PLAYBACK ST. LOUIS
22
Backstage Pass
CURMUDGEON By Rob Levy Lollapalooza darlings Jane’s Addiction have their first new material in over a decade due out this July. The album, entitled Hypersonic, is being released on Capitol Records. Speaking of Lollapalooza, Perry Farrell’s traveling road show has recently added the Music and 30 Seconds to Mars to the festival’s side stage. The ultra-mundane Mansun have split up after almost a decade together. Though they crafted a few nice pop songs and had some interesting hooks, they never really got it going. The return of Courtney Love is near. She recently recorded a cover of “Bette Davis Eyes,” which may be used as a B-side for one of her new singles. Björk is getting busy later this summer. She has a small North American tour scheduled, and she is releasing another boxed set; this one is a live collection of recordings with an accompanying DVD. She also plans to release Volumen, her entire video catalog, on DVD. Also be on the lookout for Live at the Royal Opera House, which features Matmos and a full orchestra. There also are plans to release a Björk documentary DVD, Inside Björk, which will feature wacky TV interviews and appearances. Lastly, she’ll release Vessel, a concert, on DVD. Superdrag have decided to take a break. They will release a retrospective collection later this year with extra stuff like demos and unreleased tracks. Elbow are set to release their second album, Cast of Thousands, this fall. This summer they will be playing some festival gigs and previewing the new material live. They recently remixed Peter Gabriel’s “More Than This.” The first single, “Ribcage,” is available for download for 99p via their Web site (www.elbow.co.uk). Sinead O’Connor has retired from recording. In a statement on her Web site, she claims to be “tired of being a famous person.” This is not a bad thing. Third Eye Bland recently portrayed the Kinks on NBC. This is heinous. I cannot speak of how terrible 3EB are. They have a new album out to annoy and bother all of us. It wasn’t enough to have Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore bore us all with his new album and terrifying new cover of David Essex’s “Stardust.” Now we get to look forward to a new “solo” project from Dave Gahan. It is entitled Paper Monsters and features the one-verse single, “Dirty Sticky Floors.” The world is ending. Underworld are spending the summer playing various festivals and releasing a “Back to Mine” remix compilation this July. The Chemical Brothers are releasing a two-CD
collection of their greatest “hits” later this fall. They are in the studio working on a new album that’ll come out in early 2004. Über-producer Nigel Godrich is off the new Strokes project. He was producing the new record but things did not work out during the sessions. I am thrilled that the Kiel Opera House may reopen. St. Louis needs another venue for mediocre rock acts to play in. But it is great for the city to have such an important part of its heritage revived. Plus, it will bring more people into the city. I only hope that the shows and theater they bring there are not just the abysmal, boring, and terrifyingly stupid fare offered by commercial media moguls and corporations. Could the Creepy Crawl bathrooms be any worse? The Inspiral Carpets are releasing a two-CD retrospective, Cool As. This is funny because I don’t think they really had more than two or three good singles. Nonetheless, the retrospective has new and unreleased material. Before & After is the newest album from softumlaut rockers the Wannadies. It is full of contradictions, fast, slow, happy, sad. Look for it Stateside this fall. When is Clear Channel getting their own space on the Monopoly board? Roger Eno and Peter Hammill have teamed up in the weirdest way imaginable. From 1 to 2 p.m. on April 1, 1999, they respectively worked in solitude in separate studios, miles and miles apart. They each built recorded musical improvisations and compositions for their The Appointed Hour project. Later, they infused and overlapped the recordings to make the album. Collide have a new CD out entitled Some Kind of Strange. It features guest stars cEVIN Key of Skinny Puppy and Danny Carey of Tool. They were sonically featured in a recent episode of “JAG.” St. Louisan and Alchemy founder Pete Johnson has recorded the score to the Universal Pictures film, 12 which is going to Sundance. Belle & Sebastian are working with producer Trevor Horn. Horn has produced weirder acts like Propaganda and the Art of Noise. Cinerama will be touring next month for a few dates in support of the New Pornographers. Very dead and depressing singer Nick Drake is the subject of a new documentary, A Skin Too Few. The documentary is making the film festival rounds in the U.K. The Cure will begin recording a new studio album next month. It will be their first album away from Elektra Records. The Cure recently signed with I AM Recordings. They just will never go away gracefully. I still am in shock and awe that people paid money to see Good Charlotte perform at the Family Arena. We live in desperate times. ’Nuff said for this month!
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Robert Randolph and the Family Band Mississippi Nights, May 16 To those familiar with him, Robert Randolph can be easily identified by his Bear Bryant-style hat selection. At Mississippi Nights, however, Randolph lost his beige cap immediately due to his energetic display, like a centerfielder chasing a triple to the wall. The hat was on the floor in two minutes, leaving just a black ’do-rag, which itself eventually disappeared in favor of short cornrows. He didn’t pick up the hat until he left the stage at the end of the night. Randolph’s style owes much to the gospel roots of sacred steel, which originally sprang from the House of God Church denomination in the ’30s; Randolph learned the pedal steel at his boyhood church in New Jersey. The idea is for the steel to mimic the human voice via call-andresponse, and Randolph has the jaw-dropping dexterity and chops to keep up with anyone. Randolph and his workmanlike Family Band strayed from that formula liberally, though, for this two-hour-plus Friday night set, choosing instead to mimic various guitar styles—hard rock, blues, and scratchy swamp-funk. Among the covers, teases, and references that reared their heads were J.J. Cale’s “Ride Me High,” Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” and an epic hard-rock voyage that wove together one part Black Sabbath and two parts Jimi Hendrix. And it would be an understatement to call these impressions convincing. It made for an intriguing spectacle, but the show’s real heart lay in the more traditional gospel stylings. Trading vocals with his astounding bassist, Danyell Morgan, Randolph was most at home in the driving one-two gospel beat that allowed him to scrape the sky over and over again, nearly falling out of his seat with exuberance each time. Only then did Randolph go from sounding like an extraordinarily wellhoned Hendrix or Duane Allmann knockoff to sounding like Robert Randolph. After all, who could imagine Hendrix or Allmann playing your Sunday mornings? And the best part? This guy’s just getting started. Randolph was discovered at a Sacred Steel convention in 2000, and this was his first time to make it to St. Louis for a gig. The Family Band’s only live release is last year’s acclaimed Live at the Wetlands. And both Randolph and his band made a giant splash at last year’s Bonnaroo Music Festival, both in their allotted set and as an omnipresent guest star. Exposure at Bonnaroo worked wonders for Jack Johnson and Norah Jones a year ago, and even though the gospel-jam format doesn’t suit your local radio station very well, rest assured critics and industry types alike know this man’s name. It’s only a matter of time before it gets around to you. —Taylor Upchurch
