Posted by Charlie on Sunday, November 18th, 2007
Dear Graham,
Is it alright that I call you Graham? After all the great music that you have given my ears to soak in over the years, I feel I must give you some career advice as a friend and as a serious fan.
I know, I know. Damon Albarn can be a bit of a sod. After all, he was the face and glamour of your quasi-boy band Blur. I understand that he hurt your feelings when he brought in Fat Boy Slim (ugh) to produce Crazy Beat for your last Blur album (Think Tank). I’m with ya man. That track sucked. It’s too bad, Think Tank has become a classic album in my collection and I still listen to it more than the last Oasis record (oops, sorry, did I mention the unmentionable?).
It was a Friday night. Flopping down on my unmade bed I turned on MPR’s “Fresh Air.” Behold, “Bitter Sweet Bundle of Misery” from what I learned to be a “forthcoming solo outing “Happiness in Magazines” by former guitarist for Blur.” IT WAS FANTASTIC! It was like “Coffee and TV (from Blur’s 13)” had birthed a son……..and it was wonderful.
The next day I dashed out on my bike to the now defunct Let it Be records to ingest this new nugget of brit-pop joy. The cover is green, slick, with a cartoonish shadow of Graham hidden away. The record is a landmark in brit-pop history and the follow up record “Love travels at illegal speeds” is equally as powerful and perfect.
I’ll give it too you straight Graham. You’ve proved that you’ve got NOTHING to prove. Yes, Damon led Blur. Yes, he liked Blur to have a certain flavor. But he has talent. You of all people should know that. Everyone knows now that you don’t need Blur to be a successful musician. But I do.
You’ve recently gotten together with your former mates to talk about what could be one final Blur record or a full out reunion. It seems as though you’ve gotten a tip from the perhaps wiser Damon in this matter. With Gorillaz, Blur, Mali Music, and The Good, The Bad, and the Queen, he’s got nothing to prove either. But, Damon wants Blur, he wants you IN Blur, he wants the songs back. Help him bring the songs to the People!
You all have talent, and to bring it together not for the money or the fame is what every big, rich, and famous musician wants in their lives. Do you think that Michael Jackson wants to tour with the Jackson 5? He does it for the money. You both proven that you don’t need Blur, but the fact that everyone involved is on board is a testament to what Blur is. Blur is here for me.
Sincerely,
Charlie Van Stee
P.S – If Blur tours again, make sure to hit up
Minnesota. We’ll get drunk and grind to some Fat Boy Slim records.
Posted by Sam on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
Last week, amidst a sea of disaster and turmoil related to crashing PCs, exciting business transactions, and various musical craziness, I found myself walking into the Varsity Theater and interviewing two of the three bands playing that night. Those bands were The Never, and Annuals, two North Carolina acts who have been playing together for some time and were touring with Manchester Orchestra. It was the first time they’d ever played Minneapolis, so I tried to go easy on them.
I got to the Varsity early. It’s such a great theater. You walk into the auditorium and it just feels so welcoming. After calling the two band managers, I was greeted by Adam from Annuals.
Above: Adam of Annuals
Lunch of Champions: How has the tour been going so far?
Adam: The tour’s been absolutely amazing. We’re touring with our closest friends and every night there’s been a lot of people coming out who are really passionate about the music. It’s really fun.
LOC: Have any shows stood out as particularly good or difficult?
Adam: Well there was one that was just really fun. We played the Bowery in New York on Halloween. It was really fun because we got to dress up and shit, and we all got really fucked up after the show. So it was great.
Then the one in Chicago last night was really cool. That one mostly because it was just full out packed and the sound was really good, better than I’d heard us sound before.
LOC: Your website describes you as something of a musical commune with interchangeable roles within the group. With that dynamic do you feel the audience has a stronger effect on your performance than it might other artists?
Adam: Umm, you know that’s hard to tell because I can’t get off the stage and watch us. But I would hope so, definitely. We all care so much about what we’re playing. We’re putting 110% into it. And every little fuck up, I can guarantee you we’re going back to the hotel and thinking about it all night. But I certainly feel completely electric whenever I get up there, almost shaking with enthusiasm, and I hope some of that gets to people in the crowd. I think it does. As long as they’re having fun, that’s all that matters.
LOC: You’re all fairly young musicians, what are your hopes for the group in the future?
Adam: The most immediate hope for the future is that we can afford an apartment. Right now I’m living in Mike, our bass player’s basement, you know, his mom’s basement, with him. Everyone else is certainly extremely broke.
We’re just hoping we can tour and do what we love so much and be able to make a standard living the same as anyone else our age. I was working at Banana Republic and I was making a lot more money. But still, it’s way worth it. There’s nothing better than being able to see the world and play music and then call it a living.
LOC:What contemporary artists do you listen to?
Adam: Does it have to be contemporary?
LOC: Well, you can go back a ways too.
Adam: Well my very favorite of all time, right now (there’s always a different “of all time”), is Roy Orbison. I think he’s one of the best song writers who’s ever been born. Paul Simon, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr..
But contemporary artists? I really like Grisly Bear. That’s a really good band that’s come out recently. The Never, the band that’s opening tonight, they certainly don’t get as much attention as they should. They’re so outside of the box. That’s such a cheesy way to put it, but they think about song writing in such a different way. It’s so fresh and nice. Instead of people just going up there and playing what’s popular at the moment and doing how other artists are doing it just so they can get that crowd, they just do it their own way. And it works, it just works.
LOC: Is there any place that you’d like to perform that you haven’t had a chance yet?
Adam: Oh yeah. I mean, I look at it more in the sense of places I’d like to be. Really, a city is a city wherever you go, so it’s less about the cities, but more the places you get to see in between. I really want to play somewhere in Africa. Africa and Australia. There are just places like that, places that I haven’t gotten to see in my life yet. I’m so lucky to have seen what I’ve seen so far. But of course I’d like for my luck to hold out.
LOC: How does touring compare to the scene at home?
Adam: Specifically our scene back at home in North Carolina? Well touring is completely different, obviously. It’s almost like a blur because every night you’re playing these songs over and over again and eventually it just turns into your own little scene. And the scene ends up being all the bands you’ve played with and are close to on tour.
It’s certainly different from our scene back at home because we get to play with a lot of bands that are really different. The bands back at home in North Carolina, sometimes they focus too much on one kind of music. That’s not really true, come to think of it. Some bands, like the Never who are opening for us, are definitely taking it in new directions and those are the ones that certainly deserve a listen. Anyone can pick up a guitar and start recording these days with things like Garage Band and Fruity Loops, anything like that. So many people are just oversaturating the market with just passionless music.
The scene at home is probably just like anywhere else, though. Just a whole bunch of music that everyone’s playing, only most of the scene should just be one band, really.
I hope no one at home reads that.
When I interviewed the Never, I spoke mostly with Noah, but a few answers came in as the band hurried around after the show.
Above: The Never
Lunch of Champions: What’s the first step when you write a song?
Noah: It generally comes from a melody first. Often I’m just driving somewhere or doing something and I get a melody idea, and then I use a Dictaphone just to put it down. Then if I think about it later I’ll try to think of a way to back it up on Guitar. It generally comes melody first and then I write a lot of lyrics down. Then I try to kind of puzzle-piece them together until they work out fine. But there’s no particular way, that’s just probably just the most often the way it turns out. Sometimes I’ll just write the words and they’ll sound like a melody to me. But my main instrument is Guitar with a little bit of mandolin, but it’s kind of hard to accompany yourself with a mandolin, so usually the guitar sort of ends up backing me up a little bit.
[laugh]So that’s the first step.
I guess after that, when it’s with the whole band it’s a whole different story, it may be completely unlike that first bit.
LOC: Getting started as a professional musician, Noah, you had a little bit of help from more seasoned musicians. Ken Mosher from the Squirrel Nut Zippers helped a lot. Do you feel that had any major effects, negative or positive.
Noah: It had major effects, all positive, I would say.
Joah: A lot of great stories.
Noah: Yeah, he’s a wild man. I think when I started playing music and me and my friends started putting together it was just a simple thing where we thought it was fun to write and play together. But I don’t think we ever took it seriously. When Ken showed interest and he wanted to record us, it kind of came to us that we could record. We didn’t have a bass player at the time, so he started just started playing bass with us.
Pretty much any professional attitude I have towards music is from him. He started booking shows, started doing press and distribution, and all the things you need to be a professional working band. If we didn’t have his influence, it might have come from somewhere else. But his influence, certainly, is what got us off the couch and out of the garages trying to book shows. I know tons of bands who just practice and practice and never book a show. You just have to make that step, and he was sort of a catalist for us.
He’s also just a great musician in general and a great pruducer.
LOC: I’m sure having a pair of brothers in the band changes the dynamic a bit. What do you think is different for that? Do you see it as a positive, negative, or non-entity?
Noah: It works great for us. In a sense, the brothers are our rhythm section. If there’s anything you want from a rhythm section, it’s that you want them to be honed in with each other, and I think that just happens when two people grow up together. Pretty much if Jonny plays a drum line, Joah can play a bass line that goes with it. You’d be surprised how many great musicians can’t really play together or have to really work to play together well. With them it was just second hand.
And sometimes my brother plays in the band. We’ve definitely toured as the family band before [laughs]. Yeah, it’s great.
Jonny: Yeah, I’ve definitely gotten really sick of Joah before. We got in a fight once. It was over an alarm clock situation that was going on. So I punched him in the stomach while he was putting on a sweater. Then he gave me a black eye.
Noah: I remember that.
Jonny: Yeah, then I had to wear makeup for a few shows.
But yeah, it’s really nice, Joah and I have played together since I was 13 and he was 11. It was kind of weird; we would always listen to the same music, we were always into the same stuff for the most part.
LOC: What are some contemporary bands that you listen to?
Noah: That’s tough, a lot of the music that I listen to is older stuff.
I love Annuals. It’s really a pleasure playing with them night after night. Their album’s good, the have a great live show, they’re definitely one of the bands I listen to.
Jonny: Yeah, it’s actually kind of amazing that we could be on this tour. They’re really good friends of ours and I think we’re equally really big fans of each other’s music.
Noah: I like Rufus Wainwright. He’s just a great singer and great production. That’s kind of cheating because I like him for the reasons I like Harry Nilsson’s music from the ’70s. I think Rufus Wainwright is probably a big fan of Harry Nilsson himself, so it’s sort of cheating since I like him because I like Harry Nilsson. But I think he’s put out some really good albums.
I just like music where there’s a lot of attention paid to the songs and the production is a little more than just typical, in your face, rock production. I like the Feist singles. I don’t have the albums, but what I’ve heard…
Jonny: There’s not a lot of “Rock” bands that I really like. I really like a lot of Feist and Joanna Newsom’s stuff. I can’t listen to a WHOLE lot of Joanna Newsom because of her voice.
Noah: I like Smog too.
Jonny: Smog’s great!
Noah: A band, a rock band now, that I like and I’ve liked before and is still together and I still like, is Nada Surf. I think they’re a great rock band. And that’s impressive to me, because they are three-piece rock band, when you see them live it’s a three-piece rock band, and for the most part on the albums it’s a three-piece rock band. But they really pull it off.
LOC: How do feel about touring? Do you have favorite cities or areas of the country to play?
Jonny: Well, tonight is awesome. We’ve never been to Minneapolis, so it’s been really great. We don’t usually get to see a lot of the cities, but tonight is really nice. There are so few venues that put this much effort into making their space so comfortable and inviting. Intimate I guess is the keyword.
You go into all these other places and it’s a concrete floor and it’s still sticky from last night. Just, you know, that’s not what my house is like! I want people to come in and be comfortable.
Noah: Yeah, this is a great venue, a great city from what I can tell.
The Midwest in general. Chicago. We tour often and we always stop in Chicago. One of the reasons we stop there is because I have friends there, but also because it’s just a fun town. It’s a cool place.
Yeah, I think that we find that on tour we have been best received in the Midwest. The East Coast is tough. Our home town, Chapel Hill [North Carolina] is very hip scenester. You really have to work to get approval from the local scene. It’s a tough town, I think, for any band. For touring bands I’m sure it can be pretty disappointing to go to Chapel Hill, where all this great music has come from, then you get there and find a bunch of people with arms folded.
LOC: What does it feel like to play live as opposed to the studio?
Noah: I think generally we’re a band that enjoys the studio. So much of song composition, to me, relates to texture as well. I come from a visual arts background where it’s art theory and composition in a visual sense. But I apply a lot of that thought to songwriting. In the studio it’s a great opportunity to, like, see what that part sounds on a banjo instead of the guitar. Or instead of having a string swell you have a vocal swell. There’s something very liberating about, when you have the time, really piecing together the song parts through experimentation. I find often after we do that we’ll go live and we’re trying to recreate what we’ve been doing in the studio live, which is often just not the right approach. Live we try to make that up with energy and we try to be creative. We carry all our own lights around with us and just try to have something fun and memorable. I think it’s a different kind of feeling there. With a live set you practice this handful of songs until they’re so second nature that you can sort of have fun with them.
Jonny: Get them to where you can more perform than just play.
Noah: Yeah. I love playing live. Pretty much if the sound is good and there’s people watching, I’m having a good time on stage. Which makes it nice to be on tour and having a good time every night. Really, it’s a good lifestyle when it’s going well. This tour is pretty fantastic. Being able to go out with lots of bands with a little more road experience and a little bigger following so there’s not much pressure on us. We show up and play. There’s people there and we all have a good time.
LOC: So this tour’s been going well?
Noah: Absolutely fantastic. This tours been fun. It’s short enough, two and a half weeks, that we’ve been able to convince some friends to come along.
Jonny: It’s kind of been a party every day. We have a school bus that’s been converted into sort of an RV. We run it on Bio-Fuel.
Noah: It’s like camp on the bus. We get in there and we tell stories…
Jonny: Three office people from our record label are with us. Will, who’s playing guitar, keys, and bass with us tonight, he’s kind of one of the co-presidents of our label. Then our tour manager, Martin, is also a co-president. Then our booking agent is out doing merchendise right now.
Noah: We whole team came on board.
Jonny: Our driver, Dave, has been really great, sort of our spiritual guru. He’s been teaching us a lot because he’s been touring for 18 years. He’s kind of teaching us to appreciate the whole art of touring. To relax and not be freaked out all the time.
Noah: We’ve toured pretty intensively and we’ve had the entire range of experience from good to absolutely abysmal. We’ve broken down countless times and had poor shows because we’re booking ourselves to headline in towns we’ve never been in with no press. So we’ve been there. And this, compared to that, is like walking on clouds.
LOC: Is there anything you’d like to say to everyone who came out to see you play on this tour?
Noah: Well, I think, with us touring with the Annuals and Manchester Orchestra, a lot of people who came out were there to see them. So what I would say is I hope we entertained and I hope they come out to see us again because we’ll definitely be back again.
Posted by Sam on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
Those without turntables may have missed it, but there’s a growing trend in vinyl music. More and more new vinyl records are sold with a code that allows the consumer to download the album in mp3 form. A perfect solution for those, like myself, who are in love with their big, bulky record collection but can’t get by without the portability of digital music.
Young Dudes (Zach Wilson - bass. Matt Torbinson - vocals, guitar, keys. Katelyn Farstad - drums. Dustin Miller - guitar.) have taken this trend one step farther with their first full-length album, a self-titled vinyl ONLY release that comes with a free CD of the album so everyone can listen. At only $12 bucks (purchased on their site or at a show), it really is a good deal.
(Above: Young Dudes’ LP)
The album is heavy-duty balls-to-the-wall rock. While the modern influences are obvious, the roots of their sound seem deeply planted in rock history. What really sets it apart from modern main-stream rock is the melodies. It’s not so much that the melodies are particularly complex or anything, but just that it focuses so much on the melody while still bringing the rock. Listeners might get flashes of the Rolling Stones, particularly on the track (Doin’) Crimes.
The sound is very well built. At its core are breathtaking drums and bass , not only supplying the rhythmic glue holding the band together, but layering in their own voices above and beyond the usual metronomic flatness that seems to drive so much modern music. On top of that are simple but satisfying keyboard licks, a nice distorted rhythm guitar and a great metallic-sounding solo guitar, all toped off with vocals that whine and scream but still stay perfectly. It may be surprising to some that, as of the Album’s release, the Young Dudes had only played a dozen shows in their four years as a band.
While the album succeeds as an entity, with only eight tracks it falls just short of half-an-hour long. While the old adage “Leave them wanting more” does apply, I really wish the album were longer and had a few more tracks. It’s just a little unsatisfying to find yourself at the end so early. I wonder if perhaps they should have focused on an EP with a full-length album to follow soon after, once they’ve recorded a few more songs.
In the end, this is a young band who have produced a breathtaking first album. Given the quality of this release, I expect great things from them in the future.
Posted by Sam on Saturday, November 3rd, 2007
Last night at the 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis, MN, a group of four bands and a few tap-dancers celebrated the release of the Young Dudes self-titled LP, a vinyl-only release with a free digital version for everyone who got rid of their turntables. While it wasn’t the greatest show to ever bless the Entry, much fun was had by all. And why not? Four bands and a tap-dancing trio titillating the crowd between sets could turn anyone.
First up came Togetherness. Togetherness has a sound and look to make you think you’re in Manchester in the 1970s. This is partly because the guitarist has his Ian Curtis dance-moves down, but mostly because they’re on the edge of something new and exciting. It’s still raw, and I don’t expect them to be chart-toppers any time, but don’t count them out. It’s girl-driven dance music with a heavy synth backdrop, not something I’m usually particularly partial to, but good music is good music. Give them time and practice and they may turn dance music into an art form again.
Mid-setup for the next band came the tap-dancers. Who doesn’t love three attractive young women in tight 1970s disco outfits dancing? Enough said.
Next came Castle. I’d really love to say something nice about these guys. They were technically very good and they’ve got a nice heavy-metal sound with a little Black Flag influence thrown in the mix. It’s the kind of sound that can really get an audience excited, and the audience was excited. The trouble is the juvenile attitude intrinsic to their stage show. This was pretty well summed up by the drummer vomiting on stage while the leas-singer/guitarist grinned and pointed it out to the audience. For now, I’ll stick to listening to them on my hi-fi and avoid their shows.
Even after another bout of tap-dancing, I have to admit I was pretty negative when the next band, Knight in the Box, got up on stage, but they won me back with the first song. Not since the Blues Brothers have two white boys in fedoras been able to play R&B with such heart. They’re unstoppable! I knew they were good when, during their second song, they broke a string and finished the song without missing a beat. I knew they were fantastic when they did the same after a guitar actually lost a chunk. If you have a chance, go see these guys no matter what plans you may have already made.
But, in the end, it was the headliners that truly shone. Never turn your back on a rock band that has the guts to invite their parents to the show and point them out mid-set. They have a classic rock feel with it’s own originality. It’s the kind of quiet musical revolution that the New York Dolls and the Velvet Underground brought about. It’s taking the existing standards and stretching them, shaping them into something new. For such a young band to already have such a great rapport with the audience, fantastic stage presence, and a tight performance is something you rarely see. Plus they were the second band that night to break a string and keep going without missing a beat. Expect great things from these guys. I look forward to reviewing their album.
So, to sum it all up, one good band, one band that needs more practice, two band that can knock you on your ass, and three gorgeous tap-dancing ladies. All in all, while it may not have been history in the making, I’ll remember it.
