May 2015 by Scotty Scott

ISSUE No. 4-MAY ’15

THE LINER NOTES OF ST. LOUIS

WILD AND BLUE Remembering ANNE TKACH, 1967-2015

HALCYON DAYS INSIDE: POKEY LAFARGE • JESUS AND MARY CHAIN • THE EDUCATED GUESS

SAN FERMIN Brings Their Orchestral Pop to Cherokee Street

4 NIGHTS, 4 GENRES GRACE BASEMENT’s Tuesday Night Residency At Foam Is Gonna Rule

ELEVEN MAGAZINE VOLUME 11, ISSUE 4

COMPLIMENTARY

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F E A T U R I N G B E E R F R O M : 4 Hands, Alpha, Earthbound, Griesedieck, Kirkwood Station, Schlafly, Square One, Civil Life, Urban Chestnut and more! A N D C O F F E E F R O M : Sump, Kaldiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, Blueprint and Goshen

DEPT. OF

PERIODICAL LITERATURE ST. LOUIS, MO

Volume 11, Issue No. 4

FRONT OF THE BOOK 5 Editor’s Note 6 Where Is My Mind?

May 2015

ELEVEN’S MUSICALENDAR Recommended Shows 24 Natalie Prass

BRING ON THE NIGHT

COLUMNS

Show Previews and Reviews226

8 Puzzles by PATRICK BLINDAUER Crossword and MusiCryptogram

9 Watcherr by CURTIS TINSLEY

Robert DeLong, Kaiser Chiefs, Of Montreal, Joan Jett, Bob Dylan, TV On The Radio, Interpol, St. Vincent, Alabama Shakes, Father John Misty

Blue Beat 28 by JEREMY SEGEL-MOSS .

Esme Patterson

FEATURES 10 Anne Tkach: An Appreciation by MELINDA COOPER 12 L ine of Best Fit: Death Cab For Cutie Keeps On Rolling by JAMES KANE 16 P hotos: The Educated Guess by JASON STOFF 18 San Fermin Is An Orchestra by CAITLIN BLADT 21 Grace Basement Resides by HUGH SCOTT

HOT ROCKS Album Reviews2 30 Pokey LaFarge, The Old Souls Revival, Icky Blossoms, Legend Camp, Avid Dancer, Bill Fay, Django Django, Girlpool, Michael Rault, Hot Chip, Psych Squared

Singles For Singles 32 by IRA GAMERMAN . THE WAY BACK PAGE Bargain Bin 34 by JACK PROBST .

22 The Jesus And Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by ROB LEVY

ON THE COVER: Jason McGerr, Ben Gibbard, and Nick Harmer of Death Cab For Cutie. Photo courtesy Atlantic Records.

Fraudots

Degree and Diploma Programs include:

Entertainment & Media Business Recording Engineering & Producing

ANNE TKACH. PHOTO BY SARAH FNKE.

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Eleven Magazine Volume 11 | Issue 4 | May 2015 PUBLISHER Hugh Scott

800 N. Third St. | St. Louis, MO 63102 314-657-4400 | eibynelly.com

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Evan Sult SPECIAL ASSIGNMENTS EDITOR Paige Brubeck WEB EDITOR Hugh Scott PHOTO EDITOR Angela Vincent ART DIRECTOR Evan Sult CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Grant Barnum, Caitlin Bladt, Patrick Blindauer, Paige Brubeck, Ryan Boyle, Sam Clapp, Raymond Code, Melinda Cooper, Jenn DeRose, Ira Gamerman, Suzie Gilb, JJ Hamon, Matt Harnish, Jordan Heimburger, Ducky Hines, Jake Jones, James Kane, Gabe Karabell, Sean Kelly, Nelda Kerr, Chris Keith, Denmark Laine, Josh Levi, Rob Levy, K.E. Luther, Bob McMahon, Geoff Naunheim, Jack Probst, Jason Robinson, Jeremy Segel-Moss, Robert Severson, Alex Tebeleff, Michele Ulsohn, Robin Wheeler, Rev. Daniel W. Wright PHOTOGRAPHERS Nate Burrell, Duane Clawson, Jarred Gastreich, Jon Gitchoff, Kelly Glueck, Jess Luther, Adam Robinson, Adam Schicker, Bill Streeter, Ismael Valenzuela, Angela Vincent, Theo Welling, Carrie Zukoski

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ILLUSTRATORS Paige Brubeck, Sean Dove, Tyler Gross, Lyndsey Lesh, Curtis Tinsley PROOFREADER Tracy Brubeck PROMOTIONS & DISTRIBUTION Suzie Gilb Ann Scott CONSULTATION Clifford Holekamp Derek Filcoff Cady Seabaugh Hugh Scott III FOUNDED in 2006 by a group including Jonathan Fritz, Josh Petersel and Matthew Strรถm ELEVEN MAGAZINE 3407 S. Jefferson St. Louis, MO 63118 FOR ADVERTISING INQUIRIES Hugh Scott advertising@elevenmusicmag.com CALENDAR LISTINGS listings@elevenmusicmag.com LETTERS TO THE EDITOR deareleven@elevenmusicmag.com We welcome your comments. Please let us know if you do not want your letter published.

Editor’s Note by Evan Sult EVERY SUNDAY FOR the last dozen or so years, there have been only three things I’ve needed: a cup of coffee, a pencil, and the New York Times crossword puzzle. It’s a simple pleasure but a profound one. That’s why I’m very pleased to introduce to you the new Puzzles page in this issue. It’s not just that it’s a crossword, or even that it’s a music theme. The crossword’s author, Patrick Blindauer, is a wordtrickery freak of nature who has published over 50 puzzles in that very same publication where I go to get my fix. I mean, I don’t want to get carried away, but the man’s a star in my book. He’s also a friend. We met recently when my band Sleepy Kitty was working on a theatrical version of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (see last month’s Ed Note for more about that; in short, it was a huge challenge and a bigger thrill), and that whole cast and crew turned out to be nothing but a pleasure to know. That’s the thing about making art and music for a living: it’s a very intense set of relationships, built on faith in each other’s skills, and respect for what you each make. Essentially all of my strongest friendships were forged by working together in bands, publications, or art projects (I’ll admit, the theatrical presentation was a first). That’s also the way I met Death Cab For Cutie, way back when. I was playing music and writing and designing for a music magazine, a lot like now, and stumbled across their very first demo cassette, before it was actually even released. We met, talked (I think I wrote the very first story about them), and eventually my band took them out on their very first tour, and they’ve been doing just fine since then, thankyouverymuch. It’s a funny kind of pleasure to be editing a different music magazine in a different city, many years later, and find myself still spreading the word about my friends, still happy for their accomplishments, and still listening to their new album — their eighth now, amazingly. I look forward to their show at the Pageant. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find a pencil.

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WHERE IS MY MIND?

HOW LO CAN YOU GO?

THE CARDINALS ARE heating up, the Blues are crashing out of the playoffs, Claritin D is flying off pharmacy shelves and Bill Streeter is leading his team up and down Cherokee Street like the Pied Piper of music videos: yep, it’s spring in St. Louis. Each year in April, a crowd follows Streeter and Co. as they film LO-FI CHEROKEE, a series of music videos along the street. Each year, the intrepid film crew has grown and the party has gotten looser. From year one’s dozen or so spectators, it grew this year to roughly a couple hundred at its peak, crammed into the basement of 2720 for Blank Generation, overflowing from Melt for Illphonics, crowded around Earthbound Brewery straining to hear River Kittens, and hollering for Crazy XXX Girlfriend at Foam. And that wasn’t even half the day; eighteen bands were caught on film this year in a single epic day of shooting. Now Streeter hunkers down for the editing process. Whether you caught the action or not, don’t fret, because you can see all the videos at the official release party on May 29 at St. Matthews Church at Jefferson and Potomac. Check out Lo-Fi St. Louis’ Facebook page for more information on the viewing party, and get ready for some amazing video action. HUGH SCOTT

This Month in the History of Now

FAMILY BAND

Scenes from a shoot (clockwise from upper left): Allie Vogler of River Kittens; Marianne Laury; Stan Chisolm, Louis Wall, Brennan England, Sarah Velasquez of 18andCounting; Sunyatta McDermott, Mary Whiteside, and Brian McClelland; Hearskra-Z and Damon Davis of Blank Generation; Adria Nicole; Brian McClelland, Mic Boshans, and Syrhea Conaway of Whoa Thunder POLAROIDS BY CHRIS WARD AND LORI RITTER

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ON ANY GIVEN WEEK in St. Louis you stand a fairly good chance of running across BRYAN RANNEY, either playing his mandolin by himself, sitting in with someone else, or among the audience at an open mic. (In fact, he’ll be both opening for and playing with Grace Basement on Tuesday, May 12 — see page 21 for details.) But this month he’s got something special going: a family affair, as it were. “A Murphy Family Songbook” is a project that gathers up the musical Murphy family siblings — Jane Murphy Godfrey, Ellen Murphy Ranney, Tom Murphy, Bill Murphy, Rich Murphy and Pattie Murphy Voss — to put on a concert of music and stories focused on (no surprise here) the subject of family. Bryan Ranney and his brothers Elliot and Stephen will be accompanying them. Meanwhile, sisters Annie Murphy Schuchart and Margaret Murphy Schneider have created artwork in a complementary theme. The whole project is an investigation into, and celebration of, family history. By using the bonds of one family as a starting point, “we hope to entertain, emotionally move, and provoke the audience to consider their own evolving family history,” says Jane Murphy Godfrey. With that goal in mind, all the proceeds from the event will be donated to the Angel Band Project, which was established specifically to use music as a means of healing the survivors of sexual violence using music therapy. It all happens on Saturday, May 16, 7pm at 1900 Park in Lafayette Square, and you can go to http://murphysongbook.brownpapertickets.com for more information.

TAKE A BOW, VIA DOVE

The band goes back much further: it can trace its roots back more than 10 years ALMOST EVERY BAND in the history of and across two states, when Shadburne time started in a garage or practice space moved to St. Louis from western Kentucky jamming on a cover song, and you can glean and roomed with Vaught, a good friend a lot about a band simply by the covers from back home. “All of the early stuff in they incorporate into their sets. Usually, Via Dove was written in that time period,” the more unique the cover, the better the said Shadburne, when I sat down with him, band. “Unique” could mean a deeper cut in a popular band’s catalog, or a song that reveals an unlikely influence; Radiohead playing Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better,” for example. I bring this up to talk about the end of a hard rocking original band that had a great knack for covers: VIA DOVE. There is probably no band more associated with the infamous annual event known as An Undercover Weekend than them: they’ve played the event five times, starting in 2009 when they played a rocking Stones set with Via Dove at Off Broadway. Jimmy Griffin and Manoj Mohan. Tomko, Burnett and Marquard at MoKaBe’s AUCW founder Mike Tomko also coffee shop recently. Soon after, they asked happens to play guitar in the Via Dove, Burnett, another old friend from Kentucky, though he didn’t join until he’d sat in with to join them on drums. The lineup the band on rhythm guitar for three of shifted often over the years, those AUCW shows. In 2012, he finally but “it was when we played joined lead singer Andy Shadburne, Aerosmith that we figured drummer Reid Burnett, bassist Mike out what I would do in the Marquard and guitar player Aaron Vaught band,” says Tomko. Via Dove (and occasional member Charlie Brumley continued to write and record on keys) in Via Dove’s official lineup.

their own music, eventually releasing two full-length albums (Twilight and El Mundo Latino), one live EP (Live at the Chapel) and most recently, on Record Store Day 2014, Fugue State, an EP of songs written in those very early days when Shadburne and Vaught lived together. Which brings us to the present, and the final chapter of the Via Dove story: on June 6, they will play their final show at the Firebird, which has become their home venue of sorts. It’s a bittersweet moment to be sure, but talking to the band, you can tell for them it feels triumphant. There is no animosity or bad feelings; all the members remain good friends, and all have had successes in other aspects of life outside of music, both professional and personally, such that they’ve concluded that it’s gotten too hard to give Via Dove the attention they feel it deserves. So, some PHOTO BY JASON STOFF members will be moving on to projects they have in the works, while others are not sure what their musical future is. What’s sure is that the final show will be a celebration of the band and its history, both the original work and the covers they’ve been so proud of. “This is the right decision,” Shadburne declared. “This is the right time to step up and say, ‘Let’s close this chapter and celebrate it.’ And that’s what we want the final party to be.” HS

WELCOME BACK JESSE

JUST MAYBE, THE next big thing out of Nashville might be St. Louis native JESSE LAFSER. A highly talented songwriter with a rockin’ country sound, she’s already made some big friends in the business since her 2012 debut, including songwriter/producer Will Kimbrough and Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard. Lafser has garnered much critical praise for her down-home-witha-hint-of-outlaw storytelling, and she’s coming back to STL and Off Broadway on May 14 to celebrate the release of her third album, Raised on the Plains.

ANNE TKACH

1967-2015

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23 RE 25 MI Puzzles 29 Do some damage to 30 Spots for surfers 32 180° from SSW 33 Fudd in “Wabbit Trouble” 35 SNL’s Sarducci 37 FA 42 Address a crowd by Patrick Blindauer 43 Bakery buy 44 “___ Cents a Dance” 45 Care for ACROSS 65 the Tough trip 47 “For Boys” gp. 1 Fill one’s tank 66 “The Sound of Music” role 50 SOL 53 LA 6 Satisfy completely 67 “Aw, heck!” 56 Bishop of the Rat Pack 10 Slothful 68 Relig. speeches 57 Plugs 14 Turner memoir 69 Softens 58 Fig. on a baseball card 15 Jay in “Jerry Maguire” 59 TI DOWN 16 “Ricochet” rapper 64 Spine feature 1 “Stayin’ Alive” brothers 65 Tough trip 17 DO 2 Open 66 “The Soundcourtyard of Music” role 20 Recycling receptacle 3 W ord after raw or burnt 67 “Aw, heck!” 21 Former Soviet station 68 Relig. speechesMerkel 4 Actress 22 World-class 69 Softens 5 ______ Amidala (“Star Wars”

10 11 12 13 18 19 24 26 27 28 31

Flaxen fabric Royal flush card Zorro has a big one From Jan. 1 till now Noxious emanation ___-Caps Musburger or Scowcroft, e.g. Tending to the problem Bring to ruin Bar sign gas Hackneyed

48 49 51 52 54 55 59 60 61 62 63

The Sounds of Music

23 RE 25 MI

29 Do some damage to 30 Spots for surfers 32 180° from SSW 33 Fudd in “Wabbit Trouble” 35 SNL’s Sarducci 37 FA 42 Address a crowd 43 Bakery buy 44 “______ Cents a Dance” 45 Care for 47 “For the Boys” gp. 50 SOL 53 LA 56 Bishop of the Rat Pack 57 Plugs 58 Fig. on a baseball card 59 TI 64 Spine feature

princess)

6 More unctuous 7 Good to go 8 1940 Karloff film

11 Royal flush card 12 Zorro has a big one 13 From Jan. 1 till now 18 Noxious emanation 19 ______-Caps 24 Musburger or Scowcroft, e.g.

14 17

22 25 30

24 29

56 59

9 “The Comedy of ______” 10 Flaxen fabric

Sitcom, e.g. Homeward bound? Give the boot Scand. land “___ Mio” Flavored cucumbers Get a total Evergreen Airport org. Sonnet preposition “Men in Black” gp.

38 Ground-breaking discoveries?

51 Give the boot

26 Tending to the problem 27 Bring to ruin

39 Black and ______ (bar beverages)

54 “______ Mio”

28 Bar sign gas

40 “I’ll pass”

55 Flavored cucumbers

31 Hackneyed

41 Sulks

59 Get a total

34 Grant’s foe

45 Aromas

60 Evergreen

35 Received

46 Friend of Pooh

61 Airport org.

36 Run out of

48 Sitcom, e.g.

62 Sonnet preposition

37 “Name That Tune” clue

49 Homeward bound?

63 “Men in Black” gp.

MusiCrytogram by Patrick Blindauer

52 Scand. land

Decode this Death Cab For Cutie lyric, in which every letter has been substituted for a different letter. The title of the song that the lyric is from is also given.

_ ____ ___ _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ . ____ _ _ _ _ _ _

______ ____ __ _______ _ ___.

P E PA I N I O E H V R W E B A K R B N R P Z O N I O H R W W B J A . N I O L P M H Y R W N V B D O R G YA N Q J K H R W P L X B S B U . — “_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ”

—“NIO LOE JOBV” Answers to both the crossword and the cryptogram will appear in next month’s issue of Eleven.

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Futurism

WATCHERR

by Curtis Tinsley

elevenmusicmag.com | ELEVEN | 9

Anne Tkach, 1967-2015

PHOTO BY SARA FINKE

by Melinda Cooper THE LAST TIME I saw Anne was late afternoon on Tuesday, April 7. She was getting ready to leave and I had just come in for my evening shift. I gave her a little shit about leaving as soon as I got there and she halfjokingly reassured me that it was only because she knew she was leaving the place in capable hands. Before she left she said she was headed to her dad’s house. She bought a bottle of red wine and a beef pot pie to split with him for dinner. This happens over and over every day in my mind. I’ve been scrambling to remember everything she ever said, every funny moment, every meaningful conversation, every everything — the pink pie box, wishing I’d looked to see which wine it was, etc. We met years ago. However we never really sat down and talked to each other until two of our bands were playing the same show one night at the Firebird. It was a weird situation, and we were both trying to make the best of it. I was pretty intimidated and nervous to play in front of her. At the end of the night we met up at the bar and she asked me if I’d ever had maple whiskey. She hadn’t either. We clinked, threw it back, and then agreed it was disgusting. We stayed there for a while and had what became the first of many honest, and kind of tough, discussions that left me feeling a little like I’d been to church. I ran into her here and there at shows. I’d had too many glasses of wine with her at Mangia a few times, talked about moon signs and matches, and various other comforting and fun bullshitting usually happened. She called me a while back about coming to work at Local Harvest Grocery and I came in to discuss it with her. We walked into the back and she said, “You’re hired. Do you have any retail experience?” I said “Nope,” and then she asked when I wanted to start. The rest of the “interview” was pretty much

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just a lot of laughing. I can honestly say that I’ve not had a more solid and joyful experience at any place of employment as I have since she called me to come there. That, I feel, is about 90% due to Anne’s capability to be direct, empathic, and trust in her own instinct. The other 10% is because the people she’s brought in have proven her instincts to be spot on. I didn’t realize she was Anne from Hazeldine until later on, and then I felt pretty dumb not making the connection. I’d intentionally neglected to mention to her that their Orphans CD had blown my mind back in college. In fact, it was the first time I’d ever heard “Wild and Blue,” and I played it at open mics and anywhere anyone would let me sing. A couple of months ago I finally said something while my co-worker and I were talking to her about some stuff. Yeah, I had a fangirl

moment and I felt pretty stupid, but Anne kind of always looked at me like I was talking too much and cracking her up at the same time, so it wasn’t anything out of the norm. She thought it was funny and then the next time we worked together we played some of the songs off the album from an iPod. She sang along with “It’s Only Love” and then said something about how great and dramatic John Doe is. I’ve read a lot of tributes to her, and everyone has done so well at nailing what it meant to know Anne Tkach. Brett Underwood did an especially perfect job when he spoke at the service, and like he said, “Now her powers are legendary and her friends are a nation.” But no one, I think, has yet to really say what it meant to lose her within a community of women. Without shame or pause, Anne was ready to talk about anything — diva cups, perimenopause, sexual fluidity, reconnecting and caring for our families, and the importance of solidarity — nothing was a taboo topic. She made us realize we weren’t the “girl” in the band. We were in the fucking band. Anne has been two steps ahead. She was leading us all by example and ushering us into the next, letting us know that she’d already been there and it was going to be OK. Sometime toward the end of March we had our last staff meeting. It was just before Anne’s birthday. There had been several changes, she’d had a lot going on, and there was a ton of extra hugging happening at work. Anne looked around the room and laughed at all of us, then cried, then laughed more. She told us how lucky she felt to have us all there and how much she appreciated us. Not long before lightning struck, I’d texted Anne asking for the go-ahead to do something at the store for which I felt I should get an OK from her first. She’d been at band practice and didn’t see the message until hours after the store closed. She replied in the middle of the night, saying, “Well that’s very respectful, however If I could ever trust a group of folks with actual anarchy, this would be it. Now you know…”

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Line of Best Fit Eighteen years and eight albums after they sparked an indie-rock revolution, DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE is back with Kintsugi, an ornately inscribed sonic sculpture. James Kane catches up with drummer Jason McGerr in advance of their show at The Pageant. DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE’S eighth studio album, freshly out on Atlantic Records, is called Kintsugi, named for the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery. Using lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum, kintsugi takes something damaged and makes it new and whole again with the careful application of rare and precious materials. In some ways the album is classic Death Cab fare: a guitar album built around the highly personal musings and metaphors of frontman Ben Gibbard. But there are important variations as well: it’s their first since the departure of multi-instrumentalist and producer Chris Walla. Though Walla did play on the new record, it was in a different role. And not surprisingly, given how much he contributed both in the studio and onstage, his absence required more than one person to fill in: the band recruited a new guitarist and a keyboardist for the live show, and

Death Cab For Cutie, The Antlers Wednesday, May 13 THE PAGEANT

brought in producer Rich Costey to take over the mixing board. Costey, who’s worked with acts like Sigur Rós, Muse, Foster The People and Santigold, spurred the band to strip down and rebuild Gibbard’s early demos. Jason McGerr has played drums in Death Cab For Cutie since 2003’s Transatlanticism. He arrived as the latest in a string of drummers; Gibbard, a drummer himself, not only writes the lyrics and chords but often writes the drum parts himself. It was a big moment for the band, because their relentless tour schedule, charismatic songs, and smart deci-

sionmaking as a band was just about to pay off in the form of a record deal that would deliver them from Barsuk, the Seattle-based label that had given them their start, to Atlantic Records. It was exciting, but a risky proposition for a band that had built a welldeserved reputation for authenticity and sincerity. McGerr, though, was a friend of long standing. He had played with Gibbard and bassist Nick Harmer in previous projects, and his personality fit well with theirs. Plus, he’s a superlative drummer, a natural-born talent who nevertheless worked hard to achieve a world-class level of playing. In Seattle, where the band was based, he was a teacher at the Seattle Drum School and played in a wide variety of bands, including the spare Americana of Marc Olsen and the wild improvisational virtuosity of jazz trio Teenage Rockin’ Combo. He also worked with everyone from teens (including Chloe

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Saavedra from the young Barsuk band Smoosh) to world-class drummers like Matt Cameron of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. Though he’s hardly an old man, McGerr is a legitimate percussion guru. McGerr’s arrival to Death Cab For Cutie brought both a degree of stability that had been missing, and a new level of craftsmanship that boosted the band into new, deceptively complex capacities. In the four albums since then, the rhythmic layers of the songs have stayed straightforward but have gained increasing nuance of dynamic and tone. McGerr spoke to Eleven by phone recently about the new record, Walla’s exit, and the group’s future. How are you today? Where am I finding you in the promotional touring cycle? In LA, it’s release week. We’re doing a bunch of stuff, TV and radio. It’s exciting, it’s fun. We haven’t had a record come out since 2011, so it’s been almost four years since we’ve done this. It’s really nice to hang out with people that are just excited to have our record once again, radio folks and DJs we’ve known for along time. One thing we did, an instore at Amoeba Music, one of the biggest physical record stores in LA, and we pulled up in a 15-passenger van with something to prove. All of us are dying to get back on the road. Nightly, long full sets. The Pageant means a lot to us. It’s a real show. It’s a lot different than some odd, stale radio performance.

that’s a healthy pace. What we can do is pace ourselves to continue to last as long as possible as a band versus burn out. We’re smarter, in that way of knowing what we can and can’t do. It’s not just the band, it’s the crew; everyone involved contributes to the machine. The new album is the band’s eighth, but its first without Chris Walla as producer. He still played on the album, but how did the process change without him behind the board? In a lot of ways, making records with Chris was like making records with your friend in a bedroom. You can’t harsh on your bandmates that much. We’re always as honest as we could be, but sometimes you just wouldn’t pick a battle. There was always this sort of safety net. We didn’t push as much as we could. We decided to go with Rich [Costey]. This is a first time making a record where someone had the authority to tell me if I suck. It was difficult. I always felt that

being safe. You’re still pushing all the time to do something a little out of your comfort zone. And that was the impetus for hiring an outside producer. We’re technically good at recording. I can record myself. Ben can write demos that sound album quality. That doesn’t mean that they’re good enough. It’s dangerous when you’re doing it so long by yourself, with no unbiased ear. It can be a real danger. Every time we’ve sort of taken a leap of faith, it’s worked out extremely well. On the previous album, that was the first album Chris didn’t mix. That was a stepping stone in terms of letting the reins go. Tour starts in earnest in April. What’s the rehearsal schedule like, especially with two new band members? We finished mixing and mastering the record in October, and it wasn’t long after, maybe December, we were rehearsing with the two new people, Dave Depper on guitar and Zac Rae on keys/guitar. That was gonna take some work, learning all this new material and back catalog material. We rehearsed through January, playing a couple warm-up shows, and rehearsed in February. Even though tour hasn’t started yet, we’ve been ready. There’s still plenty to work out and to learn. There’s nothing like playing live, you can’t really prepare. By the time we get to the Pageant, everything should be good.

“ The difficult thing is to make sure you’re not being safe. You’re still pushing all the time to do something out of your comfort zone.”

Having played festivals and toured internationally, is there anything you haven’t done? What’s the drive going forward? We’ve never done South America. It would be great to explore there at some point. And we really want to make it to ten records. If we’ve got some more gas in the tank, that would be my next thing to cross off the musical bucket list. Even sort of losing a band member, the fact that we can still do this and carry on. It’s rare and something I never take for granted. I want to talk about that, but what about the inverse — are there things you’re capable of now that you weren’t ten or more years ago? Ten years ago was the release of Plans, the major label debut — a very scary time. We didn’t know what we were getting into. I think that we had a lot of energy and momentum after Transatlanticism. International presence and resources. We had a different energy. Twentyseven days straight playing, one day off, then ten more. We could handle it just fine, but we understand that there’s a pace

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How did you find the new guys? working for someone else as a hired gun. There were other producers I worked with that would push me really hard. It might be uncomfortable at the time, but you see the results. Rich really did that for us, made us work a lot harder and dig a little deeper. Plus, we’d never had Chris on the floor that much before — Chris was always playing guitar behind the console. It was different. Has the content of the songs changed much, given they come from Ben’s initial input? As much as Ben comes up with initial sketches, we all contributed more this time around. A lot of demos were broken down much further, boiled down to lyrics and chords, and built back up in bigger and more advanced ways. A lot of that came from Rich. Two weeks into one song, he’d say, “Does this still sound like Death Cab?” A few instances I was like, “I’m not sure. This is not where we’d go if we were doing it on our own.” It was extremely valuable. After so many years, is writing and recording easier since you’re more experienced or harder because you’re competing against your own catalog? I think we’ve all learned what we’re good at. The difficult thing is to make sure you’re not

Ben was Dave’s sponsor, I was Zac’s. Several friends and great musicians offered up their services. It would’ve been great to play with any number of people. But already, the chemistry with these guys — they showed up with more material prepared than Ben and Nick! Having a fifth member, we can fill out a lot of these songs in a way that we’ve never been able to present them. We’ve always had to make concessions in the past. [In the studio] we layer a lot of sounds — guitars, acoustic, piano parts, weird synthy keys — that we’ve never been able to do with four hands. Now the live show is really great. You’re just setting out on a new tour cycle, but have you begun to think about what writing and playing new songs is going to be like going forward? This year’s gonna be very packed. Tours in US, Europe, Australia. Next year’s Southeast Asia, possibly South America. If I had the perfect plan moving forward, it was would be writing something by 2017. For me it would be great to go out and become ultra musicians in the live setting, then jump right back into the studio. Although that time off was important for making this record. I am respectful of nature’s way — if we can start sooner rather than later, we will.

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With The Saint Monday LP, THE EDUCATED GUESS turns back the clock to a time before The Beatles rocked the Earth. Photos by Jason Stoff, text by Evan Sult. “I LIKE MUSIC that’s really fun,” says Charlie Brumley, “that doesn’t take itself too seriously but is lavishly orchestrated.” Brumley is a dedicated fan of Phil Spector’s trailblazing Wall of Sound music production, which is not unusual — everyone knows how much Spector’s work with The Shangri-Las, The Ronettes, and a hundred other bands (including The Ramones!) refined and defined the sound of popular music. But not everyone also loves early Roy Orbison recordings in all their lushness. Those early, pre-Beatles records “just absolutely kill me,” he says admiringly. “Most of that is the singing, but the orchestration is so beautiful. They’re just love songs, but they’re so classic and timeless. And I love the strings. On those early records, the Monument [label] records, the string writing is excellent.” With that deeply nostalgic palette in Above: Charlie Brumley with David “Nacho” Gomez, and conducting the string section. Right (from top): the string section readies; The Honeys and chorus; Brumley listens back to a take.

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mind, The Educated Guess set out to write an album that was a departure from their earlier work together. “The band’s been around for while, and we’ve put out records before that weren’t very great,” Brumley laughs. After a scholarly hiatus, “We all moved back to St. Louis in 2012. I wanted to start from scratch and do something completely different than we’d done before.” So the band — Grant Alexander on guitar, Brumley on pianos and vocals, Brian Pincus on drums, and John Venegoni on bass — decided to go for broke and write the album of their dreams. “It felt like the right thing to do,” says Brumley, “though it took a little longer than I thought.” That’s not too surprising, given how ambitious the project was. The band wrote the songs, and then “it took a year and a half to rehearse everything and for me to tweak the arrangements, get everything where I wanted it,” says Brumley. By November 2013, they were ready, and along with engineer Dan Ruder set up in Memorial Presbyterian in the Loop. Then they started bringing in musicians, with Brumley — who had composed and arranged the orchestral parts — overseeing it all. “We gave every instrument family a day,” he says, including the band, brass, strings, a full chorus, and “The Honeys” — Alexis Coleman, Arrika Rayburn, and Jess Speropulos, the trio of backing vocalists whom The Educated Guess frequently rely on. They also invited in Née’s Kristen Dennis to sing lead on a pair of songs, including “a big, schmaltzy opera ballad” called “Tomorrow’s World.” “I felt like no one was going to give me a better performance than Kristen,” says Brumley. “It was cool for me to hear her sing something so different and just hit it way out of the park,” he says. In all, 42 musicians were recorded in eight days, including the four members of the band, seven brass players, 15 string players, a chorus of 14 voices, and Drew “Maxxx Tempo” Button on additional percussion. The album is lush on a scale that has all but passed away from the world, made by humans but larger than the sum of its parts. In 2015, The Saint Monday LP sounds almost radical in its stubborn adherence to analog, old-fashioned glorification of essentially simple pop songs, more Ray Coniff or Henry Mancini than rock and roll. Last month, on April 17, The Educated Guess finally celebrated the release of The Saint Monday LP with a party at Off Broadway. It was a joyous and crowded affair, both onstage and off, and a fitting conclusion to a very long, detailed, and decidedly old-fashioned artistic process. “I really do like the dark ages of rock before The Beatles,” Brumley says. “They sound so mysterious to me, like they’re coming from a tin can but they’re just monstrously big.”

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Modern Masterpiece On their freshly released LP Jackrabbit, SAN FERMIN mastermind Ellis Ludwig-Leone gets to know his band on a whole new level

S PHOTOS BY DENNY RENSHAW

AN FERMIN’S MUSIC should not be as entertaining to listen to as it is. As described, the band’s genesis seems like a recipe for disaster. Or at least pretension of the absolute worst sort. San Fermin started as nothing more than a collection of songs from composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone, written during that bizarre time right after graduating college when the support, structure, and purpose that school provided have suddenly disappeared. As most people who have struggled through those first few post-school months can attest, very little of what is produced during that time could be considered “entertaining” or even really “worthwhile.” Melodramatic, overwhelmingly fearful, and self indulgent? Yes. But not necessarily entertaining. Luckily for Ludwig-Leone, he’s not most people. After spending four years studying composition at Yale, dabbling in experi-

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San Fermin, Natalie Prass Thursday, May 14 LUMINARY CENTER FOR THE ARTS

mental jazz and rock music in between his formal compositions, he had developed a keen ear for combining complicated, avantgarde structure with hooky, pop tunes. He honed his craft by working closely with the composer Nico Muhly, who, along with an expansive classical repertoire, has worked with indie artists like Grizzly Bear and Sufjan Stevens. Add in an innate knack for interesting storytelling and you have the

magic of what would become San Fermin’s eponymous first album. Ludwig-Leone explains, over a landline from his home in Brooklyn — people still have landlines? “Yeah, it’s actually just a tin can with a string,” he says with a laugh — that the name San Fermin has been with him since he first started writing that original collection of songs. In that dread time after school’s end, he retreated to rural Canada, to Banff Centre, to write and think. As the music began to stack up, he realized that he had named many of the songs “San Fermin 1,” “San Fermin 2,” and so on, and decided to stick with the name for the whole project. Ludwig-Leone took the name from festival of San Fermin which takes place each year in Pamplona, Spain, and is world renowned for the running of the bulls. “I’m just fascinated by this idea of people just killing themselves for no reason,” Ludwig-Leone says of the ceremony. It is no coincidence to the band name that the festival of San Fermin is also the centerpiece of the Ernest Hemingway novel The Sun Also Rises. In the novel, the main

the players are, from the horn section to and Holly Laessig of the New York-based characters — romantic, decadent, drunk the voices of the main characters. It’s an band Lucius. The duo sing the female parts in expatriates all — wrestle with questions of attitude and method far more common in unison, their tone beautiful, clear and somelove and truth and purpose. Ludwig-Leone the world of classical composition than in what disassociated. They become mythic also incorporated facets from the 1885 the indie-rock context, but the result is and anonymous, more a figment of the man’s novel The Purple Land into the album. In fascinating. imagination than a defined character. the William Henry Hudson novel, a young The final product sounds a great Once it came time to take the music on Englishmen has many adventures across the deal like Dirty Projectors, as well as The the road, though, Lucius’ own schedule was South American countryside after marrying National. Yet what makes San Fermin stand heating up, and Wolfe and Laessig were a young Argentinean woman against the apart is its deep sincerity. It is the work of unavailable to tour. Vocalist duties switched wishes of her family. someone who is just discovering his voice, over to singer/songwriter Rae Cassidy for The themes and motifs of the two who is just play-acting at being jaded. the band’s first tour. Cassidy approached novels, along with the futility of the Released just last month, the band’s the lyrics from a more sincere vantage, in running of the bulls which so fascinates sophomore record, Jackrabbit, was tones earthier and more passionate. The Ludwig-Leone, factor heavily into the songs. conceived and created under very different songs, which seemed aloof and insincere at San Fermin plays as an ongoing dialogue circumstance than San Fermin. Instead of times on the album, become heartbreakbetween two unnamed characters, a romanretreating to Canada to stew and create in ingly real in Cassidy’s hands. Nowhere is tic, dramatic man defined by his longing and solitude, Ludwig-Leone composed most of this more obvious than on the track “Oh, a jaded, calloused woman who isn’t quite the songs while on the road. Darling.” A quiet, beautiful meditation, the sure what she’s seeking in life. “We spent all of that first The music’s lyrics and heavytour learning the sound of the handed literary references — The band,” Ludwig-Leone says. After Purple Land isn’t exactly pop culture returning from the road, he took currency — could make it seem out of each song and worked to rewrite, touch or silly. However, the immerework and polish the new pieces diacy of the production, the joy of the into a cohesive set of album performers, and the interesting intertracks. play of pop singles and avant-garde He also wrote each song with interludes, makes the band’s debut an his bandmates in mind. While absorbing piece of pop music. the first album was written for a And Ludwig-Leone isn’t without generic female vocalist and a large a playful sense of self-deprecation. group of faceless musicians, this The album opens with the earnest, album was specifically written for dramatic “Renaissance!,” which Kaye and Tate and the rest of the features a lead male vocalist touring San Fermin troupe. As an intoning about “a mob at the door, example, Ludwig-Leone admits I hear them calling for my head.” A that one of the first singles off the beautiful female chorus, backed by record, “Emily,” was “written to plaintive violins, begs for someone Charlene — it’s a drunken rant.” to “please come wake me up, I’m Ludwig-Leone also says that everywaiting for your love.” It’s about as San Fermin circa now (from left): Tyler McDiarmid, Rebekah Durham, one is confident in the sound of the melodramatic as a song can get. Michael Hanf, Allen Tate, Ellis Ludwig-Leone, Stephen Chen, Charlene Kaye, band now, explaining that during It is, however, immediately and John Brandon. recording, sometimes his bandundercut by the snarky, femalemates would make suggestions for fronted “Crueler Kind.” tweaks to songs, and he would be surprised women of Lucius performed the song with “I wouldn’t worry, your melodramas to realize that “one of them would know what resignation and a tinge of annoyance in are embarrassing,” the female voice says I was trying to say better than I did.” their delicate voices. Cassidy’s take on the disdainfully. “I wouldn’t worry, I’m not Jackrabbit sees the band exploring song is one of profound heartbreak. A video about to fall in love again.” beyond their previously established sound. of her performing the song in a New York Most intriguing to both the sound and Fiddle solos that would sound at home on City church reveals a slower, deeper and far the narrative, these immaculate, baroque classic country tunes slide in and out of more affecting composition. pop constructions are buttressed by Due to other duties, Cassidy had to even- songs. Funky, syncopated horns and guitars abstract, experimental interludes. intermingle with the supporting female tually bow out of the project. Her replace “I like using pop songs to soothe the vocalists. And the solo female parts of the ment, Charlene Kaye, a powerful, grandiose listener, interspersed with more discordant songs grow far more energetic and muscular performer, has changed the tenor of the parts,” Ludwig-Leone explains. “I love that through Kaye’s presence. songs once again. on the record you have ‘Sonsick’ and ‘In “Charlene is very physical and in your It’s extremely rare, in the personalityWaiting,’ which is one of the most abstract face,” Ludwig-Leone explains. “But then her driven world of rock music, to hear a band pieces I’ve ever written, 20 minutes apart.” voice just has this warmth to it, like she’s survive the transition to new lead singers When Ludwig-Leone first conceived of singing you a lullaby.” — much less a series of them — but Ludwigthe album, he knew only that he wanted to For the new record, the band worked Leone seems unfazed. work with longtime friend and vocalist Allen with Peter Katis, best known for produc “I think that’s the mark of a good song, Tate. Listening to Tate, it’s impossible to ing The National, Interpol and The Swell that you can change the singer and the song miss the comparisons to The National’s Matt Season. Ludwig-Leone describes him revermaintains its value,” he says. The implicaBerninger. Both men share an unbelievable ently as a “legend.” tion is that these changes are built into baritone and a relaxed delivery which they “This album is a lot more discordant,” he the deal: that he composes the music, and still manage to charge with tension. says. The title track is a frenetic, productiononly after determines, or discovers, who Joining Tate on the album are Jesse Wolfe

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heavy single which finds Charlene Kaye calling for the listener to “run for the hills, run for the hill, run!” “Astronaut” is quieter and leans more on acoustic guitar and piano than earlier San Femin tracks. It is still enriched greatly by Ludwig-Leone’s masterful arrangements and layering. Horns swell as a single soprano voice dances above the mix. “Philosopher” is one of the band’s heaviest songs to date, with skittering, halting drums and bleating horns that call to mind the stylized world of St. Vincent. Ludwig-Leone says that he wanted to move in new, interesting directions with the band. However he maintains that each of his songs, from his classical compositions in college to the tracks on San Fermin and Jackrabbit, “live in the same world.” And it is definitely true that while the album is different and engaging, it is still distinctly LudwigLeone’s voice — even though it’s never his literal voice that we here. With the album written and recorded, Ludwig-Leone has had the interesting challenge of arranging each song for live performance. While he records each of the songs as he envisions them, with an expansive selection of musicians and instruments, the logistics of touring require him to scale each song down to just eight musicians — a very generous crew for most pop music, but only a fraction of the hands and voices he writes for. “It’s like doing a crossword puzzle,”

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Ludwig-Leone explains of the more logistical process of arranging songs. “But I’m not sure if I’m very good at those types of puzzles, so…” he trails off, laughing. San Fermin’s audiences may disagree on that score, however. The band is bombastic and mesmerizing in concert, and their show this month at the Luminary promises to be a fully immersive one. As he’s talking on his landline, LudwigLeone has just gotten back from a whirlwind tour of SXSW, performing nine live shows and one in-studio session in four days. Ludwig-Leone uses the city-wide, marathon music festival as an example of how the band has bonded so quickly in the last few months. “Touring is a collective battle experience,” he says, and recounts a moment just before the band was set to play when the stand for his keyboard collapsed. “Everyone was running around trying to fix it using cables that were also broken,” he says. “We were trying to fix it up until about a minute before the show.” Their few days at SXSW speak for their showmanship and draw — it’s hard to make any kind of substantial impact in the crowded fields of Austin, but San Fermin packed out their shows. Having completed their first round of tour, Ludwig-Leone seems to have settled into building the most varied resume in pop music. On March 6, the Alabama Symphony

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Orchestra performed an original piece by him Ludwig-Leone before hosting a full San Fermin concert. This fall, the New York City Ballet will be performing an original composition of Ludwig-Leone’s, in a season that also sees a performance to an original composition by The National’s Bryce Dressner. And later this year, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus is set to perform another of his original pieces. Add all of that to the most rigorous tour schedule the band has undertaken. “I just looked at my Google calendar and April, May and June are all blocked out and just say ‘TOUR,’” Ludwig-Leone says with equal parts excitement and preemptive exhaustion. “Our goal is just to have this get bigger so that people can live the lives they want.” When pushed to clarify, he responds with a much smaller goal. “Right now the goal is just for everyone to have their own bed on tour,” he says with a laugh. “With eight people you sometimes end up not having your own bed, and that would be great.” It’s that same mixture of lofty artistic goals and self-deprecation that make San Fermin’s music so interesting and endlessly listenable. Against a future of symphonies, ballets, and world-spanning tours, the dream of eight whole beds seems downright achievable.

Amazing Grace A new album and four completely different shows in four weeks: Kevin Buckley’s GRACE BASEMENT roars back into the spotlight

PHOTO BY NATE BURRELL

by Melinda Cooper YOU CAN FIND Kevin Buckley on any given Monday playing the fiddle for hours of Irish folk (and a few monkey wrenches) down at McGurk’s in Soulard. He’s recorded numerous bands at his own Avonmore Studios, has a music-teaching website in the works, and has traveled all over the country and the world playing music while also acting as guitarist/fiddler/utility man in various bands around St. Louis. He’s even performed in the band for the Patsy Cline musical put on by Stages St. Louis the past few summers. In short, he’s a lifer. And that’s without even mentioning his band, Grace Basement, which just shot a Lo-Fi St. Louis video and plays Twangfest on June 10 with Cracker and Marah. The first two Grace Basement albums were chock full of power pop rock written and recorded by Buckley, the band’s founder and sole songwriter. New Sense (2007), released on Dren Records, and Gunmetal Grey (2009) released with the Undertow Music Collective, both feature Buckley as the primary instrumentalist on a good portion of the work as well. In 2013, Buckley took a definitively folky turn on third album Wheel Within a Wheel. This album was also the first to feature current bandmates Jill Aboussie and Greg Lamb as the rhythm section on record. Dave Anderson, longtime bandmate in various projects and master of all things stringed, provided the icing on the proverbial cake. Now, as the same cast of characters nears the completion of their fourth fulllength release, they’re taking another sharp turn, and again challenging what it means for a band to have a sound. “Tentatively, it’s called Mississippi Nights,” says Buckley. “It’s hoosier rock. It’s like what I would want to hear on KSHE 95, or maybe what I think I would have heard on KSHE when I was 15.” While album production will not likely be wrapped up until summer’s end, Buckley & Co. are excited about the new perspective, as well as the idea of playing live again. “It’s a super easy album to make,” he says, “and it’ll be even easier to make after we play it for a month. It’s just really direct. The songs have been refined for a while now.” So with a seriously diverse set of locals for support,

Grace Basement is diving back in headfirst and taking over Foam every Tuesday with an artist residency for the month of May. “The other reason for all this is that we haven’t played in a while,” says Buckley. “I’ve still been getting together with Jill and Greg with the songs for the new record, rehearsing a lot and recording. That’s how this whole thing came about. These songs are very ‘bandy;’ it’s very much a rock record. So it

Grace Basement Tuesday, May 5, 12, 19, 26 FOAM

seemed like a good idea to play them out live.” In true Grace Basement style, there’s a spin: each of the shows will showcase a different musical genre, both in Grace Basement’s set and in the choice of opening band. Tuesday, May 5 will be the first installment of the series, and will focus on the pop portion of the band’s skill set. St. Louis transplant band American Wrestlers, who released their impressive self-titled fulllength last month on Fat Possum Records, will be supporting. Though it’s technically Cinco de Mayo, they’re sticking to the pop theme. “Maybe we can figure out a margarita special at the bar,” allows Buckley. The show on May 12 show will be completely different. “We’re going to do kind of an acoustic/folky country set with a different set of songs,” says Buckley. “It will still be the three of us, and I’m going to have a couple of country ringers playing along too.” He’s bringing in some heavy hitters. “Tim Sullivan and a guy named John Higgins are playing too. John was in the Patsy Cline show

last year. [He] plays pedal steel, dobro, he’s kind of a session guy.“ Brian Ranney will be sitting in on mandolin (not the ukulele), and also performing a set of his own music. The third night of Grace Basement’s residency will most closely resemble their new album: it’ll be a straight-up rock show. He’s asked rockers The Old Souls Revival to join them, and Buckley is going top shelf with his own guitar support. “I’m going to pull Dave Anderson in for this one — loads of guitar solos and have him shred for a little while.” He promises that the night will be all “guitar rock, very direct: guitar, bass, drums, etc. You know, sometimes you’ve just got to play that shit.” May 26 will mark the final and most adventurous installment of the series. “We’ll play with Animal Children, who are like a jazz band. I know Kaleb [Kirby, drummer], I’ve played a lot of music with him off and on for a while,” explains Buckley. He plans for this last set to be somewhat of an improvisational free-for-all, reined in periodically with planned pieces. “We’re going to probably interact with them more,” he says. “Kaleb’s going to arrange some stuff for a few songs, and I’m arranging some stuff too.” He maintains that this finale will not likely fall into any category other than improvisational. “It’s not like we’re going to be playing jazz, but we’ll definitely have something different going on there for sure.” This last night will also feature the future Grace Basement live lineup. “Marc Schneider is a friend of mine who just moved back to St. Louis from New York and we’ve played in bands together for years,” says Buckley. “I’ve kind of pulled him into the fold as a guitarist/singer.” Buckley intends for the foursome — Aboussie, Lamb, Schneider, and himself — to be the band supporting the upcoming album, and this is a big part of what is making this residency so important to them. “We’ve had a couple of band practices with [Schneider], and he’ll be playing with us on the 5th and also on the 26th,” he says. “Bringing Marc back in for the last show — it’s more of what the band will end up being.” This group of shows is the deep breath before Grace Basement plunges into a new album and a new lineup. It’s also a four-part education into the elements that constitute one of STL’s finest bands.

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My Little Underground Three decades ago, two miscreant Scots and their friends sat at home, clumsily recording the fuzzy mess that would change rock music by Rob Levy THE JESUS AND Mary Chain’s 1985 debut, Psychocandy, remains a hugely influential album that has often been overlooked by critics for its massive effect on contemporary indie music. Now, as the band tours to mark the 30th anniversary of their seminal debut, that is changing. Ascending from the drudgery of Thatcher’s Britain, The Jesus And Mary Chain were in many ways the right band at the right time: snarling, rambunctious, drug-fueled, and clad in a black with a rock n’ roll sound that was unique, biting and completely new. Their energetic blowout of Phil Spector’s wall of sound melded with the esoteric clang of Einsturzende Neubauten, the smeared darkness of the Velvet Underground, the anger of The Stooges and the punk aesthetic of The Ramones was refreshing and disturbing. The town of East Killbride is outside of Glasgow but not so far out that brothers William and Jim Reid couldn’t catch wind of

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The Jesus And Mary Chain, The Black Ryder Sunday, May 5 RIVIERA THEATRE, CHICAGO

the sounds, politics and pop culture around them. They knew they wanted to be a band, and got started as early as they could, pretty much from the time they heard the Sex Pistols in 1977 and connected it to their long-standing love of The ShangriLas, and spent as much time working on what their ideal band would look like as what sounds it might make. This musical amalgamation served them well in the beginning. They made their own rules and took no prisoners. When talk turns to sparring musical brothers, the subject is usually Oasis’ infamous Gallagher brothers. But just as tumultuous, and arguably more productive, is the relationship of William and Jim Reid. Their

creative but physically bruising partnership was both a cancer and an inspiration for The Jesus And Mary Chain. Musically they feed off each other, adding layer upon layer of density and texture. Their sparring has often led to creative brilliance and sometimes physical violence. Yet somehow, out of the chaos the band thrived. In November of 1985, WEA subsidiary Blanco y Negro Records released The Jesus And Mary Chain’s debut album, Psychocandy, which featured Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie on drums, bassist Douglas Hart, and the brothers Reid on buzzsaw guitars and narcotic vocals. In a country already both frazzled and electrified by the destructive presence of the Sex Pistols, the initial response of the straight world to this new feedback-squalling band was fear and loathing — but among the punks and misfits, there was a recognition that nothing like them had been seen before. Aesthetically, Psychocandy slashed the clean veneer of the UK’s reigning new wave and pop sounds with razor blades of

left to refocus on Primal Scream. Despite this, the Reids carried on and regrouped. Their timing was perfect as American college radio morphed into something called commercial alternative radio. Now MTV friendly, they augmented their sound, downplaying their raucous side to focus on more traditional pop sensibilities which would get them more airplay. As a result they found commercial success in the late ‘80s and ‘90s with tracks like “Happy When It Rains,” “Blues from a Gun” and “Reverence.” In 1999, after their lukewarm release Munki, they announced that they were done. The rupture was due in large part to continued lineup changes and the fact that the Reid brothers couldn’t keep it together. But as the new century began, the band lived on in the hearts and minds of their fans and critics alike, and Psychocandy achieved the kind of cultish love that defines a subculture. Their retirement was relatively short lived; they returned in 2007 for reunion gigs at several festivals, and released a box set of B-sides, a reissue series, and then went on a short tour in 2012. Earlier this year The Jesus And Mary Chain announced a North American tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of Psychocandy. The closest their jaunt across

America takes them to St. Louis is a gig in Chicago on May 5, at the beautiful Riviera Theatre. For this tour the band will play a collection of hits and favorite tracks followed by Psychocandy in its entirety. Live, the band has always been an adventure. Early gigs saw them playing with their backs to the audience; later ones saw them immersed in so much darkness that they only appeared as silhouettes. It wasn’t until they’d achieved the kind of much-delayed mainstream acclaim that had them headlining mega-events like Lollapalooza, where they could be glimpsed playing in daylight and with a bigger, more robust sound. At a distance of 30 years, a listen to Psychocandy reveals the singular power of the album and its crucial appeal: the Reid brothers’ combative dispositions drenched in sound and fury, wrapped in a coat of gnarly fuzz and brutal feedback that almost, but not quite, hides the musculature of pop music powering the whole thing from within. Despite all of the growling, broken hearts, bitterness and bloody ears, it’s touching that Psychocandy has become an important star in the musical composition. After three decades one shudders to think what indie music would be like if we’d never gotten a taste of their honey.

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jagged distortion and wicked feedback. The fact that they couldn’t actually play their instruments didn’t really matter. Songs like “Taste the Floor, “The Living End,” “Taste of Cindy” and “You Trip Me Up” were loaded with attitude and sporting for a rumble. Their early success gave them a belligerent swagger that augmented their sound, resulting in a textured sound that is equal parts sugar and strychnine. Yet beneath all the white noise and grime is the key to the band’s success. As heard on songs like “Just Like Honey” and “Sowing Seeds,” their ability to dig below the muck and unearth an unexpected musical side, something frail, soft and gorgeous, was ingenious. But lest we forget: this is a band that also seared and flailed and droned. Their feedback, distortion and amphetamine-fueled rhythms kicked in the doors of a stagnant UK indie music scene. Those who heard Psychocandy upon its initial release couldn’t have imagined that this band would help launch a whole slew of new musical genres and influence thousands of artists over the next three decades. A year after that album landed, in fact, it looked as if the band was down and out. Bassist Hart left to establish himself as a video and film director (he would later work with My Bloody Valentine and, most recently, The Horrors) and Gillespie also

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RYLEY WALKER, Brothers Lazaroff at the Luminary

FRIDAY, MAY 8

ACCELERANDO, The Deciders, The Ottomen at Schlafly Tap Room

JAMES MCMURTRY, Max Gomez at Off Broadway

SATURDAY, MAY 2

OF MONTREAL, Icky Blossoms at The Ready Room

ANDREW WK (solo show), Thor Axe at Firebird

SATURDAY, MAY 9

MATT POND PA at the Duck Room

THURSDAY, MAY 7

FRIDAY, MAY 1

RECOMMENDED SHOWS

NATALIE PRASS

SATURDAY, MAY 23 THE PAT SAJAK ASSASSINS, The Tennis Lesson, Syna So Pro at Heavy Anchor WHISKEY FEST BBQ PIG ROAST with Beth Bombara, The Barn Mice, The Maness Brothers, Tok, Old Capital Square Dance

QUIET COMPANY, The Rocketboys at Demo SKAREKRAU RADIO, Naan Violence, Bear Cub at Schlafly Tap Room SCARLET TANAGER, Typhoon Jackson, Major Cities at Heavy Anchor

WITH SAN FERMIN AT THE LUMINARY CENTER FOR THE ARTS | THURSDAY, MAY 14 There’s a bit of the uncanny valley effect to Natalie Prass’ self-titled debut LP: the production is so carefully retro in the Ann Peebles/Hi Records/Stax Records mode that you can’t help but keep your ears pricked for a modern tell. But drop your guard, and those sweet sad moments that you rarely access anymore will start to well up inside. This record is the sound of love being lost, and Prass’ voice is both precise and delicate; she would sound helpless if not held aloft and beatified by the horns and strings and studio-ace drums. On “My Baby Don’t Understand Me,” she sings “Our love is a long goodbye” over and over, and each repetition gets a new inflection, making it mean something slightly different each time. It’s an expert move that has no business on a debut album — which makes sense, because despite her sudden appearance, Prass has been building up to this for years, both in Nashville and in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia. With so much tasty orchestral work between her songs and the eight-piece San Fermin, this promises to be a real musicians’ show. Just be advised that you may want to have a hankie available — or better yet a shoulder to cry on. ES

PHOTO BY RYAN PATTERSON

ATMOSPHERE, B Dolan, deM AtlaS, DJ Adatrak at the Pageant

BETH BOMBARA video premiere at 1300 Washington Ave

ALEX CUNNINGHAM, Ghost Ice, Lobster at the Luminary

BOB DYLAN at the Fox MELT BANANA, Braining at Firebird

YOUNG FATHERS, 18andCounting, Blank Generation at Firebird PENICILLIN BABY, Big Blond, Boreal Hills at Off Broadway

THURSDAY, MAY 14 SAN FERMIN, Natalie Prass at Luminary JESSE LAFSER, Becca Mancari at Off Broadway

DANIEL LANOIS, Rocco DeLuca at the Duck Room

WEDNESDAY, MAY 6

KAISER CHIEFS, Priory at the Pageant

AU REVOIR KELSEY MCCLURE: A ROAST at The Demo

TV ON THE RADIO, Bo Ningen at The Ready Room

BUILT TO SPILL, Wooden Indian Burial Ground, Clarke And The Himselfs at The Ready Room

FRIDAY, MAY 22

GHOST ICE/LOUIS WALL DUO, DJ Jake Leech, Trancers at Schlafly Tap Room

THURSDAY, MAY 21

SIDNEY STREET SHAKERS at Foam

WEDNESDAY, MAY 20

FIDLAR, Metz, Blight Future at Firebird

SAM PREKOP, Eric Hall at the Luminary

GRACE BASEMENT, The Old Souls Revival at Foam

WEDNESDAY, MAY 13 DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE, The Antlers at the Pageant

TUESDAY, MAY 19

MERCHANDISE, Bug Chaser, Maximum Effort at Off Broadway

MONDAY, MAY 18

JENNY LEWIS, Nikki Lane at Ready Room

BRUISER QUEEN, Modern Convenience late night at Foam

MIDWEST MAYHEM at the City Museum

HEATERS at the Demo

GRACE BASEMENT, Bryan Ranney at Foam

TUESDAY, MAY 12

SUNDAY, MAY 17

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS at the Pageant

INTERPOL, Algiers at the Pageant

CHUI WAN, Bug Chaser, Tone Rodent, Enrique Maymi at Off Broadway

SATURDAY, MAY 16

MONDAY, MAY 11

On new album Voir Dire, Chicago’s Minor Characters have a theatrical flair, constructing intricately dynamic songs that work well in the indie palette but have the vocal range of classic rock’s heyday, not entirely unlike Radiohead or Dots Not Feathers. The narrative lyrics will be a strong match for Jon Hardy’s taut short-story noir. Do yourself a favor and be here now.

JON HARDY AND THE PUBLIC, Minor Characters at Off Broadway

BELLA & LILY at the Duck Room

CHRIS TUCKER at the Fox

Beth Bombara is getting ready for a hell of a 2015: a new album, a coast-to-coast tour, and a full-on radio push. But first she’s releasing an animated video, as well as a making-of-said-video doc. If you’ve been following the career of our city’s hardestworking musician, you owe it to yourself to brush past the Wash Ave bros and get a good spot at this premiere: once she hits the road, we may not see Beth for some time.

FRIDAY, MAY 15

MAGIC CITY, Red Mouth, Zak Marmalefsky at Heavy Anchor

GRACE BASEMENT, American Wrestlers at Foam

TUESDAY, MAY 5

WILCO, Steve Gunn at the Pageant

MONDAY, MAY 4

HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF, Daniel Romano at the Sheldon

SUNDAY, MAY 3

HELL NIGHT/CATHEDRAL FEVER (split 7” release), The Lion’s Daughter, ThorHammer at Firebird

LAST IN THE AMERICAN LEAGUE ALBUM RELEASE show with Blackwater ’64, Volcanoes, Arthur And The Librarian, Via Dove, Letter To Memphis at The Ready Room

WILL HOGE, Emily Wallace at Off Broadway

ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO at the Duck Room

There are a lot of reasons to be at Cinco — the People’s Joy Parade (at 1:11 sharp!), the tables of cool stuff, the booze-filled pineapples — but this year there’s also Chicago’s Divino Niño. They sound like the fantasy of a rad-looking ‘70s record you’ve never heard of, scooped off a thriftstore rack: breezy, rockin, clever, and sexy in a distinctly sudamericano way. It’s the perfect music for relaxing in the sun, wearing your best cheap shades and catching up with the barrio.

CINCO DE MAYO with Sleepy Kitty, Divino Niño, Blank Generation, Black James, Demonlover, Whoa Thunder, Javier Mendoza, The Carondelettes, Maness Brothers The Free Years and more on Cherokee Street

Scan this QR Code, or go to ElevenMusicMag.com for a listing of club addresses. Check out our expanded calendar of events at calendar.elevenmusicmag.com, powered by

Discussed this issue Comedy show

LEGEND

MUSICALENDAR

THE DECEMBERISTS at Peabody Opera House

SATURDAY, MAY 30

PEDESTRIAN DEPOSIT, Kevin Harris/ Kingston Family Singers, Hardbody at Blank Space

STREET FIGHTING BAND, The Brothers at Old Rock House Outdoor Pavilion

HOUNDMOUTH at The Ready Room

FRIDAY, MAY 29

SURFER BLOOD, Alex Calder at Firebird

DAVE STONE TRIO, The Tory Starbuck Experience, Kevin Harris at Schlafly Tap Room

ALARM WILL SOUND at The Sheldon

ALABAMA SHAKES, Father John Misty at the Fox

THURSDAY, MAY 28

ST. VINCENT, Sarah Neufeld at Pageant

WEDNESDAY, MAY 27

EX CULT, Beth Israel, Soda Boys late show at Foam

GRACE BASEMENT, Animal Children at Foam

TUESDAY, MAY 26

MINISTRY at The Ready Room

MONDAY, MAY 25

Club, Redheaded Strangers, W.T. Newton, Zacksquatch, Fred Friction, Pat Eagan at Off Broadway

Live Music

BRING ON THE NIGHT = STL band (current and/or honorary)

Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney, playing to a crowd of ecstatic fans on Friday, April 24 in support of their new album, No Cities to Love, their first in a decade. PHOTO BY ADAM SCHICKER

<<REVIEW

Robert DeLong Thursday, April 2

FIREBIRD Electronic dance music shows often lack that vicarious connection of watching musicians organically performing with instruments, but Robert DeLong has an answer for that. Bands who use real instruments without triggering backing tracks often forget to provide that sonic pulse that compels an audience to dance. He’s got an answer for that, too. After relentlessly touring as a solo EDM performer for the last two years, DeLong landed at Firebird last month to perform for a packed house. His familiar crowd of teenage rave types came early to get their faces painted, but his latest single “On the Long Way Down” brought in plenty of curious newcomers. Those in the know were ready for his onslaught of unusual equipment: computer gaming controllers, a joystick, a steering wheel, multiple microphones, a Nintendo Wii remote, timbales, and a full acoustic drum kit. This was a much more engaging experience than going to a dance club, and certainly not a performance anyone could have mimed along to a prerecording. DeLong was constantly manipulating his vocals using his various controllers, inspiring an enlightening sort of game: What was he doing? This gadget changed his vocal pitch, this one sped up his looping, this one controlled a bass wobble. It was like watching a magician — he was the only one who knew what was really happening, and often the best we could do was guess.

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Better than anyone, DeLong has found a way to deliver the instant satisfaction that our newest music generation craves. From his tongue-in-cheek stage entrance while Seal’s “Kissed by a Rose” played over a video of a ‘90s Batman movie, to his hypnotically introspective lyrical hooks, to his fresh take on dubstep dance beats, to his complex fusion of electronic and acoustic instruments, to his clever use of screens and cameras (at one point the crowd got to watch themselves dance), he’s a genius at teasing the senses. All in, it was an incredible performance — so if you missed it, make sure to check him out on his trip back to Missouri in July! GRANT BARNUM

>>PREVIEW

Kaiser Chiefs, Priory Wednesday, May 6 THE PAGEANT Since forming in 2000, Kaiser Chiefs have released five albums worth of their trademark swagger and post-punk bravado.Their outspoken lyrics are replete with agile snarkiness and biting social commentaries. Following the success of their debut 2005, Employment, they have been relentless, establishing a reputation as a workingclass band that never rests on its laurels. Ten years on, Kaiser Chiefs’ post-punk/ neo-wave sound still resonates with the masses. Their success continues despite challenges from the crowded field of established bands and up and comers of the contemporary British indie scene. In 2014, the band emerged once more with Education, Education, Education &

Live Music War, which again saw the Leeds five piece tabbed as critical darlings, whose heavier, more polished and edgier sound was embraced by their fans as well as the usually fickle UK press. In the last decade the lads have released a solid set of singles, including “Oh My God,” “I Predict a Riot,” “Ruby,” “Never Miss a Beat,” “Angry Mob,” “Everyday I Love You Less and Less,” “On the Run,” “Coming Home,” and their latest, “Falling Awake,” each laced with infectious melodies, catchy lyrics and driving percussion. Armed with new sense of purpose and new drummer Vijay Mistry, they have set their sights on conquering the new world, headlining an extensive tour of the US and Canada in April and May. Their show at the Pageant will be their debut performance in St. Louis (not a bad room to start in!), and you can expect that vocalist Ricky Wilson and his band of rough-and-tumble bandmates will bash and smash their way through an energetic set of virulent tunes guaranteed to win the citizens of Gateway City over to their side. ROB LEVY >>PREVIEW

Of Montreal, Icky Blossoms Thursday, May 7 THE READY ROOM Of Montreal, the brainchild of Georgia native Kevin Barnes, has shifted and profoundly modulated during it nearly 20 years of existence. Originally a lo-fi garage outfit somewhat associated with the mysterious Elephant 6 Collective that brought the world Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power, Apples In Stereo, and The Olivia Tremor Control, the group came into its own in the mid-2000s with a series of strange, hypnotic dance records. With their most recent album, Aureate Gloom, Of Montreal’s new output has shifted away from the giddy insanity of 2005’s The Sunlandic Twins or the wiry, dancey energy of 2007’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?. The new album replaces that wild abandon with a consciously bleak, but still glamorous, malaise. Barnes himself describes the album’s title, in a Stereogum interview from last fall, as “a sort of aesthetically interesting or beautiful ugliness, if that is possible — a sort of beautiful misery or something.” Barnes’ recent albums have been colored by his relationship with ex-wife Nina Aimee Grøttland. The two married in 2003, separated and then reconciled for a period of time, and finally divorced in 2014. The album, Barnes said in the Stereogum interview, came out of, “One moment feeling, ‘What the fuck have I done?’ and the next moment being, ‘Ah, I feel so liberated!’ and the next moment feeling, ‘I’m the worst person in the world.’” Those schizophrenic swings of emotion

See the Hot Rocks section for a review of Icky Blossoms’ new album, Mask.

speaking, dealing with deeply emotional topics such as losing both of her parents, growing older, and living through the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy. In addition to headlining their own tours, Jett and the Blackhearts have had the good fortune to open for a vast array of rock’s heaviest hitters, including The Police, Aerosmith, Queen, and Foo Fighters. Currently, they are on a massive, 45-date, five monthlong tour with The Who, who are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year. On May 7, St. Louis will play host to a once-in-alifetime opportunity for experiencing backto-back performances by two truly iconic, legendary rock acts, whose influence on their individual genres is both unparalleled and immeasurable. MICHELE ULSOHN

>>PREVIEW

are evident all over the album. In “Last Rites at the Jane Hotel,” Barnes sings in a tense, glam-rock taunt, “Don’t you know it’s pointless to try to bully me into caring more? / It’s through no fault of your own it’s really just the boredom of being someone’s captive.” But quickly he switches into a silky, ethereal croon, wondering that, “These tears I cry for you must mean I’m not the demon that I’m meant to be.” The song’s upbeat glam rock both hides and heightens Barnes’ pain. As he himself says on “Empyrean Abattoir,” “I repeat the wickedness to force reactions out of you / but it never hurts as deeply as I want it to.” CAITLIN BLADT

Joan Jett And The Blackhearts opening for The Who Thursday, May 7

SCOTTRADE CENTER Throughout her multi-faceted 35-year career, Joan Marie Larkin, better known as Joan Jett, has firmly established herself as a highly respected, often-imitated creative force of nature, seemingly never content to rest upon her many laurels. Since the early ‘80s, she has had several acting roles in both television and mostly independent films. She was an executive producer for the 2010 biopic The Runaways, which documented the history of the all-female, late-’70s band that made her famous. And way back in 1980, way ahead of the DIY curve (especially for her preferred form of bad-attitude rock’n’roll) Jett co-founded her record label, Blackheart Records, which has produced and released every Joan Jett And The Blackhearts album, as well as albums for several rock and hip-hop artists. She even debuted her own clothing line last year, which is available (naturally) at Hot Topic. But first and foremost, her primary focus has always been on creating and performing her music — a unique and distinctive blend of rock, garage, and punk which has earned Jett several awards and honors. She is on Rolling Stone’s “Greatest Guitarists of All Time” list and, as of this year, is also a well-deserved member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Jett’s most recent release, 2013’s Unvarnished, is the tenth studio album with her longtime band The Blackhearts. Although there was a seven-year gap since the band’s last album, Unvarnished still retains their signature sound while introducing previously underutilized elements of pop, and even a string section on one track. Recorded at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 (and featuring his songwriting and instrumental skills on a few tracks), Unvarnished is also an extremely personal album for Jett, lyrically

Bob Dylan

Monday, May 11 THE FOX When discussing Bob Dylan, critics must stop using the language of surprise. In a February review of the new Shadows in the Night record, legendary Rolling Stone writer David Fricke employed the words “unlikely” and “shocking” to describe an album of spare, meditative Frank Sinatra covers. It is a testament to Dylan’s artistry that he seems the most provocative when appealing to the largest number of people. But after five decades of success, spanning every cultural revolution from the anti-war protests of “Blowin’ in the Wind” to the drugfueled ruminations of “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” to the Reagan-era sermons of “Gotta Serve Somebody,” the only confounding move left for Dylan to make would be to retire from music altogether. What the critics routinely overlook is that, more than the stock market, more than the major newspapers, more than any presidential election, Bob Dylan serves as the most accurate barometer of the national psyche in history. During the Vietnam era, when the country yearned for peace and for an end to the social inequalities of the past, Dylan played the role of the embattled revolutionary, exposing the failures of the “Greatest Generation” while challenging the complacency of his own. Throughout the Nixon administration, he wore the disguise of the morally conflicted cowboy, even taking a bit part in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. And to this day, Dylan reflects the culture back to itself, showing its true nature at any given point in time, regardless of whether or not his fans like the stripmall evangelist with the disco beats. The good news for the country is that, according to the current, Stardust iteration of Bob Dylan, the American foundational myths are alive and well — in a post-modern sort of way. Young bohemians of today

elevenmusicmag.com | ELEVEN | 27

Live Music fetishize the typewriters, vinyl records and plastic cameras of the postwar period, along with the idealism and experimentation that they represent. Dylan, who always presented himself as a man out of time, spent the last decade capitalizing on this interest, stealing his image back from the pretenders and asserting himself as the prototypical hipster, delivering the best impersonation of himself in the music business. And by inviting comparisons to Sinatra, who shared many of the same eccentricities and obsessions, he has further established himself as a cultural legend, a man whose story will echo down through the ages along with those of Jesse James, Woody Guthrie and the rest of his heroes. When a well-established artist travels to St. Louis, I usually urge readers to attend the show in case the performer retires before mounting another tour. But Bob Dylan will outlast any musician on the road today. Instead, fans should go see Dylan at the height of his powers because, with another election cycle on the horizon, the nation needs to take a hard look at itself — and the one man who embodies America. K.E.LUTHER >>PREVIEW

Interpol, Algiers Monday, May 11 THE PAGEANT When Interpol played their first show in St. Louis on September 25, 2002, those scant few in attendance walked away impressed and confident that bigger things lay ahead for the New York based band. These intrepid late nighters knew then what everyone else knows now: Interpol is

PHOTO BY REED R. RADCLIFFE

BLUE BEAT

a band that means business. Clad in black, visually and sonically they paint hauntingly intricate and moody music, with elegantly layered lyrics. Their Matador Records debut from that year, Turn on the Bright Lights, was a pretty big deal, propelling them into relevance behind songs like “NYC,” “Obstacle 1,” “PDA,” and “Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down.” This initial success became both blessing and curse as topping the brilliance of their first offering proved a challenge. Their subsequent releases — 2005’s Antics, still on Matador, then a switch to Capitol for Our Love to Adore and a self-titled album — were both successful and underappreciated in equal measure. Both the band and their fans seemed to be experiencing identity crises as Interpol moved from solid indie band with a catalog of strong and innovative music to stadium rock band — they toured with U2, after all, which is officially as big and grandiose as it gets. Often compared to Joy Division or The Chameleons, Interpol’s melodies teeter precariously as they wind and twist through loss, lust and pain. Paul Banks’ lyrics veer from angry and spiteful to sweet and subtle. Percolating alongside Banks are Daniel Kessler’s searing guitar and Sam Fogarino’s driving percussion, aided by slick keyboards and down-and-dirty basslines, which amplify Banks baritone without overpowering him. On tour, this three-piece unit features Secret Machines’ keyboardist and vocalist Brandon Curtis. Interpol is on the road supporting last year’s El Pintor, an album whose songs (including highlights “Everything Is Wrong,”

“All the Rage Back Home” and “My Desire”) restore the swirling sonic melancholy that made them the It band of the early ’00s while at the same time showing the band’s determination to forge their way into previously uncharted territory. ROB LEVY >>PREVIEW

TV On The Radio, Bo Ningen

Wednesday, May 13

THE READY ROOM What a huge get for the Ready Room. The venue, still in its infancy, has been throwing rocking shows for the last few months, from a blistering Run The Jewels set to Sylvan Esso’s joyful, sold out performance. Yet this, TV On The Radio’s first show in St. Louis since a headlining slot on 2011’s LouFest stage, may be The Ready Room’s biggest show to date. TV On The Radio is vaunted among indie artists, and could easily filllarger, more established seated venues like The Pageant or the Peabody. Instead, they’re performing at our scrappy new Ready Room with a fraction of the capacity. It’s an exciting move that seems directly at odds with the motives behind Seeds, easily their most pop-friendly, mainstream album to date. Their fifth full length and first album since 2011, Seeds is far more accessible than the band’s past output. The hooks are catchier, the arrangements more straightforward, the vocals less hidden in the mix. It’s still without a doubt a TV On The Radio album, yet there’s no mistaking the conscious step towards populism. That shift away from the tight, complicated syncopation that used to define TV On The Radio may be the natural result of losing their longtime, gifted bassist

AARON GRIFFIN is the son of local blues guitarist Larry Griffin, but in the last few years has really solidified a place for BY JEREMY SEGEL-MOSS himself in a city full of outstanding guitar players. Schooled from Young Guns the beginning in the sounds of St. Louis, Griffin has become a fan SO OFTEN THE picture that comes to mind when thinking of favorite at the Blues City Deli and other local blues haunts. Most blues music and the musicians who perform it is of old folks. It recently he has taken his place among one of St. Louis’ longest is very true that many icons of the music are later in years, but running groups, The Soulard Blues Band. As they weren’t always. At one time, each and their new guitar player, he will have big shoes to every one of them was the kid on the scene. St. fill: the spot has been held by some of the city’s Louis has a rich heritage of old folks playing most talented blues guitarists for 30-plus years. blues, but who are the young folks who will NICK PENCE made a splash in the St. Louis become the old folks? The scene seems to be music scene several years ago with the acousgrowing all the time, but here are three musitic old-time blues group The Thin Dimes. The cians that are well worth the time to check out 22-year-old Kirkwood native has since begun and support. to perform solo, as well as with local pianist MARQUISE KNOX is a true St. Louis Ethan Leinwand in The Bottlesnakes. Influenced gem. Coming from a musical family, at 24 by mostly pre-war (pre-Robert Johnson) blues years old he has already had international in the styles of Sister Rosetta Thorpe, Frank success, shared stages with B.B. King and Stokes and Clifford Gibson, Pence and Leinwand Honey Boy Edwards, and recently released are currently reintroducing St. Louis to an old Aaron Griffin at Blues City Deli. his third album, Here I Am. Regardless of format of piano/guitar music. Unique to their age, Knox is one of St. Louis’ most engaging version of young musicians is the attention to acoustic music, performers. His guitar work, singing and harmonica playing slide work, and that blend of folk and blues that stands as the are throwbacka to the origins of blues while adding an electric fountainhead of all contemporary blues music. performance to every stage.

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Live Music Gerard Smith, who died of lung cancer in 2011. Without the basslines that used to define the band’s tracks, Tunde Adebimpe’s iconic vocals emerge as the most powerful signpost of of their sound. Even after more than ten years of performance, his voice still soars in falsetto, breaking and popping with latent sadness even while singing about new love. By necessity if nothing else, Adebimpe has been pushed further out in front of the mix on this album. No longer another instrument in the blend that would occasionally rip to the front of a song, his voice now leads the songs through their paces. As a result, the album as a whole seems cleaner and more danceable. Unlike their past output, Seeds reveals almost as much from a casual listen as it does from a frank, close listen. That night in Forest Park, TV On The Radio ripped through a ferocious set of music, smoke, and lights, awing the LouFest crowd with their undeniable magnetism. With the new set of songs and a catalog of much-loved songs at their back, their show this month promises to be unmissable. If anyone wants to argue that the band has lost their edge, just check the location. CAITLIN BLADT

>>PREVIEW

St. Vincent, Sarah Neufeld Wednesday, May 27

THE PAGEANT St. Louis got a long-overdue taste of St. Vincent when she opened for The Black Keys at Scottrade Center in December, even if the pairing seemed a bit misguided. Annie Clark hadn’t brought her act to town since a rather grumpy set at The Old Rock House in 2011. To be fair, though, a lot has happened in that time — namely Love This Giant, her successful 2012 collaboration with David Byrne, and especially the self-titled, deeply self-confident album she released last year to much hype and acclaim, including a wellearned Grammy. When St. Vincent returns to St. Louis for her May 27 show at The Pageant, the band will be coming off a series of festival performances — including Coachella, Beale Street Music Festival, Boston Calling, and Sasquatch — back to a setting better suited to her highly visual performances that need to be viewed up close for full effect. Even more so with the music from 2014’s St. Vincent, peppered with digital blips and distorted guitars, drum machines and drummers which Clark leads like a consummate rock frontperson. She struts, dances, howls, and handles her guitar with deft skill and bravado. While there are still plenty of traces of the young woman who created “Marry Me John,” “Cheerleader,” and “Cruel,” she’s matured and grown brazen, an attitude that blasts newer songs like “Birth

in Reverse,” “Regret,” and “Digital Witness” into manic danceability. She’ll be backed by multi-instrumentalist Toko Yasuda of Enon, drummer Matt Johnson (Jeff Buckley, Beth Orton, Angus and Julie Stone), and keyboardist/synth player/sequencer Daniel Mistseris. Sarah Neufeld opens the show; you may be forgiven for not recognizing her name, though you would surely recognize her music: she is the charismatic violinist for Arcade Fire. Like many of the members of that band, most recently Will Butler, she’s got something going on the side. In her case that would be 2013’s solo album Hero Brother, and the freshly released, powerfully beautiful “duo album” with woodwind/brass virtuoso and fellow Arcade Fire touring alum Colin Stetson, Never Were the Way She Was. Seeing as St. Vincent first hit the big stages opening for Arcade Fire on their Neon Bible tour, it seems fitting that she can return the favor now. ROBIN WHEELER >>PREVIEW

Alabama Shakes, Father John Misty Thursday, May 28

THE FOX The dual headlining sets of Alabama Shakes and Father John Misty represents a true distillation of different slices of Americana. On the one hand, there’s Alabama Shakes, representing the good ol’ boys, the joyful, drunken late nights of summer, the passionate cathartic fights with lovers, the emphatic and empathetic swagger of classic rock. On the other, there’s Father John Misty, a mystical character donned by former Fleet Foxes member Josh TIllman. Misty’s America is disillusioned and cynical, partying desperately to stop feeling so deeply post-Summer of Love. Both bands play in the sandbox of traditional rock, country, punk and folk music. And both bands show a profound, powerful command of their personae and music on their sophomore albums. On their first album, 2012’s Boys & Girls, Alabama Shakes sounded like they were holding back. There are moments that feel like smashing through a wall and screaming towards the sky — breakout single “Hold On” being a notable one — but they’re few and far between. The band’s forthcoming Sound & Color show that they’re done playing nice. Nowhere is this more evident than on the single “Don’t Wanna Fight,” hands down the most blisteringly passionate song from the band yet. The song opens simply enough, with a workhorse, classic-rock guitar backbone. But then Brittany Howard wails into it, slamming the guitar to a halt with a frustrated, enraged shriek that rips your heart out. Then comes the chorus, begging for a lover to just for fuck’s sake let it rest.

This is what the band was always capable of. This was what was hinted at when Howard attacked the chorus on “I Found You,” hiding behind the warmth of fuzzy production. Her voice was there, the power and confidence of the band present. But the immediacy and the pain were stripped out. “I never wanted to be the greatest / I just wanted to be your baby,” Howard sings with swagger on “The Greatest.” She may not have been striving towards greatness, but she’s certainly gotten there. This is a band who has figured out who the fuck they are. Relocating from the sweaty, sticky south of Alabama to the arid glamour of Southern California, Father John Misty’s sophomore effort, I Love You, Honeybear, plays like the back third of a Scorsese movie. The parties have stopped being fun, the drugs have stopped fully numbing the pain, the people aren’t funny they’re just vapid, and the American dream has started steaming like a fever dream at best and a bold-faced lie at worst. “We sang ‘Silent Night’ in three parts, that was fun,” Misty sings on “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.” “I hate that soulful affectation white girls put on / why don’t you move to the Delta? / I obliged later on when you begged me to choke ya.” It’s that quick turn, the moment when you realize the joke you thought everyone was laughing at together wasn’t a joke at all, that defines Misty’s music, shuttling straight from sardonic wit to raw emotional honesty. On “The Ideal Husband,” Misty is forced to list each of his transgressions, desperation growing as his faults are laid bare one by one. “I did things unprotected, proceeded to drive home wasted,” he sings. On and on he confesses until it shatters into resignation: I came by at seven in the morning… I said baby I’m finally succumbin’ Said something dumb like I’m tired of runnin’... Let’s put a baby in the oven Wouldn’t I make the ideal husband? All the while, Misty’s voice is as clear and melodious as ever, his arrangements more lush and interesting than on his impressive debut, Fear Fun. He also leans more heavily into decadent ‘60s rock — strings, organs and a full chorus weave their way onto the album — than his previous, jangly folk music. Together, the two bands create an intriguing double-feature of American music and consciousness: Deep South vs. West Coast, blues vs. pop, cynicism vs. romanticism. It’s fitting to get to see such a thing at the Fox — right here in the Gateway to the West, or the Top of the Dirty South, depending on who you ask. CAITLIN BLADT

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Album Reviews

HOT ROCKS = STL band (current and/or honorary)

Pokey LaFarge

Something in the Water Rounder Records

Mean Scene The very latest releases from all around St. Louis, assembled by SUZIE GILB. To get your upcoming release on the list, email suzie@elevenmusicmag.com. LP = vinyl album | CS = cassette DL = download | CD = CD (duh)

MAY Last In The American League compilation 2 LPs with art book Release show: May 2 at the Ready Room: Letter To Memphis, Via Dove, Arthur & The Librarian, Volcanoes, Blackwater ’64. Each band contributes one song, and the band is paired up with an artist, who creates a piece of art to accompany that song.

Hell Night/Cathedral Fever Split 7” River Despair River Despair CD Banks And Cathedrals Now Is All We Have CD Release show: May 15 at Cicero’s

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YOU KNOW, ST. LOUIS is a lucky city. I’m not saying we’re lucky just for being the place where Pokey LaFarge hangs his snappy hat on the rare days he’s not on tour. We’re lucky because we have a musical vernacular rooted in decades of Mississippi River American history. All those South Side boys and girls dressed to the nines and out for a hot night of jitterbugging and dancing the St. Louis Shag: most cities don’t have that. The raucous barroom piano jams at Yaqui’s on Cherokee, especially after the Casa Loma Ballroom empties out: most cities don’t have that. Whether that’s your scene, or you just enjoy the view, the richly evocative music of the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s is not only a part of our musical heritage here — it’s a living thing, growing and changing the same way that the experimental or punk scenes are. LaFarge isn’t just the poster boy for that scene, he’s a prime example of its potential for growth. On his seventh record, Something in the Water, you can hear him reaching past himself for something larger. Where previous work was built around establishing the character of Pokey LaFarge and the legitimacy of the genre, now he’s comfortable — the establishing phase is done, and he and the band can instead explore the world they’ve built together. Even as they continue to declare and celebrate their roots in the title song and “Knockin’ the Dust off the Rust Belt Tonight,” they’re able to reach outwards and encompass the wide world they’ve been touring through all this time. Recorded and co-produced (alongside LaFarge) by Jimmy Sutton, the arrangements are the biggest innovation here. Where LaFarge made his bones sweating out the barroom authenticity of the form, there’s a mellow sweetness on this album that is new. Brass, woodwinds, a drumset, gentle tremolo guitar, and especially sweet backing vocals now adorn the songs. With a bigger band, counterintuitively, LaFarge is able to distribute the weight and bring his

tone down to a conversational volume. Of course, he still jumps plenty on songs like “Actin’ a Fool,” where the bass strings slap and the banjo and harmonica flow and it’s impossible not to picture a capacity crowd at Off Broadway dancing along, but on songs like “When Did You Leave Heaven” or “Cairo, Illinois,” his smooth delivery is exalted by the amazingly dulcet backing voices of Scott Ligon, Casey McDonough, and the band. There are highlights everywhere. “Underground” is a finely crafted bandstand number, and you can see the speakeasy jumpin’ and jukin’, sweatin’ and swingin’ — but the lyrics are deceptively complex. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine it as the soundtrack to scenes of devastation and lamentation on film. Even as it nails the details of the form, LaFarge’s music has reached past genre and achieved the freedom of interpretation. “All Night Long” opens like a scene from Chicago, and indeed the theatrical voice of a narrator sets the place and time: “Awww, here we are once again on the northwest side of Chi-town, where the girls will pick you up, and they’ll put you down all night long.” From there, the scene practically constructs itself from the piano outward into a zoot-suited dance contest. It’s a beautiful mirage, and a multicultural one — this is the music of the old Midwest, and there’s no impediment to picturing white girls swirling their fancy dresses at nattily dressed black gentlemen, or a bartender of any color with black bands on his sleeves and a bowler on his head. Meanwhile, in “Goodbye Barcelona” we are reminded that Pokey has his choice of contexts: he reps South St. Louis, but he certainly could place himself in any number of other locales. As he sits alone at a table in Spain, torn by his need to leave and his desire to stay, the band makes a deft turn into flamenco mode without breaking character — again like the theater, where the ensemble plays multiple roles. Castanets and claps do most of the transformative work, and the horn section completes the job with a flourish. “Far Away” brings us back to Pokey’s Jimmy Rodgers roots, starting with just him and a guitar. As the second verse begins, a cowboy chorus hums reverently. It’s a touching scene, in which the lyrics and the musical form complete each other so you can almost smell the cattle out past the campfire’s light. Something in the Water is a crucial evolution for Pokey LaFarge, who needed at this key moment to be able to slip the strictures of genre without abandoning his roots. By turning in such a beautifully nuanced collection of songs and styles, he makes a successful case for the bandstand format and clears plenty of space for their further development. And that’s reason enough to count ourselves lucky. EVAN SULT

Album Reviews

The Old Souls Revival I Will Let You In Self release

Old Souls Revival singer-songwriter Neil C. Luke recently confided that his band’s next album would be “less folk, more rock.” I Will Let You In delivers on that promise while staying true to what fans have come to expect from these bluesy barrelhouse rockers. Their second effort dodges sophomore jitters by proving both a solid follow up to 2013’s Common Ground and a fitting next step in the band’s career. Already the boozy, dingy soundtrack for no-collar barflies played with calloused fingers and vocal cords, Old Souls expand their repertoire by reveling in the tension between rural pride and low-rent city life. There’s a sympathetic resonance hums between I Will Let You In and the messy, muddy grit of the Flamin’ Groovies’ classic Teenage Head, another album that binges on equal parts country and rock n‘ roll. But where the Groovies’ ‘70s classic was a product of its time, drawing from Slim Harpo R&B and Rolling Stones sex and drugs, Old Souls is clearly a Gen-Y band raised on grunge, garage and alt-rock. The title track goes off like a shotgun, a dense jam that’s a jaded epilogue to a bad breakup in which pity is offered but a second chance is not. Luke lets fly his angry yowls while Pete Moss’ guitar riffs chip away at the rough edges and Jeremy Reidy’s drums provide the blunt force. Luke’s hound-dog rasp is at its best in the rollicking chorus of “Broadway Connection,” a soaring joyride down a deserted street in a beat-up hooptie flying well over the speed limit. Moss bares his teeth for the airtight guitar solo at the end of “Shadow Boxing,” all speed and fluidity. Songs like “Those Old Souls” and “High Tide,” with their lonesome harmonica and Southern-fried twang, smell faintly of hickory smoke — which is only fair, because they’ve never been anything less than honest. To their credit, Luke’s poignant lyricism avoids the customary whiskey and tumbleweeds motif rampant throughout Americana. My favorite cut, “Time Didn’t Notice,” is a sweet, meandering groove filled with late-night introspection that slowly builds to a back-up church choir humming a smooth gospel-tinged refrain in blue-eyed soul-shouter style. The painfully heartfelt tone remains vaguely unsatisfied — older, wiser, yet unapologetic; serious, but far from sober. With bitterly intelligent lyrical shards like “progress in the sense of selfawareness” and “mostly all that shines was a heart of darkness,” the song is a resigned acceptance of one’s flaws, coupled with a

lingering hope that it’s possible to overcome our worst personal habits (“We’ve got to fight the motion of the old machines, the ones that have been running for centuries”) and begin new patterns of behavior. Elsewhere, notable guest chanteuse Irene Allen harmonizes with Luke on “Move,” the ballad of a prodigal hometown girl. The Old Souls hold their own in rabble-rousing good form. DENMARK LAINE

Icky Blossoms Mask

Saddle Creek

Who knew a band from Omaha knew how to electro-rock this hard? Well, you should, because they come from the land of aggressive dance rockers The Faint. Icky Blossoms was formed in 2011 by Tilly & the Wall’s Derek Pressnall along with vocalist/synth Sarah Bohling and guitarist Nik Fackler. The trio signed to Saddle Creek and released their amazing self-titled debut in 2012, which pretty much kicked ass, though it was a few small stumbles shy of sheer perfection. After spending these last three years touring and perfecting their craft, the band has finally evolved their sound until it smashes their previous album into glorious pieces. Mask comes in heavy with “In Folds,” drum machines thumping and synth pulsing. It’s a perfect thesis for the rest of the album, full of passion, pain, and desire. “Phantasmagoria” follows, drives nails into your head with a bang, bang, bang! Pressnall and Bohling join together in the chorus, where the sporadic drums and guitars overwhelm til it feels like you’re on a verge of a mental breakdown. The back-to-back pairing of “Away from You” and “Want You So Bad” is pure pop perfection as a display of love and affection. The former plays like a slow jam about living forever just so you don’t have to be away from your true love. Bohling’s final plea — “let’s get together, there’s no afterlife” — plays as a kind of atheist torch song. Things get even better on “Wait,” an optimistic look about packing your bags and moving away, as the narrator tries to figure out what the hell s/he’s been waiting on while wasting away at a menial job. Suddenly, it’s decision time: wait another day, or follow a dream and start anew: “Let’s go right now before we can’t get out. Let’s run away!” Mask is a fun dance album that also contains plenty of bellicose moments to keep the floor moving and pumping. Icky Blossoms poured their blood, sweat and tears into this record, so much that you can taste it. JACK PROBST Icky Blossoms plays the Ready Room with Of Montreal on Thursday, May 7.

Legend Camp The CAMP-aign Delmar Records

Though Fresh Voice and X-Luger are well-respected St. Louis hip-hop artists, there’s a good chance you may have heard their music and not know who they are. Legend Camp, as the duo is known, has performed a lot of shows and released a lot of music over the years. They started off recording on cassette tapes, but as they rose through the ranks they eventually caught the attention of multiplatinum producer Jason “Jay-E” Epperson, who produced Nelly’s Country Grammar and E.I. Their 2014 signal, Champion Sound, featured Lil St. Louis and garnered plenty of buzz from Atlanta’s Top 20, music blogs and music industry executives. Their new album, The CAMP-Aign, will be coming out on Delmar Records, one of St. Louis’ hottest newest labels. After all the hard work they’ve already put in, “[we] really appreciate the opportunity presented to us so we can really push our music,” says Fresh Voice. Delmar Records is headed by St. Louis music heavyweights Finsta (formerly of Hot 104.1), DJ/producer Tech Supreme, and luminary manager Jay Stretch, and is intended to provide a platform for their artists to display their craft on a grander scale. “Stretch and Finsta extended a hand to us and we were with it,” Fresh explained. “We have thought-provoking songs as well as party songs,” Fresh says of the new album. A prime example of that is “Ain’t Nuthin,” featuring Grammy Award-winner Murphy Lee and multi-award winner Tef Poe assisting with verses on the song. Legend Camp’s live show is a blend of high energy and crowd involvement — hands are up and clapping, and the crowd will often rap along with the duo’s lyrics. They started out opening for the St. Lunatics and have conquered stages at South By Southwest in Austin, TXthe A3C festival in Atlanta. Camp Audio is already a fan favorite; with production by Trife Trizzl, Rodney P The Average Jo and Tech Supreme, The CAMP-Aign is an incitement to get down. Keep your eyes out: The CAMP-Aign should be available before the end of this summer. DUCKY HINES

Avid Dancer 1st Bath Grand Jury

Here’s a different kind of singer/songwriter story than you usually hear: Jacob Dillion Summers grew up in a strict Christian household without any exposure to popular music. When he was older he joined the Marines — not the

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Album Reviews

SINGLES FOR SINGLES by Ira Gamerman Single reviews in monologue for single people by a single weirdo EVERY SINGLE MONTH!

WAXAHATCHEE “UNDER A ROCK” You must have your head caught in a ditch if you think you’re gonna find a lady who can handle your drunken bullshit like Katie. AND WHAT DO YOU DO? Turn around and treat her like a call girl! Make her drag you out of the bar like she’s your PAROLE OFFICER? Clean it up and get it together before you wind up the lonely sad-sack-o-shit you deserve to be. Don’t make me tell you twice, OK? She cares about you? WHY?? Because she has qualities like empathy and patience and selflessness — attributes which it wouldn’t hurt for YOU to cultivate. NOW SOBER UP AND BUY HER FLOWERS, PRICK! LOWER DENS “TO DIE IN LA” Hey did you see Twin Peaks is coming back? Yeah — a little too esoteric if you ask me. I prefer Michael Bay to David Lynch, but I mean, I’m a Hollywood studio executive. And I’d never normally notice or care about a girl like you, but — I don’t know — there’s something about the treble in your Telecaster that really bends my notes, if ya know what I’m sayin’. And if you wanted to drive over to the Valley from Silver Lake I could maybe be persuaded to watch Eraserhead or Lost Highway or Inland Empire… That’s your thing, right? You’re into that kinda stuff? I dig arty pictures too. It’s not just about explosions for me. Maybe I watched Twin Peaks under shitty circumstances or something? I’m willing to give it another shot…for you. TORRES “COWBOY GUILT” Yeah — my George W impression is pretty good, eh? How bout you pass me that whiskey and we get a little cozy on this couch? You seem different than last I saw you. I don’t even think I noticed you last time, cuz you seemed a little, I don’t know — sad? But your riffs are a little spacier this time around, if ya know what I’m sayin’, you’ve got a whole new swagger. Like you’re more of a woman and less of a girl? Was that over the line? I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. WAIT DON’T GO! Fool me once, shame on — you? Me? The point is YOU CAN’T GET FOOLED AGAIN, AMIRIGHT?

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route chosen by most future indie rockers. It was during his service that he joined a music program and picked up the drums. When Summers left the Marines he settled in LA, backing a handful of local bands in the mid to late ‘00s. He eventually formed The Rhone Occupation, a psych-pop band influenced by rock of the ‘60s and ‘70s, who gained a lot of recognition in the local scene. Avid Dancer evolved from Summers’ previous solo outing Lauralaura after a move to Alaska and back. This time around, Summers has assembled a group of musicians that perfectly expresses his brand of indie rock goodness. Avid Dancer still has roots in Summers’ years experimenting with psychedelic rock as the curtain pulls back on opener “All the Other Girls.” It’s about having a yearning desire for a woman who’s only interested in friendship. Summers’ knack for writing a catchy chorus is coupled with memorable riffs — “Stop Playing with My Heart” sounds exactly like an M. Ward song, from the mellow groove of the slow love song to the paper cup vocal effect. “Not Far to Go” is the album’s first real garage rocker, with burred distortion and dreamy vocals, while “I Want to See You Dance” drapes a classic rock sound over a disco beat. Single “All Your Words Are Gone” is a sweet love ballad as Summers sounds saintly and innocent. If you’re looking for a lovely and pleasant record for days laying in the grass and looking for shapes in the clouds, give Avid Dancer a spin. JACK PROBST

Bill Fay

Who Is the Sender? Dead Oceans Records

Bill Fay is an artist who exists not for rock success, but to influence rock stars. Wilco fans know his work from their live cover of his 1970 song “Be Not So Fearful,” and Jeff Tweedy lists Fay as a major influence, as do Nick Cave and Jim O’Rourke. Despite releasing his first album 45 years ago, Who Is the Sender? is only Fay’s sixth album — though his second in three years for Dead Ocean. His career’s been marked by a lack of commercial success and long breaks from the industry. Which is a shame: a pianist first and foremost, Fay’s melodious playing would fit into Tom Waits’ or Randy Newman’s libraries. But he opts instead for orchestral backing. Dark and lush under the moan of organ and strings on “War Machine,” his influence on Cave and Tweedy emerges as something more human than Cave’s gothic leanings, more biting than Tweedy’s emotionalism. He’s quiet and restrained throughout, forcing the listener to lean in deep to really hear his words on the eulogy “The Freedom

to Read.” Who Is the Sender? is filled with sweetness in the vein of “Be Not So Fearful.” “A Frail and Broken One” offers kindness to the weak through church-like gentle organ and restrained guitar as Fay reminds us all, “There’s a light that shines above the frail and broken one.” On album closer ”I Hear You Calling (Studio Reunion),” his quiet and wavering voice leads a growing choir in the collective plea: “Give me back my time. All my time is lying on the factory floor.” Sometimes it’s too late to experience the obscure artists who quietly steered the music we love. That’s not the case with Fay. As unlikely as his recording resurgence has been in recent years, it’s a welcome glimpse into our roots. ROBIN WHEELER

Django Django Born Under Saturn Ribbon Music

Here we are again, floating out in future space with England’s Django Django. It’s an interstellar beach party! There’s the Silver Surfer riding the edge of a black hole — he has the Power Cosmic and he’s spreading all that goodness out to the stars. There are planets so far out here that you couldn’t even imagine the kind of parties that go on. The universe has been saved once again, so it’s time to get our space drank on! Apparently, after the success and critical acclaim of their self-titled debut Django Django decided to record their new album, Born Under Saturn, here among the stars. Their Dick Dale-icious guitar riffs can no longer be contained in Earth’s atmosphere, so they’re broadcasting it out into the blackness of space. Out here, no one can hear you scream, but everyone can groove on the universe’s favorite band, so we all sway and wriggle to the beat as we float free of gravity. Out here in the furthest reaches of space the band looks pretty strange. Singer/ guitarist Vincent Neff has two heads so he can sing his own backup vocals. He makes that surf-rock guitar wail so much it’s shaking the waves of this beach planet! Drummer David Maclean’s making up some crazy beats, but he’s got six arms to get to both the traditional kit and a set of electronic drum pads. Jimmy Dixon keeps up on the bass — just two arms, but ten fingers on each hand! Tommy Grace is surrounded by his synth, which starts on the floor and spirals up into infinity. Some of the notes he’s playing don’t even exist, and he’s sprouted a tail so he can glissando from one end to the other! By the time these sounds travel back to Earth it will be May of the year 2015, and you’ll be able to hear what I experienced at the

Album Reviews edge of the universe. Lucky you! JACK PROBST

Girlpool

Before the World Was Big Wichita Records

Stark, warm and dry: that’s Girlpool’s feel on album opener “Ideal World,” with a simple, deep guitar riff as Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad harmonize until their guitar and bass merge into distortion. The Philadelphia two-piece keeps it simple on their full-length debut. Their combined voices highlight silence, even though silence is lacking in their brief songs. There’s no time for pauses, but the robustness of their harmonies bring forward the quiet left by the simplicity of their twoinstrument arrangements. They maintain this sound through the brief album — it clocks in well under half an hour. Any longer, and the simplicity would wear thin and dull, but this brevity works with the youthful thoughtfulness that runs through the album. The title track, with its round refrain of “I miss how it felt wearing matching dresses before the world was big,” exemplifies the first childhood nostalgia at the beginning of adulthood. With their high and lilting voices, it’s sweet and sad, an anxiousness that balances just the right side of shrill when they sing, “When I love myself would I take it the wrong way?” on “Chinatown.” “Now that you are older, pick with your hands,” they chant together on “Magnifying Glass,” which thematically sums up the album. Nostalgia for childhood, accepting the requirements of adulthood, and navigating the emotions in between color every song, making the album more of a cohesive whole than a collection of tunes. Tied together by their simplicity and thematic elements, they’re the quiet and introspective, sloppier kid sisters of Lucius. “Before the World Was Big” captures a snapshotquick bit of the space between girlhood and womanhood, full of harmonies and noise, thought and silence. ROBIN WHEELER

Michael Rault Living Daylight Burger Records

Thank you, Modern Technology, for taking one-man bands from the realm of street performers with cymbals strapped to their knees into the realm of legitimate musicians. Multiinstrumentalist Canadian Michael Rault is a fine example of the latter. Living Daylight features plush psychedelics trimmed into three-minute, poppy garage-rock earworms that don’t sound like the work of one musi-

cian in this tight and crisp recording. Fuzzy guitars, looped claps, and self-harmonizing make “Hiding from a Heartbreak” harken back to post-Sgt. Pepper’s Beatles territory. “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes” brings 3/4 time and loopy guitars for what sounds like the saddest carousel ride of your life, ‘til Rault leans into Hanni el Khatib territory with dark humor, a catchy melody, and affected vocals on “Suckcess”. The ten-track album keeps whiplash garage momentum with a languid acid groove. Rault runs the gamut of guitar styles through the album, often in the same songs. “Lost Something” uses a sitar’s ringing highpitched tone to complement his strongly Lennon-esque voice. “Real Love (Yeah)” combines fuzz and funk guitar with a layer of bongos and bass drum underneath, and guitar freaks will love Rault’s ability to nurse so many tones and styles, as on songs like “Too Bad So Sad,” where he swings comfortably from fuzzy riffs to rich pop hooks. Living Daylight has been ready to see daylight for over two years. Before he recorded it in early 2013, Rault selfreleased several works, played with his side project Slim Twig, and did some production work with Fucked Up. Even with the wait, the timing’s right for Living Daylight. Bright harmonies, warm guitars, and wiggly rhythms make this a summer-ready DIY pop-rock delight. ROBIN WHEELER

Psych Squared Painted Red Self Release

In the past year, a whole lot more Americans have learned of the existence of Daniel Drake, aka Dr. Dan The Pancake Man, thanks to his amazing artistic portraits and illustrations deploying only the batter that makes up the greatest breakfast food on this planet (my personal favorites were the pancakes made in the likeness of Moe, Larry and Curly). His unique skill has landed him spots on The Today Show and The Steve Harvey Show and even inspired imitators elsewhere — though most days you can walk into the Courtesy Diner on Kingshighway and see him slaving away at the grill. But there’s another side to Daniel Drake, as the front man of Psych Squared. With the Bloc Party vibes of opening track “Redact,” Drake and crew have created an album that feels very much like something from the Scottish indie scene of the early 1980s, where a feeling of innocence serves equally as an advantage and deficit. Guitarist Shaun Moses takes Johnny Marr-inspired guitar playing and adds a little more funk behind it, drawing closer to bands like Aztec Camera and Orange Juice than the straightforward pop structures of

The Smiths. Painted Red is the sound of a band trying to find itself. On the highs, such as “Bittersweetheart” and “Gargoyle,” you can glimpse the potential beyond the rough edges. However, the tracks that try too hard, such as “Fame” and “Product Placement,” leave much to be desired. Though you can see where the band is going, and why, the band might have been better served to take a little more time with lyrics that can get a bit heavy-handed and naïve. But “Redact” and closer “Different” bookend the album well, both capturing your attention. The musicianship in the record is solid. Drummer David Ederer and bassist Hank Gustafson put a spicy lifeline into each song and mesh with the indie funk of Moses’ guitar playing. When you add in Drake’s smooth voice, you definitely have an interesting combination — one that will hopefully get better with time. REV. DANIEL W. WRIGHT

Hot Chip

Why Make Sense? Domino Records

Full disclosure: I’m a massive Hot Chip fan. I love most everything they’ve done, from their humble bedroom beginnings on Coming on Strong to their last album, 2012’s club banger In Our Heads. That said: Their brand new record, Why Make Sense?, just isn’t working the same magic. Is it a lousy album? No, it’s not. It just doesn’t have the punch that Hot Chip records have always had. It may just be a grower, needing some time to latch on. But here’s the thing: while it is a bit disappointing at this point, even a weak Hot Chip record still beats almost everything you’ll hear when you spin the radio dial. Late last year, Hot Chip appeared on the compilation Master Mix: Red Hot + Arthur Russell performing an intense 10-minute cover of Russell’s “Go Bang.” It was stunning jam of epic proportions, and may have set the bar too high for what was to follow. The first five tracks herein aren’t terrible; the funky Stevie Wonder-esque “Started Right” is the best of side A, and things pick up when we hit the screech of a guitar at the halfway point with “Dark Night.” All the boys sing on this one, with multi-instrumentalist Al Doyle taking lead for the first time outside of his side project New Build. Next, vocalist Alexis Taylor twists things around as he sings about playing “Easy to Get.” But it’s the title track that wraps up the record with a beat that shatters the rest. I really want to love this record as much as the rest of their catalog, I truly do. Ask me how I feel about it in about three months, and we’ll see if this batch of songs have broken the initial feeling of mediocrity. JACK PROBST

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THE WAY BACK PAGE While enjoying all the latest offerings the indie world has to offer, I often find amazing records buzzing around my brain months and years later. A tragic truth gained while working at a record store: it doesn’t matter how incredible you think a band is, they won’t sell as much as they should. Eventually all these gems will get marked down and sent to

The Bargain Bin Memories of long-forgotten records by Jack Probst

Frausdots

Couture, Couture, Couture Sub Pop, 2004

I SAT ON a green puffy chair in the hallway at the South County St. Louis Community College campus. She had just dumped me and returned to live with her parents after spending the summer sharing my tiny room. It was a terrible few months full of arguments, jealousy, frustration, and video games. I’d foolishly followed her lead months prior and scheduled an hour between each of my classes; in a building where it takes literally five seconds to get from one room to the other, that extra time was spent sitting around, staring at the parking lot through plate glass windows. It was still a little while before I’d bite the bullet and buy an iPod, so I had my headphones plugged into a clunky CD Walkman. I was miserable and needed a distraction. I remember the sky looked green that day, perfectly matching my mood. She sat on the floor with her back to the wall, giving me the silent treatment, but still stringing me along like I was her little dog. I felt like I was dying inside, so I slid on my headphones and tried to escape. As I pressed play, a steady thumping started off as the singer trilled an intro based on America’s “Horse with No Name”:

there alone, isolated from the drudgery that was my college life, knowing I was experiencing the greatness of this record before the public would. They were so new wave at a time before its resurgence. And they would never make another record after this perfect debut. Frausdots was the brainchild of Brent Rademaker, who made his start in bands like shoegazers Further, the psych-folk rockers Beachwood Sparks, and their spinoff The Tyde. It all started to come together when Michelle Loiselle (who appeared on Guns ‘n Roses Use Your Illusion II) and Rademaker fell in love. As more collaborators joined, including the likes of Roger O’Donnell from The Cure and Mia Doi Todd, the songs started to solidify. Couture, Couture, Couture’s retro sound came out of an appreciation of ‘80s New Wave, but built something new on top of that existing foundation. With its odd America reference, “Dead Wrong” kicks off Couture, Couture, Couture with a powerful chorus that sent shivers down my spine. Immediately following this, the tempo speeds up on “Fashion Death Trends,” the shortest and poppiest song of them all. Just as quickly as the song ends, I would hit the back button to start it again — then again. “Soft Light” sounded like how I felt inside, bleak and heartbroken. Its sad, soft guitar riff changes to something buzzier halfway through as they head into the bridge. Rademaker sings about being lost, rejected, and even deleted, as my own relationship faded into nothingness. “I don’t wanna live forever, baby,” the chorus sings back to Rademaker. I felt like I understood those words, and took them to heart. She packed up her things as I heard “Current Bedding”, a bit of an upbeat and depressing tune. “You should go inside,” she said. I watched from the kitchen window as they loaded up her stuff. I was out of control of my emotions back then, and I sabotaged it all without realizing it. I want to paint myself as the hero, but I’m not. The album ends with the upbeat “Tomorrow’s Sky,” a synth-laden track that helped me look towards the far future. I realize now that this song doesn’t paint as positive a picture as I had always imagined, but it helped me close out a complicated chapter in my life. She would still be a reoccurring character over the next year, as she strung me along like she still had a claim on me, but eventually we both moved on.

“Soft Light” sounded like how I felt inside, bleak and heartbroken.

“Lived in the city on a street with no name / it felt good to be out of the rain / in the city / you can’t remember your name / in the city / you can’t remember your name” My record store career was still in its infancy, with only about four months under my belt. Promos arrived sometimes months in advance, and Sub Pop was particularly kind to Euclid. Frausdots was one of the first to catch my attention. I felt pure joy sitting

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“Another day comes and slowly life is passing me by / another balloon floats lost into tomorrow’s sky”

NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH FLOWERS TO THE PEOPLE

STRANDS

Full-service floral & gift boutique, specializing in locally & sustainably grown flowers. All retail gifts made by local STL artists. Delivery available in the metro area.

A relaxing boutique salon in the historic DeMun area, Strands draws inspiration from the world of fashion and art to stay on top of current trends. They create designs to showcase your individual beauty!

Cherokee Street 2317 Cherokee St (63118) 762-0422 | flowerstothepeople.biz

Demun 730 Demun Ave (63105) 725-1717 | strands-HAIR.COM

SASHA’S ON SHAW

MELT

Great wines, the best cheeses, always served late! The Shaw Neighborhood’s best bar in the shadow of the garden.

Melt is a funky & eclectic waffle bar offering waffles, cocktails, beer & coffee. Patrons can enjoy live music, pinball, skeeball & more. Gluten free, vegan & vegetarian options available

Shaw 4069 Shaw Blvd 771-7274 | sashaswinebar.com

Cherokee 2712 Cherokee St (63118) 771-6358

CITY DINER AT THE FOX LATE NIGHT CLUB

THE MUD HOUSE

Complete with food and drink, the Club hosts a variety of unique DJs spinning reggae, ska, soul, ’60s garage, surf and rockabilly every Saturday night from 10:30pm until 3am! Midtown 541 North Grand Blvd (63103) 533-7500

There is not a better patio in St. Louis to enjoy our tasty sandwiches and salads or a better place to get out and work outside of the office.

Cherokee Street 2101 Cherokee St (63118) 776-6599 | themudhousestl.com

FOAM

STL STYLEHOUSE

An all-ages music venue with full bar, impressive coffee options, free Wi-Fi, & a great vibe. Catch amazing bands before they’re too big to see in a small room. New hours! M-F 5pm-12am, Sat 9am-12am

St. Louis-inspired wearables, custom screen printing and graphic design. You can’t spell STYLE without STL!

Cherokee Street 3359 S. Jefferson Ave (63118) 772-2100 | foamvenue.com

Cherokee Street 3159 Cherokee St (63118) 494-7763 | stl-style.com

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