Death+Taxes Issue 18 2009 by Death+Taxes

Dan Deacon Chairlift School of Seven Bells Friendly Fires

D+T’s SXSW Artist Guide

On Tour with Matt & Kim The Craziest Will Oldham Interview Ever pg. 50

SNL’s Jorma Taccone his First Solo Interview

Animal Collective tHe MEN BEHIND THE MASKS

$4.99 US / 4.99 CAN MAR/APR 09

*For example, a Vivid Black 2009 XL 1200 Nightster motorcycle with a $9,899 ($9,999 in California) MSRP, 10% down payment, a 72-month repayment term and 12.99% APR, would result in monthly payments of $178.80 ($180.60 options such as color, and delivery charges. Dealer prices may vary. Model shown includes custom features that may vary price and monthly payments. ÂŠ2009 H-D. Harley, Harley-Davidson, Dark Custom, Nightster and the Dark

THE NIGHTSTER速 STARTING AT $9,899 *

in California). MSRP does not include tax, license, title, registration, documentation fees, Custom logo are among the trademarks of H-D Michigan, LLC.

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9

Features 70 | ANIMAL COLLECTIVE Many, many people are betting that Merriweather Post Pavilion will be the best record of 2009. Hey, we can’t blame ‘em. By Joe Colly | Photos By Ray Lego 80 | JORMA TACCONE Andy Samberg’s sidekick steps into the spotlight. By Todd Lewin | Photos by Ray Lego 92 | THE ORIGINAL DON DRAPER George Lois sets the story straight on the sixties madman era. By Alex Moore | Photo by Luke Lois 98 | FUCK YEAH PHOTO FEATURE Yup—that’s a microphone up the butt. Photos by Tod Seelie 112 | USCG RESCUE Living and dying in big blue. Photos by Nick LaVecchia

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 HELL O P H O T o B Y R A Y L E G O

Discover the legend of the Zodiac race at onitsukatiger.com

Departments

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 HELL O

HELLO M A S THEAD

Editor Stephen Blackwell Publisher

Editor Alexander Moore Doug Perkul

Creative Director Director of Photography Advertising Director

Isaac Lekach Joey Parlett Ray Lego Shanon Kelley

Copy Editor

Angie Hughes

Managing Editor

Contributing Writers

Contributing Photographers

Intern

Tobias Carroll Joe Colly Danny Fasold Max Goldblatt Shane Gill Amber L. Herzog Todd Lewin Brian Merchant Matt Sweeny DJ Pangburn Doug Wallen Brian Appio Blossom Berkofsky Tom Hines Nick LaVecchia Clay Patrick McBride Stephen Schuster Siobhan Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Brien Drew Reynolds Tod Seelie Jennie Warren Amelia Kreminski

Advertising Shanon Kelley, 212.925.3853 shanon@deathandtaxesmagazine.com Liquid Publishing President Vice President of Operations Accounting Managers Accounting Assistant Death +Taxes Magazine 72 Spring Street, Ste. 304 New York, NY 10012 Ph: 212.274.8403 Fax: 212.925.3853

Jeffrey Geller Jonathan Abenhaim Sara Flexer, Michael Labinski Joe DeMasi Liquid Publishing 20855 NE 16th Ave, Ste. C16 Miami, FL 33179 Ph: 305.770.4488 Fax: 305.770.4489

All content Copyright 2008 Death & Taxes Magazine 2008 Liquid Publishing ISSN: 1930-3424 No part of Death & Taxes may be reproduced in any form by any means without written consent from Liquid Publishing, LLC

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 HELL O

HELLO EDIT O R S ' LETTER

OPTIONS In an era of worldwide recession, we’re given two options. The first is to get down into fetal position, complain constantly and hope we don’t lose our jobs, all while listening to depressing music and finding joy in nothing. It’s a popular option. We call it Option A: The Recession, and How to Be a Bitch About it. We know that choosing Option A is easy peasy because complaining is second nature to Americans. Why don’t I have any money? Why’s my therapist such a dick? Who let Kanye start singing? Who the hell nominated Benjamin Button for all those Oscars? If it takes a Herculean effort to wake up every morning and not go, “Why?” we think you need a change. We call it Option B: Lighten Up, Already. Things suck—agreed. But, and we could be wrong about it, we

get the vibe we’re not going to be eating doled-out soup and bread in front of Madison Square Garden anytime soon. Maybe you can’t spend fifty bucks on a round of drinks, maybe you can’t spring one hundred on a haircut—so what? Music, the life spring of our culture, is cheaper and easier to get than ever. We’ve got a new president, and when he speaks you don’t get a pit in your stomach. The era of embarrassment is coming to a close. To celebrate, we’ve got a slew of incredible, innovative artists in this issue, and if there were one word we could use to collectively describe them it’d be “vivacity.” We’ve also got a portfolio featuring the musicians of the Fuck Yeah Tour. These are people who know how to have a good time. And we’ve tapped into the creative genius of the original Mad Man, George Lois, an ebullient troublemaker if there ever was one. We implore you to enjoy this issue. Actually, we implore to just enjoy. Times are tough. Try to remember you’ve got options. - The Editors

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 HELL O

CUTTH E FAT F I L M S.CO M

HELLO C O NTRI B U T O R S

Tom Hines

Todd Lewin

Jim McGinley

Tom Hines was born and raised in Brandon, Mississippi. He lives in New York City with his wife Michelle and their two cats. He studied fine art at Cooper Union and currently specializes in both art and fashion photography.

Originally from Miami, Todd Lewin now lives in New York City where he is a copywriter and real estate agent. He has two dogs named Alabama and Moses, and he cares for them deeply. One time, he got jumped on the G train. While that sounds like a euphemism for sex, it is not. He loves plaid, ranch, and remixes. He dislikes bouncers, mom jeans, and midtown tourists holding hands.

Jim McGinley is a decorated United States Coast Guard helicopter pilot. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 2003 for the rescue of five sailors over two hundred miles off of Cape Cod loose in fifty-foot seas. McGinley spent his career saving lives at sea, and he told Death+Taxes his story, which is featured in the USCG photo portfolio on page 112.

Clay Patrick McBride

Nick LaVecchia

Max Goldblatt

Photographer Clay Patrick McBride began his visual training in the South of France, where he spent his late teens and early twenties. His portraits of athletes and musicians have appeared in the pages of Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Parade and XXL. Clay’s commercial work includes print campaigns for Pontiac, Boost Mobile and Nike. Of Matt & Kim, whom Clay shot for this issue, he says, “Like a two headed monster destroying a village, it was beautiful to see two unique energies become one. I was totally psyched to be in their rehearsal space listening to the manic sounds of their love.”

Nick LaVecchia grew up in suburban New Jersey and found that board sports suited him at an early age. Soon he realized being outside shooting pictures was way better than sitting in front of a computer working for the man, so he quit and bought some camera gear. It wasn’t long before trips to Africa, South America and Costa Rica (as well as the images that came from them) fully inspired Nick to pursue photography as his life’s passion. He will hike, swim, float, dive, jump and stand for hours to get the shot. Nick is equally at home shooting people as he is shooting large carnivores and huge waves. Nick’s work has been published in many national and international publications including Outside Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Surfers Journal, Water, and Drift UK.

Max Goldblatt is a walking anachronism. He writes about food for D+T, yet he is a lifelong vegetarian. He was born and lives in Los Angeles, but he doesn’t drive. He is a recovering child actor without a drug problem. He's great at getting girls' numbers, but he doesn't have a phone. [Ed: We’re pretty sure that last one isn't true.] In addition, Max choreographed MGMT’s video for “Electric Feel” and The Killers’ “Spaceman,” and wrote this bio, and, okay, he’s bad at getting phone numbers and he has an iPhone and a landline. www.tothemaxxx.tumblr.com

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 HELL O

HELLO Y O U M I S S ED IT

The Times They Are A-Changin’ Bob Dylan Performing at an Anti-Nuke Rally in Pasadena, California. June 6, 1982 Photograph by Neal Preston

Times are always changing—it’s just part of the deal with time. But sometimes they seem to do a lot more changing in a lot less time. For better or worse, now is one of those times. The real triumph of Bob Dylan’s music was in the way it brought people together, to think hard about the world they lived in and to demand something better from their government and from each other. Most of us, including our new president, are way too young to remember anything about the sixties. But anyone who got involved in the campaign to elect him got to experience something similar—a broad demand for accelerated change. Everyone knows times are changing these days. Global wellbeing seems to hinge on fancy terms no one had even heard of three months ago, and no one really knows where we go from here. Plenty of questions, no great answers. After all this time, they’re apparently still blowin’ in the wind.

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 HELL O © N eal P re s ton 2 0 0 9

THE LATEST BOOKS • DIGITALISM • THRE ADS • POLITICK • SUCK • CON FESSIONS • AN D MORE

Steven Soderbergh ’s

WATCHMEN Alan Moore is an interesting character. He’s a comic book writer. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He’s also one of the only people around in this economic climate who actually begrudges— resists, even—getting paid out the ass. As comic after comic have been spun into Hollywood coin (V for Vendetta, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) Moore has griped and grumbled all the way to the bank. Though V for Vendetta was well loved, neither Natalie Portman’s shaved head nor its box office success favorably swayed Moore’s desire to support the film. He still claims to not have seen V or any of his other adapted work. Watchmen is the latest of his creations to get the Hollywood treatment, and as such, the latest to not garner his endorsement. Photo By Abbot Gensler Courtesy of Sony And this time he has company. For starters, there were the epic legal battles. Rights to the book have changed hands a couple times, and after Warner Brothers spent over $120 million making the film Twentieth Century Fox decided they were the ones who actually owned it. The result was one of the biggest, most publicized legal blunders in film history, which held up the release for months and must have had Alan Moore just rolling in aisles.

THE G REATE ST OF THE

LATEST

Then there was the early resentment from hardcore fans. Director Zack Snyder’s decision to dress the Watchmen in costumes resembling Joel Schumacher’s loathed and ridiculed nipple-boasting Batsuit have sent purists reeling. Unlike your average caped-crusader tale, this isn’t a typical good-versus-evil scenario. It was written in the mid eighties, so the opposing force comes not from the Middle East but from the Soviet Union, and the story hinges on the threat of nuclear annihilation. As Moore is wont to do, the comic book medium was simply a tool to tell a bigger story, warn of looming dangers, and dare I say it—enlighten. So altering the book’s catastrophic ending for a more politically correct one didn’t do Snyder any favors with the die-hards fans—or, presumably, with Alan Moore. Months later, after a multi-million-dollar settlement with Fox, Watchmen will finally see a release March 6. For better or worse, all the bitterness, drama and griping have turned Watchmen into one of the most anticipated movies of the year. It’s the kind of hype that almost no movie can live up to. Throngs of rabid fans will line up to find out if it does. But the one guy who probably won’t care is Alan Moore, since he’ll never see it anyway.

The New Polaroid: Why Instant Just Won’t Die | Rebecca Turbow on the clothing of Of Montreal | Andy Warhol–The Party Continues | The New American Socialism (This Time We Mean It) | The Wheel Of Suck: What Sucks Now

T he L ate s t

BOOKs

B y S T E P H E N B L A CKW E L L

Two New Books Explore Warhol’s Expanding Legacy

ANDY WARHOL THE RECORD COVERS 1949-1987

Covering Andy Warhol is the pits. What the hell is left to write? Warhol—who founded the sixties pop art movement (really?) and loved celebrities (you don’t say?), produced the first Velvet Underground record (no shit!), survived a bullet to the chest by an arch feminist (get out of town!)—is America’s preeminent dead artist. The man spoke of becoming “a machine,” and there is little evidence to suggest that he hadn’t, which you’ll realize as you pore over these books. With so much to hear, see, watch, read, and so on, it’s a wonder what draws a kid into the world of Andy Warhol twenty years after his death and forty after his artistic peak. It’s all stuff you see anyway— celebrities, Coca-Cola bottles, cans of soup. But his work continues t o entice newcomers, as if they’ve just seen these banal American objects for the very first time.

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 LATE S T

LIVE CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ

WARHOL LIVE Andy Warhol: The Record Covers 1949 – 1987 (Banana) Warhol Live (Silver)

We’re often introduced to Andy Warhol as the guy who ran the out-of-control drugand-sex chamber, The Factory. But before he aluminum foiled any loft space, Warhol (née Warhola) was a New York City émigré from Pittsburgh who needed to make money, so he made album covers. Lots of them. And they are, as you suspect, the subject of Record Covers 1949 – 1987. The ones from the sixties have more passion. All the iconic covers were created then, including the Stones’ Sticky Fingers, which was banned by the Catholic Church. Warhol Live explores Warhol as music aficionado, glam artist, party promoter, producer, director—the list goes on. He

started shit, and a lot of it was good. Underground parties didn’t exist before Warhol. Downtown cachet didn’t exist before Warhol. Strobe lights at rock concerts didn’t exist before Warhol. Neither did indie filmmaking. In fact, almost every aspect of urban cool and its subsequent identities are owed in some way to Warhol, definitely not to his chagrin. To him, nothing seemed worthwhile could it not be put on repeat. The books themselves are beautiful, especially the reflective silver cover of Warhol Live. Both editions are coffee-table size, which makes them a pain to read, but suits the images best. They’re an enviable addition to any Warhol follower’s library. And yes, they make a fine gateway for the curious newcomer, too, which I suspect there are a lot of.

An Awesome Book

In The Flesh

As a youth Dallas Clayton wrote zines and printed them for free at Kinko’s. Now with a child of his own, Clayton, releases An Awesome Book, his debut children’s book dedicated to his son. You may not have a kid, but times are tough and this is a touching read—dare we say inspiring—at any age. Available at www.dallasclayton.com -IL

In the Flesh is the new debut graphic novel by Israeli illustrator Koren Shadmi. It’s filled with dark, arresting images: a severed head held casually by its owner, a radioactive woman causing the illness of her lover, and a girl biting into a rat in a subway station. But upon a closer read they illustrate tales of relationships and young love, literally illustrating the nightmare love can be. www.amazon.com -BM

U O Y E HAV ? D R A HE

e h t r o f p o h s is the one stop . f o o r e n o r e d n u l l a , s d n e r t t s e t la February 17–19, 2009 — 9am-6pm | Las Vegas Convention Center — C5 Entrance Register now at www.pooltradeshow.com

The Wheel of

D+T's guide to cultural highs and lows.

Disclaimer: Sure, the Wheel was funnier before the global collapse, but we're keeping it, becuause, what the hell—we were here first. N

Bush Leaves Back to the ranch, psycho. Obama Enters Hopefully he’ll nail the oath of office in 2013.

Music Industry Stops Suing Kids Guess they’ve finally learned not to bite the hand that feeds ‘em—even if it takes a cookie from the cookie jar every now and again.

Airliner lands in the Hudson Ok, that landing was bad ass. But seriously–aren’t we all a little disturbed to know an airliner can get taken out by a few Canadian Geese? WTF?

CO R E O F

Steve Jobs’ Decline We thought an Apple a day kept the doctor away? Here’s to a speedy recovery.

The Middle East Possibly worse than Zimbabwe.

John Boner "You say Boehner, we say Boner."

Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion Yes, it’s really that good.

N O

Big Love Season 3 HBO’s hit show is back—we’re starting to rethink this whole monogamy thing.

Madoff He shamelessly stole from non-profits, though we’re all pretty much nonprofits these days…

T S

THEY DON'T SUCK: Cotton Jones Some people just sound like Jim Morrison when they sing. For Cotton Jones’, Michael Nau it’s not an affection. He doesn’t even listen to The Doors. Nor should he, in my opinion. Morrison was a drunken clown. No offense eighth-graders just discovering marijuana, Zeppelin et. al. But I digress; Page France was Nau’s former band. Cotton Jones is his new one with old band mate, Whitney McGraw. The name is evidently meaningless, but Paranoid Cocoon is not. It’s a stellar debut from a duo worthy keeping track of.—IL

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 LATE S T

T he L a t e s t

TELEVISION

By ALEX MOORE

What now, Jack?

24 FACT

t its best and at its worst, 24 has been the most prescient TV show maybe ever. Just two months after 9/11, Jack Bauer stormed onto the world scene full of post-9/11 fervor, out for retribution. While the show embodied the obvious new values of the post-9/11 mentality, it also managed to predict many of the less obvious pitfalls that would come to define the new era. There was the idea that Jack had to lose his soul to get the job done—which foreshadowed the real-life moral costs of pursuing our war on terror. There was season two’s prediction of a progressive African American president to lead the next administration. And in 2007, with the violence in pre-surge Iraq dragging on and the mainstream American public growing weary about the whole ordeal, the critics turned on 24 as being stale and predictable. Entertainment Weekly said, “Jack is back, but this Jack is wack.” The public had lost its taste for blood, and its taste for 24 along with it. Continuing the show’s tango with reality, 2009 24 is the second longest-running found Jack out of the Agency altogether. “He's espionage series in television history, behind the original Mission: found a place he thinks he belongs and a job he Impossible series enjoys doing that doesn't involve the government,” explained co-executive producer Manny Coto. On his first day on the job President Obama signed several executive orders, closing Guantanamo and banning the use of torture by the CIA. It reversed the Bush Administration’s by-any-means-necessary moral code. The real-life CIA was none too pleased. I’m sure that day agents were asking each other, “What are we supposed to do now?” I’m sure the producers of 24 were asking the same thing. What the world will become, and who Jack Bauer will become, in the post-post-9/11 era is anybody’s guess. But if the show has proven anything, you can count on this: They will probably mirror each other damn near perfectly.

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 LATE S T

TV FU N HOUSE

United States of Tara

Showtime has been on a hot streak— Weeds is an undeniable hit and This American Life a downright coup d’etat. But when the poster campaign for United States of Tara started to roll out over New York and L.A., featuring four distinct Toni Collettes (or Taras) dolled up to represent each one of her multiple personalities (or states) we were highly skeptical. But we’ve been served. Poster be damned—it’s another triumph. The show, created by Diablo Cody and Stephen Spielberg, centers on Tara, who decides to reject her meds and live with multiple personalities. The premise might seem a little preachy, but Brie Larson, who plays Collette’s rebellious daughter, tells us not to take it too seriously. “Our main goal on the show is to have an underlying sense of love. The show revolves around an unstable heroine, who, with the help and understanding of others, gets through it.” Of the Speilberg/Cody factor, Larson says, “They were on set eighty per cent of the time and were both quite vocal in every decision made—down to my haircut.” Half the show’s fun is watching Collette’s thespian gymnastics. Does she go all Brando and refuse to come out of character? “You would think she would,” says Larson, “considering how far the characters are from her. But she is able to go into each character with such ease. She is my hero.”

NEW MUSIC NEVER GETS OLD New sounds every day at eMusic.

Get 25 Free SonGS at WWW.EMUSIC.COM/DEATHANDTAXES25 MY MORNING JACKET EVIL URGES

Kentucky quintet My Morning Jacket skillfully redraw the classic rock blueprint, adding strange hallways and dark corners. They swaddle grizzled guitars in sheets of reverb, propelling their songs with pounding percussion and topping them with Jim James’ unearthly howl. Their live shows are legendary: wild, wooly affairs that see their soulful songs expanding endlessly and incredibly. You can sense that same restless energy on My Morning Jacket’s latest record Evil Urges, now available on eMusic. Whether it’s the limber-limbed choogle of the title track or the full-on roar of “Remnants,” My Morning Jacket make passionate music for passionate music fans. Don’t call it “classic rock” – just call it classic. Get up to 25 downloads and 1 audiobook download free with 7-day eMusic trial subscriptions. Separate subscriptions required. Offer available to first-time eMusic customers only. Internet access, registration, and credit or debit card required. Audiobook offer only valid on 1-credit audiobooks; some titles require multiple credits for download. Limited time offer. Offer and eMusic’s prices are subject to change without notice and are subject to eMusic’s terms of use. eMusic and the eMusic logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of eMusic.com Inc. in the USA or other countries. All rights reserved. iPod®, and Zune® are registered trademarks of their respective owners, Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corporation. Neither Apple or Microsoft are partners or sponsors of eMusic.

T he L ate s t

BEST THREADS

B y IS A A C L E K A C H

Tell me about your line. It started with my senior collection called, A Safe Place. Each piece focused on protecting a different area of the body. The launching of Safe was something that just evolved, but has also been a very long and arduous process. I guess things are finally starting to take off, so I finally feel some relief. Where is it available? Online as well as at Otte in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Pixie Market in Manhattan and Los Angeles and Love Brigade in Brooklyn, as well as a bunch of other boutiques in the U.S. and one in London called No-One. Are you still wearing gray or have you moved on to another color? I’m pretty happy with gray these days—it feels really refreshing after wearing the turquoise for so many years. How did you get into turquoise? I originally discovered it through a turquoise and silver ring I had as a child and then when I was in high school I got really into South American turquoise jewelry. When I started making clothing I was drawn to that color in fabric as well. I can’t see myself switching to another color anytime soon. Is your limited color palate restricted to your clothes, or does it extend to say, how you decorate your apartment? Oh yes, for sure. If I had my way, almost everything would be gray. How did you get involved with Kevin Barnes? We originally met at an of Montreal show at SXSW in 2005. Designing for of Montreal is fulfilling in a way Safe isn’t, because I get to make the more outrageous costume-like clothing that I don’t really get to anymore for my actual clothing line. Seeing him perform in them makes me really happy.

Quirky New York designer plays it Safe. Rebecca Turbow is a fashion designer. Her line is called Safe and she only dresses in the color gray. What’s more, she designs costumes for of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes. Yup, she’s pretty cool.

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 LATE S T P hoto b y T om H i ne s

I saw a photo of the Ting Tings wearing Safe. I thought the line was for women, but Jules was in Safe as well. Is there a men's constituent as well? I’ve done men’s t-shirts and sweatshirts for years, but people don’t really know about it. He was wearing one of the sweatshirts. I’m actually adding some unisex pieces to the fall ‘09 line and then hopefully by spring 2010, I will have an actual men’s line started What are you working on now? Rushing to get my fall 2009 collection finished and starting on a new costume for Kevin.

T he L a t e s t

DIGITALISM

B y I s aa c L e k a c h

The Instax 200 Shake it like a Fuji Picture? Doesn’t have the same ring—oh well.

All Hail The Mikey

The Mikey By Blue Microphones $79.99

Dimensions 178.5(W) x 94.5(H) x 117.5(D) mm Weight 650g (without batteries, strap and film) Number of prints 10 per pack

$53.95 | fujifilm.com Twenty years ago, rifling through my friend’s parents’ bedroom cabinets in search of god knows what, we found a Polaroid of his mother’s breasts pressed together like books on a shelf. In February of last year, Polaroid announced they’d be discontinuing their production of film. Recalling my first (post-breastfeeding) exposure to the female anatomy, I suppressed a mournful groan. Thanks a lot, Digital Age! Fortunately for amateur pornographers, voyeurs like myself and everyone in between, Fujifilm has filled the void left behind by Polaroid and created its own brand of instant cameras. While there isn’t any assurance Fujifilm’s venture will stay solvent, we can at least, for the moment, allow ourselves a sigh of relief and burn through what’s left of our income on instant film (which is just as expensive as it was when Polaroid made it). The Instax 200 is Fujifilm’s flagship product. Sure, it’s bulky (almost two pounds) but it also features some welcome amendments to the Polaroid original. In general, the colors are more vivid, thanks to its retractable high-quality lens, multiple exposure options and focus settings. So spread the love—for posterity's sake.

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 LATE S T

It’s 2009, and the iPod is still kicking. It seems that Apple and its handheld music player are immune to the economic uncertainty looming over global industry. 22.7 million were purchased during the holidays, which was the weakest holiday shopping season in modern time. So what is the most popular music player in history poised to do next? Become the most popular recorder. Audio recording is a great iPod function that is reasonably overlooked. The microphones manufactured for its purpose are flimsy pieces of trash that produce low-quality recordings—right? Nope. Not anymore. Blue Microphones, one of the best mic manufacturers around, is getting into the iPod game, thank god. They’ve just introduced The Mikey, the first high-quality iPod recorder to hit shelves. Microphones for the iPod are handy dandy when recording lectures (boooring) or interviews, but, with The Mikey, Blue focused on doing what it does best: recording live music with unrivaled clarity. This is great news for bedroom recording artists everywhere, but The Mikey just may reinvent the concert bootleg while it’s at it.

Road to Socialism

1917 Bolshevik Revolution WWI got the ball rolling on the “killing people” thing, and the Bolshevik revolution took that ball and ran with it. Basically Lenin came along and said, “I’ll see you a Marx, and I’ll raise you a crazy.” His party overthrew the government and the socialist Soviet Union was born.

1848 Marx Publishes the Communist Manifesto And it was bad news for bourgeois landowners everywhere. Marx sparked a revolution based on powerful principles that ended up being pretty much impossible to implement without killing people.

1961 Berlin Wall Erected After the wall was put up to separate socialist East Germany and capitalist West Germany, Berlin officially became the shittiest place on earth, though we did get some good rock songs out of it (no, we’re not talking about “Winds of Change”). The wall fell in 1989, ushering in German reunification and democracy.

1964 U.S. Enters Vietnam War The most enduring myth of the Vietnam War is that America won. It didn’t. We went to war to stop the communist Vietnam Worker’s Party in the north from coming to power in the rest of the country. After the war the country reunited under the Communist Party of Vietnam. Woops! Chalk one up for the Reds.

1966 Chinese Cultural Revolution Holy shitballs. This can easily be called the worst idea in social history. Mao Zedong, (already with a spotty track record as Communist Party chairman) actually encouraged his country into chaotic anarchy, to eradicate the “liberal bourgeoisie.” And they did! The educated were killed, the food trashed, everyone froze and starved. Total mess.

1991 Russian Communism Ends The late-era Soviet Politburo had the kind of corruption that would make Rod Blagojevich look like a Franciscan monk. Gorbachev tried to turn the ship around with his “Glasnost and Perestroika,” or “transparency and openness,” but it was too little too late: By that point the Russians didn’t give a shit about openness—they wanted to make some damn money.

Am I A Socialist? While campaigning for the presidency during the summer of 2008, President Obama told the infamous conservative swindler Joe the Plumber that it was a good idea to “spread the wealth around.” From that moment forward, Obama was branded a socialist (among other things) while his opponent John McCain continually referred to him as redistributionist-in-chief. Though the redistributionist-in-chief tag was kind of funny, it attacked Obama’s proposed tax policy, which involved cutting taxes for the least wealthy while raising taxes for the very wealthy. This is one of the fundamental differences between conservatives and Democrats, and, as the polls showed, it holds a lot of sway during an election season where the economy is collapsing. Now, if you’re child of the eighties, you were more or less bred to despise socialism. Rambo hated communists, Rocky hated communists, G.I. Joe (probably) hated communists, and the real bad guys in the then-WWF were The Bolsheviks alongside the Arabian scrapper, the Iron Shiek. Yet, the overwhelming majority of people in their twenties voted for Obama.

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 LATE S T

If I read one more ten thousand-word article about why the economy collapsed I may barf. That said, last year’s economic disruptions are responsible for the period of pseudo socialism we’re experiencing. So let’s quickly re-cap how we got here: The crisis was an instance where you actually could blame everything on the future. Or futures, rather—the derivatives used to create value though contracts between buyers and sellers of mortgages and stocks. You’ve heard a lot about credit-default swaps and mortgagebacked securities, and how these were the financial instruments evil capitalists employed to destroy America and its free-market philosophy. Not so. They were employed because Americans will make any attempt to increase value and profitability. This is how brokers sell mortgages, it’s how real-estate agents sell houses, and it’s how hedge-fund managers rake in the big bonuses. It’s how America stays America. After the tech bubble burst earlier this decade, people were hurt, but not cleared out. Microsoft didn’t lay off five thousand people. Our financial institutions were still solvent, and there was

1925 Communist Party Forms in Korea We all know how this turned out: psychopathic leaders, a disastrous economy, humanitarian atrocities, and nuclearcapabilities just to sweeten the deal. Did we mention the size of its standing army? One of the largest in the world.

1919 The US Communist Party Forms You know how the FBI and the CIA hate terrorists, and they have all these egregious tactics they employ to shutter their cause? Well they cut their chops on US Communists. After Reagan’s election in 1981 the party went bust.

1950 China Becomes Communist As is often the case, socialism in China sprung from violent revolution. In this case, we’re talking one serious motherfucker of a revolution. The Chinese Civil War lasted from 1927 to 1950—so long they had to call a time out to fight WWII, the Sino-Japanese War, and then finish the game. Mao Zedong’s team won.

2008 Guns N’ Roses release Chinese Democracy And it wasn’t half bad. The title was a hell of a lot more effective in the early nineties, though. “Whoa, democracy… in China? You’re blowing my mind, Axl!” But to release it in a year where China’s economy grew 12% due to the exercise of free-market principles? Not so much.

1950 McCarthyism Spreads Senator Joe McCarthy scared the bejesus out of Americans when he announced that there were Communists working inside the US government. A witch-hunt ensued, spreading paranoia across every level of American life. And who could forget the Hollywood Blacklist?

2008 TARP! Remember when a tarp was a big blue thing you threw over your car? Before it was a big Red thing you throw in your bank? In October 2008, American capitalism collapsed. Without nationalizing our banks and industries it would have been game over. By borrowing from the socialist playbook, we’re still going (for now). Maybe these Reds were onto something all along.

still money to invest. And, hey, houses never lose value—seemed like a solid area to pour resources once tech was no longer viable. American investors and corporations had, until about eight months ago, enormous amounts of faith in the efficiency of markets. So much so that the majority of our financial institutions were willing to bet the farm on the housing market and the securities that mortgages were rolled into. So much so that they would leverage thirty dollars for every single dollar they had in cash. So much so that lenders would offer adjustable-rate-mortgages to people ill equipped to own homes. So when the mortgages reset, hell broke loose. The derivatives that created trillions of dollars of value were wiped out. American mortgage institutions were absorbed into the government; hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money (talk about redistribution) were pumped into private banks to such a degree that the government is still trying to look for ways to not become their primary shareholder, which would effectively cause them to become publicly traded nationalized banks, like the Bank

of (gulp) China. Auto gets a bailout, steel’s next—we definitely haven’t adopted a policy of “strengthening the strong” here. In a truly capitalist, free-market system all these institutions would have collapsed. That they didn’t is due to the taxpayer dollars the government pumped into their coffers to ensure their survival. The goods and services they sell are now social products. And although us taxpayers don’t get a stake in these companies, we’re still practicing the principles of socialism to keep their doors open. And all of this happened before Obama was elected. With his presidency, we'll see new forms of regulation and oversight coupled with government spending initiatives and the redistribution of wealth through taxes. But oversight never lasts too long in America for fear it will constrain the incredible profits available through free-market enterprise. No matter how deep we dip into socialist practices, the free market will always be there, ready to burst whatever bubble we blow up next.

T he L a t e s t

CONFESSIONS Of An Aging Indie Rocker B y D o u g P er k u l

EATS B y M ax G oldblatt

As more and more Americans lose their jobs, (if one counts the under-employed alongside the unemployed, this figure hovers at around thirteen per cent) it is becoming inappropriate to flaunt personal wealth. While we, as a culture of consumers, have long used our shekels (or, more likely, our credit cards) to purchase premium brands that speak to our good taste and upward mobility, the economic climate has made this impossible for many as they trade in Prada for J.C. Penny. For those who still have money, many are hiding their luxury purchases from friends and family to not appear too above this financial meltdown. While I can certainly understand this phenomenon, I believe that the long-term ramifications of such a strategy will be catastrophic to the American way of life. You see this country is based upon the notion of making others feel poor and unworthy at all times. By making others feel inadequate, they are forced to work harder, ultimately making more money, purchasing premium products, basking in their luxury, and thusly uplifting the next rung on the ladder. The

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 LATE S T

newly minted citizens have the responsibility to rub their purchases in others' faces, keeping the cycle moving in a positive direction. If this machine breaks down we will all be in a world of hurt. To avoid such a calamity, I have a remedy that I believe will rectify this situation. For those of you who have money (which I’m guessing will be the majority of you), I suggest you take all of the money out of your mattresses and buy as many shiny new things as possible. This includes, but is not limited to, flat-screen TVs (one per wall is correct), baby seal jackets, titanium denim and diamond-crusted lip balm. For the rest of you (the have-nots), all you need to do is cut out the above logos and sew onto all of your garments. Your friends and family will spend so much time wondering where you got the money for designer goods that they’ll be sure to overlook the fact that you have paper logos scotch-taped onto your Old Navy Puffer. And so the cycle of upward mobility continues.

Trust is fragile. Radiohead trusted their fans to assign a value to In Rainbows and ended up making a mint. A year later, the idea of trust disintegrated as Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme duped fifty billion out of his investors. In today’s economic climate, you would expect a restaurant with a “pay what you want” policy to fail. Weinerei is a popular and cozy wine bar on the hill of Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin. Upon entering, you pay one Euro for an empty wineglass. Before you is a small counter stocked with a selection of reds and whites, many of them German. You pour, drink and try to find a seat at one of the couches or tables. In the back is a second spread: a small selection of fresh organic food. New dishes come out as the previous ones disappear in an endless cycle of luscious quiches, hearty stews, pasta and cakes. You eat as much or as little as you want. You chat with the young international crowd (there’s much English spoken, more than you’d expect) and down a few more glasses. When the time comes to head out, you deposit whatever you feel you owe into a jar on the bar, and you’re out the door. Most customers pay more than they probably owe as a way of rewarding the brave experiment and to ensure that Weinerei stays open. And to make up for the cheap bastards who can’t honor the honor system. So yes, socialism still works and it tastes good, too. Despite the risky business model, Weinerei seems to be thriving. They’ve recently expanded and opened up a second location. Could this work in America? I’m not so sure. Give Obama a few years.

MUSIC

IN THI S I S S UE . . . 36 38 40 42

TELEPATHE VIOLENS FRIENDLY FIRES CHAIRLIFT

44 46 50 56

SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS DAN DEACON WILL OLDHAM MATT & KIM

Y ELLE When you think French dance music, you probably think Daft Punk and Justice. But it’s not all brooding robots, cigarettes, lasers and late-night disaffection. Yelle is almost compulsively lighthearted. The name is apparently a variation on an acronym YEL–You Enjoy Life. In what will no doubt be viewed in retrospect as Dark Days for the world at large, the sounds of Yelle are just what the doctor ordered. Check out “Les Femmes” and “Tristesse Joie,” and dance your cares away.

35 37

The New Kids on The Block By Brian Merchant • Photo by Stephen Schuster

Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais are Telepathe–the umpteenth fast-ascending, uber-buzz band to rise out of Brooklyn's inexhaustible indie scene. But Telepathe is different. Sure, they hang out with TV on the Radio and live above an underground Bushwick show space. But they also love Southern hip-hop. They dance ballet professionally. They've already built a huge fan base in the UK, and the dense, pulsing tunes on Dance Mother, their incoming first album, are set to confound and energize loft-party goers and dance-floor denizens everywhere. So what does 2009's most hyped femme dance band do when you show up at their apartment for an interview? Apparently, they make you spaghetti. I arrive at Busy's place in the early afternoon. She lets me in, and Melissa, who's wearing a platinum blonde wig for the photo shoot, floats by and says hello. I wait in the kitchen for the shoot to wrap, and when it does they come in and promptly offer me some spaghetti. They're hungry. Busy starts boiling water and I start running the recorder, and we talk music and eat pasta and drink tea. And it's all very rock 'n roll. Seriously—don't let all this domesticity fool you. Telepathe sits on the cutting edge of dance music, and they've got an oddball intensity and passion to prove it. I start off asking about the good ol' origin story, how the whole, you know-"Busy's actually a lot better at telling it than I am," Melissa says. "I am?" "She has it—dude, you have it down to a T. I just usually get stuff mixed up at this point. Go for it." So Busy starts explaining how they met, and Melissa jumps in almost immediately anyways. Melissa came to New York after

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 8 M U S I C

dropping out of college around six years ago. Busy came for school, where she studied modern dance. She did ballet, and still dances with a troupe that she describes as "academic," and "even more DIY than our band." It's all improvised and loosely structured. (Note: a post-interview Google search for "Busy Gangnes Ballet" reveals that one random woman's best night on the town, according to some blog post, was a "ballet dance off" against Busy in front of thousands of people on a First Avenue stage. How's that for oddball rock 'n roll?) I ask if there's any crossover: "No modern dance breakouts?" "In Telepathe?" they say in unison, "No." "Well, it's something to consider." I say. "You know what? I feel like I've tried it once or twice, and it just felt too forced. I would rather just play our music than have other people dance to it. Which, I mean, some people do. Like in London we played recently, and I saw people pumping their fists," Busy says. "We were like, whoa, wait—to our music?" Melissa says. "It was fun." "I mean, anytime you get the fist pumping, it can't be a bad thing," I say. "Yeah, it's good. I mean, we haven't been that successful live, but I think we've got it now. We realized that we had to make the music really fucking loud," Melissa says, emphasizing the fucking. "It's like if you're not the opener, you're significantly quieter, and the headliner is so grandiose. And, man—it just sucks. But now we just put up a wall of amplifiers behind us in these little clubs, and just make it so fucking loud," Melissa says. "Do you want tea?" Busy asks me. Yes, yes I do. "We were both listening to a lot of hip hop," Busy says at one point.

This I knew. Every interview I've read mentions their affinity for Hot 97, New York's infamous rap station. I tell them so. "I know, it's getting out of hand. I don't even say that anymore," Melissa says. Busy laughs. "I mean, we really love the production, especially southern hip hop, you know, like bass. We never wanted to be rappers," Melissa says. And that's sort of what I'm trying to get to the bottom of–Telepathe has a pretty weird stew of influences. So what's the unifying thread, I wonder—what's the heart? "The beat. The rhythm," Melissa says. "Yeah," Busy agrees. There's a second of silence—perhaps we're all deciding whether or not to reference Huey Lewis's "Heart of Rock and Roll" (which, for the record, is of course the beat). I decide against it. Busy thinks for another second, then says, "I guess the beat, and wanting to make beat-y music that doesn't sound like all the other beat-y music you hear." In order to make sure that the beat-y otherness translated to the record, Telepathe enlisted one of their biggest fans to handle production duties: TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek. The album is already being praised by critics and torrent leakseekers everywhere. What this all means to the band, however, is unclear. "I have no idea what it means. We've never had a full record out before. What is it? I don't know, what happens? We're going on tour, that's exciting. I hope people will hear it," Melissa says, genuinely mystified. One thing is certain, as far as this houseguest is concerned: no matter what befalls them this year, no matter where they get their sound from, the girls in Telepathe are the most hospitable badass rock goddess hosts ever.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;We never wanted to be rappers.â&#x20AC;?

Neither violent nor violinists, but these guys will still move you By Isaac Lekach • Photos by Tom Hines

Violens are the latest NYC band to wedge itself into the psychedelic niche carved out by MGMT. Though the band doesn’t find singer-guitarist Jorge Elbrecht forging new ground, their stellar self-titled four-song E.P. released last fall garnered warranted attention from peers and critics alike. Elbrecht took some time off during the recording of the band’s full length to talk about the evolution of the band, and also revealed a slightly disconcerting obsession with flamingos. I know you and Kris are from Miami. Machete [drummer Kris King’s former band] was a favorite of mine. Machete rules! I moved to New York in 1996 to go to Cooper Union. At that time Machete was still playing shows and Kris was down in Miami. He joined the Miami-in-New York City crew in 2002, I think. Do you miss anything about Miami? The delicious Cuban food from Versailles, perhaps? Sure, I miss driving and listening to music, flamingos and alligators hanging around my house, manatees in the canal behind my house. That kind of thing.

The first time I saw Violens was at Poplife in Miami, during Art Basel. How did it feel to play in your hometown? It was really fun. It was also our first show with a proper P.A. system! People represented and were dancing a bit too. What happened to Lansing-Dreiden, your old band? Lansing-Dreiden lives on and on. We just had a solo art show at Rivington Arms and released an E.P. of new music. So how did Violens come together? I had a lot of songs on the backburner that Lansing-Dreiden wasn't planning on using any time soon, so I created an outlet for it.

I know it is pronounced Vy-lenz—sounds like an amalgamation of the words “violence” and “violins.” Is that how the name come about? It came about from remembering the way Alejandro Jodorowsky pronounced the word "violence" in an interview I saw many years ago. So basically, I’m dead wrong. [Laughs.] The band has played high-profile shows in NYC and overseas and garnered the support of bands like MGMT and Yeasayer. Yeah MGMT are really great dudes and we were super stoked to go on tour with them. I’ve heard Violens be compared to of Montreal, The Zombies and The Cure. A pretty eclectic range. Are there any you welcome? Despise? I like them all.

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 8 M U S I C

According to the Wikipedia page, which could be wrong, Lansing-Dreiden referred to themselves more as "a company that sees no distinction between art and commerce" than simply as a band. Is that true? Violens definitely has developed a cohesive visual aesthetic as well. Is the Lansing-Dreiden model something that Violens is adhering to? Yes, it's true about Lansing-Dreiden, but not Violens. Violens is a totally separate project from LansingDreiden with simpler goals: recording, releasing and performing music. The Violens aesthetic is important in terms of the band's visual identity—I've always respected bands that have that clearly defined from album to album. But Violens is a music project, a band—not an art company that makes music.

I know you’re working on a full length now. How is it going? What can we expect? It is going well, things are sounding great so far. You can expect to hear the band you see live more with this record than you did with the EP It sounds a lot like flamingos battling evil sea creatures—but the flamingos are wearing cool sunglasses.

English prep-school kids strike gold through the sheer love of Prince By Michael D. Ayers • Photo by Siobhan O'Brien Drawing from an electronica-filled background, as well as capturing the fast paced, rhythmic energy of acts like Bloc Party and to a degree, The Talking Heads, the U.K.’s Friendly Fires have a mission: create a pop song that makes you want to dance. Their self-titled debut is packed with all the subtle feelings one gets when heading out for a night on the town; anxiousness, anticipation, and eventually maybe even some euphoria (assuming you get past the line and the cover charge).We caught up with lead singer Ed MacFarlane the night before they were to embark on their second NME-sponsored tour. How are you? I’m doing good, I’m doing good. A little bit stressed out—some things have been going wrong with our equipment, the day before our big tour. What’s exactly the problem? I know I can’t help, but…This thing called a buttkicker— it’s a thing that goes under Jack’s drum seat, and every time he hits the bass drum, it sends this really strong vibration into his ass. We spent loads of money on it, and it’s all packed up. And the bass amp is making some weird sounds too. “Paris” is a really fun and very dance oriented song. Was there a specific weekend or event that inspired that? No, there wasn’t. I wrote the song for my friend Holly. We were sitting in Notting, and it was a really gloomy day. She’s never been on holiday before and said she wanted to go to Paris. It sounds a bit cheesy, and

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 8 M U S I C

sentimental when I phrase it like that. But I suppose that was the initial inspiration for when I wrote that track. Written when we were in boring, rainy old England, to be honest. Now that you say that, it does have a romantic notion of “onlooking.”Yeah, of course. I like the idea that it’s looking forward to the future, and being excited about the future, but you can never be sure if it’s as good as you expect it to be. Are these NME tours bonkers? [Laughs] Well, no. This time there’s more pressure, and it sort of has a reputation for bands trying to outdo one another. So I’m looking forward to it in that sense. Here in the States, we sort of think the NME tour is synonymous with insanity. Or at least I do. No, I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t think it has that reputation in England. Throughout the entire record, the songs have this very rhythmic, almost tribal energy. When you’re writing songs, how do you work in the studio to capture an energy like that? I think, to be honest, the whole writing and recording process is very different for every track we do. Like for “Paris,” every little bit was recorded separately. Nothing was done live as a band. It’s only recently that we’ve actually been doing live jamming. Which is something we didn’t have before, in the studio, because it was just three of us. You can only play so many instruments at once. But it’s still very “pop” live.

Aside from the rhythmic elements, there’s also a dirty, clubby sound to your songs as well. Yeah, I’d agree with you on some tracks. Were you all club kids? When we were about seventeen and eighteen, we were really into Warp Records. They had a guy Chris Clark, who was sort of like a local hero. I suppose I got into Warp through him and we admired the fact that he was making this crazy dance music on his computer. We then got into house during university, when we started to go out to clubs and get into the whole lifestyle surrounding it. I think we’re influenced by proper house and techno, and we try to take elements of it and turn it into a pop song. Are you finding it hard to be productive on the road in terms of writing songs? It’s quite hard to write songs in the sense that it’s nice to be in a room with equipment. We’re the second to headline act, so we don’t have a lot of time to piss about. It’s kind of hard. When we write songs, its not like we pick up the guitar and play a couple of chords and sing over top of it. We’ve never written a song like that. Maybe we should try that one time—it might be rather inspiring.

The emerging Brooklyn trio battles mass consumerism one fan at a time By Doug Wallen iPod commercials have been on a roll lately when it comes to tipping off the world at large about buzzy indie acts, from Feist to CSS to the Ting Tings. Likewise, the Brooklyn label Kanine has been breaking bands since day one, releasing the earliest output from Grizzly Bear, Oxford Collapse, and Northern State. So what happens when they both throw their weight behind a single new band? In the case of Brooklyn trio Chairlift, it's a European tour right out of the gates and a spate of song-inspired user videos. Our audiences are wider ranging now than ever before,” admits Caroline Polachek, whose sleepy, cryptic singing is heard throughout Chairlift’s sparkling debut, Does You Inspire You. “Kids listen to us now, [and] adults [and] jocks. That’s cool. We always planned on having a slow build, but the press hit like ‘wham’ and it’s taking some time before we’ll see it reflected in people that are coming out to shows. People take time to internalize an album.” When all those kids and jocks do finally sit down with the album and let it sink, they’re likely to feel a bit bewildered. While the iPod commercial uses the track “Bruises” for maximum cuteness—by now you should know the line “I tried to do handstands for you”—the rest of Does You Inspire You is a weird, woozy fantasia that smuggles subversive lyrics into balmy, electro-damaged pop. Polachek sings, plays vintage synths, and shares songwriting duties with guitarist-singer Aaron Pfenning and drummer-bassist-producer Patrick Wimberly. Both live and on the record there’s lots of switching instruments and old-school electronics.

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9 M U S I C

The central trick to Chairlift is that while we nod and sway to their atmospheric tunes, Polachek is hypnotically unspooling cautionary tales about the consequences of global consumerism, the effect of waste on the environment, and the insidious rot of modern marketing. “That’s the fun part!” she enthuses. “Feeding it back into itself. Since everyone’s a [producer/ consumer] now, airbrushing and manipulative marketing are becoming more and more obvious to consumers. Either we bypass it by fetishizing the real or pop stops hiding its real purpose: seduction, hypnosis, and advertising.” Does You Inspire You opens with the eerie mood-setter “Garbage” and the following lyrics: “All the garbage that you have thrown away / Is waiting somewhere a million miles away / Your condoms and your VCR / Your Ziploc bags and your father’s car / Dark and silent it waits for you.” Polachek then sings, “So much garbage will never ever decay / And all your garbage will outlive you someday.” That it functions so well on two levels is a testament to both Chairlift’s sneaky M.O. and musical prowess. “It would be totally boring if we were critiquing society in a punk song,” explains Polachek, “because the concept is built right into the format. We expect it. But if we can get a ton of high-school kids to sing along to mainstream-sounding songs that actually satirize the tactics of the mainstream, that forces change from the inside out. It puts the last nail in the coffin with a cherry on top!” Inspired by the gaudy tourist traps that surrounded them in Boulder, Colorado, Chairlift gelled in early 2006 before relo-

cating to Brooklyn later that year. There, the band became pals with hotly tipped brethren like MGMT, who remixed their debut single “Evident Utensil,” and Yeasayer, with whom they toured Europe this past November, less than two months after their album came out. “A flight from New York to the U.K. is quicker and cheaper than van gas from New York to California,” Polachek observes, “so having played the U.S. a few times now, the hop across the pond is the next natural thing to do.” While the band’s formative time in Colorado bore more folky and acoustic-based songs, Brooklyn saw them introduce more beats and nurture the idea of subverting commercial pop. “Boulder was low-pressure,” says Polachek. “The naiveté and distance from any real music scene gave us a really comfortable place to experiment and learn how to work together. The ‘sound’ on Does You Inspire You was developed in New York for the most part.” Long after the British press stops drooling over the next-big-thing value of Chairlift and Apple moves on to newer bands for its eye-popping ads, Does You Inspire You should still be resonating with anyone lucky enough to have stumbled upon it. From the lurid eighties sheen of “Planet Health” and the country-tinged duet “Don’t Give A Damn” to the lullaby-like “Ceiling Wax” and the Sinead O’Connorish “Territory,” it’s one of the most diverse and fully developed debuts in recent memory. And if it subliminally points unsuspecting listeners towards an awareness of the fragility of our planet and the hollowness of consumerism, so much the better.

Hell’s Belles By Matt Fink • Photo by Siobhan O'Brien

They keep you guessing. The music made by the New York-based trio School of Seven Bells shifts constantly, both from song to song and from version to version of the same. Alpinisms, released late in 2008 by Michigan label Ghostly International, was their full-length debut, but some of the songs on it could be heard with radically different arrangements on previous releases—including the Face to Face on High Places EP on Table of the Elements— released directly to the Internet. There’s a sense of disconnect, then, but that’s to be expected: The group conjures ghosts of its members’ previous bands—Benjamin Curtis in Secret Machines, Claudia and Alejandra Deheza in the drifting shoegaze of On!Air!Library!—but shifts them everso-slightly, falling into a space beyond easy categorization. Or, as Curtis puts it: “This genre limbo is heaven for us.” “It's a blessing and a curse, starting a new project when people are aware of what you've done,” says Curtis, sitting beside Alejandra Deheza in a bar in the East Village. “People have really heard the process, the development of these songs. It's weird because this year, when we made Alpinisms, we took everything we had and had to break it down to make the album we wanted to make. It was kind of a moment of crisis for us, doing that.” Mostly recorded in home studios and following the departure of rhythm section Joe Stickney and James Elliott, Alpinisms may owe some of its ethereal texture to those changes in lineup, exchanging the booming rhythms of their first EP for a

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 8 M U S I C

negative sonic space. Though for Curtis, the renewed trio’s sound reflects the earliest days of the group most closely: “Alpinisms ended up sounding closest to the original, very rough demos we had done.” Considerations of the group’s music have referenced everything from West African pop to Appalachian vocal traditions. “If you listen to stuff that's the best music for us, like Can or something—in a way, Can was consciously trying to incorporate music from different parts of the world, and we're digesting it thirdhand—listening to Can and then listening to Tinariwen and then thinking, Oh my God, they sound very similar,” Curtis says. “There's something very fundamental about a drone and rock music and percussive music.” The often-layered vocals of the Deheza sisters make for the most memorable aspect of School of Seven Bells’ sound. Alejandra recalls, “In On!Air!Library!, Claudia and I rarely sang together. The weird thing about that is, ever since we were little, we've been singing together, and I have no idea why that element wasn't in that last band. Now that we didn't have any restrictions on ourselves, I'd start singing something and Claudia would harmonize over it. No one was going to say no.” Curtis adds, “One major, fundamental rule is allowing Ali and Claudia to go as far as they can with vocal ideas before we do anything else.” And while it’s tempting to categorize School of Seven Bells alongside other genre-eluding New Yorkers like Gang Gang Dance and High Places, the prominent role of vocals in their sound

seems indicative of a larger movement in independent music, one emphasizing a more controlled and polished singing style. “Even when that was so uncool, listening to Stephen Malkmus and Pavement, there is so much character and humanness in what he says,” offers Curtis. “So I think even when it wasn't cool, people still gravitated towards this charismatic sound.” For Deheza, vocals remain “the first thing I notice, aside from guitar. You hear somebody like Robert Wyatt, and you're like, God! He's got to sing that good all the time! There's no excuse to be lazy!” Talking with Curtis and Deheza, there’s a constant sense of a narrative that has yet to be solidified: of their place in music, of the group’s trio/five-piece/trio progression, of their relationship with collaborators. Alpinisms has an assurance possessed by few debuts. For Curtis, that cyclical progression may have been the trigger for that assurance. “We were antiband for no good reason,” he says, “but what we forgot about was that making music is so much about chemistry—we had to find that again. The chemistry was the three of us. [The band’s live sound] sounds good; it sounds like our records, which is weird. We didn't mean for it to. We made the record with, really, no thought of who was doing what. When we got together after making Alpinisms, when we wanted to start playing again, it was the three of us, and we thought, Damn—this sounds like our record; this is great. We're so lucky.”

The Wham City madman returns with his most mature (it is!) record yet By Matt Fink • Photos by Drew Reynolds

Believe it or not, Dan Deacon never wanted to be a solo artist. While studying composition at the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College in New York, he had been performing in ensembles, playing tuba for Langhorne Slim, and kicking up a racket in a grindcore band. But when he found himself alone in Baltimore, with no friends and no real prospects for collaboration, he had a decision to make. He’d already made a handful of records, experimented with sine waves, and made sound collages, but he wanted to attempt something different. “I knew that I could either spend a year trying to convince someone to play my music,” he says, “or I could just do it myself and not lose the momentum that I had going in school.” He translated that momentum into 2007’s Spiderman of the Rings, a leftfield classic that married cartoon samples with pitchshifted vocals and candy-colored electronics, setting him across the country on a public bus to play basements and houses. By the end of the year, he was an underground sensation, filling clubs with sweaty throngs of kids who just wanted to dance. Then he got the itch: He wanted to play music with people again. Few knew at the time, but even while he was touring with his brand of electronic pop, Deacon had already started writing his next chapter. While he was writing Spiderman of the Rings, an album he never expected anyone outside of his friends and fans to hear, he was writing music for ensembles again. Heavily percussive and elaborately layered, these arrangements would show off his compositional chops—if anyone ever heard them. “If the album is never going to exist anyway, I might as well make it as awesome as possible,” he says, recalling his fantasies. “I started composing in a different way, and that’s when a new body of songs came on the scene.” Those songs became Bromst.

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9 M U S I C

Did this album change much from the way you had originally envisioned it? Yeah, I’d say it did. A lot of the tracks that I wrote for Bromst were very slow and very droning, and I think there are only a couple tracks that reflect that way of thinking. I worked on it for a long time, so while I was writing it, my musical tastes would slowly evolve and the shows I was playing were changing, and that would effect how I thought about the music I was making and how the crowd would react to it. But I never thought Bromst would exist, because I didn’t think Spiderman of the Rings would be as successful as it was. I didn’t think I’d be able to play pieces that were both loud but delicate at the same time through PA systems that were good. When I first started, I was playing basements and house shows, so I was up for whatever equipment was there. I toured by Greyhound bus, and it blew my fucking mind that I was able to play for large crowds through good PA systems. It was working, this weird music that this weirdo dude was making. People seemed to like it, and I am very grateful for that. And it changed my approach. But, at that point in my life, if I had tried to play a track like “Of the Mountains” or “Snookered” through those types of PA systems, it would have sounded like garbage or it would have blown the PA. The timbre of the piece would have been completely compromised. After Spiderman of the Rings came out, and I found out I would have that kind of opportunity, I started thinking about having live performers and not just me playing the tracks. Does that make any sense?

I think a lot of electronic music is way too esoteric and pretentious and full of it.

I think so. Listening to this record, it definitely sounds like it isn’t going to let people construct any sort of easy caricature of you. Cool! Then it worked. I think a second record—and for a lot of people this will be my second record—is a good opportunity for an artist to figure out if this is the style they want to continue working in or to branch away from it. I didn’t want to write another record like Spiderman of the Rings, and I didn’t want the same kind of show. I didn’t want it to be a sequel. I wanted it to be something that was in the same nature and had the same musical ideology but had a different focus and different overall feel. In retrospect, do you think the reaction to the last record created an image that you weren’t comfortable with? Like in terms of the “wacky” shit? Yeah. I read a lot of reviews of the record where they put on the album, listened to the first song, reviewed the album, and took it off. “Woody Woodpecker,” the opening track, is certainly absurd to a lot of people. It seemed to paint a very vivid picture in people’s minds of the music that I make. There are definitely “wacky” parts of the album, but they are also juxtaposed against some pretty serious counterpoint. It wasn’t the goofy, jerk-off record that a lot of reviewers put it as. I think a lot of press, at least within blog culture and the Internet, feeds off of itself, and someone will read a review and then write a review based on that review. And it will start feeding back in on itself, with certain key words. And those key words would be the things that everyone would hear, and before they’d even hear the record, those are the things that would stick out in their minds. Like, “Oh, he pitch shifts his voice, and he uses a cartoon sample, so he’s a wacky jokester. Let’s put him in the wacky jokester pile and not write about anything else on the record.” I wanted there to be lightheartedness, because I think a lot of electronic music is way too esoteric and pretentious and full of it. I wanted to write something that was accessible yet radical at the same time, and I feel like a lot of people couldn’t get past the absurd element of it, and that was a little disheartening. But it’s okay. I was really worried about being typecast as a joke, because nothing about the show is a joke. Just like the “dark” thing, where I said in an interview last year that this album is much darker than the previous one, and all of a sudden that became the word for this album. And it’s not a fucking dark album! It’s not a goth album. It just has more dark tones that the last one and a story that’s focused on an apocalyptic view of the future. That’s what I was talking about,

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9 M U S I C

but the early press was focusing on that word so much, so I decided I had to squash this or dark would become the new wacky. And people are going to put it on and think it’s going to be dark and be like, “Well, what the fuck is this about?” It sets expectations, which I don’t think are ever good. When I go to the movies, I don’t want to know anything about it. I just want to see it and enjoy it at face value. I think a lot of stuff gets too hyped. Does that make sense? Sorry, I keep saying that… No problem. Did you construct this album as a complete narrative? No. Musically, there is a narrative, but lyrically it varies from song to song. It’s about cycles in time and parallel existences and what happens after we’re done with this stage of life and what happens after we die. I think there is going to be a shift in the way humanity exists, and it can be a positive direction or a negative one. I think we can enter into a new age of enlightenment and collective consciousness or we can enter into a dark age and it will be an age of kings and horrible exploitation and greed and fear. The album focuses on those lyrical aspects, and I guess the last one was about having guns that shoot rattlesnakes out of them and cats made of crystals. It’s a different lyrical approach. Does that make sense? God! I need to fucking stop saying, “Does that make sense?” When I was writing these songs, I was living at Wham City, which was this paradise land where nothing could go wrong, and we didn’t need any jobs because our rent was so cheap and we could eat out of the dumpster. After we got evicted, that mindset didn’t exist anymore, and everything became real. I became interested in researching the ideas of how society is run and books like The Power Elite and Democracy for the Few and Ruled by Secrecy. Those spoke to me very powerfully in that period of my life, and I wanted the record to have some sort of tone like that. Even though it was music that was meant to be played in a celebratory and uplifting way, I wanted it to bring light to these topics and have people geared toward a positive and more connected future. Where the last record was made for people to dance around to, I wanted this one to inspire something other than partying. Does that make sense? Damn it! I’ve said that five hundred fucking times! So, overall, what would be a gratifying response to this record? I don’t know. Do you know that scene in Miracle on 34th Street where Santa Clause gets bags and bags of letters? I want to get Santa Claus’ letters.

AN OTH ER SI D E O F

By Isaac Lekach â&#x20AC;˘ Photos by Blossom Berkofsky

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9 M U S I C

5 535

“Fergie told me either a terrible joke or a joke that I don’t understand yesterday. Which is, ‘My finger, my asshole.’ Do you guys know that one?” Jeniffer Herrema

S E P T / OCT 2 0 0 8

Decked in Moroccan flair, the Figueroa Hotel in downtown Los Angeles looks like a place Indiana Jones would likely rest his feet in after an excavation. The building was originally a Y.M.C.A. when it opened in 1925 and only became a hotel after the Great Depression. Will Oldham’s label set up camp there for him to field interviews and photo shoots comfortably. Beside the emptied pool, among cacti and chirping builds, longtime friend and collaborator Matt Sweeney sat down to reminisce with Oldham. Oldham’s terrific new album Beware!, under his moniker Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, was not discussed. What follows is a candid and at times twisted conversation between Sweeney and Oldham. Label mate Jennifer Herrema (of Royal Trux) popped in and out as well making sporadic contributions. Matt Sweeney: Where did Jennifer go?

JH: Something like money laundering?

Will Oldham: She’s right there. [Calls] Jennifer, you going to be part of this round table discussion?

WO: Yes. Fully. And the man ran away with all the money.

MS: She’s got the two lost Trux records coming out, right? WO: Yes. And they just reissued the first and second record on vinyl and CD. Twin Infinitives and the self-titled record. Jennifer pulls up a chair. WO: Alright, now we have to lay this down! Jeniffer Herrema: What’s wrong, you guys couldn’t think of anything to say to each other? MS: No. Not Really. JH: I want to hear a touring story. WO: Dickette Cavett. You’re Dickette Cavett. The female Dick Cavett. MS: Dickette? WO: Yes. [Laughs] JH: I prefer to think of myself as Bob Costas. Bobby… MS: Bobette? WO: Bobbi with an “I.” …Somebody was telling me that they had this bootleg of that Irish festival— MS: No! JH: What was this Irish festival? WO: It was an Irish festival in the country. A creepy fascist German guy put it on. MS: “Liss Ard” and the whole deal was that people paid five hundred dollars—no, pounds. WO: It was when Actual Air [David Berman’s poetry book] came out. JH: Okay so this was a long, long time ago. MS: And it was before All Tomorrow’s Parties and shit like that, but it was a curated event in West Cork, in the Irish countryside, and Nick Cave was the curator. WO: He might have been. He was there. MS: But there was this whole thing about it. It seemed—

MS: It really happened. WO: But we had a little cottage–Matt, me, Bob and Berman. MS: Sharing a little seaside cottage. Super beautiful. Did you guys go swimming? WO: In tide pools the size of this swimming pool. JH: Wait. So did they record you guys without you knowing and then all of a sudden it just showed up? WO: I just heard about it yesterday. MS: What was funny is that we got to the site and somehow established that what had happened on the flight over was that we’d been through a time-space warp and the Germans had won World War II and we were going to German-occupied Ireland and this was a well-meaning Nazi who was putting on the show. And everything played out just like that. WO: We kind of worked up a set, but we’d do a song, then tell jokes, then Berman would read a little bit. He was sitting by the piano. Then we’d play another song. MS: The first thing that happened was that we showed up, had some drinks and ended up jamming with Nick Cave on that song “New Pony,” which was your idea. WO: It was his idea. MS: Didn’t you say, “Why don’t we do a Dylan song” because you had recognized that he had ripped off “New Pony” for some song? You were like, How about “New Pony?” And he was like, Oh yeah, I know that one! WO: Yeah. But at that point I was very tired. MS: You were sitting next to Cave at the piano and you fell asleep. JH: You did not! WO: At first I think I was lying in a pile of mud outside the tent where the show happened and they were like, Is Will Oldham available? Is Will Oldham available? And I just rolled under the tent flap and sat up by the piano. I could hardly hold my head up. JH: And you were muddy? WO: I was muddy and then just rolled off back into the pile of

53 37

mud. And then was woken up again, maybe an hour later. MS: While you were driving. WO: [Laughs]. Yes. Driving on the country road with Thin Lizzy playing really loud. Driving so fast, it was like, You’re not gonna make this turn! And I didn’t. MS: Okay, okay. So it’s the Irish countryside and it’s totally dramatic that way. It’s night time. Pitch black. Single lane road. Having just been sleeping in a pile of mud and totally jamming. We were really having fun. And all of a sudden you could see the sea. And I remember a moon and the sea and the rocks and we’re going fuckin’ straight towards it. Just like a movie. There’s no way we’re going to make the turn.

[This one gets a laugh.] WO: DB and I were discussing this concept that I return to every few years, which is the idea of, What if when you came it was powder? And then imagining that a foggy night in L.A. is because there’s just so much jacking off going on and it’s going in the air. JH: Where’s that song, Will? WO: And you could get AIDS on days where— MS: Like too much smog. JH: That’s terrible!

WO: I was sure I was going to make the turn.

WO: Magenta Alert!

MS: It was like, Wow, this is what it feels like to drive off a cliff.

JH: It was cool and psychedelic until the AIDS joke.

WO: Fortunately there was a boulder.

WO: People would walk out of the bathroom with a coke ring around their nostril and a come ring of powder around their mouth.

MS: No, like an embankment. Cos we just sort of slammed into this thing and you slowed down just enough that we didn’t get hurt.

JH: What if everyone’s was a very specific color?

JH: That would have been like The Day the Music Died–new school style.

WO: Can you believe that George Clooney has this dingy gray? That’s why he’s single most of the time!

MS: We could have been much more interesting people, had that happened. But nobody liked the show. That was the best part. But it was one of those things where we felt really good about it.

MS: So I joined Facebook and the first thing that happened was somebody posted a photo of me and the first girl I ever kissed.

WO: Like, We really pulled it off. MS: I’m glad that it did get recorded because I bet you even if people thought it sucked, I’d imagine I’d still think it was good if I heard it now. WO: Fergie told me either a terrible joke or a joke that I don’t understand yesterday. Which is, “My finger, my asshole.” Do you guys know that one? MS: No. [Laughs] WO: There’s this man talking in marriage counseling with his wife. And they’re talking about one thing like, You never wash the dishes. And then she says, “There’s that one thing that you do.” He’s like, What are you talking about? “That thing that you do when we’re making love.” JH: Dude, you were hanging out with Fergie? MS: Different Fergie.

WO: I saw that picture. MS: It was like getting kicked in the stomach. I had not seen her since then. JH: I don’t have a Facebook, but I went on to look at it one day and I saw myself. I had my boyfriend start one and ask to be her friend. He wrote, Is this really you? And whoever it was wrote back, Yeah, it’s really me and I have no time for your fucking asskissing. It was awful. WO: And you’re sure that you are not doing that? JH: Positive. WO: I don’t know, I saw you last night with your Facebook open. I got a friend request from somebody. I didn’t know his name, but he included a message with his friend request that said, “Yo. Dude. You fucked my girlfriend.” I wrote back, Are you serious? And he said, “Oh, I thought that conversation was more memorable, but yes I am.” And we had two mutual friends who are both decent people, so I wrote one of them and I was like, Who is this guy? And they’re like, Oh he’s a very dear friend from my childhood. So I blocked him.

WO: She’s like, That thing that you do when we’re making love. And then he says, “My finger, my asshole.”

JH: So wait, did you ever get the bootleg?

JH: I don’t get it.

MS: We played a similar show at the Monteux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

WO: I’m guessing he means that it’s not up for discussion. MS: He has another one where he went to see the doctor and the doctor said, “Man, you have to stop jerking off.” And he’s like,

Why the hell would I want to do that? And the doctor says, “Because I’m examining you!”

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9 M U S I C

WO: No.

JH: You guys played a jazz festival? MS: Superwolf [Sweeney & Oldham’s collaboration] headlined.

Have you been to Montreux? You’d love it. For starters there’s a statue of Freddy Mercury.

MS: I can guarantee you that you’ve never heard anything like this.

JH: I’ve seen photos.

JH: Are you playing songs?

MS: I’ve been thinking about the statue lately. It has a plaque that says something like, Freddy loved Montreux for its beauty and its discretion.

MS: No. It’s just a—

JH: It’s discretion! That’s great. I think Brian May said he never knew that Freddy was gay. Curious, right?

JH: It’s a free-for-all. WO: What’s amazing is that Brit seems to be the expert/bully. JH: I can imagine that.

MS: What would it be like to see the world through Brian May’s eyes? You must not notice and notice really amazing things.

WO: He was really good at it.

WO: Makes me think about the My finger, My asshole joke. Like, Oh, that’s what gay is. Then yes, he totally was gay.

WO: Chris Hop. This guy Chris Hop, who is on Facebook.

[After a long pause, he addresses Sweeney]

WO: He’s now a father. He’s a professional. One of the amazing things about listening to it now is that I remember we were on a school field trip and Brian is sitting on the back of the bus with his girlfriend. And he was very mature and at one point Brit has his boombox and starts playing the breathing tape, really loud.

I was listening, for the first time in about twenty years, to the Anus Breathing Tape the other night. MS: [Laughs]. WO: I can’t believe how country everyone sounds on it. I can’t remember us talking like that. MS: Is it still completely mind blowing? JH: I don’t know what you’re talking about—but he’s got this devilish laugh. What’s the story? WO: There was this skill developed among certain high-school peers in the eighties in Louisville of drawing air into your anus and pushing it out. Being able to make all sorts of noise in both directions.

MS: It’s him coaching— JH: I’ll go check him.

MS: The tape is called, “The Tape Of Anal Breathing.” WO: So Brian marches up with a determined look, pushes eject, grabs the tape and starts yanking the tape out of the cassette and Brit is like, MY GOD BRIAN, NO! So, well, Brit saves it all and reconstructs the tape. And that’s what you hear today. MS: It’s very intense, but I would recommend listening to it. JH: What if you didn’t know what it was but you were listening to it. Would you know what it was? WO: You wouldn’t, but the sounds are insane and there’s this crazy, redneck, pubescent voice coaching going on–“Have deep ins! Deep ins!”

55 37

By Shanon Kelley • Photos by Clay Patrick Mcbride

The only band left in Brooklyn who can’t be called psychedelic.

ackstage at the Cat’s Cradle, a venue in Carborro, North Carolina, Kim is stressing out. But not because of a sound issue or anything pertaining to the show Matt and Kim will be playing later that evening. No, she’s having a mild panic attack because she can’t figure out how to make an “On the Go” playlist on her iPod. You see, more important than the technicalities of the show itself (which both Matt and Kim take very seriously) is the music being played while they’re preparing for show. It has to be Top-40 hip-hop. Exclusively. Their tour manager and I try explaining how to create the playlist, but Matt realizes a personal demonstration is necessary. As soon as Kim sees how it’s done, she anxiously reaches for the iPod and says to him, “Okay, okay, I got it. I want that 50 Cent song first. Wait—don’t pick anything!” He rolls his eyes and replies, “I won’t! Play whatever you like.” A small smile appears on his face and he quotes another of their favorite rappers, “Baby you can have whatever you like.” Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino met about four years ago while taking classes at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. They started dating a short while after and decided to form a band, or at least learn how to play instruments. “We didn't really have any plans to start a band,” Kim explains. “We just thought it would be easier to learn our instruments together. Our friend Ian knew that we were doing this and put us on a show. It was in a basement of an art space in Queens, a Todd P show with Double Dagger and Japanther. We only played three songs, and we don't really remember the show—we were both so nervous the fear made us black it out.” Since then, Matt and Kim have become de facto leaders of the DIY punk movement in Brooklyn. Alongside the promoter Todd P and a handful of other bands (Japanther, other bands), Matt and Kim have spearheaded the return of all-ages, DIY warehouse

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9 M U S I C

shows that Brooklyn has become famous for. Of course, Matt’s views on all-ages shows have grown a bit with age: “I go back and forth on the all ages issue only because when we first started out we wanted the shows to be all-inclusive. But now, at twentysix, I’ve started to feel a bit uncomfortable being at a show with a bunch of kids. When you get to a certain age and start to feel uncomfortable at a show, then it’s no longer all-inclusive. So now we like to do a mix between the two.” One thing they won’t change is insisting on the lowest possible ticket prices. “That just comes from our demographic,” Matt laughs. “All of our broke friends! I think that bands that come from money, or older people that have money, think that twenty to twenty-five dollars for a show is normal. For our friends it’s like, Oooh, double digits? I don’t know—I’m going to break the bank on that one.” Matt and Kim recently signed with Green Label Sound, the singles-only label supported by Mountain Dew. Green Label Sound’s goal is to support DIY bands that are loyal to their core constituency but ready for the next level. Green Label releases the band’s singles for free, a perfect match for the band that convinced the Bowery Ballroom to sell $8 tickets to their show, an unheard of low price for the famous venue. In early December of 2008 I accompanied Matt and Kim on the Green Label Sound tour with the Cool Kids, the label’s first signee. Matt and Kim were the opener for the Chicago-based hip-hop duo, an unusual tour line-up to some, but a perfect match for Matt and Kim. “Let me explain our love for hip-hop through the events that took place last night,” Kim explained to me when I asked her to elaborate on their obsession. “So last night T.I. performed here in the city and I couldn't go because we had to practice. Yes, I know, I missed T.I. because of practice but honestly we need all the practice we can get. My friend Nick was at the show and when T.I. went on he called me and I sat on the phone for a half an hour listening to the show while dancing around and singing along. It was amazing! That doesn't really answer the question huh? I probably should have let Matt respond to this. Okay, let me pretend to be Matt [pushes glasses up with finger]. Matt would say hip-hop is doing what rock music in the sixties did. It was mainstream music that could be experimental and still accepted by the masses. He would then reference something like Pharrell's ‘Drop It Like It's Hot.’ He thinks too much about shit. I take the simple side—it’s fun and you can dance to it.” Kim hit the nail on the head. When I asked Matt to explain the duo’s obsession with hip-hop he responded, “The popular hip-hop, you know Top-40 hip-hop, the kind that’s listened to by millions of people, can be the weirdest fucking songs. They’re so bizarre and creative and different. The one example I always talk about is ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot.’ I mean that was the weirdest song! Clicks and a bass drum, and weird buzzing in the background! But it’s still acceptable, it was a number-one hit and people loved it. You can

only really compare that to rock music from the late sixties. The Beatles, for example, could still do something really weird back then and have it be popular, but now, over the years rock music has a hit formula. Hip-hop’s as bold right now as rock music was then. It’s still creative. I think that’s what really constitutes being innovative. Plus I’m the type of person that responds to beats and rhythm.” Matt and Kim are a couple in real life, which I found puzzling until I spent some time on the road with them. When they go to work, they go to work with each other. How does one not kill the other? “I like to say it’s magic,” Kim muses, “but Matt thinks that’s too cheesy to say. I really don't know, and it isn't just a tour thing. When we get home from tour we hang out together all the time. My time away from him is when I get up early to work or when one of us is in the bathroom. That’s where we draw the line.” Even their band name serves as a reminder that the two come hand in hand, although Kim says that this is just a coincidence. “When Ian forced us to do that first show we didn't have a band name and Todd P called us and asked what he should bill us as. We had no idea, and let me tell you, coming up with a band name is almost as hard as learning your instruments, so we left it up to someone else. Ha! But no, we couldn't come up with one so Todd P put us down as Kimberly and Matthew. It seemed fitting but a bit too formal so we changed it to Matt and Kim. Everyone gives Matt shit cause his name is first but that was my call. In the graphic sense it looks better. Got to put that art school education to work!” Matt and Kim’s sophomore album, Grand, is set to be released on the FADER Label in February 2009. Compared to their self-titled debut, Grand is multi-instrumental and more stylistically varied— they can’t play it live. The band’s first single released on Green Label Sounds, “Daylight” is just as fun as their previous releases, albeit more mature than the prosaic punk style they have come to be known for. When describing the basic concept for their new album, Matt once again referenced his hip-hop versus rock theory. “We take influence from lots of different places, a big splash of shit. But, for example, take a song like ‘Louie Louie.’ You have a rock-chord progression that you can use with any instrument, A-D-E-D. With rock music, you only use one instrument for that, but with hip-hop and pop music these days, you can use a different instrument for each note. When you put that together though, you still have the same progression. That’s what we tried to with ‘Daylight,’ and this was all done with a keyboard and our laptop. So it’s more like that, the new album–things that I think are really contemporary." And where does the band that never even intended to form see themselves in ten years? “Man,” Kim told me, “if we could still be playing shows in ten years I would be pretty damn excited. I guess we don't really look that far ahead. Right now we only look ahead a year at a time because that is usually how far in advance our tour schedule is. So for now I’m stoked we are touring for the next year, and if the year after that can be the same thing then life is pretty sweet. Does that sound corny? Fuck it, it's the truth.”

61 37

2009

TEXAS TIME! South by South West (SXSW), a music and film festival in Austin, Texas, is not for the faint of heart—or the sober. Mostly, it’s an excuse for execs to get drunk, fuck and eat BBQ. But at the heart of it is the music. The non-stop barrage of shows all over town. From

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9 F E AT U R E S

Emo’s and Stubbs to the alleyways and rooftops— the city is filled with promising performances. Sure, it’s overwhelming, even if you’ve had eighteen shots of tequila—that’s why we’ve compiled a list of artists to watch.

HOMETOWN: Portland

Favorite thing about SXSW: This I have yet to learn.

Miles traveled to get to SXSW: MANY Number of times played SXSW: 00 LEAST Favorite thing about SXSW: Ditto. BBQ or Tofu Hot Dogs: Neither, yucko

MIRAH LATEST Album: (a)spera

Photo by

HOMETOWN: Long Beach, CA Miles traveled to get to SXSW: 1400 Number of times played SXSW: 1 BBQ or Tofu Hot Dogs: TOFU

Favorite thing about SXSW: The late night Lamar bridge shows and staying at our friend Maggieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s parents house and swimming in her pool.

LEAST Favorite thing about SXSW: Way too much everything.

CRYSTAL ANTLERS

LATEST Album: Tentacles

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9 F E AT U R E S P H OTO B Y D R E W R E Y N O L D S

LATEST Album: Fantasty Black Channel

LATE OF THE PIER HOMETOWN: NOTTINGHAM, UK

Favorite thing about SXSW: N/A

Miles traveled to get to SXSW: N/A Number of times played SXSW: N/A

LEAST Favorite thing about SXSW: N/A

BBQ or Tofu Hot Dogs: N/A

LATEST Album: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart

THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART HOMETOWN: NEW YORK CITY Miles traveled to get to SXSW: 1850 Number of times played SXSW: 00 BBQ or Tofu Hot Dogs: TOFU

Favorite thing about SXSW: Hanging out with friends from other cities you never get to see.

LEAST Favorite thing about SXSW: The whole VIP scene ... it's a rock show, not Bungalow 8.

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 F E A T U R E S P H O T O B Y SI O B H A N O ' B R I E N

SI NG E R /

HOMETOWN: PORTLAND, OR Miles traveled to get to SXSW: 1707 Number of times played SXSW: 00 BBQ or Tofu Hot Dogs: TOFU

Favorite thing about SXSW: It's a place of vibrant energy, where people are excited to both perform and witness performances. Rarely is there such a nexus of people so rapt to witness euphony. LEAST Favorite thing about SXSW: The energy can turn suddenly negative. The darkness is always present.

YACHT LATEST Album: Mystery Light

/ S ONG W R I T E R

PHOTO BY JENNIE

WA R R E N

HOMETOWN: NEW YORK CITY Miles traveled to get to SXSW: 1850 Number of times played SXSW: 1 BBQ or Tofu Hot Dogs: BBQ

Favorite thing about SXSW: The sunny warm weather in Austin.

LEAST Favorite thing about SXSW: The crazy crowds of people.

MARNIE STERN

LATEST Album: This Is Itâ&#x20AC;Ś

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 F E A T U R E S P H O T O B Y SI O B H A N O ' B R I E N

LATEST Album: Wavvves

WAVVES HOMETOWN: San Diego, CA Miles traveled to get to SXSW: 900 Number of times played SXSW: 00 BBQ or Tofu Hot Dogs: TOFU

Favorite thing about SXSW: Looking forward toÂ getting to see a bunch of good bands and eating Texas BBQ.

LEAST Favorite thing about SXSW: I can't really say yet since this will be my first time playing, but I hear it's full of cheeseball industry types.

Animal Collective By Joe Colly â&#x20AC;˘ Photos by Ray Lego

When the fellows of Animal Collective were tinkering with found sounds and tribal-skewed noise in band member Brian Weitz’s New York apartment in the early part of this decade, the prevailing musical landscape of the city was defined by musicians looking backwards, most notably the Strokes’ stylish—if unoriginal—aping of punk’s glory years. Animal Collective’s philosophy, though, shaped by a spirit of experimentalism and a desire to look beyond the present and far into the distance, was one of unrestrained creativity and vibrant improvisation. Now, almost ten years later, the group—alongside fellow everything-but-the-kitchen-sink adventurers Black Dice and Gang Gang Dance—has shifted the paradigm towards itself by releasing a string of groundbreaking records that may be looked upon in years to come as those that most defined an era of indie music. What’s even more remarkable is that their latest effort, Merriweather Post Pavilion (loosely titled after the verdant lawns of the outdoor arena in their home state of Maryland) is probably their best album yet. The record has everything we’ve come to expect from an AC release: a wild shift in style from its predecessor (here, the sinister, coarse tones of 2007’s Strawberry Jam are swapped out for blissful, aquatic ones), a childlike sense of awe and wonder, and layers upon layers of boundary-pushing sound explorations tied to a pop-focused core. This time, though, the band—perhaps encouraged by the success of vocalist/ percussionist Panda Bear’s hook-laden 2007 solo release Person Pitch—has leaned even further in the direction of melody. And as a result, Merriweather Post Pavilion is the most accessible piece of Animal Collective’s catalog to date. On a blustery Manhattan morning just five days before Barack Obama was to become the president-elect of the United States, I got together with Brian Weitz (Geologist), Dave Portner (Avey

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9 F E AT U R E S

Tare), and Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) to discuss what went into the creation of this extraordinary record and how they came to make it with one band member living on a different continent. We found that nothing is simple when it comes to the band’s creative process, and much like our new leader’s creed, everything revolves around the notion of change. With the three of you living in different places—Brian in D.C., Dave in New York, and Noah in Lisbon—how did you collaborate from a distance when you started thinking about the record? Noah Lennox: I’d say that the real work goes on once we’re all in a room together. Maybe twenty or thirty per cent of the process— the skeletons of the songs—happens in our respective places. Everybody gathers sounds and just mentally gets in the zone for it. There isn’t a whole lot of conversation about what we’re going to do, but there is some aligning ourselves and thinking about what we’d like the songs to be. We sent a couple song files to each other, but the demos we send to each other are pretty basic, and, like I said, the songs really come together once we’re all in the room and we can see what’s working. Especially because, with this one, we were thinking about the three of us trying to operate in three different frequency ranges. We didn’t want two of us to be doing the same thing at the same time, especially with all these electronic sounds and samplers, they would really collide a whole lot. So it was Dave’s idea to have all these speakers on stage, the sound on the stage is really, really loud and then that is being projected out in to the crowd as well. In terms of that setup, if we were both occupying the same space it would get really muddy and clouded, so we were constantly trying to find our own spaces in the songs. That was a lot of the work—just trying to find the right sounds. We had a lot of samples of ourselves playing rather than sampling a lot of other records.

Shirt: Vintage Noah Lennox

"At this point, we're super comfortable with our lives shows," says Lennox. "Maybe too comfortable."

Do you come into the process with ideas for a feel or a vibe for the record ahead of time? Is that discussed ahead of time? Brian Weitz: Yeah, we talked about it a lot over e-mail going into the songwriting session. NL: I feel like it changed over time, too, slightly. As we worked, the idea kind of morphed. But there was definitely a focus on bass from the very beginning. BW: And on Strawberry Jam, even though there were a lot of traditional instruments on it, we worked really hard on trying to get it to sound more like an electronic record—really synthetic and futuristic. And, for this one, going into it we knew the setup was going to be primarily all of us doing electronics, but we wanted the source samples for a lot of the sounds to be more organic and acoustic, and kind of environmental in terms of the field recordings. Even though the way we perform it is more like an electronic composition, a lot of the samples are us using traditional instruments in the practice space or at home. Then it’s tweaked further to sound more like an electronic record. But on this record there is more straightforward organic stuff–even more than there is on Strawberry Jam. When you normally head into the studio, you’ve already been playing most of the new material live for a while. Was that the case with this record as well? BW: Yeah, except for two songs— “Bluish” and “Lion in a Coma”—that we didn’t play live beforehand. They’re both Dave’s songs; he sent us his demo versions for them. I worked on a few ideas but we didn’t actually get together and play anything or actually practice them until we got to the studio. Then we spent, like, one afternoon working on them and then recorded them after that. And you did the record in two different places, right? Dave Portner: Yeah, two different places. Sweet Tea in Oxford, Mississippi, and then we mixed it in Athens where Ben Allen, the producer, grew up. He was just familiar with the studio there, he likes the room, and it had a lot of cool eighties and older electronic effects and plate reverb. We really don’t like to use computer effects at all, if we can help it. Sometimes they can be used subtly, and if you’re running so much stuff out you actually can’t do it any other way. But especially for this record we liked the natural spring reverb and that’s utilized a lot on it.

In terms of those recording techniques, obviously the music is very intricate, so how would you describe the process to a layperson? How many samples, would you say, are on a given track? BW: I could only speak for myself; I don’t think we usually have a good grasp of what each other person is doing. DP: And it’s kind of different for every song, too. NL: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. For a song like “Summertime Clothes,” Dave went out to run an errand or something, and we pretty much wrote the melody. Then he came back to the practice space where Brian and I were working on something, played the guitar part, and then we just started adding stuff in there. For that song I’ve got maybe six little sample things, there’s Dave’s guitar part, and Brian’s got a good four or five. BW: I think I have six. I mean the strings are like multiple parts. NL: Plus two singing parts. DP: I’ve got a rhythm track, too, of Noah hitting a drum stool. Plus we did, like, tons of overlay percussion on that song to get it to have that kind of roomy, wall-of-sound percussion feel. So it all depends on the specific track, then? DP: Yeah, because some tracks are just based on really repetitive elements, so for those we’ll try to keep it to that. Like “Brothersport.” Even thought there’s a lot of percussion added in the studio, the live tracks that we would play are pretty simple. In that song we all play the same thing over and over—well, maybe not Brian—but Noah and I pretty much play the same elements throughout the whole song. Whereas some stuff we’re constantly changing what we play or adding in new things. This record feels more lush and more approachable than your previous stuff. Did you want to make something more instantly accessible? DP: Not really. There have even been times when we’ve thought that this harkens back to some of our weirder records. I feel like we always go back and forth about this for every record we make. With Strawberry Jam, at the time, we thought it was really dark and abrasive. Then we played it for a lot of people and they thought it was the poppiest thing we’ve ever done because the vocals are really up front and clear in the mix. And for this one, since there’s just three of us, we talked more about leaving a lot of open space and making sure we were adding something to each song—we weren’t just getting crazy and throwing whatever in there. NL: Yeah, like I was saying earlier about each of us trying to occupy a separate frequency range…

"We've said the whole time there's an eighties vibe that sneaks into our music," admits Portner. "The better side of the eighties." DP: Yeah, in the past it’s been very wall-of-sound-y with all four of us playing, especially with the guitars. So just talking a lot about the elements we were going to use really helps, and making sure that there was a lot of room in there. I think that maybe adds something to the accessible quality of the record. BW: Also when we first started doing this stuff live we would just play most of the record all the way through, and even our sound guy said that it was kind of hard to wrap your head around, initially. He said once it clicked for him, it clicked. But I still remember going into the studio with that thought of him, who knows our music better than anyone, saying that it took him a little bit to get used to. After recording a few songs in the studio—I don’t think we thought of it as being accessible but we were thinking it was going to be a pretty heavy-hitting album. DP: It’s definitely the most melodic thing we’ve done. Brian’s parts, especially, for the most part are all really melodic. And a lot more of the parts in these songs fit into the melody or the rhythm—there aren’t as many noises and sounds thrown in. BW: That was part of my personal challenge for the record. Because I’m not a multi-instrumentalist like these guys who can change a source of inspiration with what they choose to play. And I don’t really have good pitch; I often needed Noah’s help to pitch myself into being melodic. But I tried to find samples that could be placed melodically into songs. I feel like there’s a joyful, upbeat quality to some of things you do live and on record. Do you ever think of your music as “positive?” DP: In terms of lyrics, I think we’re writing about whatever is happening for the most part. I think a lot of the songs I contributed here maybe came from a sadder, but positive place BW: I don’t know about positive, because there are sentiments behind the songs that are sadder because our lives aren’t onehundred per cent positive and happy all the time. But I think starting from the beginning, coming out of the nineties it felt like music was getting very serious and stale and over-thought. In 2000 when we started playing, even if the content isn’t super happy, which it isn’t for those early records, we still wanted to put across that playing music is fun and joyous and that it makes us happy. And to put that across in our live shows. Since the live shows have influenced the records, it still comes out there. NL: There’s that kind of manic excitement and energy that we’ve subverted into something slightly different now. But I don’t think any of us want to force this positive vibe just for the sake of it. Though on first listen, Merriweather Post Pavilion seems much prettier than something like Strawberry Jam. DP: A lot of our older records have this kind of hyped-up, ‘Let’s go!’ feel, especially in the vocal style—sort of shout-y and callout based on how we used to—and still—play live. These songs

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9 F E AT U R E S

immediately didn’t seem to be right for that. Even though there is a hyped-up, electronic, maybe even dance quality to some of them, I feel like there’s also this calm, mellow aspect to them that didn’t need that kind of vocal from us. At least on my part, I tried to mellow out the vocals a bit more. NL: I feel like that was dictated by the way we had to perform the songs. Just in terms of—you have to be doing this a lot [mimes playing synths] and singing in the mic. Dave dances around a little bit, but it’s not like with a guitar where you can go crazy, so the mood is much more mellow. DP: They’ve definitely gotten more intense and excitable as we play them more because it’s taken us a long time to get used to how perform them. When you’re using samplers and drum pads, do you try to play them as you might a traditional instrument to keep it more organic? BW: Yeah, totally. It’s also just more fun to play that way. Eventually the samplers start to feel almost like you’re playing an instrument or keyboard, but it’s just a pad with numbers on it and it takes a little while. It’s sort of like learning a song on piano— eventually your hands just know the motions. NL: Eventually you stop thinking about it. DP: And in addition to the samplers, we use outward effects and have a lot of stuff that enables us to constantly change whatever’s coming out—to keep a flow going so it never feels like it stays the same. That keeps it organic. So it does feel like you’re playing even if it’s a piece of equipment that might just run the whole time. You still have the ability to change it, and move it around. It’s never going to be the same every night. It still feels like you’re putting some of yourself into the performance. BW: The last two engineers we’ve worked with, Scott Colburn and Ben Allen, who did this new one, have commented that how we play is not traditional. I remember Scott talking about the way we all played our mixers as if they were pianos. And Ben, too, he thought when we said we were making more of an electronic record with lots of samplers, he asked how we would sync up with each other, like the tempos, how everything would lock. And we said, “It doesn’t, we do it manually.” And he didn’t understand, because he comes from a hip-hop background where that’s not how it’s done. The first day we were in the studio, he said, “I just need to watch you guys play a song ‘cause I still don’t get it.” And we did it for him and he was like, “Oh, you just play them like they were real instruments.” He told us that was how Public Enemy used to do it, too, because they couldn’t afford the samplers back in the day, or maybe they just didn’t exist.

DAVE PORTNER

BRIAN WEITZ

In terms of the live show, a few years back you made the switch from playing traditional instruments live to using electronics. Have you grown more comfortable with that setup? BW: For me, it’s what I’ve always done live. I guess in the old days I used a little bit more keyboards and percussion. But it’s not a change for me. NL: It was definitely kind of a slow transition for me from playing drums to loops and rhythms on samplers, then playing full songs with the sampler to playing solo stuff with two samplers, and then sort of incorporating the two-sampler stuff into the Animal Collective stuff. So it was always a process of slow steps that never felt like a big, “This is totally new to me, I don’t know what I’m doing” thing. At this point though, yeah, it’s super comfortable. Maybe too comfortable. Would you ever consider going back to using more organic elements on-stage? NL: Sure, yeah. I feel like we always like to switch it up, so I’m sure we’ll go back to something completely different sooner or later. So, back to the album, your pal Bradford Cox from Deerhunter is on record as loving it and even likened it to Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain… BW: He told me that. I had to test it out in a car and I just happened to be staying with him at the time, so we drove around his old neighborhood in Atlanta, which is very much like the area we grew up in Maryland. He went on a whole thing about why it’s the Ocean Rain of this generation. NL: They’re both really wet-sounding records, I think. BW: Yeah, he was saying that Ocean Rain has, like, everything in it. There’s the rock aspect and there’s the strings and it has fun rhythms to get into and a very grand feel. DP: Actually right before we recorded I remember listening to Porcupine by Echo and the Bunnymen and I remember thinking, Oh, I can see some similarities between us. Brian and I really liked Echo and the Bunnymen when we were growing up, and those records have stuck with me for sure. There’s a weird

quality to their percussion at times, and there are similar effects. We’ve said the whole time that there’s a certain eighties vibe—the better side of eighties production—that sneaks into our music sometimes. And I think Echo really rides the line of very subtle and kind of sweet, almost psychedelic eighties production. And the record’s title—where did that come from? BW: Well, we talked about this record about being a record that sounds like it could be listened to outdoors. Not specifically at Merriweather Post Pavilion but out on a lawn or a blanket or something, especially with Maryland-type surroundings. And it sort of fit that way because Merriweather has that big lawn. And we were talking about this Terri Riley all-night performance that we had heard about and Dave said that it’d be awesome to see that outside just chilling out at the lawn at Merriweather. And when he said it we were just like, Oh man, that’s an awesome album title. Also, it has the word “weather” in it, which we like. And it’s three words, which we decided we needed three or more words in the title this time. And Noah really likes the word “pavilion” because he thinks its sounds kind of futuristic. And then just to divorce it completely from what it is, those words just kind of sound awesome together. How about the very trippy cover art? BW: We saw a magazine when we were going down to mix, like Scientific American or Discovery, one of those things from the airport and the theme of the magazine was optical illusions. We saw that one in there. And we really liked looking at it and how it moved and it kind of moves in wavy way. We just kind of kept it around the house when we were mixing and it just became this image that we associated very much with at the time. We thought it would be sweet if we could do this as a record cover. Our friends who are graphic designers who help us with our artwork spent a lot of time with the pattern and changing the background. I guess it was kind of difficult with the color ratio and stuff to actually keep the illusion. They spent a lot of time with it. But that’s not the whole artwork–it’ll be the outer slipcase and there’s an inner thing with more artwork. Noah wanted the illusion for the cover to be more like wrapping paper, and inside is this present. And what’s inside is alive, and somehow making the outer packaging move.

By Todd Lewin Photos by Ray Lego

Taccone By Todd Lewin â&#x20AC;˘ Photos by Ray Lego

Step aside, Samberg! The little dude with the funny name is stepping into the spotlight

t was another dismal and unreasonably cold day in New York, only this time I found myself walking in on Jorma Taccone as he regurgitated three-bean chili all over himself. The stylists on set couldn’t keep from gagging, but I must admit I was fine. More than fine. Sure it was gross, but it was also fucking hilarious. If you’re not familiar with Taccone’s work (which, if you’ve seen Saturday Night Live in the last three years, you are) this gag pretty well embodies his brand of humor. He’s crude. And obscene. But what softens the offensive nature of his work–what makes it something even your mother would respond to–is a mystery. It’s almost as though each joke comes delivered with a note, or a warning label–one that reads, Come here little buddy. Don’t worry, this is all in good fun. And then swiftly slaps you in the ass. As the shoot wrapped up in the Death+Taxes office, I introduced myself to Taccone and escorted him to my apartment, where he confessed that this was his first interview without the company of Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer (his coconspirators in The Lonely Island comedy troupe) and that he was legitimately nervous about it. On my couch, around the corner, shoes kicked off and Gatorades in hand, we chatted about Saturday Night Live (his day job), The Lonely Island’s recently released comedy album, Incredibad and, of course, about jizz, dicks, and Maroon 5’s Adam Levine. You are the first Jorma I’ve ever met. Well, I grew up in Berkley, California. 1977. I'm thirty-one years old. [Laughs]. And …that's it. Are your parents from the U.S.? Yeah. Andy, Akiva’s and my parents are all from the east coast and that tends to be the same with a lot of my friends in Berkley. Almost everybody’s parents moved out during the free speech movement, hitchhiked out slowly. It was more for the political consciousness, I would say, than the drugs. But, I would also say that some of our parents definitely moved out for the drugs. When did you realize that people were laughing at what you were saying and what you were doing? I have a lot of pictures of me on my soccer team—you know, when you get that little oval picture? Yeah, when you're on one knee? Exactly. Except my shorts were hiked up as high as possible and I was looking off into the distance pretty majestically. Literally nothing has changed. Honestly. I'm basically twelve years old inside. Somehow we've tricked everyone into allowing us to make a living. Because I can almost guarantee that Andy and Akiva–

well maybe not Akiva as much, because he's a more mature breed– but definitely Andy, is a super goofball. You probably caused a lot of trouble when you were young. Were your parents always really supportive of your talent? After college we all reconvened in L.A. and decided that this is what we wanted to do–try and create careers in the entertainment industry. But it was five years of having crappy jobs, PA-ing, being on unemployment like the rest of Los Angeles. After I got SNL, I found out from both my mom and my dad that they were like, We thought you guys were going nowhere. So, I would say they were very encouraging in that they held their tongues for so long, and actually never said anything when they were genuinely worried about me. But growing up as a kid, I was in plays that my dad would do at the theater. And my mom was in art too. They were both really poor and had only started to actually have normal adult lives, so there was no standard by which you could go lower. Where were you when you found out you got SNL? I was on a trip up north with my wife's family, who at the time was my girlfriend. We had heard that Andy was offered the show, so he was definitely going to have to move to New York. And we were waiting to see if me and Kiv would be hired as writers. We had a pact that if just one of us got hired he wouldn't take it, because we didn’t want to leave anybody behind. Andy obviously had to take it. It’s been his dream since he was five years old. And then luckily they wanted to hire the three of us. Lorne [Michaels, SNL head producer] has since told us that he doesn't really like breaking up groups. So lucky for us, he was willing to hire all of us. How was it adjusting to the SNL environment? Even when we didn't have jobs in L.A., we were always pretty selfmotivated. We were always making films as much as possible and stuff like that. I wouldn't say it was easy to adjust to SNL—it’s the most hectic schedule I think I'll ever have–but it definitely does encourage self-motivation. And when we first got there, we kind of realized what our strengths were. It's not like we don’t write live sketches, because we do it all the time. But our strengths are in doing the things that we had been doing for the previous five years. Within the first couple of weeks of being there, Kiv and I shot this short called “Ding Dong Brothers,” which is this parody of the Ying Yang twins and the whisper song about showing our penises to the ladies—it’s very literal. And we just got re-excited about shooting stuff on our own. We’d borrow a camera from Bill Hader's wife, Maggie, and shoot something on a Monday or Tuesday, edit it, and then bring it in to the show. We did one called “Lettuce,” which is about two guys having a dramatic conversation about lettuce, and then once called “Peyote,”

M A R / A P R 2 0 0 9 F E A T U R E S St y l i ng : Carmel L obello , J i ll B ream G room i ng : A m y Komoro w s k i

T - Sh i rt Un i q lo T ren c h Coat Un i q lo S c arf R alph L a u ren

T - Sh i rt - Calv i n Kle i n

Card i gan Un i q lo Sh i rt Steven A lan TieSteven A lan B elt Un i q lo J ean s L ev i

where Andy is a jumper and he's about to jump off a building, and he's on peyote, but it turns out that he's actually on the ground floor—so it wasn't really dangerous at all. And we shot those before the week even started at SNL and we would just bring them into the show and hope that they would want to bring them on. The third short we did was the “Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia” rap video. We were huge fans of Chris Parnell and we wanted to make some sort of rap song with him. And then after that one became really popular it sort of became what we were doing on the show, just because that's clearly what we were better at. Being from California, how has acclimating to New York been? It's funny because I think SNL is a New York institution and obviously has been for over thirty years. But working here makes me less of a New Yorker because I think what really connects you to the city is being able to hang out in it and with the people who are living here. I work all the time, and I love New York, but I think I’ve actually been able to experience less of it, because I just work all the time in Rockefeller Center and seeing the tourists in Rockefeller Center is not the same as going to all the boroughs and actually going to all the places I would normally go if I was living in the city. So I’m still just as excited about New York as when I first moved here, because I feel like there’s so much more to experience, which I haven’t been able to. How would you describe the writer's room? I'd describe it as perverted. Because— Partly because of us. It’s a lot of fun. Working at SNL is kind of like going to camp–every week you laugh a lot, and also feel kind of abused, but in the best possible way. Abused? The show beats you up pretty hard, in terms of hours, and exposing your insecurities. No matter how popular something is, or how well received it seems to be by the audience or by other writers, you can come in the next week and feel like you're the worst, most unfunny person on the planet. Like you just don't have it in you for whatever reason. But I’m sure you’re aware that lot of people credit you guys for revitalizing SNL. Well, I personally don’t agree with that statement. I think that we've just tried to do what we think is funny at the show. I think the show always goes in ups and downs. It’s kind of this rollercoaster. And I think that we just came in at a time when there were a lot of new people in the show. Jason [Sudeikis] was fairly new, Bill Hader, Kristin Wiig—and those people do amazingly well. We just came in at the beginning of the crest of something. We brought something new by doing the films, but every time I’ve heard that, because I have heard people say that before, I really don't agree with it. I just feel like we came in at the right time with a lot of funny people who brought a lot of life at the show. At the very least, being on SNL must have has led to other opportunities. Having had a few shorts that people seem to have liked has certainly opened doors. I think we were able to do Hot Rod because of “Lazy Sunday,” directly or indirectly. It kind of put

Andy front and center and people noticed. So it has helped out a lot to make things that were quote on quote successful, or, you know, well received. And then you take those opportunities and you make a movie that apparently no one wants to see. [Laughs.] But we had fun making it. The best part of SNL, for me, has always been watching the cast crack up during skits. How does it feel to be mostly responsible for that? How do you mean? Having written sketches that people bust up at? Yeah. I don’t know if I've written any sketch that's made people lose their shit. There was a sketch that we wrote a couple years ago, I think in our second year, called “Surf Meeting,” which Steve Martin was in. And he's one of my all time favorite comics, so it was just really exciting to have a sketch that one of your heroes is in. And it actually got to dress [rehearsal], it got to air, and then we watched it die a miserable death on air. That’s more the experience that I tend to remember. I was like, Oh, that was probably the funniest thing I feel like I have written on the show. I died laughing at five o'clock in the morning writing it with Andy and Kiv—could not contain myself at how funny I thought I was. It’s just about a guy being abused by a circle of friends who don't want to hang out wit him. And he keeps asking them if they are sure and they really don't want him to hang around, and everyone keeps going, Yes, we don’t like you. Get out of here! And he keeps using slang that’s inappropriate and being like, But what about when you're in the tube and it’s gnarly? And everyone’s like, Get out of here Ted! No one likes you! And somehow that was the funniest thing I've ever written. And then seeing it fail miserably was so sad. And also, a learning experience. It sounds like you all have a great time writing together. In the end, does it even matter for your material to get to air? You can never predict what others people’s reaction is going to be. You can guess, but you're never actually right. They are literally editing up until the very last minute. When a sketch happens live it’s so much harder for things to be funny, because with all the cameras switching back and forth everything has to happen perfectly. It's very different from our shorts. So when something is funny, it’s much more rewarding because of all the opportunities for failure. It’s no secret that you guys are responsible for filthy, raunchy humor. Is there ever anything you don't get away with on the show? There's a certain kind of humor you can't get away with on cable, like drug-induced wonderfulness, that just isn’t appropriate for a broader audience. We’ll bring things to dress and there will be a firm stance where they tell us, No, we do not like this, and sometimes that just makes us like it even more. Some of my favorite Digital Shorts are the ones where a few random people come up to us after and say they liked it. Comedy is so particular. It’s the easiest thing for people to hate or love. And there are very few reactions in between. Let’s talk about the record, Incredibad. How was it working with tops dogs like Justin Timberlake and Maroon 5’s Adam Levine? That's how you'd describe them, as “top dogs?”

P ar k a Urban O u tf i tter s

It was another dismal and unreasonably cold day in New York, only this time I found myself walking in on Jorma Taccone as he regurgitated three-bean chili all over himself. The stylists on set couldn’t keep from gagging, but I must admit I was fine. More than fine. Sure it was gross, but it was also fucking hilarious. If you’re not familiar with Taccone’s work (which, if you’ve seen Saturday Night Live in the last three years, you are) this gag pretty well embodies his brand of humor. He’s crude. And obscene. But what softens the offensive nature of his work–what makes it something even your mother would respond to–is a mystery. It’s almost as though each joke comes delivered with a note, or a warning label–one that reads, Come here little buddy. Don’t worry, this is all in good fun. And then swiftly slaps you in the ass. As the shoot wrapped up in the Death+Taxes office, I introduced myself to Taccone and escorted

him to my apartment, where he confessed that this was his first interview without the company of Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer (his co-conspirators in The Lonely Island comedy troupe) and that he was legitimately nervous about it. On my couch, around the corner, shoes kicked off and Gatorades in hand, we chatted about Saturday Night Live (his day job), The Lonely Island’s recently released comedy album, Incredibad and, of course, about jizz, dicks, and Maroon 5’s Adam Levine. You are the first Jorma I’ve ever met. Well, I grew up in Berkley, California. 1977. I'm thirty-one years old. [Laughs]. And …that's it. Are your parents from the U.S.? Yeah. Andy, Akiva’s and my parents are all from the east coast and that tends to be the same with a lot of my friends in Berkley. Almost everybody’s parents moved out during the free speech movement, hitchhiked out slowly. It was more for the political consciousness, I would say, than the drugs. But, I would also say that some of our parents definitely moved out for the drugs.

When did you realize that people were laughing at what you were saying and what you were doing? I have a lot of pictures of me on my soccer team—you know, when you get that little oval picture? Yeah, when you're on one knee? Exactly. Except my shorts were hiked up as high as possible and I was looking off into the distance pretty majestically. Literally nothing has changed. Honestly. I'm basically twelve years old inside. Somehow we've tricked everyone into allowing us to make a living. Because I can almost guarantee that Andy and Akiva–well maybe not Akiva as much, because he's a more mature breed–but definitely Andy, is a super goofball. You probably caused a lot of trouble when you were young. Were your parents always really supportive of your talent? After college we all reconvened in L.A. and decided that this is what we wanted to do–try and create careers in the entertainment industry. But it was five years of having crappy jobs, PA-ing, being on unemployment like the rest of Los Angeles. After I got SNL, I found out from both my mom and my dad that they were like, We

thought you guys were going nowhere. So, I would say they were very encouraging in that they held their tongues for so long, and actually never said anything when they were genuinely worried about me. But growing up as a kid, I was in plays that my dad would do at the theater. And my mom was in art too. They were both really poor and had only started to actually have normal adult lives, so there was no standard by which you could go lower. Where were you when you found out you got SNL? I was on a trip up north with my wife's family, who at the time was my girlfriend. We had heard that Andy was offered the show, so he was definitely going to have to move to New York. And we were waiting to see if me and Kiv would be hired as writers. We had a pact that if one of us got hired the other two would stay behind together, because we didn’t want to leave somebody behind. Andy obviously had to take it. It’s been his dream since he was five years old. And then luckily they wanted to hire the three of us. Lorne [Michaels, SNL head producer] has since told us that he doesn't really like breaking up groups. So lucky for us, he was willing to hire all of us.

Okay, you're a writer, how would you describe them? [Laughs]. Okay, Justin Timberlake is pretty much good at everything. He is just the most talented, charming guy—it’s a little scary how talented he is. When we recorded “Dick In A Box,” every one of his takes was just ridiculously on point, while mine were just so crappy. You're just like, CRAP! And Adam Levine is... [Laughs]. You don't have to say nice things about everybody. No, he's great. When Andy is singing in all these shorts, is that his actual voice? Yeah, you're hearing Andy. Andy loves to sing. He is pretty smooth. Yeah …Well, you’re hearing a lot of pitch correction. But nobody ever stops him from singing? No way, why would you ever want to stop somebody's dream? I only like to crush people's dreams in print. Like Adam Levine's? Ehhhh ...No! First of all, Adam Levine is fantastic. He's a great dude. He flew in on a day's notice. He probably cancelled a concert because of it. Don't print this. [Taccone laughs and regroups.] The entire album was made this summer, minus a few songs that were already on the show from years past like “Dick In A Box” and “Lazy Sunday” and Natalie Portman’s rap. But besides those three, it’s basically all new stuff that we made over the summer. And a few of the things have already aired on the show, like “Ras Trent” and “Space Olympics,” and “Jizz In My Pants.” But we're really excited about doing this. It’s something we've wanted to do for years and years. I found YouTube videos of you dancing shirtless in front of the musical guests like Death Cab For Cutie during sound check. Out of curiosity, when you dance shirtless to indie rock, do your prefer smaller or larger crowds? I prefer literally, literally any size crowd. It’s not about the crowd. No, it's about the zone. Let’s talk about Land Of The Lost with Will Ferrell. What's your relationship with him like? How were you scooped up for the film? I didn't know Ferrell at SNL, because he left two years before I started. But I was always a really big fan of him and of Adam McKay. In fact, before we got to the show we always noticed that the sketches we really, really liked were at the very end of the show and tended to be very weird and had Will Ferrell in them. Obviously we figured out that it was he and Adam McKay writing the craziest shit ever. So I was always a fan of his obviously, and originally Hot Rod was written with him in mind. He got too busy and couldn’t do it, so it just sat around forever. Technically he was a producer on Hot Rod because he kind of created the idea with Pam Brady and Jimmy Miller years and years ago. He came to one of the screenings and we got to meet him there, and it was just super sweet to even meet him. And then when I was offered

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9 F E AT U R E S

an audition just to be a part of Land Of The Lost I was so excited. And when I got the call, I was amazed that I was going be able to do something with him. In such a big budget movie, too. It’s a huge movie. Like one hundred and twenty million dollar budget or some crazy amount of money. And also, I get to be a little weirdo monkey, so that's pretty good. You mentioned Steve Martin. Who are some of your other comedic heroes or inspirations? I mean its a little weird to say now, because I would consider Ferrell a friend, but I’d still say that Ferrell is one of my comedic heroes. Who else? There’s a lot of funny people. The guys who created Wundershowsen and Xavier: Renegade Angel. John Benjamin and those guys. Tim and Eric, and Human Giant. We're also friends with Jonah Hill and that whole Judd contingent of people. I really like everyone who's working in comedy today, and I kind of look up to all of them. So I guess, that'd be my answer ...pretty boring ...but fuck Danny McBride, I hate that dude. I’m just kidding. Or am I? When I watch the Lonely Island stuff I feel almost as if I’m being let in on an inside joke. Sure it’s obviously perverted, but can you elaborate on how you go about creating it? [Laughs] I like "obviously perverted." That's just a given. I guess we are. We have enough songs about fucking putting your dick in a box, and jizz... But is there ever a formula or a method you guys adhere to? It really is just how you made fun of things and came up with jokes with your buddies in high school. These are my buddies from high school and junior high. We're literally doing exactly what we've always been doing, and what I think millions and millions of dudes across America and the world do with their buddies. There’s something really attractive to me about dudes having fun. And by “attractive,” I mean, sexually attractive. Like a turn on. I just mean, like, boner inducing hard-ons. Anything else you’d like to add? In that run of comedians I look up to, I just want to add all of the people I work with at the show. Everybody I work with–Will Forte, Sudeikis, Kristin Wiig, and Keenan [Thompson] and Fred [Armisen]. I also think that when I add to that list, and it keeps getting bigger and bigger, it’s much funnier that I don’t add Danny McBride. Lastly, I was wondering if you had a favorite SNL moment? Honestly, writing “Surf Meeting” was one of my favorite moments. I wish there was a way that you could see it right now. I actually went in to talk to Steven Martin to give him one final note. He looked at me and he said, "This is a really funny sketch, I wish you had a week to work on it. It's not working." And I was like, Yeah I know it’s not working. Anyway, good luck! So yeah, that was a great moment. Watching “Dick In A Box” with the audience for the first time, and just feeling like, I can’t believe we got this on the show, and that people seem to really like it. There’s no feeling like that. There are a ton of great moments. And of course, the next Monday, those moments are gone. And you have got to start all over again.

George Lois THE ORIGINAL MADMAN

By Alex Moore • Photos courtesy of George Lois

e You know George Lois. If you don’t know the man, you know his work. If you don’t know his work, you know its influence. Lois has spent his career in advertising and as the creative director of Esquire from 1962-1972 (a dazzling run that produced the most provocative, influential magazine covers in the history of publishing). But to say that Lois simply made ads and magazines is like describing Orson Welles’s The War Of The Worlds simply as a radio show. Like Welles, Lois’s real work has been in the realm of ideas. As a young man just back from the Korean War, Lois led a shift in the way advertising is conceived and consumed, away from simply showing products to what he calls The Big Idea—appealing to the intellectual and emotional framework of the viewer. Sound familiar? If you watch Madmen, then it probably does. Lois’s life was the inspiration for its semi-hero Don Draper, although Lois himself dismisses the show out of hand as “just a bunch of assholes getting drunk and playing golf.”

If you’re a fan, you’ll have to excuse him if Draper and Co. look like a bunch of chumps to Lois—but he wrote the book on this stuff, and he didn’t do it by acting like an arrested-development case, running around on his wife and being exiled out in the suburbs. Indeed, Lois’s Big Idea revolution sprung from his indefatigable thirst for the history of human culture. Lois has lived and worked in New York City his entire life. He talks of “going to worship every Sunday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” And after more than fifty years of marriage he still seems downright giddy about his relationship. His wife Rosemary has been at his side ever since he convinced her that their Pratt art professors were mostly useless because they didn’t possess the capacity for original thought. Fittingly, The Museum of Modern Art has an exhibit of Lois’s Esquire covers on display through March 30. Lois also recently published his newest book, called George Lois on his Creation of The Big Idea, a brilliant collection in which he offers a first-hand glimpse at the thought processes behind his most important work.

You see, even if it was wrong, it was action.

Lois made the short trip from his office to the Death+Taxes office in SoHo to discuss his new book and his life’s work. He greeted me with the vigor and bravado of a guy who keeps audience with presidents and calls Muhammad Ali one of his best friends–but also with the sincerity that allowed him to throw the same passion into campaigns for Ovaltine and Jiffy Lube that he had for the most lauded Esquire covers. “I don’t design,” Lois tells me. “I put my idea down and that’s the design. My ideas are my design.” Of himself and his peers, who lead a paradigm shift towards ideas in the 1950s, he explains, “Other designers were artists—you know, Artists. We were communicators, with design. My thinking was grittier, it was tougher, it was funnier.” The real triumph of his career has been to spark conversations— to grab our cultural framework and rattle the hell out of it. Muhammad Ali as a martyr during Vietnam? That was Lois. The injustice of falsely imprisoning Rubin “The Hurricane” Carter— the inspiration for the Bob Dylan song? That was Lois. I want my Maypo? I want my MTV? You guessed it. Lois’s influence on modern advertising and media is so fundamental that you might not even recognize it. But look at it this way: Every time you see an ad that makes you laugh, every time you see a magazine cover that makes you think, hell, every time you see a Shepard Fairey poster, it can be traced back to his innovation of The Big Idea. “I don’t just add lines and things,” he continues. “I’ll watch kids today at their computers—they’re putting things on it and I’ll say, ‘Well what’s the idea?’ and they’ll say, ‘I don’t know, I’m fooling around.’ And I’ll say ‘What the fuck are you working on the computer for? You don’t have an idea. You ought to go to the computer when you have an idea.’” Lois talks like that. He comes from a different time. In the course of our conversation, he tells me stories about two expresidents and an almost-senator. One of them excused himself from a lunch meeting with Lois for an illicit rendezvous in a restaurant bathroom. “When he came back to the table,” Lois recalls incredulously, “I said to him, ‘Do you fuck ‘em, or do you just get a blow job?’ He says to me, ‘George, I’m a busy man–I got no time. I just get a blow job.’ Can you believe that?”

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9

After attracting national attention for his ad campaigns, Harold Hayes, editor of Esquire, asked to have lunch with Lois. “He had this great magazine,” Lois tells me, “but he knew his covers sucked. Everybody’s covers sucked.” It was probably Lois’s frankness and disarming confidence that led him to tell Hayes exactly that. “Can you do me a favor” Hayes said, “and do me one cover? Because I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” After being briefed on a few topics in the issue, Lois had his Big Idea. Exactly one week later he handed in his first cover. It depicted Floyd Patterson, heavyweight champion of the world, knocked out flat on his back in the middle of an empty ring, in an empty stadium. The championship title fight with Sonny Liston was set for a week after the Esquire cover hit stands, with Patterson favored eight to one as the winner. Lois explains Hayes’s incredulity: “He said, ‘But you’re calling the fight.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘But what if you’re wrong?’ I said, ‘I’m not wrong.’ He said, ‘You’re crazy.’ I said, ‘You’re crazy, because you’re going to run it!’ You see, even if it was wrong, it was action.” But the haunting image of the abandoned fighter left for dead did much more than call a fight. Decades before the celebrityobsessed, build-you-up and tear-you-down mindset our culture has grown into, it’s a gripping comment on the nature of celebrity, success and failure. “It was an image of defeat, of a loser,” explains Lois. “If you lose, they forget about you. If you lose, you’re a dead man. It really is an image of a so-called loser in any category, in any field of work.” There was a third layer of meaning in play: In 1962, racial tension in the country was approaching a boiling point. Liston, a juvenile criminal, had done time for robbing a gas station. He was a Scary Black Man to a xenophobic and still segregated society. Patterson was the good guy. He was safe. He was supposed to win. Liston was never supposed to win—he was terrifying. The image of Patterson, not only defeated but left for dead, stirred and challenged those fears in an entirely visceral way. And it became that much more chilling when Liston actually won. It was a picture worth way, way more than a thousand words. In his pursuit to push the Big Idea ever further, it was one of Lois’s great gifts to convince highly visible people to do outlandish things in his ads and magazine covers. He got Mickey Mantle to cry like a kid. (“I want my Maypo!”) He somehow convinced Muhammad Ali, a devout Muslim, to pose as martyred Christian saint. (It would turn out to be perhaps the most famous magazine cover in history, and sparked the conversation about Ali’s protest against Vietnam.) He convinced the universally despised Roy Cohn, instrument of McCarthyism, to pose with a halo over his head, and the infamous Lt. John Calley of the Mai Lai massacre to pose smiling with Vietnamese children. How did he do it? Sometimes he appealed to their needs–the need for personal vindication, the need for publicity, whatever. Cohn desperately wanted to do the cover to help sell his book.

Clockwise from top left: For Esquire’s 35th Anniversary Issue in October, 1968, Lois worked art-direction magic to depict the decade’s heroes living on. | April, 1968, Mohammed Ali becomes immortalized | Lt. John Calley offered a chillingly human look at the Vietnam war, November, 1970. | August, 1970 showed that god is dead, and the kids are all right. | Lois’s first cover for Esquire called the Liston/ Patterson fight in August, 1962 | May, 1969, at the end of an era, Lois astutely placed Warhol drowning in his own soup.

Lois’s searing humor sold a lot of lipstick. The werewolf archetype was the inspiration for this before/ after. • The “I want my MTV” slogan nearly incited a riot. When cable providers refused to carry the station, this ad was released and the kids responded by flooding them with pleas for MTV.

When Lois sat him down with the halo, he said to Lois, “You liberal commies are gonna pick the ugliest one, aren’t you?” “You bet,” Lois replied, “I hate your fucking guts.” But what could Cohn do? He needed the publicity. When his Big Idea wasn’t Lois with the champ Muhammad Ali feasible, Lois would doctor the covers in a pre-Photoshop slight of hand. There was the one of LBJ as a ventriloquist, holding a talking Hubert Humphrey doll; the paparazzi-style Howard Hughes cover; the 35th Anniversary edition at the end of the sixties, which pictured JFK, RFK, and MLK standing together in Arlington National Cemetery. All this led some people to ask the question, just as they do of advertising in general, Isn’t it manipulative? Isn’t it cynical? But the Big Ideas in Lois’s work have always been bigger than the subject on the cover or the subject in the ad. For the Christmas 1963 cover of Esquire, Hayes asked Lois to do a Christmas-themed cover. “I said, ‘All right,’” explains Lois, “‘I want to take a photograph of Sonny Liston, the meanest motherfucking prick in the world’—and he was a prick, a really bad guy—‘in a Santa Claus hat.’” To get him to do it, he asked his good friend and boxing hero Joe Louis to ask Liston. They got Liston to the shoot without mentioning the hat. During the shoot Lois put the hat on him and the photographer snapped two shots. “‘Get this fucking thing outta here,’” Liston growled at Lois. “‘A couple more, champ,’ I said. He looks at me and says ‘Fuck you.’” But it became another landmark cover.

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 9

“It was a time of incredible racism,” continues Lois. “It was still the Jim Crow South. There were still segregated drinking fountains. And I was thinking, Jesus if I were a black guy I’d be a terrorist. There should have been a black terrorist organization. I’ll never understand why it didn’t happen.” With one wardrobe addition of the Santa Claus hat, Lois subverted one of the major identity icons of white America and challenged its rancourous racism. Did he manipulate Liston into the cover? Possibly. But was it cynical? Anything but. In fact all of Lois’s Big Ideas rely on an overwhelming optimism of people to get the ideas and to do something with them—to think. They give their audience the credit of intelligence, and the vote of confidence to move progressively toward the right side of history. Picasso once said (and if Picasso said it, you can bet Lois read it) that "art is a lie that makes us realize truth." Which is what Lois seems to want for all of us. His new book, George Lois on his Creation of the Big Idea, reads like a love letter to learning, to history, to art, and seems to urge its readers to soak in more of it, to experience everything you can, to think more. “That’s what I’m trying to say in the book—” Lois tells me, “the more you understand about life, the more you understand about movies, the more you understand about seven-thousand years of art, the more you understand about comic books, the more dirty jokes you know, the more you live your life and the more you know about ballet—I don’t know a lot about ballet, but you should know something about ballet—that’s where the DNA comes from. That’s your reserve when you’re thinking about ideas.” That, he claims, is where the Big Ideas come from. Take it from Lois—he should know.

Still brilliant, after all these years George Lois, Mr. Big Idea having a “Eureka!” moment. Photo by George Lois and Luke Lois, made exclusively for D+T.

Yes We Can. Fuck Yeah. ‘Twas a year for affirmatives. Fuck Yeah in 2008 was triumph over tall odds (financing issues) and smaller annoyances (its founders were unjustly beaten up by security guards outside a Radiohead concert.) But triumph they did. “Fuck Yeah We Can,” they said, and took the annual L.A.-based festival on the road for its tour, featuring rowdy favorites like Matt & Kim, The Death Set, Monotonix, and Team Robespierre. Celebrated photographer Tod Seelie was there to capture everything in its rugged, dirty, smelly glory.

Johnny from the Death Set jumping off the base drum in Baltimore.

Ty of Team Robespierre crowd surfing at Club Exit in Brooklyn. The Brooklyn show was the final one of the tour.

Crowd surfing chaos at the Bottletree in Birmingham, AL. This venue was great because they had a massage chair and free socks for the bands backstage.

Josh Fadem warms up backstage.

Johnny and Rex working on new music on the bus.

Johnny and Ty: cuddle buddies catching Zs.

Monotonix plays in the back of a pickup truck in Winston-Salem, NC. They had a tendency to try and move the show outside the venue wherever they played.

Ami of Monotonix gives the crowd a taste of his "assfeedback" at Whirly Ball in Atlanta. Luckily, Ami usually used his own personal mic, most of the time.

Ami rubs it all in after an audience member poured his beer on him at the Black Cat in Washington DC.

The proverbial group portrait. From left to right: Top row: Jahphet (Death Set), Pensecola Ryan, Kim (Matt & Kim), Yonotan (Monotonix), Matt (Matt & Kim), Steven (Microcosm Publishing), Pete (Death Set), Donovan (bus crew), Delilah (Space 1026). Bottom row: Johnny (Death Set), Joey (Deat Set), Nick (comedian), Josh Fadem (comedian), Jim (Team Robespierre), Jay (film crew), Ami (Monotonix), Haggai (Monotonix), Sean (F Yeah Fest founder), Mike (Team Robespierre), Phil (bus crew), Malia (bus crew), Ty (Team Robespierre), Michael (videographer), John (sound guy).

Crystal Antlers rock on the Lamar pedestrian bridge in Austin at a late night post-show performance.

A grease dumpster sits ready to provide free (but smelly) fuel for the tour bus.

Mike House from Team Robespierre and comedian Josh Fadem stand behind Greased Lighting as the dumpsters get inspected.

Debris and broken glass litter the ground after a chaotic Monotonix set.

Young fans rock out arm in arm.

Jahphet cruising in someone's pool in Austin, TX. The whole tour bus crashed at a family's home out in the suburbs. There were so many sleeping bodies all over the house you could barely move.

UNIITED STATES COAST GUARD Photos By Nick LaVecchia

230 People Die In The Open Ocean Each Year. More Would, But Guys Like Jim McGinley Are There To Save Them

How many open-water rescues have you been involved in? If you are performing an open-water rescue, the odds are something went very wrong. Most rescues are performed while the survivor(s) are still on board the vessel. The majority of rescue missions are for injury or health problems while on board a vessel, or a ship sinking or fire on board—not so much a live-water rescue. But when flying conditions or difficulties in locating the rescue scene take too long you now have an open-water situation. In some cases—like the case of the Lady Samantha in November of 2003, which was a forty-foot sailboat that was going down off the coast of Cape Cod—the five survivors actually had to jump into the thirty-five to fifty-foot seas—to be rescued. In this case, the wild swinging of the mast from the seas prohibited us from performing a direct hoist to the boat so all the survivors had to jump into the sea to be rescued—a strategy usually kept as a last resort. I have been involved in roughly five open-water rescue situations.

Flying helicopters is extremely dangerous - how'd you get into it? Flying helicopters is not dangerous. Not flying them well in the conditions the US Coast Guard goes out in can be. As soon as you lift into a hover you understand that it takes the skills and mutual trust of four very talented and dedicated people to not only make this hunk of metal actually fly, but also fly through snow and ice and wind—to help someone you don’t know and will most likely never see again—to get them to safety. And then to get you back home.

Have you ever worked with a diver who had to choose between saving one person and letting another die? I have not been on a rescue where that had to be discussed or factored. I do know of situations where it was. But you can, in most circumstances, only hoist one survivor into the helicopter at a time. So, in essence, any multi-survivor rescue situation requires critical decisions like that which need to be made. Who is going first? Who is going last? Will we have enough fuel to stay that long? Have you ever worked in Arctic conditions? If so, any good stories? I was stationed for twelve years on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. While itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s by no means arctic our area of responsibility was from Montauk, NY to Canada so you get into cold water and ice rescue situations pretty routinely. Units in the Great Lakes region and Alaska deal with it on a much more consistent basis. It doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make the situation all that much more difficult, just much more time-critical.

There are scenes in movies like The Guardian and The Perfect Storm where sixty-plus foot waves rise up that can take down a helicopter. Does stuff like that actually happen? There are some crazy big waves out there. When they are real they seem about ten times bigger than any film production special-effects geek can make. Do they reach up and pull helicopters down? No. But a couple of random misguided steps while flying in those conditions and you can easily find yourself upside down underwater. But thank God for those seas; if I wasn’t so fucking scared of them I would never have been focused enough to do my job. How many lives have you saved? I have no idea what the actual US Coast Guard records indicate. In my own head and heart I know of eleven people that are alive because of being saved by helicopter crews I was a part of. There are countless people we have helped, transported to the hospital, got out of an uncomfortable situation, or simply brought to safety. But, luckily, most rescue scenarios are dealt with in such a swift and precise manner— it’s more assistance than life saving. But there are a handful of people, whom I may never see again, that got to wake up today because of us. That’s a nice feeling, maybe even more so due to the relative anonymity of it.

REVIEWS Key: Worst + Best +++++

SWAN LAKE Enemy MIne Jagjaguwar ++++

People like supergroups. The prospect of seeing the brains behind some of their favorite bands come together to collaborate oozes possibility: perhaps the best of all worlds will emerge– an album that is exactly the sum of all the parts and therefore better than any not-so-super album could be on its own! Or maybe people just like to say "supergroup." Either way, Swan Lake is one—it's the union of Dan Bejar from the New Pornographers, Casey Mercer from Frog Eyes, and Spencer Krug from seventy-five per cent of all indie bands in existence. On their latest, they actually do sound like a perfect amalgam of each of their respective bands. It's weird, anthemic, carnival-esque, occasionally poppy, and ethereal. But sometimes it even seems like each is trying to out-weird each other, each singer desperately emptying their own brand of rampant neurosis into song after song—and it can get a little exhuasting. Even so, it's a dynamic, melodramatic romp of supergroup proportions. -Brian Merchant

RE V IE W S

123

DAN DEACON Bromst | Carpark Records | +++

Don’t be fooled. It may sound as if you downloaded a corrupt file or bought a damaged CD, but that disembodied noise you’re hearing loop over itself in perpetuity is actually how “Build Voice” is supposed to start. Give it a minute or so for those Wall-of-Sound vocals to kick in and you’ll see what Dan Deacon’s all about. Those unfamiliar might find themselves shocked and confused. Those who know him well might lift an eyebrow over the fact that he’s kind of writing songs now. Coming from a guy who once composed a forty-two minute piece comprised entirely of six monotonous, slowly diverging sound waves, this is quite a feat. So then. Here’s where Deacon’s at now. While still heavy on the electro-spastic side of things, layering things like a mad scientist’s Brian Eno, at the heart this LSD-spiked cake is good, honest pop music made, if for no other reason, than to get you to tap your foot. And tap your foot you will. “Wet Wings” flies on the Irish-folk funeral hymns spilling from some faceless woman, one line looping over the other until the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own feedback. Then there’s “Woof Woof,” which is the album’s best attempt at a hip-hop song backed by MC Alvin and the ChipMunKK Gang and all the rest of the Saturday-morning cartoons. Bromst is either a total hit or a total miss. Some might find certain parts to drag, and Deacon’s use of weird, sometimes nauseating noises is sure to annoy more than a few. But the others will be taken somewhere far, far away, where the colors are manifold and the out-of-body disco floor beacons. – Danny Fasold

Coconut Records Davy Young Baby ++++

Jason Schwartzman is an actor. We all know that by now. He was also a drummer for Phantom Planet, a band he assumes “you’ve heard of” on the biographical song, “Drummer.” Either way, your familiarity with Schwartzman’s creative output shouldn’t sway your ultimate appreciation of Davy. The multi-talented Californian finds focus worth noticing here. His debut Nighttiming, which is also pretty darn good, did feel a bit hopped back and forth between genres, like a bullfrog at a rave. Jon Brion, Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney’s influence are bountiful on Davy and “Saint Jerome,” “Wandering Around,” “Is This Sound Okay?” are perfect examples. The question, however, still remains: Who the heck is Davy? – Isaac Lekach

124

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 8 R E V I E W S

Asobi Seksu Hush Polyvinyl +++

Asobi Seksu like reverb and fuzz. By god they do! They are the living monument to shoegaze and dreampop, and no one can deny that they are quite deft at sniffing their way around sublime melodies. But what they lack is the conceptual and imaginative qualities of someone like M83's Anthony Gonzalez, who knows how to deconstruct and reconfigure the genre's sounds into something otherworldly. Asobi Seksu are, on the other hand, hamstrung by their delicate style. The band only really has two modes: lilting and melancholic, and usually both at the same time. It would be nice if Asobi Seksu could forge another path, like the musical equivalent of Bill Clinton's Third Way economic policy or Buddhism's spiritual, Middle Way. “Glacially” and “I Can't See” hint at some possible future directions, but the album as a whole is merely window dressing ...but it’s damn good window dressing. – DJ Pangburn

Bat For Lashes Two Suns Astralwerks +++

With Two Suns, Natasha Khan has crossed that barrier which has become the defining challenge for musicians in the post-mp3 world. Rather than being confined by her initial release Fur and Gold, or doomed into obscurity out of the need to undo its impact, she has transcended it with a timeless follow up. With contributions from Scott Walker and Yeasayer, Two Suns not only speaks to the moment we're living in, it forgoes all individual moments of reference and bends time at its will leaving behind a classic collection of eleven songs. – Shane Gill

Hot Chip with Robert Wyatt and Geese S/T EP Parlophone +++

Cryptacize Mythomania Asthmatic Kitty +++

Hi. I’m Robert Wyatt. You might remember me from such sixties pseudo-world music/ psychedelic act The Soft Machine, or fusionrock band Centepide. Well, okay, I doubt you remember me from Centepide, but The Soft Machine, right? We touched elbows with the likes of Pink Floyd, man, dig? Doesn’t ring any bells? Well, thanks to Hot Chip, now you won’t forget me. We’ve reworked some jams and added some spice. Now that’s music! So grab yourself a moist towelette, 'cos listening to Hot Chip never felt so hot! - Danny Fasold

Mythomania is a psychological disease defined by pathological lying—the impulse to fabricate, to weave stories and fantasies that never happened but are realistic enough to almost convince you they did. Mythomania is the aptly titled new album from Cryptacize, a fusion of whimsical, chromatic indie pop melodies, spidery rhythms, upbeat guitars and the dreamy liquid texture of Nedelle Torrisi’s ambient voice. It’s a compilation of songs so happily bizarre you’ll find yourself transported to the fantastical alternate realities of your quirkiest dreamlike states. – Amelia Kreminski

Ben Kweller Changing Horses ATO +++

Cut Off Your Hands You and I Polyvinyl +++

“Country twang-infused” may read like a red warning label, but Kweller’s Texan roots guided him well in writing and producing the album. From the whiskey-dripping, woeful prairie-wind vocalizations of “Gypsy Rose” to the Dixieland throwback and ragtimereminiscent saloon piano tunes of “Sawdust Man,” Kweller delivers only the most delicious lemonade-stand refreshment to the parched genre of contemporary country. The songs on Changing Horses are still filled with Kweller trademarks – what other songwriter could compose such endearingly fumbling lyrics as “I’m like my grandma, short but I stand tall”? But between the addition of Kitt Kitterman’s meandering pedal steel guitar and the foot-stomping, grass-chewing (cow-tipping?) rhythms and guitar riffs of the tunes, Kweller’s usual style leans a little south. So just like the name of the last song, Kweller’s album finds his musical style “Homeward Bound,” and it’s a trip that will make any Kweller fan make tracks for Texas as well. – Amelia Kreminski

Broken Spindles Kiss/Kick Blank.wav ++

Not sure what it is that misses on Kiss/Kick. Could be any number of things, really—the

Cut Off Your Hands have stumbled upon something remarkable: If you take the New Wave sensibilities of the Cure and the propulsive rhythmic attack of Gang of Four, put them together into one upbeat, dance-

happy stew, you get . . . precisely the same shit that every indie dance rock band has been making for the last eight years. I mean maybe we should cut them a break since they're from way down in New Zealand, but this is some seriously generic stuff. Clichéd lyrics, unimaginative synth lines—Cut Off Your Hands make the Black Kids seem like revolutionary innovators. If you are the most diehard fan of dancy, upbeat indie rock ever, and have already listened to every single other album the genre ever produced, this album might not bore you. But it probably still will. – Brian Merchant

REVIEWS

tired Gang of Four-ish guitars, the decorative synthesizers (to appease the Futurists, of course), the imagery evoked in the song title, “The Moist Red Mess,” or perhaps it was the oh-so-inventive punning executed in “No Mind Knows Mine.” Lewis Carroll would not be proud. He would be sad. But, Joel Petersen does manage to stick the proverbial spaghetti noodle to the wall with, “You're Happy But Not For Long.” Which, upon some quiet reflection, represents the general psychological state induced by the album. – DJ Pangburn

Cursive Mama, I’m Swollen Saddle Creek +++ Cursive fans expecting a cheery follow-up to Happy Hollow won’t find it in the melancholic twists of Mama, I’m Swollen. The band’s characteristic minor-chord style underscores the epic tracks on this record. Complete with violin whispers, haunting chorus groups and a healthy dose of lyrical social commentary sung through Tim Kasher’s heartsick voice, the songs ring with eeriness. Thoughtful and somewhat depressing, this rainy-day album brings another round of well-crafted music to Cursive enthusiasts. They have wandered back to the dark side—for the true believers. – Amelia Kreminski

Dan Auerbach Keep It Hid Nonesuch +++

Like chicken soup for alt-country and soul, the solo debut from one-half of The Black Keys serves up back-woods blues that aren’t one bit half-assed. Organ peddling, “I Want

Bonnie “Prince” Billy Beware! Drag City +++ Proving that the good will and easy optimism of 2008’s Lie Down in the Light were short-lived, Will Oldham turns back to exploring the ugly and un-presentable on Beware!. Utilizing a similar backdrop of warmly nodding fiddles, twinkling electric guitars, and swirling pedal steel, the Bonnie Prince sounds like Gram Parsons but sets a decidedly different tone with songs about jealously, wishing to possess another human being on the opening “Beware Your Own Friend,” and warning that he will destroy everyone who trusts him in “You are Lost.” Written during three months of near-total isolation, these songs ache with the fear of abandonment and the desperate loneliness of a master artist, someone who knows he will always be alone. – Matt Fink

125

Some More” and T. Rex inspired, “Street Walkin’” are candid and uncouth. “The Prowl” follows suit with lurking guitars exactly as advertised. “Whispered Words,” written originally by Auerbach’s dad, adds sentimental sweetness to this otherwise unrelenting ransack of rock. – Amber L. Herzog

Faunts Feel.Love.Thinking.Of. Friendly Fire ++

There is such a thing as over-perfecting, and Faunts are red-handed. The poker face of their technical rigidity—somewhere between math-rocking Minus the Bear and a laptop-bolstered New Order—is uncompelling, especially for an amorously titled disc. The title track’s intro eerily recalls Phil Collins, and eighties pop beats appear often thereafter, but it falls just shy of danceable. “Out On A Limb”, “I Think I’ll Start A Fire,” and “Explain,” are the best of what Faunts have to offer, and while decent (and ripe for Sofia Coppola’s next period film), a little

Eulogies Here Anonymous Dangerbird ++ Bands like the Eulogies are the hardest to write about—they play pleasant, inoffensive alt rock/power pop. I mean, what do you say about an album that embraces those genres at face value? I guess you say the same thing you'd say after your friend asks how you like the new off-white paint job in his apartment. "Um, it's fine," you might say. "Looks like a nice, even job. Good technique." And so it is with the Eulogies: nice, pretty melodies, some distorted power chords, justemotive-enough vocals, and minorly bad lyrics about love and such ("you're like a bad connection I want to fix") all make for a collection of pop songs that blend into the background of the music world like vanilla wallpaper. -Brian Merchant

126

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 8 R E V I E W S

loosening up would have gone a long way. – Amber L. Herzog

Vetiver Tight Knit Sub Pop +++

Since emerging on the freak-folk scene five years ago with a great self-titled LP, it seems like Vetiver's Andy Cabic has been doing his damnedest to erase that “freak” qualifier from the genre in which he once trafficked, moving towards more conventional acoustic pop-folk and rock. Of course, freak folk – freak = well, folk. And that's exactly what we get here on Tight Knit, a solid, generally satisfying collection of mostly-folk songs. Bottom line: Nothing too freaky about these solid, if unimaginative, folk tunes. -Brian Merchant

Bell Orchestre As Seen Through Windows Arts & Crafts +++

Montreal’s Bell Orchestre share members with Arcade Fire, but aside from a fondness for songs that unfold on a large scale, there isn’t much that musically unites them. The french-horn-driven compositions on their second album, As Seen Through Windows, have a timelessness to them: after years of hearing the term applied to folk-rock with ornate arrangements, it’s tempting to declare this the right and proper heir to the term “baroque pop,” especially after the flawless “Icicles Bicycles.” That said, the album’s middle section finds the group incorporating electronic elements more prominently, while “The Gaze” achieves a manic energy. As they head more and more into rock territory,

bringing in dissonant elements alongside an upbeat precision, comparisons with currently-dormant post-rock precursor Rachel’s may come to mind. – Tobias Carroll

Iran Dissolver Narnack +++

Shrouded in mystery since their 2000 debut earned raves for its noise-encrusted experimental pop, Iran sounds like they are ready to step out from behind the curtain with Dissolver. Now six years since their last release, founder and main songwriter Aaron Aites has left San Francisco for Brooklyn and enlisted TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone to play guitars. With TVOTR’s Dave Sitek producing, the quartet’s previous lo-fi sprawl is cleaned up, lowering them from “Harry Pussy” to “Pavement” on the scale of buzzing feedback, though tangles of lead guitars and noisy detours ensure the mix doesn’t become too austere. – Matt Fink

Loney Dear Dear John Polyvinyl +++

Already home to Chicago’s Owen, Polyvinyl is now importing an additional one-man show, bedroom recorder, Emil Svanängen. The Swede, who has self-released four albums in his native land as Loney Dear, emanates a stark intimacy similar to John Vanderslice (minus the suicidal tendencies). Revealing a steady knack for storytelling, “Summers,” and “Violent” are goose bump-inducing stunners. “I Got Lost” and “Airport Surroundings” incorporate—certainly inadvertently— melodies resembling the Animals’ “House of Rising Sun” and the Warren G classic “Regulate,”respectively. True to his countrymen’s stereotype, Svanängen provides the precise economically sexy bang for the buck anticipated. – Amber L. Herzog

M. Ward Hold Time Merge ++++

Matt Ward has become obsessed with time— its fleeting nature and looming influence over our lives. On Hold Time, Ward explores that theme gracefully. After lending Zooey Deschanel a hand in She & Him, it’s nice to find him back in the forefront. As per his usual, Ward offers up a couple of covers— this time tackling, “Rave On” made famous by Buddy Holly, and “Oh, Lonesome Me,” featuring Lucinda Williams. While both are remarkable, it’s the originals—songs like “To Save Me” (featuring Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle) and “Fisher of Men” that remind us why it’s worth spending time, with Hold Time. Yuk. Yuk. – Isaac Lekach

REVIEWS

Antony & The Johnsons The Crying Light | Secretly Canadian | ++++ You’ve got to hand it to Antony Hegarty—he’s truly the Björk of androgynous balladeers. His voice is like no other, but actually describing how that voice sounds is a challenge. “Warbly” seems too easy a description, as does “emotive” or “heart-felt”or any number of strung-together adjectives. Let’s just say it’s different, and that it’s also beautiful, and leave it at that. The Crying Light is his third full-length effort, and quite possibly his best yet. Each song is superbly orchestrated, from the Ys-like violins cradling “Daylight and the Sun” to the stripped-down, atonal hum floating in the background in “Dust and Water.” A flute sounds off far-away eighth-notes that never, ever change pitch during the title track, which only fuels its woodsy campfire feel, and my gawd, those slowly-creeping-swinging-door noises that bookend the noir-ish “One Dove” (best song on the record, hands down) are, in the words of A Clockwork Orange’s Alex, a “real horror-show.” This record is melodrama-galore. If you’re expecting things to sound joyful, as they do in “Kiss My Name,” just remember not to get too caught up in the season. After all, even this song is only surface-level happy. “I’m trying to be sane, I’m trying to kiss my friend and when broken, make amends,” Antony gleefully intones, but there’s something in the lyrics and in the way the violins frantically scatter about, as if the song is trying to force a smile on the listener. And maybe you will smile. Or maybe you’ll melt away. - Danny Fasold

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart S/T Slumberland +++

Having developed considerable underground buzz on the strength of their three seven-inch singles, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart face the problem of translating their momentum into a focused full-length release. They do that and then some on their debut, rarely wandering from the template of dreamily rendered hooks, malted boy/girl vocals, and crackling drums that they established on previous releases. You’ve heard it all before, of course, and like early My Bloody Valentine or Jesus and Mary Chain, the New York City quartet favors the sort of buzzing layers of guitar feedback and bubblegum hooks that seem untouched by the last twenty years of indie rock. – Matt Fink

Peter Bjorn and John Living Thing Almost Gold +++

Give them credit—Peter Bjorn and John haven’t attempted to cash in on their success in following up their hipster-approved 2006 breakthrough, Writer’s Block. Instead, the Swedish trio breaks down their playful and plaintive indie pop and rebuilds it on a template of vintage synthesizers and splashy drum textures, creating a confusing mixed bag of eighties pop balladry and surprising left-field experiments. Among them are Flaming Lips-styled psych anthems (“The Feeling”), squeaky sing-along grooves (“Nothing to Worry About”), and playfully throbbing threats (“Lay it Down”), but the album eventually gets bogged down in clever but slight mid-tempo fare. Bold but unfocused, Living Thing is the kind of album that is flawed by design. – Matt Fink

Phosphorescent To Willie Dead Oceans +++

Matt Houck, Phosphorescent ringleader, puts aside his epic, ambient art-folk aspirations to do an album of Willie Nelson covers. Sitting down to listen to a cover album is usually a dim prospect—a surefire sign of a creative lull by the artist recording it, and likely a thoroughly dull listening experience, right? Thankfully, not so with To Willie. Sometimes

127

MORRISSEY Years of Refusal Attack/ Sanctuary ++

Let’s start with what’s good about Years of Refusal, because there’s plenty of here worth digesting, like those uber-lush synth tones in “It’s Not Your Birthday Anymore,” which is like the theme song to Twin Peaks spiked with a heavy dose of Top 40 guilty pleasures. And “You Were Good in Your Time” makes a surprisingly triumphant leap into more intense Lynch territory when the song drops its sleek, James Bond-style sexiness in favor of faraway helicopters and strange chantings. Now, the reigning indie-rock sentiment seems to be that if you have half a brain, you’re required to love Morrissey simply because he’s Morrissey and he has a pretty voice and he’s in tune with his feelings. But anyone with five minutes to actually scrutinize his work can realize that he’s been moping about the same high-school bullshit for like twenty-five years now. When he was a sexually maladjusted twenty-something speaking for a generation of sexually maladjusted Reaganites, his message was somewhat poignant. Coming from a guy who’s about to turn fifty, it’s just plain silly. “Nobody wants my love, nobody needs my love,” Morrissey croons in “I’m Throwing My Arms around Paris,” and it’s pretty much this same line passionately exclaimed throughout almost every song here with slightly different words. Only on last year’s hit single, “That’s How People Grow Up,” does Mr. Morrissey almost catch a glimpse of forces beyond his own feelings. “Yes, there are things worse in life than never being someone’s sweetie,” he sings. Dude. Take a page from your own book. It’s fine if you want to write about heartache, but there are other ways to do it than playing the rejection card for the umpteenth time. – Danny Fasold

strictly faithful to ol' Willie and sometimes innovatively re-imagined, the arrangements are lush, thoughtful, and surprisingly emotive. Phosphorescent is about to make Willie Nelson fans out of a bunch of indie rock kids. -Brian Merchant

128

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 8 R E V I E W S

MSTRKRFT Fist Of God Dim Mak / Downtown +++

In a possible attempt to one up Justice, or at the very least, parlay some of their massive, dancey crowds, MSTRKRFT has culled together a “who’s who” list of guest vocalists, including Ghostface Killah, John Legend, and E-40. Not surprisingly, each guest puts their electro-grime-pop into a different light. Jamal adds a neo-soul thing to his cuts “Breakaway” and “So Deep.” You can see these being spun on Friday nights ad nausea, but they mostly sound generic in sound and scope. Legend surprises during “Heartbreaker,” a poppy piano tune that wins on its ability to

hook and flow; be warned: if you actually stop and listen to the words, you’ll cringe just a bit. Ghostface kills with “Word Up,” one of the more aggressive collaborations, where the Wu-Alum sagely advises, “it’s all in your fuckin’; do it hard.” With all these “hip” moments though, it’s actually the instrumentals that are the real stand outs on Fist Of God. –Michael Ayers

Aristotle once famously warned, “Never indulge too greatly in questionable aesthetics.” Well, he didn't really say that, but he should have. Perhaps it would have stopped Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band from throwing their musical ideas into a blender and shouting, Voila! across the Sierra Mountains. I would liken their eponymous album to the severed head of a slaughtered chicken. Like that one who managed to live on after the farmer's blade made its cruel descent—Mike The Headless Chicken. “A Year Or Two” and “On the Collar” are the highlights of the album, and it's no coincidence that they are the least frantic tracks. MSHVB is all about tempo. Multiple tempos. Criss-Crossing tempos. Lots of tempos. They can't restrain themselves. One is tempted to adapt Berkeley's famous philosophical riddle when considering this album: if MSHVB suddenly lost tempo and nobody was there to hear it, would they still exist? – DJ Pangburn

Wavves Wavvves Fat Possum +++

The bedroom project of an eccentric twentytwo-year-old San Diego native named Nathan Daniel Williams, Wavves revives the era of underground four-track tape trading with his second full-length release. Choked with noise and lo-fi fuzz, the album focuses more on texture than technique, mixing caterwauling exorcisms with more conventional (relatively speaking) song structures, where guitars mumble and groan and vocals are smothered under heaps of pounding drums and sonic abuse. But that’s just the surface sprawl. Close listens will reveal surprisingly imaginative pop arrangements, where sodden layers pile up and strangle each other and stray melodies strain to poke their heads through the surface buzz.—Matt Fink

Obits I Blame You Sub Pop +++

The attraction of Obits might initially be its members’ collective résumé: stints in Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes, Edsel, and Shortstack, among others. And Rick Froberg, primary vocalist, hasn’t attracted dedicated followings for his projects for nothing: The man’s got a perfectly raw vocal style, infuriated and immediately gripping. Here, though, the songs are slower, more minimal in their construction. There’s a slow build, with Froberg’s vocals mountingly paranoid and Scott Gursky’s minimalist drumming propelling the songs forward. What makes it click ends up being the room they allow for texture, to slip in a harrowing guitar tone, to allow a bass line or a damning lyric to rise out of the mix. It’s straightforward, primal rock music, true, but in the same way that Denis Johnson’s Already Dead is straightforward noir: all of the expected elements are there, but arranged in a sinister fashion, heralding doom to come. Review – Tobias Carroll

Mirah (a)spera K Records ++++ There’s a cinematic quality to Mirah’s music, much of this record injected in spoonfuls of buzzing synths and flourishing violins and grandiose multi-part choruses, which come sweeping down like a hawk only to once again take to flight and disappear. The high point of the album, not only in structure but in terms of everything I just talked about,

REVIEWS

Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band Dead Oceans ++

Zero Boys Vicious Circle Secretly Canadian ++++

Delving back into punk reissues from decades before can be an awkward experience. The reissue of Zero Boys’ 1982 Vicious Circle avoids this pitfall, due in part to pop and thrash tributaries feeding into an already restless sound. The shouted chorus of “Civilization’s Dying” is instantly memorable (and, as Jack Rabid points out in his liner notes, far less archetypal lyrically than it might seem initially). Still better is the way the refrain seems to come in a half-step early on “Drug Free Youth,” leading to a feel that’s both anthemic and disconcerting. Which, considering their contemporaries, is no small feat. – Tobias Carroll

is “The Forest,” a song so epic in scope it’s a wonder its Beirut-style melodrama could be compressed into a narrow threeand-a-half minutes. But that’s for the best, anyway—any more than that and whatever punch those funereal marching-band beats have would evaporate into thin air. With classical harp ditties like “Shells,” Mirah’s sure to withstand her fair share of Joanna Newsom comparisons. Not that this is a bad thing. The influence is clearly there, and if you’re looking for muses, Newsom’s a pretty damn decent place to start. But there’s also a lot of originality here as well. Whereas Newsom’s more prone to the harp/violins/bigger violins formula, Mirah takes things a step further, leading her songs fearlessly into strange territories riddled with spaghetti western power chords and grungy dissonance. “The River” sums up (a)spera’s theme perfectly through the words of a woman longing for more. “If you won’t be having me, watch the sorrows shape my mouth,” she sings under the sway of flutes and sporadic waves of dissonance. It’s sad but simultaneously playful, like a blown kiss from a broken heart. – Danny Fasold

129

GAME REVIEWS Chinatown Wars Nintendo DS Rockstar Games ++++

Question: Can the most adult-friendly gaming company in history produce a classic title for the kid-friendly Nintendo DS? They just did, and without sparing a modicum of indecency. Chinatown Wars follows the character Huang Lee, an Asian playboy who finds himself in the middle of Liberty City’s typical gang warfare. Within minutes he is stealing cars, chucking Molotov cocktails, burning people with flamethrowers, and, of course, making money. The game makes great use of the DS’s stylus. While Huang’s general actions are controlled with the d-pad, you’ll use the stylus to smash car windows, fill up Molotov cocktails at the gas station, and crack open safes. Rockstar were not constrained by the DS’s graphic capability. The game is textured and vibrant, employing a top-down visual with expansive, rotating camera angles while maintaining a cartoonish, fun feel. As a matter of fact, selling drugs, running over civilians and gunning down cops has never been this adorable. By Stephen Blackwell

LocoRoco 2 Sony PSP SCEA +++

How one becomes many and many become one is a quandary philosophers have grappled with throughout time. LocoRoco answers,“Press O.” The second installment of the series is a lot like the first—you control a lovable yellow blob by pressing the trigger buttons to “tilt” the screen. LocoRoco 2 makes for hours of cute gaming, though it can get tedious. Works best as a pick-up and play.

Guitar Hero: Metallica PlayStation 3 / Xbox 360 Activision +++

You and everyone you know play Guitar Hero. The cultural phenomenon that it is, the series works with the biggest recording artists in the world, and Metallica are the biggest guitar band out there. The game brings classic Metallica songs to the series like “Orion” and “Disposable Heroes” (Kirk’s best solo?) along with“Fuel” and “The Thing That Should Not Be,” possibly the two worst Metallica songs. Also, the Metallica characters are current, so no longhaired, tight-jeaned hooligans chugging bottles of Vodka will be present on stage.

Killzone 2 Sony PlayStation 3 SCEA +++

Here’s another super-violent, alien-battling first-person shooter to add to the pile, after the success of Gears of War. You know the drill: aliens attack humanity and then we invade their turf, launching all-out war with our fast-talking, racially diverse squads. What Killzone 2 lacks in originality it makes up for in game play, which is fast paced and strategically complex enough to keep you coming back for more. Just be prepared to die a lot.

Star Ocean: Second Evolution Sony PSP Square-Enix ++++

There’s much to love about the Star Ocean series—the fighting system, item alchemy and skill development all draw the player into the game’s Star Trek-meets-classic-RPG story line. Second Evolution, the second PSP port in the past few months, will excite fans of the series, especially with the addition of top-notch voice acting. I can’t help but wish the battles were more challenging, though.

131

With all the Oscar buzz this year about Mickey Rourke's comeback in The Wrestler, we have one questionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;did anyone else out there see JCVD? You still got it, Jean Claude, and don't let 'em tell you any different.

132

M A R /A P R 2 0 0 8 P E AC E

Please Drink Southern Comfort Responsibly.

Liqueur, 21-50% Alc. By Volume, Southern Comfort Company, Louisville, KY ÂŠ2009