Best National Roots/Americana Act: Wilco Truth be told, Wilco haven’t really played anything resembling the standard idea of “roots” or “Americana” since their 1995 debut album, but their unpretentious, low-key demeanor has defined a new post-alternative roots movement. Americana for a more . . . suburban America, perhaps. In any case, last year’s typically understated Wilco (The Album) (Nonesuch) kept fans flocking to their shows and celebrating the band’s rep as a formidable live act (with the crucial involvement of guitar hot shot Nels Cline). Perhaps BMP voters recognize that this Chi-town act have a certain fondness for our area — their North Adams Solid Sound Festival is coming in August, with not only multiple Wilco (and Wilco-side-project) sets but a line-up that offers, uh, pretty much everything but roots and Americana.
Runners-up
2. The Low Anthem
3. Avett Brothers
4. Monsters of Folk
Best National Video: Lady Gaga feat. Beyonce: Telephone
Two years past the demise of TRL, you’d think that today’s kids would be tugging their parents’ apron strings at the sight of this category, asking, “What’s a ‘video’?” Except, that is, for this thing called the “Internet,” which is currently rewriting the rules of the form, encouraging boundary pushing in a much more exciting way than MTV ever did. Gaga’s collaboration with Swedish professional oddball Jonas Åkerlund is a match made in video-weirdness heaven: nearly nine minutes of iconic images that introduce the proverbial Peoria newb to the world of Matthew Barney–lite. Whether it’s a pair of sunglasses made from lit cigarettes or a revved-up Beyoncé visually stuttering along with the song’s glitches in a homicidal rage, the video pushes arty buttons that people didn’t know they had.
Runners-up
2. Bat for Lashes, “Daniel”
3. Girls, “Lust for Life”
4. Raekwon, “House of Flying Daggers”
Best Local All-Ages Act: A Loss For Words
All-ages, a/k/a pop punk, could be the most disrespected genre this side of contemporary country. Meaning that when a band stick around in the all-ages trenches for years and years, they will inevitably have to reach for respectability. For Abington’s AL4W, that meant following up the success of 2009′s The Kids Can’t Lose (and touring the record with a grueling trek around the States and then through the UK, Russia, and Japan) with a new EP of Motown classics called, uh,Motown Classics (Paper + Plastick) that is nowhere near as ironic-pop-punk-cover cringe-worthy as it might sound. Whether they achieve said respectability remains to be seen, but throwing a spirited run-through of the Jackson 5′s “I Want You Back” into their otherwise moshtastic set of slamming, fun-time sweat inducers can’t hurt — unless you get landed on by some XXL crowd surfer.
Runners-up
2. Boys Like Girls
3. Four Year Strong
4. Vanna
Best Boston Rock Club Night: Born Of Fire (O’Brien’s) Metal fans in Boston are tired of getting the proverbial shaft — reading the regional listings and seeing all the sickest metal shows skipping the Hub in favor of Wormtown and (boo!) Connecticut is enough to make your average Slayer acolyte retire his filthy denim vest. Fortunately, the past year has seen the explosion of Boston metal that is the Born of Fire night at O’Brien’s. The brainchild of erstwhile headbanger Zack Wells, BOF has brought us pairings of the region’s slaytanic best twice a month — so you no longer need to drive an hour or more each way to get your fix of Howl, Rat Corpse, and Sexcrement. This town is already a hotbed for some of the region’s (and the nation’s) top metal acts — it’s about time they got to play a club show in their own town.
Runners-up
2. Primitive Sounds at River Gods
3. This Is Why They Hate Us at Alchemist Lounge
4. Rescue Nite at Model Café
Best Local Metal Act: Converge Converge had a great year. Their latest LP, Axe To Fall (Epitaph), found them breaking through to a more mainstream metal audience, thanks to the massively heavy thrum of walloping killdozers like “Slave Drive” and album opener “Dark Horse.” It’s actually been a top-notch year for metal in general, and that’s made the competition at the top even more insane. But “insane” is the environment in which Converge thrive, whether it’s the room-exploding fury of their live show or the claustrophobic intensity of their music (not to mention the howling screech of lead heckler Jake Bannon). The band’s relentlessly racing tempo is almost un-metal in its punk zip, but the arch weirdness of guitarist Kurt Ballou’s chugging ax is far too pained and brutal to be anything but capital-M metal. As long as Converge are still stalking the earth, it’ll be a tall order for any other band to take this category.
Runners-up
2. Doomriders
3. Gozu
4. Big Bear
Best Local Punk Act: Razors In The Night The past decade has seen the myth of working-class Boston explode onto the national consciousness — be it through Dennis Lehane’s novels or Martin Scorsese’s films. Boston punk has been a similarly popular export, with its peculiarly trad take on disheveled anti-authority, and Razors in the Night have the attitude and the songs to represent their city. Vocalist Troy Schoeller would be an intimidating neck-vein exploder if he weren’t fronting such a fun band, with every glottal scream backed by anthemic gang shouts and catchy guitar melodies. Although Razors might seem somewhat reined in by their worship of early ’80s UK Oi! punk (their name itself is a song by street-punk legends Blitz), they find ways to mix up their sound, whether it’s the whiplash fury of humorous thrashers like “Hipster Holocaust” or catchy fist-pumper anthems like “Carry On.”
Runners-up
2. Dead Cats Dead Rats
3. Kominas
4. Refuse Resist
Best Local Roots Act: Kingsley Flood
If you consider rootsy Americana to be a dour yoke worn by groups of dreary Luddites afraid to cut loose and join the modern world, then you haven’t heard Kingsley Flood. Their roots cred owes to the masterful fiddle and mandolin playin’ and the whiff of Appalachia found on their debut, Dust Windows, but the music’s sheer exuberance is beyond time or genre. And though they’re capable of quiet introspection and moments of majestic solemnity (as on the organ-heavy “Cathedral Walls”), their fans ticked the ballot for the hip-shaking enthusiasm of their more boisterous moments (imagine a shotgun wedding gone off the rails). Lead Flooder Naseem Khuri has the authority in his voice to keep the whole thing from coming off like po’-faced creative anachronism, and the band’s boundless giddiness is enough to make you never want to hear a synthesizer again.
Runners-up
2. Joy Kills Sorrow
3. Tim Gearan Band
4. Tony the Bookie
See the rest of the winners here: http://thephoenix.com/BMP/Boston/2010/
MIXED EMOTIONS “You know what they say. ‘Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.’ I guess I want both.”
At some point or another, the greatest artists are pegged as oddballs, weirdos, freaks. Being a great artist does mean going out on a limb. Over time, and often without knowing it, an artist will create something greater than just himself — an understanding of the world made from the bric-a-brac of his mind combined with the collective energies of both his supporters and his detractors. UK post-punk legend Robyn Hitchcock (who comes to the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Tuesday) has done all that — and in more than three decades of continuous experimentation, he’s fashioned a new reality for those who fall under the intricate spell of his beguiling music.
“Of course, it depends how you define reality,” says Hitchcock, on the phone from his office in London. The slightest mention of the fractured world within his songs sets him off on a fascinating flight of fancy. “I mean, reality is the ultimate collection of improbabilities, sat on a chair opposite you, you know? Reality is shaking hands with the impossible, which is what we do every day. Reality is a membrane of the banal spread over the inconceivable: we think that we are getting up every morning and going to work, or we follow these patterns of how we live — when all the while, this extraordinary mechanism is lurching and buckling beneath our feet. We all live on the edge of an apocalypse, because we all die, you know? People tend to have this rather tame concept of what reality is.”
Since the late ’70s, first with his punk-era group the Soft Boys, and then later during his ongoing solo career, Hitchcock has been chipping away at that tame concept. His songs operate as psychic Trojan horses, as lyrical mind bombs packaged in sweet and lilting pop bonbons, exploding in your mind after they slip slyly through your ear membranes. Whether indulging his early lyrical obsession with insects and fishes or his later bent for disturbing verbal ruminations on death, Armageddon, and political buffoonery, Hitchcock has always snuck his own singular surrealism into his gorgeous tuneage.
That tuneage has taken many forms, from the prickly new wave of his ’80s trio the Egyptians to the more lush vegetation on which his songs tread softly when he plays with the Venus 3 (R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey and Ministry/Revolting Cocks drummer Bill Rieflin), as he does on his newest long-player, this spring’s playful and breezy Propellor Time (Sartorial). Recorded at various sessions over the past four years with a cast of guests who include John Paul Jones, Johnny Marr, and Nick Lowe, the album finds Hitchcock toning down the direct creepiness of some of his older work, with cascading arrangements guiding his slyly hypnotizing vocals to melodic nirvanas. But no matter what form his music takes, even when minimized to just a man and his acoustic guitar (as will be the case when he graces the Coolidge stage), his mastery of surreal states always finds a way to bob to the surface.
“Surrealism is a dream state,” he points out, “but it can encapsulate what we feel about what’s going on. And anything can happen, anything can be juxtaposed with anything else. That same horrifying surrealism occurs in dreams, but in real life, too — could there be anything more surreal than those planes crashing into the Twin Towers? But, you know, it’s almost collage. You can take the president’s hand and replace it with a lobster claw. You can put a rocket in a baby’s mouth instead of a bottle, or have cars hanging from trees.”
Hitchcock’s knack for words and wordplay identified him early on as one of the more clever lyricists of the post-punk era. His imagination is rarely confined to his albums — for diehard fans, the real Hitchcock manna comes from seeing him live, where songs are woven together with strange and humorous monologues that are equal parts Monty Python and Man Ray.
And in case you were wondering: he doesn’t work them out ahead of time. “If I did, I’d never be able to remember them! I don’t know how professional comedians do it. For me, they’re just word solos, from the font of my subconscious. The things I say between songs are more apt to be funny, because they function almost to test the audience, to see if they’re on my frequency. The songs themselves are more emotional, often quite sad or morose — but humor is so important. You know what they say — ‘Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.’ I guess I want both.”
For Hitchcock, the mental is more visual than anything we actually see. “Looking at me doesn’t tell you anything, and watching me perform isn’t relevant to anything. I don’t necessarily look like my songs! And I may work in music because it’s such an emotional art form, and I use words because we have them to help communicate. But the feeling is there first, the words are just put on top, they are secondary, just the way that words are secondary to the tune. People are feeling something just by the sound of how the song goes. The words are just there to give people a picture in their mind’s eye.”
As you might guess, Hitchcock found his muse in the surreal late ’60s, when candy-colored sounds dripped from his bedroom walls whenever he put the needle on his stereo. “I was 14 in 1967, when I had what I call my psychedelic bar mitzvah. You know, Are You Experienced?, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Sgt. Pepper’s, all of that. It wound up being the compost I’ve risen from, as it were.”
If his youthful ear tilted toward the twisted end of the psychedelic spectrum, his own work has always skewed in a similarly unpredictable way — whether we’re talking the aggressive jangle pop of the Soft Boys or the constant zig and zag between somnambulant acoustic material and edgy, jagged guitar rock that has characterized his solo records. Throughout it all, his work has always seemed timeless — almost hermetically sealed from whatever trends are current.
As Hitchcock himself acknowledges, “The only state you can really know is yourself — the only world utopia you inhabit is your own. I think that if you are true to yourself, you are going to be true to other people. If you can reflect that accurately in your work, you can take something real to other people. The risk you run, of course, is that your life might not be relevant to anyone! But, really, how relevant are my songs to, I dunno, someone rioting in Thailand? Maybe they’d be happier listening to something else — maybe Lady Gaga or the Bee Gees or Handel or Indian raga might make them feel better. Maybe my stuff only works for the kind of people who live in my kind of world.”
Lucky for all of us, we can slip into Hitchcock’s world anytime we want.
ROBYN HITCHCOCK | Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St, Brookline | June 8 at 7:30 pm | $20 | 617.734.2500 or coolidge.org
A FOOLISH CONSISTENCY? “Each record, we think, ‘This one we’ll make all loose and scrappy,’ ” says Bryan Devendorf (second from left), “but then we just wind up doing the same thing.” Photo by Keith Klenowski
Is excitement overrated? Lately, our musical landscape has been overrun with glitzy snippets of shock and awe in an ever-escalating race to discover something completely new — or at least, something with distant-enough sources that it seems new. In a perfect world, a great moment in music would come accompanied by a sense of grace, as if it had traveled far and long to reach you here and now. In short: great art is often the product of a lot of work — and work isn’t all that exciting.
I’m speaking with Bryan Devendorf, drummer for the National, who come to the House of Blues on Wednesday and Thursday. His band are enjoying a brief respite after a particularly big gig: a massive benefit show at Brooklyn’s Academy of Music that was broadcast live worldwide and filmed by music-documentary legend D.A. Pennebaker. Their new High Violet (4AD) has just debuted at #3 on the Billboard album chart, and they’re about to begin a world tour that will occupy them for the better part of the next year. This is nothing new for Devendorf and company: for more than a decade, through five albums and counting, the National have plugged away relentlessly in that endless cycle of tasks that is the life of a rock band. “The whole concept of our band is that we’re a working band. And in a sense, the reward of doing the work is the work itself. That’s the way you have to keep it going.”
The music that they’ve been cranking out for the past decade reflects this dogged persistence: elegantly crafted rock that is by turns somber and expansive, patient and insistent, bouncingly buoyant when it isn’t pinned to the ground by the gravelly baritone of lead vocalist Matt Berninger. Starting out in late-’90s Cincinnati, the band sprang from the ground with a kind of somber Americana whose leaves began to turn colors when they relocated to New York. There, they played with a quiet perseverance that escalated their profile in slow shifts: first with the overwhelmingly positive reception of 2005’s Alligator, then in 2007 when rapturous acclaim marked the release of Boxer. If the hype never percolated into full-blown hysteria, it at least followed the mood and feel of National songs — most of which build slowly, a steady-yet-perky beat working as a fulcrum on which the escalating drama pivots to an eventual climax.
Devendorf is oddly desultory about the National blueprint. “The whole trajectory of our songs is almost bordering on predictable, you know? Where it’s like a slow burn, and then it peaks, and then it’s over. And you know, why not just have it peak earlier? Or maybe just not peak? I guess I have a different perspective on our music, because to me each song is like a construction project I’m working on.” He may be on to something — but if the National’s music can be considered predictable, it’s in the same way that tennis great Roger Federer just keeps nailing winning serves. “We tend to write and record each track like a jeweler, you know? Like, each song is making a fine necklace or something. Each record, we think, ‘This one we will make looser, all scrappy and rough around the edges’ — but then we just wind up doing the same thing.”
He’s being modest, of course: “the same thing” for the band entails densely woven songs with enough rock-and-roll punch and melodic heft to linger in your craw long after the last notes fade. High Violet has much that could be considered sad-sack melodrama from a lesser band, but in the National’s hands, drowsy downers like “Sorrow” and “Bloodbuzz Ohio” are filled with jittery and tense percussive touches and moments of churchy elegance that elevate them from pop songs to paeans to the power of the human heart.
“There’s something very formal about making a record,” Devendorf adds. “For us musicians in the band, it involves work — and sometimes overworking of material. For Matt, since he’s the singer and lyricist, that work is more editorial. He’s more of a literary guy than a singer/songwriter. So he’s almost working on short stories. He’ll work on demos and revise and edit and revise and edit. Maybe he’ll throw out all his revisions at a certain point and go back to the original.”
If this all sounds like a lot of work and not a lot of crazy rock-and-roll antics, too bad. Behind every wild-eyed rock star trashing his proverbial hotel room is a half-miserable person who’s spent countless 20-hour days in a studio obsessing over a song, track by grueling track. The National are just unafraid to show their work. “Sometimes the hard part,” Devendorf concludes, “is to know when to keep working and when to pull back and let the paint dry, you know?”
THE NATIONAL + THE ANTLERS | House of Blues, 15 Lansdowne St, Boston | June 2-3 at 9 pm | $25-$35 | 888.693.BLUE or hob.com
As he lay in a Texas hospital bed in March, being treated for the disease to which he would eventually succumb, Ronald James Padavona, better known to the world as heavy-metal legend Ronnie James Dio, gave an interview to a local TV station. “Cancer? I’ll kick the hell out of you,” he declared, before throwing the devil horns. “I refuse to be beaten in any shape or form, so I’m going to beat you, too.”
Throughout his career, the Portsmouth, New Hampshire–born Dio exemplified the fighting spirit that constitutes the core ethos of heavy metal. He will be remembered for his powerful work as a solo artist, but also as the instigator of the second act of two of metal’s progenitors: first, in his pairing with a post–Deep Purple Ritchie Blackmore in Rainbow, and then as Ozzy Osbourne’s replacement in Black Sabbath.
In each, Dio turned the franchise around by replacing ’70s drug-addled nihilism with a new spirit of pugilistic righteousness that heralded metal’s ’80s ascendancy. With a booming voice and a towering stage presence that belied his 5’4” stature, Dio proved to generations of rockers that, if you possess the proper determination and spirit, you can command metal legions with but a wave of your hand.
His signature devil-horn hand gesture, purloined from his superstitious Italian grandmother, was used not to ward off evil, but to channel the power of metal into a universal force that transcends micro-genres and satanic accusations. As the Dio legend now enters its mythic phase, let us throw the horns in his memory — a testament to a man who sought out and found light in the darkness.
