The Detroit subversive funk-soul group Was (Not Was) are out with their first new album, Boo!, in 18 years. There's an interview with Don Was, in the Inky Weekend section. The band plays the World Cafe Live on Friday. Below are a bunch of videos: the brand new "Semi-Interesting Week," from Jools Holland's British TV show last week, the Sweet Pea Atkinson-featuring hit "Spy in the House Of Love," the slightly demented recitation "I Feel Better Than James Brown," and "I Blew Up the United States," of which David Was has said that he was "offended that [it] didn't end up on the post-9/11 list of banned songs."
Genius songwriter Dolly Parton plays the Borgata in Atlantic City on Saturday, behind Backwoods Barbie, her first album of non-bluegrass mainstream country in many a year. This clip of her masterful "Coat Of Many Colors," is from British TV show Top Of The Pops in 1979.
There's a new Santogold track, "Your Voice," available for free over at RCRDLBL.COM. It a new version of a song that was originally on Burned Again, the 2005 album by Santi White's former Philadelphia ska-punk band, Stiffed. Download it here. Meantime, here's White sitting on her high horse, flanked by her own personal version of Public Enemy's SW1's, in the video for "L.E.S. Artistes," the lead single from Santogold. The Bud Light Lime saleswoman plays the Roots Picnic at Festival Pier on June 7.
Trent Reznor doesn't feel anything at all. He makes that painfully clear on "1,000,000," the second track (it immediately follows an instrumental called "999,999") on The Slip, the new Nine Inch Nails album that became available online yesterday. And Reznor so wants you to share his undying emptiness that he's making the hard-rocking Slip available for absolutely no money on his website, Nin.com. No pay as you wish. No cover charge of $5 - which is what it cost to get the instrumental album Ghosts, I-IV, which Reznor released online in March, and was the suggested price tag when Saul Williams' Reznor-produced The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust came out last year. Just "thank you to our fans for your continued support," and "this one's on me," as Reznor put it on Nin.com, as if he were buying you a musical beer, filling up your glass with metal-edged guitars and synthesized rage. Well thanks, Trent, you're a swell guy. NIN is out on tour this summer, playing the Wachovia Center on Aug. 29. The Slip will come out on CD and vinyl in July. We'll see if it sells.
Perhaps not powerful enough to defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588, but formidable in its own right, British Sea Power sails up the Schuykill for two shows in town on Friday. At noon, the six piece from Brighton, England play for free at the World Cafe Live. Much later, they'll be at Johnny Brenda's with the Rosebuds and the Jeff Lewis Band. Here's the triumphal "Waving Flags," off their third, and best album, Do You Like Rock Music?, which pretty much blows other Joy Division-influenced bands like Interpol out of the water.
Erykah Badu on what it takes to make it as a woman in the music business. She's at the Tower Theater on Mother's Day, behind the deep, dark and funky New Amerykah, Pt. One (4th World War).
Philadelphia and South Jersey bred poet-rocker Patti Smith will get an honorary Doctor of Letters degree at the commencement ceremony at Rowan University in Glassboro on Friday, in recognition of "her success in the fields of music, literature and art." Her dear friend Bob Dylan has two honorary docs - from St. Andrews University in Scotland in 2004, and some obscure Jersey school (oh yeah, Princeton) - back in 1970. Here's a hand held video of the two of them singing Dylan's "Dark Eyes" - from the underrated 1985 album Empire Burlesque - at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia in 1995, when Dylan and Smith, most memorably, toured together. Note their tender kiss at the end - Patti clearly brings out the softie in crusty old Bob.
I'm not sure exactly what TNT play by play man Kevin Harlan meant by his call of LeBron James' thunder dunk on Kevin Garnett's head. I guess the idea is: LeBron isn't frightened by anything, and that should give the Celtics reasons to be fearful. But as much as I enjoyed listening to the new Death Cab For Cutie album, this was the cultural highlight of my Monday. And it earns as many points for content - as the knockout blow in the Cleveland Cavaliers victory over the Celtics, sending the series back to Boston tied 2-2 - as it does for style.
That was how, on The O.C., Summer described Death Cab For Cutie's sound to Seth, the sensitive DCFC fanboy whose soul was illuminated by Ben Gibbard's songs, and who was given to issuing stern warnings such as: "Don't dis Death Cab."
The O.C. is long gone, though it's influence in establishing teen-targeted nighttime soaps as the preferred career launchpads for indie rock acts who aspire to the mainstream lives on. (See Anatomy, Grey's.) But Death Cab - whose name, in case you've always been wondering, is taken from a Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band song performed in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour movie as a hint in the Paul-Is-Dead controversy - drives on.
And though the band's zeitgeist moment may have passed, its new album Narrow Stairs , which came out Tuesday, augurs well for its musical longevity. Gibbard, now 31 (and second from left in the picture above), is still a confessional singer-songwriter with literary tendencies - he's got a role in Office star John Krasinski's upcoming cinematic adaptation of footnote happy author David Foster Wallace's short story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
But Narrow Stairs' songs like bristling-with-energy "Long Division," edgy, claustrophobic "Pity and Fear," and rocked-out "Cath..." in which Gibbard watches a woman he might have loved walk to the altar in a "hand me down wedding dress," all make good on Death Cab's trademark melancholy with newfound punch and a compelling unease, with more than one guitar in the works. And that goes for the delicate, beautifully fragile "The Ice Is Getting Thinner," too.
Death Cab used to be a band of post-collegiate smart people who couldn't help getting bummed out, even as the wide-open rest of their lives stretched before them. Narrow Stairs is the darker, scarier sound of adulthood closing in.
The band performing in this clip is not Death Cab For Cutie. It's the Bonzo Dog Dand, from MMT, doing "Death Cab For Cutie." That's John Lennon elbowing George Harrison in the front row.
Loudon Wainwright III kept singing stunningly good new songs at the World Cafe Live on Thursday, and audience members kept calling out for old ones. Such is life for a vital-as-ever artist of Wainwright's vintage, who's 61 years old and has been making pointed, painfully funny, unflinchingly autobiographical music since 1970. Nobody in pop music writes about family better than LWIII, the author of "Rufus Is A Tit Man" and father of songwriters Rufus and Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright Roche.
At the World Cafe, he opened with a new one called "Hat" ("It looks good on a hook, bad on a bed") about the first word Lucy ever spoke, did Oedipal battle with his deceased Dad (one-time Life magazine editor Loudon Wainwright II) in "Surviving Twin," and told poignant tales of drinking on the front porch with his late mother in "White Winos." He did songs from last year's Strange Weirdos: Music From And Inspired By the Film Knocked Up, a movie in which he played Catherine Heigl's gynecologist ("Nice work if you can get it," he quipped). And, while more than ably accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, he did unrecorded songs about time. loss and the International Date Line, and one called "A Guilty Conscience And A Broken Heart," which, he joked, combined the two typical topics he's written about in the early and latter stages of his career, those being "shitty love, and death and decay."
And along the way, while ignoring the calls for "Dead Skunk," he somewhat grudgingly sang some oldies, going back to his "New Dylan" days for "Muse Blues" and "Drinking Song." Wainwright's a marvel of ongoing high-level creativity of a kind that can only be attained when an artist refuses to dwell on the past. And he made that point, with an edge in his voice, on "Old Friend." a kiss-off song from 1971 that no one requested, on which he self-contemptuously copped to kissing "the past's ass, all night long." "The good old days are good and gone," the folk singer sang. "That's why they're good, because they're gone."
Black Mountain, Black Lips, Black Dice. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Black Box Recorder. Amy Winehouse's Back To Black. Historically speaking, Black Sabbath, Black Flag and the Black Crowes. Not to mention Clint Black, Jack Black, and Frank Black, formerly known as Black Francis. Or, Johnny Cash, the Man in Black.
Black, it seems, is the new Black. And two of the best of the new Black bands are playing in town tonight. The first, Black Kids, whose members Reggie and Ali Young are actually black, are at Pure for Making Time. Their infectious video for "I'm Not Gonna Teach Him How To Dance With You" is on top. "Strange Days," by the blue-rock Black Keys, who play at the Electric Factory, is on the bottom.
Tom Waits is going on tour this summer. He's not coming anywhere close to Philadelphia - Columbus, Ohio on June 28 is as near it gets. "We're going to the deep south where they still love a man who wears red pants and they make him feel welcome," he's said. Earlier this month, Waits explained it all in the fake press conference posted below. Today he released this interview with himself.
Clearly enjoying the company and approving of the questions, the practiced vaudevillian explains what's wrong with the world ("We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. ... We are monkeys with money and guns"), quotes Erma Bombeck when asked what he's learned from parenthood ("Never loan your car to anyone to whom you’ve given birth”) and offers up his definition of a gentleman ("A man who can play accordion, but doesn't").
"Oakley makes the shades that transform a tool," Rivers Cuomo sings in "Pork and Beans." "You'd hate for the kids to think that you'd lost your cool." If that's so, Cuomo might want to don some sunglasses to compensate for that tool-ish 'stache he's sporting of late. I can't find fault with "Pork," though, which is as crunchy, formulaic and effective as usual. Got some cute pop culture referencing lines, too: "Timbaland knows the way to reach the top of the chart/Maybe if I work with him I can perfect the art." The Matthew Cullen-directed video for the first single from the third album to be called Weezer, which is due out on Tuesday and destined to be known as "the Red Album," is a compendium of Internet memes, a savvy if cynical marketing strategy that might have something to do with seeing to it that 3.9 million and counting people had watched it on YouTube when I last checked. Read all about it in Wired. Look at it here. Watch below to see if, when put to the test, Weezer and pork and beans will "blend."
A bad idea has bitten the dust. The concert promoters at Live Nation confirm what's clear if you look at the ads for the venue at 334 South Street where Ingrid Michaelson (eating watermelon) is playing on Sunday.
The lame attempt to re-brand the Theater of The Living Arts as the Fillmore at the TLA has been given up. It's now Theater of The Living Arts again, TLA for short. The name was adopted last year in a misguided effort to magically transplant the 1960s countercultural hippie vibe of Bill Graham's historic Fillmore Auditorium, which was at the center of the psychedelic Grateful Dead-Jefferson Airplane way back in those Wavy Gravy days, to the touchy feely City of Brotherly Love.
It's one small victory for local tradition, which in the TLA's case goes back to Philadelphia own counter culture history, since the original Theater Of Living Arts was an experimental theater troupe founded by Andre Gregory (who went on to conversate so fascinatingly with Wallace Shawn in My Dinner with Andre), and later became a much missed repertory art house movie theater, which eventually gave way to the TLA video store chain.
The Fillmore branding concept keeps hanging on in other cities, apparently: A LiveNation search still lists shows at the Fillmore at Irving Plaza in New York, and at the Fillmore Miami Beach at the Jackie Gleason Theater, despite Ralph Kramden's protestations from beyond the grave.
Punk-rock stalwarts Pennywise play the TLA on Friday, and She Wants Revenge and Be Your Own Pet (seen below) share a bill on Saturday night.
Hayes Carll is a hellacious songwriter from Houston, Texas. There's a little bit of Dylan, a little John Prine, and a touch of Steve Earle in his new Trouble In Mind, which I would have to say is my favorite record at this moment in time. Check out "She Left Me For Jesus," on his MySpace page. He's playing free at noon at the World Cafe Live on Friday, as part of the Non-Comm convention. Here's an animated clip of his "Crystal Beach Memories," in which "Margaritaville" refers not to the Jimmy Buffet themed Atlantic City casino, but the song upon which it is based.
Rock music is "full of fiction and inaccuracies," Craig Finn asserted at the World Cafe Live on Friday, introducing a song called "You Can Make Him Like You." He asserted that there are some truisms, however. "It is a long way to the the top if you wanna rock and roll. You can't always get what you want. And parents just don't understand." Among other things that are worth believing in: Finn's band The Hold Steady, who put on a terrific, convulsively rocking, take-no-prisoners WCL show that was the high water mark of the Non-Comm convention, which also featured Ani DiFranco and the good Dr. John. (Also pictured here, playing piano and showing off his dance moves, in fuzzy photos I took on my need-of-an-upgrade camera phone.) The bespectacled, spastic Finn, along with guitarist Tad Kubler and the rest of The Hold Steady, come back to town on June 28 for the Paul Green School Of Rock Festival at the Festival Pier, and you'd be foolish to miss them. Their fourth LP, Stay Positive, comes out July 15. Dr. John's still-righteously-enraged-over-Katrina The City That Care Forgot is out now.
