I wander into a rave...am assaulted by hair

I mentioned my Divine Fits adventure earlier in the week, and now the complete report is up at Blurt. I am an idiot. What can I say?

How Not to Review a Divine Fits Concert

I spent all of last Friday night at the wrong show.

I'd planned to catch the Divine Fits, the new sparse, electro-funky super collaboration between Spoon's Britt Daniel, Wolf Parade's Dan Boecker, New Bomb Turks' Sam Brown and Alexi Taylor. I'd been listening all week to A Thing Called Divine Fits, in fact, and was kind of excited about seeing it in real life. But oh, terrible thing, Divine Fits was downstairs and Conspirator, a Disco Biscuits electronic dance side project, was upstairs, and I followed the crowds without thinking, up to the big room, where a big synthesized bass drum was thumping already, four on the floor loud enough to rattle your esophagus...as it would thump for the rest of the night. I stayed up there for roughly three hours, in the vain hope that, somehow, what I was hearing would align with what I expected to hear, and sadly, figured it out only around midnight, when Divine Fits had already finished.

How could I be so stupid? How could I not know the difference? Here are seven excuses, all pretty lame:

1. A Thing Called Divine Fits is by far the most electronically rooted thing that Britt Daniel has ever done...maybe he really likes drum ‘n bass and wanted to tour with bands like that?
2. The opening band is something called Strobe Horse, which is a mostly electronic local band...the kind of outfit that could very well use laptops and keyboards and drum machines.
3. There's a drum kit behind the mountains of speakers, which I look at hopefully throughout the evening, as one act after another relies on programmed and sampled beats. (Conspirator uses live drums.)
4. If Britt Daniel were ever to dress up in sun-glasses, a furry top-hat and feather boa, don't you think he'd look sort of like this?

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1-800 Band

No reviews running today, nothing exciting coming in the mail, so time to start trolling the WFMU heavily played list for bloggable ideas...and I find this.

The 1-800 Band is a four-piece out of Brooklyn pursuing a very catchy, keyboard-leavened variety of garage rock. Kind of basic, but super fun...



Like this one a lot.


There are a whole bunch of live tracks (which, honestly, sound about as good productinon-wise as the video) at the Free Music Archive.

Naomi Punk

Slow day, not much happening...which makes it that much harder to do even the stuff that I could be doing...

Anyway, this is a great track, almost stirred me from my torpor.

Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby

I was really happy with the way this one came out...up today at Dusted.

Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby
A Working Museum
Southern Domestic

“Do You Remember That?,” the final song on this third Wreckless Eric (Goulden) and Amy Rigby album, tells the story of how the unlikely pair became a couple. It starts with Rigby covering “Whole Wide World” at a club in Hull with its author in the audience, glances over the tentative beginnings (“Everyone said I should stay away from you, but I didn’t listen”), remembers early bonding over music (“We played guitars, sang ‘Me and Bobby McGee’”) and describes a disastrous first show as a duo (“Together we were crap, do you remember that?”). The song is like a more entertaining version of listening to your parents telling you the story of how they first met, except that it rhymes and follows a melody that sticks in your head. And in a way, that’s what Goulden and Rigby do best: translate the medium-sized, particular events of their shared lives into songs. The most intricate, personal details are presented with the ends tucked in and the syllables lined up. It sounds effortless, as if they’d found the lyrics this way, as if all life happened in rhyming verse.

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Dum Dum Girls

I think Dum Dum Girls is my favorite of all the aughts/early teens girl groups, largely on the strength of Dee Dee's fantastic, Chrissie Hynde-ish alto, but also because of the casual strenghth of the songs she writes. her songs are never showy or fuzzy, there are no weird instrumental touches or off-beat arrangement choices, but they work really well within the punk-slanted-Spector-vaulting category that she shares with the Slumberland roster, all of the ex-Vivian Girls, Best Coast and assorted others. She's maybe my favorite female singer of her generation and getting better all the time -- witness her new EP End of Days, which has been out for a week or two, and features this single, "Lord Knows."

Had kind of an interesting weekend, starting with a really botched attempt to see Divine Fits, winding through an extremely young but rather good "Romeo and Juliet" production and ending now with all hell breaking loose on a work project.

Also, on Saturday, BIll and I had a quick beer to celebrate 22 years of marriage.

So there's that.

The Barbaras...finally, a record

I've got a little review of the Barbaras one-and-only album, a piece of work that very nearly never got released.

The review's up at Blurt.

BARBARAS
The Barbaras 2006-2008
(Goner)


The Barbaras, out of Memphis, made goofy, rough-edged, addictively tuneful garage pop. They performed with props and costumes, putting on elaborate shows for scanty punk crowds. A fixture in the Memphis scene of the late aughts, their recorded output was, up until now, a 7" single put out by Goner in 2010. The a-side, "Summertime Road," got a fair amount of blog love, its bleary good cheer nearly drowned in distortion and bottom-of-a-deep-well sonics.

The Barbaras' full-length is altogether cleaner and more pop, the group's giddy psychedelic side and penchant for melody brought out by clearer production. It was produced, as it happens, by Jay Reatard, and at about the same time that Reatard was, himself, turning towards tunefulness with Watch Me Fall.

The Barbaras album was originally slated for release on In the Red in 2010, but very nearly never got released at all. The band was closely aligned with Jay Reatard - they opened for him and two members (Stephen Pope and Billy Hayes) were in his band. Reatard was producing the album - and had the master tapes and files - when Pope and Hayes quit his band mid-tour in October 2009. Bad feelings flowed and Reatard threatened to destroy the tapes. A few months later he died, and everyone assumed that the Barbaras sessions were lost forever. But then Alicia Trout found the files on Reatard's hard drive and the project was revived.

The Barbaras have mostly moved on - three of them are in the Magic Kids, others have moved out of Memphis - but their lone full-length album makes you wish that they had continued. It's poised somewhere between the straight-up, one-two punk of bands like Tyvek and the languid pop of Real Estate. "Flow," which first appeared on the "Summertime Road" single, here expands into psychedelia, lush vocal harmonies draped over its twitchy, tetchy rhythm. "Super Ball" bounces between silly exuberance and romantic longing. Reatard was fascinated, during the last years of his life, with New Zealand lo-fi pop, and it's easy to see how that might have slipped into the Barbaras' toolbox as well. "Topsy Turvy Magic" reflects Kinks-ish musical hall through the Clean's fuzz-crusted mirror, even adding some Wilson-esque vocal flourishes on top. Yet however elaborate the arrangements can get, there's a disarming, punk-style enthusiasm behind them.

Let's not kid ourselves. If The Barbaras 2006 - 2008 had never gotten out, not much in music or life or art would have changed. But these songs go down like melted ice cream on a warm day, and you've hardly finished one when another one charms its way into view. They're fun, they're easy to love, and they're here. Isn't that enough to celebrate?

DOWNLOAD: "The Flow," "Topsy Turvy Magic" JENNIFER KELLY

Late summer, early fall tunes

I haven't done this in a while, but here are some songs I was listening to in August and September.

Ty Segall, "Love Fuzz" From his third album this year, the awesomely guitar-centric Twins
The Legs, "(Let's Do the) Legs" Rough-assed garage rock from Goner, the band (not Goner) now sadly defunct.
Chris Brokaw, "Danny Borracho" Possibly the single most under-rated player, writer, performer with another really good album out.
Royal Trux, "Liar" From a reissue of RTX's chaotic, Stones-loving Accelerator
Tamaryn, "I'm Gone" This year's best dream pop...which is kind of a crowded category.
Mark Eitzel, "Oh Mercy" Third solo album, first since his heart-attack, wonderfully pop and full of bile.
Harlan, "You're a Teenager" Bedroom electronic-pop from Louisiana.
Calexico, "Para" From the much loved Algiers, Calexico's best in a long time.
Rangda, "Idol's Eye" I've got an interview in the pipe where Bishop talks about how Chris Corsano offhandedly suggested putting the main riff into a minor key...which turned out to be almost impossible to play except he's fucking Richard Bishop, so no problem.
Firewater, "Ex-Millionaire Mambo" World's happiest, bounciest song about living in a box, keeping life savings in one's socks.
Black Swan Runners, "Ff Ff Fire" It's just indie pop, but good indie pop.
Cleaners from Venus, "Marilyn on a Train" This is probably CFV's "She's Fetching," the song that plays at proms in some alternate, preferable universe.

Get it here.

Happy Friday...I'm going to see Divine Fits tonight, if I can stay awake.