For some musicians, it’d be a bold enough move to wear their heart on their sleeve with lyrics like “Feeling so confused, don’t know what to do/ Afraid she doesn’t love you anymore” or admitting they’ll“Never believe in a heart like hers again.” On his latest album, Another One, Mac DeMarco goes one step further by giving listeners his home address and inviting them to share a cup of coffee in the track “My House By The Water.”
Though certainly bold and unique, it’s not a completely risky move for the Canadian singer/songwriter. There’s little-to-no controversy in his music; DeMarco won’t have to worry about any irate listeners showing up, demanding explanations or apologies because his music has corrupted today’s youth (he lives in the Far Rockaways of Brooklyn, quite a commute even for most New Yorkers). DeMarco’s music is the chillest of the chill: slide guitar lines lazily trail his vocals, whammy bars are invoked gently, and drums keep a crisp, tight beat. His half-asleep voice invokes an incredibly laid back, slightly-stoned version of Jeff Tweedy. It’s so relaxed, some songs bleed into each other, but this gives the album a consistent, thematic quality. And at only 23 minutes long, mixing up the energy with more upbeat songs like “I’ve Been Waiting For Her” is enough variation.
It’s rare that an album can be so engrossing, yet casual and conversational. Another One feels almost like a high-production jam going on in Mac’s backyard.One might be going on right now, in fact- it wouldn’t be too hard to find out, considering we have his address. Road trip, anyone?
The femmes thought we’d leave you with something spectacular as you head out for your Memorial Day weekend. Y’all know who Mac DeMarco is already – now uncross your legs and twirl your way out of your office for a weekend of love making and growing out body hair to the tune of “The Way You’d Love Her.” It’s the type of free-spirited love song that reminds you the important things in life are puppy dog paws and not who texted who first. So discard your city worries with your cardboard coffee cup take a swig of this.
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, I found myself playing a song over and over, taking its melodic guitar tones and feeling some sort of warmth. I’m not religious, but something about the song instilled in me a sense of faith, or belief… something. Last year was filled with the opposite – unimaginable, stagnant, and emptier than the last. But then I heard Pearl Charles, paired with lover and fellow musician Michael Rault, covering The Band’s “Christmas Must Be Tonight” in her comforting Stevie Nicks-esque way. And just like all the virtual, intangible consolation we had to settle for last year, the song, in a sense, embraced me. I won’t remember this song as somber or sad, but hopeful.
As I was retiring holiday songs with 2020 in my rear-view, I was then stuck on Magic Mirror, Pearl Charles’ latest album, which came out January 15 via Kanine Records. These ten tracks became my quintessential feel-good dance-country-ballad welcome-to-2021 record. Album opener “Only For Tonight” immediately offers listeners upbeat ABBA boogie vibes, cemented by the “disco wonderland” created by director Bobbi Rich for the music video.
As the album progresses, it skips through various folk and soft rock influences, like dialing through a ’70s radio station – Carly Simon, Carole King, Linda Ronstadt, Helen Reddy, Judy Collins – and reveals Charles’ West Coast roots. But it also exposes the layers beneath her shimmering sonic reflections. She has always gifted us with honest songwriting, but Magic Mirror is more introspective than her 2018 debut,Sleepless Dreamer, which dealt more with dating and relationships. “There definitely is still some of that on this record, but I spent a lot more time looking inward,” Charles says. “[I asked myself,] ‘How does what happen to me externally actually make me feel?’ I spent a lot of time searching for myself and my own identity. I think [that’s] ever-present in my writing, but I really leaned into it on this album – that’s why it’s called Magic Mirror,” she shares.
Not all discoveries come from some grand event leading to an epiphany. It’s more of a state of mind, a feeling, being open to new ideas. Similarly to “Christmas Must Be Tonight” bringing out a hopefulness I didn’t know I had, Charles found a spiritual solace through “taking psychedelics as a creative inspiration and therapeutic sort of thing, she says. “When you do that, you have extreme highs and lows… but it’s a mental shake up every time.” she says. “It can really reveal things to yourself, that were in your subconscious. I think taking the psychedelics helped me address some of those deeper questions within myself and who I was.”
That’s most obvious on the bluesy “Imposter,” which Charles says was fully written on a mushroom trip; its opening lines stem from the age-old advice that you shouldn’t look in a mirror while tripping, but delve further into disassociation that culminates on the next two tracks, “Don’t Even Feel Like Myself” and “Magic Mirror.” For someone who has come of age in the spotlight, forming The Driftwood Singers with Christian Lee Hutson at age 18 and drumming with garage rock band The Blank Tapes by 22, it makes sense that Charles’ solo work would dive so deep into her psyche.
“Sometimes the words and music just flows out of you; you don’t even know what you’re saying until you say it. And you’re like, wow, that’s really how I felt, that’s where I was coming from,” she says, adding that establishing a strong sense of self is a lifelong journey. “I’d like to think we all reach enlightenment, but there is always going to be room for improvement and growth,” she states. Luckily, those feelings make great fodder for a record.
The consummation came with the help of Daniel McNeil at the studio of one of Rault’s childhood friends – none other than Mac DeMarco. “Loved working with Dan, he’s so talented,” Charles gushes. “It was my first experience recording straight to tape. So, that was something new for me, and required a level of confidence that I had to find within myself. This is one vocal tape from start to finish. There’s no editing. There’s no punching in. My albums aren’t highly edited anyway… but you know you have that option in the back of your mind. If you make a mistake, you can fix it. With [Magic Mirror] it was like, this is the recording.”
Maybe because Charles writes from personal experience, with the understanding that no human is going to have a flawless story, she was able to appreciate the beauty in McNeil’s embrace of imperfection. “Not every performance is going to be 100% perfect. It’s more of the attitude,” Charles says. “Dan was able to bring that out and be like, ‘It’s less about perfection and more about the moment in time – bands playing in a room and capturing that.’ In the same way the band embodied these beautiful and honest imperfections, I found a calming solace in my own reflection this past year.”
While we cannot dance to Magic Mirror at a desert festival or NYC speakeasy, Charles has been able to assemble a phenomenal band for some livestreamed performances, including Rough Trade Transmissions set via Instagram. With some kind of normalcy hopefully on the horizon, Charles looks to a Wings-inspired side project with Rault and has a whole new album written up. But even if we may want to forget this past year, she says, “Let’s get through this one first.”
Follow Pearl Charles on Instagram for ongoing updates.
Jacob Bryant, Trevor Davis and John Davidson owe a debt of gratitude to their high school history teacher, Mr. Johnson. Growing up as childhood friends in the small town of Pinson, Alabama (just outside of Birmingham), they often ditched history class to play music in the band room, fibbing to Mr. Johnson that they had “photography class.” When Johnson found out about their ploy, he took the three students aside at the end of the school year and was ultimately gracious, not taking any disciplinary action outside of scolding them for lying. Perhaps, if Mr. Johnson had been more punitive, the trio might never have formed The Brummies. “We gave him enough hell that we probably should give him a big old thank you,” Davidson shares in a phone interview with Audiofemme. “At the time, it felt like we were doing something cool – we just fed off each other’s energy. It just naturally happened.”
In November, with the release of their sophomore LP Automatic World, The Brummies showed how far they’ve come since those days skipping class – or even the ensuing years they spent playing in Davidson’s parent’s garage using his father’s hand-me-down equipment, becoming so invested in the music that they skipped prom for band practice. “We loved music and loved playing it, and wanted to keep doing it and get better at it, and try our hand at writing original songs and found out that we had a natural ability to be able to do that,” Davidson recalls.
Their passion and hard work translated into gigs at 21+ clubs in Birmingham when they were still underage. Yet it was these gigs that instilled them with the buzz for live performances. “That was our way in,” Davidson recalls. “As soon as you play in front of somebody for the first time, we were hooked. It’s just that initial feeling, that adrenaline rush that you get that makes you want to do it some more.”
In spite of their talent and live show appeal, Davidson admits they didn’t envision themselves playing music professionally until a songwriter cousin in Nashville set them up with a meeting at the publishing company where he worked, Major Bob Music. “I don’t think we ever knew we could do it professionally,” Davidson says of music. “It just morphed basically out of wanting to do it.”
Walking “blindly” into the meeting, the group decided that if they didn’t get a deal, they’d return to Birmingham and continue to be the band they were at the time, which admittedly didn’t have “big aspirations.” But as fate would have it, all they needed was two acoustic guitars, Bryant on trumpet and a batch of original songs to be offered a publishing deal on the spot, making Music City their permanent residence five months later. “It’s evolved into what it is today, which is somehow a career,” Davidson reflects.
Thus began the journey of truly honing their sound, pulling influences from The Beatles to Bill Withers to indie gems including Mac DeMarco and dream pop duo Beach House. But the haunting sounds of Bryant and Davidson’s harmonies began to take shape long before their days under Music City lights. Born into a porch-picking bluegrass music family, Bryant continues to lean into the bluegrass harmonies he was raised on. Meanwhile, Davidson received his own voice lessons through the Church of Christ that was strictly vocal a cappella, Davidson maintaining heightened awareness for ear-catching counter melodies. Eventually, the two would blend their distinct vocal styles to create the ethereal harmonies The Brummies are known for. “We just love singing together, and some kind of natural desire that I think we both have to sing harmonies and to figure out what kind of cool counter melodies or harmonies you can put on a main melody and make it a little bit more special. Or if it doesn’t belong, there’s also beauty in the silence too,” Davidson explains.
The Brummies introduced their eclectic sound to the world with their 2018 debut album Eternal Reach, which includes the dreamy duet with multi-Grammy winner and former tour mate, Kacey Musgraves. The project also taught them about the intricacies of producing, tying in their love of sonics while catering to what the song requires.
These lessons led into their latest album, Automatic World. The title acknowledges how we operate in a fast-paced world with constant access to resources at the touch of a button, the beauty of simplicity and human connection fading in the process. “Everything’s so quick and responsive now and it’s all tech driven… that I think working hard for something is becoming a lost art,” Davidson explains. “[The title says,] slow down and value the human relationships that we have and taking the time that we have here together.”
The album’s cover is a visual representation of this concept, as Bryant sits poised at a restaurant table draped in a yellow cloth, the camera focusing on his hands, holding a triangular folded napkin. “It represents us waiting at a table and having something served to us, so it goes along with the thought of Automatic World,” Davison notes. The project boasts several themes, but one of prominence is the concept of déjà vu that manifests as a lyrical thread across 13 songs, from the falsetto-sung “I’ve got the feeling that I’ve been here before” on opening number “Cherry Blossom,” a theme that’s echoed in the cinematic-meets-psychedelic “Been Here Before,” which comes after questioning “is déjà vu only a familiar feeling?” on the trippy “Fever Dream.”
Davidson says the exploration of déjà vu arose subconsciously after the group had an “experience” in Joshua Tree that led them “somewhere out in the universe.”
“It’s an interesting concept and there’s a lot of different theories, and you can believe whatever you want to believe and make your own assumptions or interpretations of what that is,” Davidson says. “We’ve had our experiences in different places and it’s fun to question things, but also ponder on what all is out there: have we been here before and will we be here again? It’s going to look at things from 10,000 feet every now and then.”
Automatic World was a direct result of that Joshua Tree trip, sparking the creativity that inspired the music. “It’s one of those coming-of-age stories where we’re all there together and we all learned something from it and took something from that experience together and we’ll never forget it. One of the most memorable and joyous experiences that I think we’ve all had – we were able to have that together,” Davidson professes. “Really, at the core of it was love. You prioritize and see things for what they are, and the overarching theme for me, and I think for everybody, was love.”
That love pours through in songs like “Sunshine,” which radiates positivity. Album closer “Island” harbors a transcendental vibe that Davidson says brings him to a “different place,” while “Call Me” ties back into the meaning of Automatic World through human connection and the desire to slow down. “I feel like the beauty of an album is that you gotta listen to the whole thing to take it all in,” Davidson observes. “Otherwise, you’re missing out on something.”
If you can picture Joan Jett fronting The Ramones while drinking a cola-flavored Slurpee at a record shop you’ll have an idea what to expect from Hayley and The Crushers. The power-pop surf-punk trio hail from San Louis Obispo, California and are fronted by Haley “Crusher” Cain alongside her bassist/husband Dr. Cain “Crusher” Cain and drummer Dougie Tangent. Their music is the perfect soundtrack for the intro credits of an early ’00s teen movie that takes place in the ’50s. This year they released their third record Vintage Millennial and a 7″ single titled “Jacaranda.” In 2019 they played 100+ shows touring cross-country while living exclusively out of their van. They put on an energetic live show; and you can watch them live on Saturday October 24th via the T1 Fest- a benefit for JDRF, who fund research and advocate for people suffering from Type 1 Diabetes.
We chatted with Hayley “Crusher” Cain about the making of their most recent record, what their band’s tiki drink would be, and her podcast Sparkle and Destroy.
AF: How was the process of writing and recording your third record?
HCC: Making our new album Vintage Millennial was kind of a blur. We were touring and playing live a bunch in 2019, so the songs came pretty quickly and with a lot of urgency. Our home drummer here in San Luis Obispo, Benjamin Cabreana, is very high energy and eager to learn new songs, so we just kept feeding the beast till we had a whole set finished. I wrote “Gabbie is a Domme,” about an old friend who had become a dominatrix, in one sitting, without a ton of drama or overthinking. I remember being surprised by that, and knowing in my head that there would be glockenspiel. It was almost creepy how quickly some songs came to be, just me and the guitar. There’s something really freeing about knowing you have to get a record done quickly, between tour dates or a deadline you’ve set yourself. You just make decisions. Ideas that might have languished for years, rotting in my notebook (“I Don’t Wanna be like Johnny Ramone” and “Shoulda Been Shangela,” which was about a drag queen that the band loved on Ru Paul’s Drag Race) just kind of leapt off the page and into life. For that reason, I think this album is a real time capsule of our lives at the moment, right now. Then there are songs like “Kiss Me so I Can,” which my husband/bass player, Dr. Cain, and I wrote together. It was a little labored but in a good way. We were tasked with making a groovy sort of Crushers-style love song that still felt universal. We wrote it in real-time as we faced the reality of what constant van-living and ambition was doing to our relationship. I think anyone can relate to the idea of never feeling like you have enough time for your loved one (even if you live in a van/apartment/house with them), or feeling split between two lives and desires. Honestly, it felt quite exposing, but like a natural next step. “Poison Box” was also a collaboration between us – I was in Berlin for the holidays with my sister, and I was inspired by the GDR museum, which showed life in Germany before the Berlin Wall fell. My husband sent me a few guitar riffs over voice memo one night and I wrote the song at my sister’s Berlin apartment after a night of drinking. Everything felt urgent and crazy in 2019. We also tried to write a bit more for production than on Cool/Lame, which is basically a representation of what we do live. We tried to keep spots open for organ, additional drums, claps, and general weirdness, which I think add a lot to our sound, and we’d like to keep that going. Dr. Cain’s sly surf song “Forever Grom” is one of my favorite tunes on the album, even if it truly is a quick interlude and just a total wild card. Fun fact: all the waves and seagulls you hear on that track were created by either Dr. Cain’s amazing vocal abilities or a steel tube being rubbed against the nether regions of my Gretsch guitar. I feel really lucky we were able to do vinyl in 2020, despite all the issues happening in the record pressing world and the wider world in general. Travis Woods from Eccentric Pop Records believed in Vintage Millennial, even if it might be the weirdest album on his label to date. All you need is one person to believe in you and you just decide it’s a good idea. That’s a little known secret of the business!
AF: What are jacarandas, and what do they mean to you?
HCC: Wikipedia says: “Jacaranda mimosifolia is a sub-tropical tree native to south-central South America that has been widely planted elsewhere because of its attractive and long-lasting pale indigo flowers.” I can confirm this is true! In my town of San Luis Obispo, California, these purple trees start blooming in May and continue through the summer. In the summer, everything is brown (burnt by literal wildfires) or just dried by the sun, so these insane purple trees really stand out. I wrote the song as I was longing for the road. We spent 100 days on the road in 2019 with two Midwest Tours and a few West Coast tours and I started writing this song between dates, when we had come home briefly to tie up loose ends. Dr. Cain was selling his comic book shop of nine years and I had quit a column I had written for the local alt weekly for about five years. The color of the trees inspired me and I loved the idea of a song that’s a wake up call. Maybe I just hadn’t been home in a while, so the trees seemed even more technicolor than usual. I felt like they were a cosmic sign, that they were speaking to me and letting me know it was okay to get the hell out. Of course, now I am back at home and have had to completely eat every single word of that song. It’s been humbling. I am grateful to live where I do and to have my friends and family and dogs here.
AF: How has quarantine affected your creative process/routine?
HCC: I just feel like I am always working at 30%. The battery in my soul is low. I don’t have the boundless energy to write demos and I certainly don’t have that urgent feeling that comes with preparing for/booking the next tour. I feel sort of like I am swimming through peanut butter. I continue to write my song ideas down in my notebook, but they take longer to come together. Band practice has helped. Making demos has helped. But everything is slower, less fluid, clunky. That’s got to be part of the underlying and ongoing trauma of 2020. I am not into “victim mentality” at all, but we need to realize we are all in a slowly boiling pot and that is going to have real consequences on our mental health over time. Someone said this recently and it really stuck with me: “It’s like we’re all in a fire. And it’s slow burning. And it’s invisible.” This is stress, anxiety and depression compounded and stretched out like we’ve never seen before. All I know is I am writing down the freaky stuff that I have seen during COVID (a guy wearing a gas mask at the grocery store; a lonely hopscotch created in chalk by kids on my street surrounded by positive affirmations) and I know it will all go into a song, a book or something. Dr. Cain has been surfing a lot, Ben has been skating, and I have been doing yoga in my backyard. You have to find something that completely takes your mind off the election, the state of our country, COVID. You just have to.
AF: If Hayley and the Crushers were a tiki drink, what would it be?
HCC: A super sweet, surprisingly strong Madonna Rum Punch from Madonna Inn, the late ’50s pink palace of a hotel located down the street from my house! It has multiple rums, a maraschino cherry, an orange slice and a cute little skewer.
AF: If you were to do a Halloween-themed cover, what would it be?
HCC: Our song “Neurotica” is about a teen witch, so that is as spooky as we have gotten! The only horror movie I can really watch without peeing my pants is Gremlins, and I’m pretty sure that’s actually a Christmas movie and a teen comedy and not at all supposed to be scary. But it is! It’s so scary. An instrumental surf punk version of the Gremlins theme song would actually be pretty frightening (on many levels).
AF: Have you had any paranormal experiences?
HCC: As for paranormal experiences, I wish I could say I have had some. I always wanted to see an alien or communicate with a forlorn ghost in a Victorian nightgown. Maybe it’s because I grew up with atheists, but boring old science has literally ruined my sense of otherworldly fun. Kim Wilde, who we cover on Vintage Millennial with our song “Water on Glass” is always talking about aliens and stuff. Her latest album is called Here Come the Aliens. It’s funny when you Google someone you admire from the ’80s and you realize that they now go on talk shows recounting their paranormal experiences. I’m jealous, really. I can only hope to be that eccentric one day.
AF: Tell us a little about your podcastSparkle and Destroy.Who would be your dream guest?
HCC: It’s like an audio zine, and it’s not supposed to be fancy by any means. It’s half interview and half just me rambling about art and my life. I worked as a journalist for about 10 years and I loved the experience of being able to walk right up to someone you found interesting or cool. It’s powerful stuff, to be able to interview them and just pick their brains (as you know). I also had a real paper zine for a few years, which was super fun if not insanely time consuming. When I quit all that so I could focus more on music, I really craved being an interviewer again. I was meeting all these rad women on the road or elsewhere. A sound woman here, a guitarist there. So now I have my own excuse to walk up to some stranger and say, “Can I interview you?” Funny that people will usually say yes. I couldn’t believe that Alice Bag said yes. My dream guest, Josie Cotton, has already been on the show. Guess I should pack it up and go home!
AF: When it is safe to have shows and tours again, are there any structural changes you would like to see in how they are run and in the music scene as a whole?
HCC: Considering we book all own tours, make all our own fliers, chase down all our own press, send out all our own advances, and promote all our own shows on our own dime—sure. I’d love to see a return of dedicated, professional venue bookers in the United States who are paid well enough to help with some of this crucial work. I find myself doing the job of the venue when it comes to promotion and even organizing what times the bands will play, because more often than not, you don’t even get an email confirming the gig. We create and print fliers and literally send the paper versions to venues, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but think about doing that for every show on tour. Then there is contacting local press/radio etc. We buy our own ads to promote the shows we play, even as we are spending a lot of money to travel across the country to be there. This work helps all the bands on the bill and the venue, not just us. Of course, some venues do have good promotion, but, in general, I think the money isn’t there anymore. These jobs are just going away or not paying well enough to attract the right people. I know they used to exist, because older music people tell me about those glory days when a venue would actually tell the local paper about a show. Of course, papers are going away too. Venues are closing down left and right during COVID so I feel bad saying anything critical. They will be so weak and needing of support when and if they reopen that all I can hope for is an open door and a few drink tickets.
AF: What are your plans for the rest of 2020 and beyond?
HCC: We have a new album we are working on! Stay tuned. It should come out next year if all goes to plan. We are also doing a live stream on Saturday Oct. 24. T1 Fest supports funding and research for folks suffering from Type 1 Diabetes, which is a big issue for our former drummer, who had to quit the band due to medical reasons.
We have a new single coming out this winter that I think will surprise and delight y’all. The song is about one of my first punk loves, Black Flag. I used to sit in the barn and play Black Flag and Ramones songs over and over, trying to sing as snotty as possible. Now I am ancient, in my 30s, and still feel that sense of excitement about punk. It’s an homage of sorts! We’ve been filming a music video for the song and I have to say it’s pretty silly. It has been a morale boost for sure. There will be a new shirt and cassette associated with the new single, so watch for that. We are supposed to head to Europe in summer 2021, but we will see if that happens. Our band has already voted by mail and we encourage everyone to do so! We thank our Crushers worldwide for all the love and support during these “uncertain times.”
RSVP HERE for Hayley and The Crushers via T1 Fest 2020 with Dan Vapid of Dan Vapid & The Cheats and The Methadones, Jen Pop and Poli Van Dam of The Bombpops, The Radio Buzzkills, Death and Memphis, The Usuals, Capgun Heroes, and The Lettermans on Saturday 10/24 6pm ET.
Detroit singer-songwriter Shannon Barnes blends her love for future-soul and psychedelic-folk on her debut record, Psychedelic Flight Attendant. Released under the moniker of White Bee, PFA is a labor of love that took Barnes over two years to complete, and survived many peaks and valleys along the way. In fact, right before Barnes planned to start recording, she suffered a personal and band breakup, causing her to question if she’d be able to continue White Bee.
“To be honest with you it was really hard at first,” Barnes explains. “I didn’t think that White Bee could exist after all that. And then I realized, this is me, this isn’t anybody else. These are songs that I wrote and experiences that I had…the whole process of my writing comes from my learning and how I play guitar.” Barnes’ rhythmic guitar style is due in part to one of her biggest influences, Nai Palm, co-founder of Hiatus Kaiyote. She even credits Palm for inspiring her to learn the guitar in the first place.
“When I was 21 I just remember seeing a Hiatus Kaiyote video online for the first time,” Barnes says. “When I saw that, I was like, ‘that’s what I wanna fucking do.’ That was the reason why I picked up guitar.” Although Barnes’ musical journey started long before that, the last seven years have been an extremely formative time musically for the artist, who is now 27. Her appreciation for classic jazz vocalists along with more contemporary artists like Mac Demarco, Tame Impala, Lianne La Havas and Britney Howard is evident in her work.
Barnes leans heavily to syncopated rhythms on tracks like “Antihistamine” and “Beat State,” which could easily be used as historical bookmarks for the time that she first heard Nai Palm. She said that, for a moment, learning Hiatus Kaiyote guitar riffs and experimenting with songwriting was almost like a drug. “You know that feeling you get when you get excited to go on a date with someone or you get excited for going on a trip?” Barnes asks. “I feel like I had that feeling constantly – it was like all my serotonin levels were tingling all the time because I just wanted to learn more.”
That exuberance is translated into each of Psychedelic Flight Attendant’s eight tracks. The record takes the listener on Barnes’ journey through heartbreak, angst, chaos and resilience. It reminds us of the beauty that can come from loss or change, and shows us how appreciating someone else’s art can become the most important factor in producing one’s own.
Welcome to our weekly show recommendation column RSVP HERE. Due to live show cancellations we will be covering virtual live music events and festivals.
Shadow Monster is the solo project of Gillian Visco, a staple of the Brooklyn music scene since 2007, having played in bands including Photon Dynamo and the Shiny Pieces and The Glitch. Since 2012 Gillian has played solo under the Shadow Monster moniker, writing introspective tunes until she paired up with drummer John Swanson (also of Sic Tic and The Glitch) in 2017, evolving their sound to heavier, moody (yet minimal) grunge. Shadow Monster is an exercise in exploring your shadow side and exorcising inner demons through songwriting. Their debut record Punching Bag was released in October 2019 via Dadstache Records, they played a ton of shows in 2019, and had plans to tour to SXSW this year (which were unfortunately canceled due to Covid-19). You can still see Gillian of Shadow Monster from the comfort of your quarantine on Saturday, playing a solo set live streamed from The Footlight Instagram alongside sets by Nathan Xander, and Kiril of Bears. We chatted with Gillian about her quarantine routine, the effects of isolation on her creative process, and what to expect from her live stream performance.
AF: You’ve been in NYC since 2007, and I’m sure have seen it change a lot. Have the changes in NYC affected how you’ve written music and performed over the years?
SM: It’s true – New York is always morphing and venues that I thought would be here forever are already gone. I tend to be a nostalgia-hoarder, so the art of letting go has been the most valuable lesson I’ve learned while living and playing music here. When you strangle the past like it’s the best thing that’s ever going to happen to you, you leave no room for the unexpected. The years I played solo I wrote quiet fingerpicking songs, and now I thrash around onstage and scream. But the root of it remains the same. I think an artist’s entire career is like chasing after something you remember vaguely from a dream. Maybe we never get it perfect – but perhaps the value lies in the passion for going after it at all. New York has taught me that patient joy in reveling in the rollercoaster and allowing myself to evolve into the most authentic version of the artist I am at this moment in time.
AF: What was the process for writing and recording your debut album Punching Bag?
SM: The songs on Punching Bag were written over a two year period while I was dealing with a bad breakup. I lost myself in a cave of turmoil and felt completely disconnected to the world around me. John Swanson started playing drums with me in the summer of 2017. Playing shows and arranging these songs with John was the main thing that pulled me out of the dark place I was writing them from. In March of 2018 I lost my job and we decided to spend every day working on getting our best seven songs recorded. We recorded everything on our own in John’s room and once finished, we brought the tracks to Brian Speaker at Speakersonic where they were mixed and mastered.
AF: Do you have a quarantine routine? What albums, movies, and shows have you been getting into?
SM: The first thing I do every morning since I’ve been in quarantine is try to get out of bed. This usually takes around an hour… It’s a habit I’m going to break… next week. So after I climb that mountain, I start my day by having a coffee, watching some news, drinking lemon water and meditating. I meditate before bed too. I find it’s a really great way to bookend the day, especially during times of high stress and anxiety. I’m a Virgo so naturally I have an ongoing list of things I’d like to accomplish during this time at home. Something that has stuck is a quarantine art series I’ve been posting on Instagram featuring a character I call NoName. I normally never have much time to devote to visual art so I’m just diving in head first now. Drawing is great for anxiety.
Shows I’m watching: Tiger King, Sex Education, High Fidelity, Preacher, 30 Rock
Shows on my list: The Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy, Dexter
AF: Has being in quarantine helped or hindered your creative process?
SM: Being in quarantine has been interesting to navigate creatively. There’s a whole aspect of my personality that loves being locked in my room, working for hours on a song, writing poetry, playing records, lighting candles, enjoying my space. But then there’s this other half of me that loves people and music and loud bars and dancing and staying out too late and escaping the confines of my mind. I’m figuring out how to adapt. We have essentially lost our social life so everything feels a bit off-balance to me. But feeling off is a great place to make art from. It’s the cabin in the woods trip I always talk about taking. And I don’t even need to pack.
AF: What’s your livestream set going to be like?
SM: I’m super excited to do a livestream show on Saturday through The Footlight’s Instagram page. I’ve done a couple of livestream sets over the past two weeks, (000ze.digital, Left Bank Magazine, Bands Do BK) but this one is going to be a longer set. I plan to give a couple brand new songs a shot that I’ve written during quarantine. I’ll play some songs from our album, and I’m working on a cover. I’m implementing a drinking game in the set too. Get your quarantine drink of choice ready and bring your pets.
AF: What is the first thing you’d like to do if and when everything goes back to normal?
SM: I WANNA GO TO A SHOW. So bad. So so bad.
RSVP HERE for Gillian of Shadow Monster, Nathan Xander, and Kiril of Bears livestream on The Footlight’s Instagram 8PM EST. Every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday tune into to their page for an hour long show. Donations accepted through the link in their bio to help support the artists and the staff of The Footlight.
4/5 Carrie Anne Murphy of Clapperclaw, Huh, Bad Credit No Credit, and The Sundae Fantastique show will be live streaming every night at midnight EST. RSVP HERE
4/5 Sunday Silent Film: Salome w/ live accordion music via YouTube. 2:30pm EST RSVP HERE
Welcome to our weekly show recommendation column RSVP HERE: LA Edition– your source for the best shows and interviews with some of our favorite local live bands. For the month of February we will be featuring LA shows!
Katy Davidson is the prolific singer-songwriter behind the indie pop band Dear Nora. The band was formed in Portland in 1999 by Davidson, bassist Ryan Wise and drummer and vocalist Marianna Ritchey. After releasing their first record We’ll Have a Time in 2001, Davidson moved to San Francisco and released two more LPs and three EPs with rotating musicians until deciding to retire the band name in 2008. They continued to write and record music under the names Key Losers and Loyd & Micheal, and also was a touring member of the bands Yacht and Gossip. Davidson picked up where they left off with Dear Nora in 2017 when Orindal Records reissued their second album Mountain Rock, and then released their fourth album Skulls Example in May of 2018. Dear Nora remained an underground favorite during their career and had a huge influence on younger musicians like Frankie Cosmos and Girlpool. Davidson now resides in the desert of Southern California, and you can catch Dear Nora’s next show on 2/18 with Nicholas Krgovich and Zach Burba (iji) at the Bootleg Theater. We chatted with Davidson about the upcoming reissue of their rarities collection, what food their music would be and their dream collaborators.
AF: You came out with your first album under the name Dear Nora after a 12 year break last year. How has your music changed and has your live show reflected these changes as well?
KD: To quickly clarify, I only really took a break from playing under the band name Dear Nora, and it was nice to put a bookend on the first version of the band at the time. But during those twelve years “off,” I was still relatively active, and I released a few records under different band names like Lloyd & Michael, and Key Losers.
To me there’s a clear thread between all the songs I’ve made during the last twenty years. My melodies are catchy, I have a strong pop sensibility, and I often sing from a zoomed out perspective. That is the same now as it has always been. I think the main way my music has changed is that my lyrics feel less like confessional journal entries and more like…poems? And we don’t just rock out with barre chords anymore. Regarding the current live show, I basically don’t know what to say. It is constantly evolving. I told my band last summer that I don’t even feel like we’re playing music. To me it’s much more about conveying a vibe and transmitting energy.
AF: If you could collaborate with any artist alive or dead who would it be?
KD: Hmmm, don’t kill me… maybe Kanye West? Definitely Ariana Grande. Or ROSALÍA, god willing.
AF: What are the differences between the music scenes in LA and Portland? What are your favorite bands and places to play in both places?
KD: I’m not saying this to be awkward or contrarian, but I don’t know much about the current music scenes in those cities, and I don’t really feel like a part of them, if a such thing exists. So I don’t know how to compare them. I live out in the desert East of LA now, so I’m honestly pretty out of the loop except for random house parties. That said, I have a deep appreciation for all the West Coast people we’ve gotten to know via touring all these years, e.g. LA Takedown, Hand Habits, Tara Jane O’Neil, Stephen Steinbrink, Jessica Dennison and Jones, Cynthia Nelson, Nicholas Krgovich, iji, Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, and so many more. Even though there are some quality rock clubs that are very good to us, I mostly like playing “alternative spaces.” The Amigo Room at the Ace in Palm Springs is fun. The Old Western Saloon in Point Reyes is fun. The Sou’wester on the Washington coast is fun. Che Cafe is pretty great. I like wooden rooms that are multipurpose.
AF: One of my favorite releases of yours is your collection of rarities (1997-2007). How did you choose the tracks on that compilation and are there any interesting stories behind any specific songs on that release?
KD: Thank you for the compliment. How much time do you have? Because I could write a book on the subject. In fact, I am writing a small book(let) on the subject because that compilation is getting reissued this year. The gist is that I wrote a ton of music in my 20s. I carefully curated which songs went on the proper Dear Nora albums, so after a while, I had amassed a lot of extra music that needed a home. I put it all together on this compilation. As a whole, it reflects the arc of a life of a 20-something person living in an urban milieu in the early twenty-first century, West Coast USA. For more details, I highly suggest getting the box set later this year if you can!
AF: If your live set was a type of cuisine or specific food, which would it be?
KD: California Cuisine.
AF: What are you plans for 2020 + beyond?
KD: Orindal Records is releasing a vinyl reissue of Three States: Rarities 1997-2007 in late May of this year. It’s gonna be really special. 3-LP box set with an 8-page booklet. I will play a handful of solo shows in support of that reissue sometime this summer. But after that I’ll be focusing on writing new music. I will probably put out another Dear Nora album someday, but I’m in no rush at all. It could be next year, and it could be ten years from now. I don’t know.
Welcome to our weekly show recommendation column RSVP HERE – your source for the best NYC shows and interviews with some of our favorite local live bands. This week we’ve doubled up and listed the best shows from 12/20-New Years!
My favorite show of 2019 was Combo Chimbita at Ace of Cups in Columbus, Ohio, so I’m so happy to be ending this year’s RSVP HERE column with an interview with them! The NYC-via-Colombia tropico-psychedlia meets cumbia rock band has a live set that takes you to another dimension of afro-futurism punk. Combo Chimbita consists of vocalist Carolina Oliveros, Prince of Queens on analog synths, Niño Lento on guitar and Dilemastronauta on a drum set that includes unique percussion instruments and crazy looking cymbals. Frontwoman Carolina Oliveros’ voice is so powerful it will make you cry and the way she plays the guacharaca is so intense it’s almost scary – I seriously thought she might slice someone’s head off. On their latest release Ahomale, which is a Yoruba word that means “adorer of ancestors,” Oliveros set out with the intent to connect with ancestral cosmology, a spirit that becomes animated in their live show.We spoke with the band about their Sun Ra Arkestra, music in Colombia, and inspirations behind their live show…
AF: What were some of your favorite cities you visited and shows you played while on the road in 2019?
Dilmeastronauta: LA, San Juan, NY
Niño Lento: San Juan, PR/Chicago/LA
Prince of Queens: This year we went to so many places! Playing in San Juan in January was amazing, LA, Chicago and Austin is always great for me – so many friends and the crowds are always amazing. One of my favorite shows was in Berlin for Día de los Muertos with Turbo Sonidero; that was an incredible party.
Carolina Oliveros: Berlín, Barcelona e Italia, LA, Chicago
AF: What are your favorite records to listen to while on the road?
D: SunRa “Nuclear War is a Mother Fucker,” Concha Buika “Don’t Explain”
NL: Bocanada (Gustavo Cerati), Lejos de Mi Amor (Polibio Mayorga)
PoQ: When you spend so much time on the road you listen to too much music sometimes… I like silence honestly! But I think always at some point during tour we hit that moment where we listen to classic rock and español and we all sing soda stereo really loud with the windows down.
CO: Me gusta mucho escuchar mucho afrobeats. Me pone alegre y contenta.
AF: What are the differences in the way the direction of music is going in Colombia vs the US?
D: Both cities offer something unique. I feel like NY provides me with access to witness more of the Caribbean diaspora music while Colombia offers its own roots plus, rock, metal etc.
PoQ: I think music in the US might be driven more by the diaspora and the immigrant experience. A lot of amazing music coming out from Colombia feels more focused on re-imagining and inspired by tradition and roots music. I think they are both super relevant and in many ways crossover.
CO: Se que colombia musicalmente en este momento es un gran referente, siento que se está haciendo mucha música que está conectada a las raíces.
AF: What are your favorite percussion instruments to use during your set?
D: Timbal!!!
PoQ: I don’t play it but the Carolina’s guacharaca is special.
AF: What is the inspiration behind the synth sounds you use?
PoQ: I love techno and sound design in general. I always try to approach synth playing more as a sound design tool than a traditional keyboard per se. I love analog sound and just unexpected freak out moments of synth.
AF: What are some of the biggest inspirations and influences on your live show? What are you looking forward to most about your show with Sun Ra Arkestra?
D: I look forward to witnessing the legacy of Sun Ra among the members of his band, their ability to improvise and to be colorful.
PoQ: Too many inspirations! I’m inspired by artists than transcend time and generations. Sun Ra Arkestra, los Wemblers, tabou combo, BIG sound on stage and full on rhythm. I’m not really a religious person but music is spiritual and powerful sound and stage presence can take you places far and deep. That’s what I am into. Honestly just meeting them and hearing them play. So much to learn and experience.
CO: Me gusta muchos lxs artistas que son únicxs y espontánexs y que proponen algo diferente en vivo, que no tienen miedo a explorar y dar creatividad para sus shows. James brown, Janis Joplin, mayra Andrade, La Lupe , celia cruz , concha buika. Tocar con Sun Ra será una de las experiencias más impactantes de mi carrera. Agradecida con tu interés de tocar con el combo .. sera una noche memorable, para ser feliz y hacer vibrar al público. Si quieren candela, candela le vamo a dar !!
AF: What are your plans for 2020 and the next decade?
D: I wanna tour in Latin America, it has become a dream I would like to fulfill.
PoQ: Travel to South America, write some new music and keep exploring, searching and interpreting those energies that keeps us together making music.
CO: Seguir poniendo sabor en el fogón. Haciendo beats poderosos , mucha letra que conecte y retumbe , muchos lugares para conquistar y mucha Alegría y nuevos amigxs
When the Bloomington-area dream pop ensemble abruptly called it quits via Facebook in early 2018, they had been riding high on the release of their debut Routines, as well as a compilation of cassette releases, Tapes #1-3, the year before. “Since the beginning, all of us have always lived in different places and as a band have operated (and thrived) on spontaneity and coming together when the moment is right,” read the statement announcing the hiatus. “That moment could come again at some point in the future but for now we’re letting this project rest and taking some time to focus on life/work/school/other projects/etc.”
That moment has evidently arrived, as the band (now a six-piece, still co-fronted by Drew Auscherman, Keagan Beresford, and Kevin Krauter, who has a solo record coming out in February) returned to New York City for two back-to-back shows last week at The Dance, a new-ish Baby’s All Right-affiliated venue situated near Astor Place, across the street from Joe’s Pub. Though the Wednesday show was announced in November, along with Hoops’ first post-hiatus single “They Say,” the Thursday gig was rather spontaneous, with ticket-holders from night one receiving a invite via email the same day to attend night two for free. Whether practicing for their impending one-off at Chicago’s Thalia Hall in support of Whitney this Sunday, or buoyed by excitement at the prospect of getting back together, Hoops’ comeback seemed completely natural, as though their hiatus hadn’t happened at all. Met with warm enthusiasm by the crowd, the band debuted a slew of new songs as well as revisiting favorites from their previous albums.
Hoops inhabit the sentimental niche carved out by acts like Mac DeMarco, Beach Fossils, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and their ilk: feel good, earnest indie pop that veers from the mainstream by introducing subtle twists here and there – an unexpected guitar solo, a little pedal magic, manipulated vocals. Like “They Say,” Hoops’ newer songs flirted with an almost funk-inflected terroir, but even tunes that might’ve seemed mellower on the band’s LPs, like “All My Life” and “La La La,” had the crowd swaying throughout the white-washed, neon-lit space whilst sipping on $6 cans of Piels. Krauter wore his hair a little longer, while Beresford sported a newly-shaved scalp, but essentially, not much had changed in terms of how they approached playing together, flexibly swapping instruments now and again but also sounding tight no matter the formation. Hoops give off an authentic, hard-working air born out of their Hoosier roots, but their glossy new tracks hint that they’ve added some shine to their production.
By the end of their set, the room was in a full-on “One! More! Song!” chant before the band re-emerged from the green room upstairs (via the swanky spiral staircase to stage right) to play their encore. There’s no word yet on when they’ll release a new album, or if they’re planning to play more shows, but Hoops certainly seem to have a knack for leaving fans wanting more.
Portuguese alt-folk-rock artist Filipa Marinho, who performs eponymously under her last name, was raised on American cartoons and the sap-fest that was ’90s rom-coms. Against this colorful backdrop, her delicate brand of snark was born. Marinho’s new single “I Give Up and It’s Ok” takes the expectations of childhood and throws them out the window.
“It came to me while trying to climb a volcano in the Azores and failing to finish due to harsh weather,” Marinho explains. “As I sat there alone and tired, 80 feet from the mountain top, I suddenly realize that sometimes you can’t fight against obvious obstacles — whether harsh island winds or someone else not willing to meet you halfway. It’s best to let go of what you’ve idealized. Sometimes it’s ok to give up.” It’s an all-too-familiar feeling, the sense of panic when you’re forced to quit; whether it’s a personal goal, career or a relationship, it can be a long journey of acceptance to get yourself to that Jerry Maguire “Free Fallin'” level of okay.
On a first listen, Marinho’s music has the instant relief of Xanax: there’s an unaffected, straightforward quality to her voice that soothes and relaxes. The video for “I Give Up and It’s Ok” follows Marinho as she wanders by foot off the road, through the woods, and towards a distant building on the top of a hill. When she reaches a stream, she stops, seemingly to unwind, and is confronted with a blue-faced version of herself hiding in the woods. The ensuing dance sequence summarizes Marinho’s vibe pretty well: upbeat, quirky, surprising.
Watch AudioFemme’s exclusive premiere of “I Give Up and It’s Ok” and read our full interview with Marinho below.
AF: “Born in Lisbon and raised in front of the tv” – I absolutely love that line from your bio. As an artist, what did you take from your childhood and what did you throw away?
FM: Thanks, I like it too. Could maybe turn it into a song.
As a child I quickly learnt to live with dichotomy. My dad had a strong character that was both the pain causer and joy sparkler in our household. He would either be a source of music, laughter, and bring us into contact with some of the most interesting people (musicians, artists, politicians, football players, filmmakers…), or on the other hand, turn into the authoritarian and emotionally violent figure that made us hide away in our bedrooms and survive on solitude and imagination.
As an artist, and as a person really, I still carry that with me. The capacity to feel and live in between opposites. Even musically I am drawn to that, to join elements that wouldn’t normally go well together. For example, some guitar and bass lines on the record are kind of fighting against each other but that’s what makes the final songs so interesting to me. Just like my favorite people are the ones that can live with their own inner conflicts.
AF: At what age did you start taking an interest in music?
FM: I was born into it really. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in music. It was kind of a mandatory thing around my family. Some older members already played piano and guitar. And my father was, and still is, the biggest melomaniac person I know.
AF: What musicians / bands have most influenced your sound?
FM: That’s a tough one. In terms of production I often went back to Big Thief for references on how the instruments take up space and respect the storytelling at the same time. Some folks have told me the tracks feel reminiscent of Black Belt Eagle Scout, Mac DeMarco, The Smashing Pumpkins, and even Alanis Morissette. So I don’t really know… I guess it all sounds like me.
AF: You’ve been touring like a wild woman this year. How’s the road been?
FM: Indeed, I was lucky enough to play a lot of shows in different formats. Some small intimate gigs and some bigger festival venues. It’s all been humbling and reassuring that I’m on the right track. And the stage feels like home.
AF: Tell us about “I Give Up and It’s OK” – what was the genesis of this song?
FM: It came to me while trying to climb a volcano in the Azores and failing to finish due to harsh weather. As I sat there alone and tired, 80 feet from the mountain top, I suddenly realize that sometimes you can’t fight against obvious obstacles — whether harsh island winds or someone else not willing to meet you halfway — it’s best to let go of what you’ve idealized. Sometimes it’s ok to give up to avoid becoming something you’re not. The video is about that too. The blue character that lives on the top of the mountain is the fool that one can become if they don’t give up on their idea of self.
AF: If you could open for any act, living or dead, who would you open for?
FM: Joni Mitchell.
AF: Where is your favorite place on earth?
FM: The beach. Or the studio. Or the stage. Hard to choose…
In Seattle, bands are known to achieve success in unconventional ways. Unlike bands in popular music towns like L.A. and Nashville, Seattle musicians are stubborn about forging their own way in order to maintain creative control, playing music that’s authentic first and foremost, and bucking industry commercialism. It’s how grunge was born, and why Seattle continues to export unique artists that take listeners by surprise.
Great Spiders is a perfect example of this sort of Seattle band. For twelve years, Omar Schambacher has made music under the moniker, playing shows throughout the city and building a solid following of “Spiders.” And yet, Great Spiders only has two singles to their name on Bandcamp, and not a single full-length album. It’s not that he’s creatively blocked or doesn’t want to record—Schambacher is a prolific songwriter and performer. More so, it’s that Schambacher is a self-proclaimed perfectionist who is putting his music out exactly how he wants to.
Luckily, those two tracks (and a new single that was recently leaked, as Schambacher put it, called “Cisuicide”) are really good—meticulously written and arranged without being overly-polished, catchy without being saccharine, and nostalgic with a modern spin. They tease listeners with just enough to bring people out to shows, and defy the typical industry standards, in a way only a Seattle band could.
AF: How did you get started with music?
OS: I started playing guitar when I was 15, but I used to hum along with the lawnmower and play Hippie whistles as a kid. I always loved music. I think mostly about composition. I moved to Seattle after high school and joined a top 40 cover band. That was a great education. We played casinos and private occasions.
AF: What was the first live show you ever attended?
OS: My father tells me he took me to see Spirit when I was very young, like one or two years old. He told me Randy California the guitar player made thoughtful eye contact with me while I sat mesmerized at the foot of the stage. But I don’t remember that. Actually, the first show I remember seeing would have to have been Bob Dylan, Tracy Chapman and Chet Atkins. Quite a bill!
AF: How long has Great Spiders been around?
OS: Shit, like 12 years? I’ve always had songs. My friend threw that name (Great Spiders) out there and I thought it was dumb at first, but then I realized it was alright. I just went with it.
AF: Tell me about your sound—what influences come together?
OS: Oh man… This question. So much! And so much not. I really don’t like much from the last 20 years. I do find myself rescinding on that statement a fair amount. Especially if I’m high and listening to a newish banger. I’m like thinking ‘damn, I was wrong!’ But when people ask me usually I’m just like: “classic blues like Albert King, groups like Guns N’ Roses, The Supremes… John Denver, Madonna, etcetera.” I think Guns N’ Roses has been my favorite band since I was like 10, despite any stupid shit Axl did as a young man. They just sound so good to me. Especially the Use Your Illusions. To me those records sound like The Rolling Stones but with the musicianship of Queen. But, yeah. Mostly all that old stuff, and on up through the Nirvana era is my shit. Really the truest epoch of formative archetypal western pop/rock.
Whether people hear that in my music is a different story. See, unfortunately the problem is my voice naturally lends itself to that sort of twee, northwest “indie” quality that makes you think of the Verizon Wireless guy. Yuck. Not feeling the Geico commercials or the whoops. I would die to have a voice like Iggy or either one of the two Morrisons. I’ve tried to get other singers. It hasn’t worked out yet.
AF: What’s you songwriting process like? Do you have a routine?
OS: It’s always different. Sometimes a hook will just happen. Sometimes I will consciously rip off a melody from a song I hear and then put different chords beneath it, then tweak it until no one but me would know how it came to be. Almost like a remix. My biggest problem is writing too many songs about ex-lovers or people I want to love. Cliché but timeless!
AF: How has Seattle been to you as a band?
OS: I have come to know an abundance of beautiful friends and musicians. There have been some gracious industry folks who have had my back. However —truth be told— the hype machine here never gave much of a shit about me or my music. You know how superficial things are. I’d say maybe they just don’t like me? Or, a more lofty assessment would be that they don’t get me. But I know they know about me. Ha! Also, I have myself to blame because my recorded output has been fairly spare thus far. I’m just too much of a perfectionist. I want to share my music, but I want it to be just right!
AF: Do you feel that your music is in conversation with any bands or other communities in Seattle? If so, which ones?
OS: Not really. Well, I don’t know if I’m really bouncing off of anyone around here. Ya know? Like I said I’m mostly just influenced by all that tired ol’ classic rock. I could name bands I like in town, but that gets dicey. I love playing in my friend’s bands whenever they need something. I really try and get the part to be how they want it to be. I’m probably gonna move to LA soon like a lot of folks have, or Mexico.
AF: It’s been a little bit since you’ve released any new music. Do you have anything in the works?
OS: Ugh. Yes. I swear I’m not a poseur, just a perfectionist! I don’t even have one record out. Just YouTube vids and a Sound/Camp and MySpace or whatever. There is one unmastered new track that kind of got leaked from a compilation on to Spotify recently. It’s called “Cisuicide.” You can Google it on Spotify or whatever people do. At this point I probably just sound really old. Ha!
AF: Do you make your entire living from music? Or are you about the side-hustle?
OS: It actually picked back up this year. It’s never been a lot but I’ve made enough to pay rent. I’ve been fired from every service job I’ve ever had. I’ve done all sort of shit here and there. I’ve sold weed, I’ve been up commercial fishing in Bristol Bay a few times.
AF: Many will see your story and wonder how you manage to garner a solid following and make money on your music with so few releases? I know you’re live shows are a blast, though, which helps. What do you think it is?
OS: People tell me that the show is entertaining live. I know I probably look like a total dork. Anyway, I realized long ago, if your will is good it’s better to do absolutely whatever you feel like live. So, if I want to stop and tell a joke in the middle of a song, or go into a cover impulsively, I will. Mac Demarco does this sort of thing. It’s one of the coolest things about him. About six years ago, after a show, someone told me I reminded them of this kid blowing up in New York and it was him. I went home, checked out one of his vids and I cried… I was like: ‘Wow, he gets it. All the layers of absurdity, humor, tongue in cheek hipster-dom, pop culture, mixed with real musicianship and fundamental goodwill.’ I ended up opening from him once. I think we share the same *hat*titude. Ha! But yeah, if we have any following live it’s probably because we’re LIVE as hell.
AF: Tell me about your band members. Why’d you choose them to accompany you?
OS: Really it’s like a team first and foremost. So personality is number one. We have to be able to joke around with each other. Being basically prepared, the less seriously we approach the stage the better the performance. That holds true 110% of the time. Folks who want to play music — that’s worth a shit — should also have a basic level of musicality. Like, just be able to tap your foot in rhythm, or whistle a tune. The more realistic one is about one’s own musical prowess, the better the musician.
AF: When you founded Great Spiders, what sort of vision did you have for the group?
OS: Uh, success? Ha! I would be thrilled to have a hit. I’m not sure that my sound or vibe is in vogue though. I try to use hooks and elements I think are timeless, but you never know.
Honestly — superficiality aside — music hits me on a soul level and if I can continue to connect with people through it, and make a little money at it I’ll be pleased as punch. Music is meant to be shared I think, more so than any other art form. Like, it cries out to be a synergistic social catalyst.
Maggie Rogers, Mavis Staples, Phoebe Bridgers and Brandi Carlile meet at Newport Music Fest. Photo by Danny Clinch. The artists shared this photo along with messages of empowerment for International Women’s Day via Twitter.
It’s International Women’s Day!
Though some form of International Women’s Day has been around since 1909, the holiday celebrating women around the world has really gained traction over the last decade. This year’s theme was #BalanceForBetter, seeking to promote a more gender balanced world. Here’s how our favorite ladies in the music world celebrated.
Cardi B made a playlist on Apple Music for the occasion, featuring visionary women (including Grace Jones, Madonna, Tina Turner, and Solange).
Ariana Grande tweeted a short video by director Hanna Lux Davis, reminding everyone a few tweets later “it ain’t feminism if it ain’t intersectional.”
Rihanna looked powerful in a black blazer.
Miley Cyrus shouted out some of her favorite bad ass bitches:
… while Lady Gaga paid tribute to her mama.
Maggie Rogers and Mavis Staples both reminisced via this photo with Phoebe Bridgers and Brandi Carlile.
Dua Lipa had some tea for those who fall short of protecting human rights.
And Micropixie released a video for Como Mínimo (#YesIsTheMinimum), from her upcoming LP Dark Sight of the Moon, out April 9.
The Fallout of Leaving Neverland
The explosive HBO Documentary about Michael Jackson’s alleged child abuse, Leaving Neverland, aired last weekend, and unsurprisingly, folks are divided on its message. Though the allegations are nothing new (Jackson settled a child abuse case out of court in 1994, and was acquitted in a similar case with a different victim in 2005) the harrowing testimonies of two men who say they were abused by Jackson when they were 7 and 10 are hard to dismiss. Radio stations have pulled Jackson’s enduring pop hits, The Simpsons producers have pulled iconic episode “Stark Raving Dad” from the syndication due to Jackson’s guest voice over, and a Chicago run of biographical jukebox musical “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” was cancelled, though its team said this occurred due to scheduling difficulties and that they’ve set their sights on Broadway in 2020. Jackson’s daughter, Paris, seemed unfazed in a series of tweets in which she told folks to “chillax” – implying that even if Jackson’s legacy took a huge hit, his $500 million estate would ultimately be unaffected by the doc (though they’d previously filed a lawsuit to block it from airing). Meanwhile, debate continues to rage regarding blame placed on the victims’ parents, the degree to which Joe Jackson’s horrific behavior absolves his son’s various issues (including the alleged child abuse) and, of course, the idea that Jackson himself is an innocent victim of a slanderous campaign. One thing is certain: Jackson’s story is ultimately one of the saddest in pop music history, taking into account his tarnished childhood, various tabloid scandals, untimely death due to physician-sanctioned drug abuse – and it’s only compounded by the suffering of his alleged victims.
That New New
Solange has blessed the world with the (semi) surprise release of When I Get Home, her follow-up to 2016’s show-stopping A Seat at the Table.
Cementing their legacy as Jersey’s favorite pop punks, The Bouncing Souls released the second single from their forthcoming 30th anniversary EP Crucial Moments, out March 15. Their massive tour kicks off the next day at Jersey City’s White Eagle Hall.
Vampire Weekend have shared two new tracks from their upcoming Father of the Bride LP, out in May
Mac DeMarco announced his next record Here Comes the Cowboy with a single called “Nobody,” giving Mitski fans a little déjà vu; both artists (and their shared PR team) say it’s just a coincidence.
Bedouine is back with a one-off single that reflects on the aftermath of her gorgeous 2017 self-titled debut.
SOAK has released another lovely singled from April 26 release Grim Town., announcing some US tour dates (including two at SXSW) to go with it.
Alan Vega’s final recordings have been released to benefit the Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, which provides teaching materials to educators seeking to engage students by teaching pop music history. The Suicide co-founder passed away in 2016.
Everyone loves a corgi – and that includes illuminati hotties, who are very honest about the fact that sometimes doggos are are the only thing keeping us in a mediocre relationship. They’ll be in Austin next week for SXSW.
Stef Chura has announced her sophomore record Midnight with its lead single “Method Man.”
Blushh shared a one-off single to get folks pumped for their upcoming SXSW dates as well.
Toronto punks Greys have announced third LP Age Hasn’t Spoiled You, out May 10, sharing its first single “These Things Happen.”
Rick from Pile remains the biggest babe in all of DIY indie rock; this week the band released their latest single and announced forthcoming LP Green and Gray, out May 3.
In other DIY news, Patio ready themselves for the April 5 release of Essentials with their latest track, “New Reality.”
NOTS have seemingly recovered from their recent lineup changes and shared the first single from their upcoming LP 3, out May 10. Two of its members are also releasing an LP this year as Hash Redactor.
The National have announced a new collaborative project with director Mike Mills entitled I Am Easy To Find. It’s essentially an hour-long companion album to a 24-minute short film of the same name starring Alicia Vikander. The first track on the album, “You Had Your Soul With You,” has some guest stars as well – Sharon Van Etten, Kate Stables of This Is the Kit, The Brooklyn Youth Choir, and longtime David Bowie bandmate Gail Ann Dorsey lend vocals. The band have announced a bunch of tour dates with Courtney Barnett and Alvvays supporting.
Local Natives released two videos this week, one of which stars Kate Mara. Both will appear on the April 26 release of Violet Street, a follow-up to 2016’s Sunlit Youth; they’ve previously announced a slew of tour dates.
Sky Blue, a posthumous collection of unreleased material from celebrated singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, arrived March 7 to commemorate what would’ve been his 75th birthday.
Kishi Bashi returns with new LP Omoiyari on May 31, and has released the album’s first single, “Summer of ’42”.
Charly Bliss have shared a video for “Chatroom,” the second single from their upcoming record Young Enough, out May 10.
CupcakKe keeps it topical with a new single entitled “Bird Box,” referencing the recent Netflix horror movie and the Jussie Smollett controversy alike.
Having penned Grammy-nominated hits for Ariana Grande and Janelle Monae, Tayla Parx is poised to break out on her own with a highly anticipated solo debut on Atlantic Records, We Need to Talk, out April 5. Her latest video for “I Want You” follows earlier singles “Slow Dancing” and “Me vs. Us.”
Christian Fennesz, who records electronic music under his last name, returns to basics with a new 12-minute track called “In My Room,” from forthcoming 4-song LP Agora, out March 29.
Ahead of the April 12 release of No Geography, The Chemical Brothers share a video for “We’ve Got To Try.”
Festival faves Marshmello and CHVRCHES have collaborated on a sugary new single titled “Here With Me.”
Dido’s first record since 2013, Still on My Mind, is out today; her first tour in fifteen years hits the US in June.
End Notes
The Prodigy singer Keith Flint was found dead of apparent suicide at the age of 49.
Swedish black metal band Watain have been banned from performing in Singapore due to their “history of denigrating religions and promoting violence.”
NYC concert-goers spontaneously burst into song on the ACE platform following a sold-out Robyn show at MSG.
Speaking of Robyn, she’s been announced as one of the headliners for Pitchfork Music Festival, which takes place in Chicago from July 19-21. HAIM and the Isley Brothers top Friday and Saturday’s bills respectively, with Stereolab, Mavis Staples, Belle & Sebastian, Earl Sweatshirt, Pusha T, Tirzah, Kurt Vile, Low, Julia Holter, Rico Nasty, Neneh Cherry, Snail Mail, Khruangbin, Soccer Mommy, Amber Mark, CHAI, and more set to play as well.
While we’re on the subject of festivals, Variety has leaked a potential lineup for Woodstock 50 and it’s not exactly overflowing with “heritage” acts; Jay-Z, Chance the Rapper, and Black Keys look like likely headliners.
Elton John tweeted an definite release date in October 2019 for his upcoming memoir.
Massive Attack have rescheduled some of the North American Mezzanine reunion tour dates due to illness.
You can buy the hospital gown that Kurt Cobain wore during a legendary 1992 Reading Festival Nirvana performance for a mere $50,000.
L7’s Donita Sparks emerged as a hero when, in true punk fashion, Marky Ramone and Johnny Rotten nearly came to blows at a panel discussion on upcoming John Varvatos and Iggy Pop-produced Epix docu-series Punk.
Morrissey is taking his upcoming covers record California Sun to Broadway.
Taylor Swift stalker Roger Alvarado was arrested for breaking into the pop star’s home again, fresh off of a stint in jail for the same charge (bringing his Swift-related arrest total to three).
Arcade Fire will reportedly cover “Baby Mine” in Tim Burton’s live-action Dumbo remake, and it’s a real family affair.
Mark your sundials – Red Hot Chili Peppers will stream a live concert from the Pyramids of Giza, Egypt on March 15.
We have officially entered the holi-daze time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, so let’s review all the beautiful-to-bizarre Christmas music released last week.
Spider-Man released a Christmas album. The Flaming Lips covered David Bowie and Bing Crosby’s Christmas Medley. Mac DeMarco collaborated with Kirin J. Callinan and covered Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song;” it appears on a benefit comp featuring Alex Cameron, Weyes Blood and more. Mariah Carey broke the all-time single-day streaming record on Christmas Eve with her 1994 Christmas original “All I Want For Christmas is You” (it was streamed almost 11 million times).
The New New
A few artists have released new music not focused on the holidays as well! Unknown Mortal Orchestra released a 19 minute instrumental track titled “SB-06.” Cardi B released a music video for her latest track “Money.” Ty Segall released his sixth full length of the year with a new band, The C.I.A., featuring his wife Denee Segall on lead vocals.
End Notes
New York City will be renaming streets after Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan and Woodie Guthrie.
Nicki Minaj was cast as a voice actor in Angry Birds 2.
Ozzy Osbourne will continue to tour after his farewell tour named ‘No More Tours 2.’
A little over a year ago, Francis Harrington and Chris Pecorelli met on their first day working at Westborn Market. Last weekend, their band, Brother Son, released their debut album, Young & Pretty. The album is a youthful slice of rock-pop pie, dancing between shiny Brit-pop and classic rock n’ roll.
Harrington, lead vocalist and guitar player, says that he feels fate has a lot to do with the rate and trajectory in which the band has progressed so far. Once he met Pecorelli (drums) at work, they quickly started playing music together and it was an instant match. The duo added Jimmy Walkup (bass) and Drew Gijsbers (keyboards) to the mix and thus, Brother Son was born. “We all have the same mindset and vision in our minds on where we want to take our music,” says Harrington.
That mindset pretty much entails enjoying life, not taking themselves too seriously, and definitely wanting you to know that they smoke a lot of pot. While the record harbors a few coming-of-age heart-wrenchers like “Growth” and “Truth Inside,” it also makes room for carefree slacker anthems like “Blue Dream,” where the main chorus lyric is “I’m such a fucking stoner.”
“All four of us are indeed mother fucking stoners,” says Harrington. This would explain the band’s admiration of psychedelic-alt artist, Mac Demarco, whom they cite as one of their heaviest influences. Alabama Shakes, The Beatles, and The Strokes are among other artists that Harrington says influence the band as a whole when aiming for a “happy, beautiful, and inviting” sound.
Harrington’s voice easily glides between brooding rock n’ roller and pleasant falsetto, giving the songs an Arctic Monkeys-esque feel. A promising debut full of hooky guitar licks and a healthy amount of “oh-oh’s,” Young & Pretty is pretty much exactly what you would expect from four earnest early twenty-somethings with a penchant for feeling good.
Brother Son is headlining El Club in Detroit, Michigan on December 30th and plans to head out on a Midwest tour in Spring of 2018.
When Kent Avenue’s DIY hotspot Glasslands closed in 2014, its founders seemed to hint that they’d open another spot eventually. Turns out that spot will be Elsewhere, a warehouse in Bushwick that will double as a community space complete with an art gallery and rooftop access. Dates have already been announced for shows as early as November. Read what the founders have to say about Elsewhere here.
Get Ready For A New St. Vincent Album
It’s been a busy year for Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent: she’s directed a horror short (and will soon direct her first feature film), covered the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” for the new Tiffany & Co. campaign, and is about to release her next album and embark on a tour. Check out her cover of the Fab Four’s classic, as well as her new video for “New York” below. There’s no official name or release date for her album yet, but according to a recent New Yorker interview, the LP’s main themes will be “sex, drugs and sadness.”
Simpsons Composer Alf Clausen Fired
He’s been using a 35 piece orchestra to compose the wacky, classic songs that make The Simpsons for 27 years, but not anymore. His work won two Emmys (in ’97 and ’98), and received 21 additional nominations, but according to Variety, Clausen was told by the show’s producer that they wanted a different kind of music. Seems like an interesting choice to make.
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”]In New York this week, we’ve learned that there are no snow days for the humble musician.
Bandcamp Made it Rain For The ACLU
After the site announced it would donate its share(about 12%) of all purchases last Friday, music fans bought about $1,000,000 worth of music. According to Bandcamp, that’s “550% more than a normal Friday (already our biggest sales day of the week).” Combined with the many artists and labels that promised their 88% of profits would also go to the ACLU, the actual figure being donated is close to $100,000. Good job, music fans. And it’s not too late to donate! If you want to get some music out of it, check out the Our First100 Days compilation:
Market Hotel Offers Coworking Space, Hopefully Shows Soon
On 2/7, the venue tweeted that “All citations related to the October ‘gotcha’ raid on Market Hotel, particularly the ‘warehousing’ summons, have been dismissed!” The DIY space was forced to relocate shows in Fall 2016 after what many deemed an unfair police raid, around the time they were applying for a permanent liquor license. No official word on when the space will begin hosting shows again, but in the meantime, it’s being used as a coworking space.
Is Indie Rock Dead? Um, Probably Not
Yes, another debate about the life of a genre was started last night between David Longstreth (Dirty Projectors) and Robin Pecknold (Fleet Foxes) on Instagram, for some reason. Longstreth wondered if the genre has come to be “boujee in the word’s negative sense: refined and effete, well removed from the raindrops and drop tops of lived, earned experience,” while Pecknold’s thoughts on the matter included nuggets such as “Also don’t rly know what counts as ‘indie rock’ these days… like, Whitney, Mac DeMarco, Angel Olsen, Car Seat Headrest? Idk if any of that has ‘cutting edge’ written into the M.O., even if it’s fun to listen to.” The rest of the conversation is mostly indecipherable, but maybe you want to take a stab at it.
Anyway, guys: no kind of music is dead (except maybe disco). This is 2017! The internet is a super useful tool when it comes to looking for great bands of all genres, or for realizing that genres can be meaningless labels. Better yet, get off the internet and go see a show this weekend.
After erasing their social media presence, the band returned with their new single, “Burn The Witch.” Um, it’s awesome. The accompanying video looks like a cutesy stop-motion animation, until things take a darker turn (as the song’s title suggests). The animator states that it was inspired by the European refugee crisis. Radiohead has also announced tour dates, including Madison Square Garden, Primavera Sound Festival, Secret Solstice Festival, Osheaga Music and Arts Festival and Lollapalooza. Read our review of “Burn The Witch,” and check out the video below.
A Brief Roundup of Prince Tributes
It’s been two weeks since Prince died, and plenty of tributes have been performed. Here are some highlights:
The touching tribute: One of Prince’s best songs is “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which opens with the line “It’s been seven hours and 13 days since you took your love away.” In honor of Prince, US radio stations coordinated to play the song at 5:07pm, 13 days and seven hours after his death. Stations all over participated in the event, initially started by the Minnesota public radio station The Current. Prince originally wrote the song in 1985 for The Family, who was signed to his Paisley Park label; on May 4th, they released a re-recorded version in memory of Prince under the band name fDeluxe.
The big name tribute: Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen both performed Prince covers after his death. The ex-Beatle performed “Let’s Go Crazy,” while The Boss played “Purple Rain.”
Grimes brought dancers, dizzying background graphics and musician Hana Pestle to The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. She performed “Flesh Without Blood” from her latest album Art Angels, and said in an Instagram post that it was her first time performing in a corset. Check it out:
Bad News For Musicians
If you’re not a rockstar, you probably don’t have to worry about this. For the rest of you, take note: a recent study revealed that musicians die 25 years younger than the rest of the population. Conducted by the Australian psychology professor Dianna Kenny, the study “examined the lives and deaths of 12,665 musicians and stars from all popular genres who died between 1950 and June 2014,” and found that musicians were more susceptible to suicide, homicide, and accidental deaths. You can read the report here.
GEMS is the shadow pop brainchild of Lindsay Pitts and Clifford John Usher — two Virginia bred musicians– who met while simultaneously attending the University of Virginia. After years of playing together, their vision coalesced under the moniker GEMS in 2012. You probably remember them as one of the mysterious internet bands whose music was gracing nearly every atmospheric playlist from Silverlake to Berlin and beyond during 2013 with their stellar four song EP Medusa. The duo just released their first full-length album Kill The One You Love (Carpark Records) and are currently touring the country to support the record. The new release unravels R&B sensibilities that were a mere thread in earlier recordings. Pitt’s vocals are as evocative as memory serves and Usher’s production showcases a level of restraint that is astounding in the current pop landscape — as a unit choosing understated to overwrought. Which is equally evident in the stark, often black and white visuals that the band employs alongside their music. I caught up with them while they were barreling towards Denver to discuss the new album and the evolution of the band.
AF: Cliff I see you have a 703 number. So do I. Where are you from exactly?
Cliff: We’re both from the Washington DC area. I grew up in Vienna, Virginia and Lindsay is from Woodbridge. We just moved to Los Angeles four months ago.
AF: How did the two of you meet and start playing together?
Cliff: We both went to University of Virginia. Right around graduation we met. We played music together for years, but we started GEMS at the end of 2012. We knew we wanted to do a band thing the two of us and so we started to lay down tracks as GEMS then.
AF: What’s your favorite fact about one another?
Lindsay: Well I have kind of an obvious fact, but I love it. Cliff is really, really tall. He’s 6’7”. You can’t tell in pictures, but he’s a giant.
Cliff: Lindsay used to play the drums. When I first met her she was taking drum lessons from some old dude who lived in the woods and she would bake him muffins in exchange for lessons.
AF: In listening to the new album your sound seems to be more restrained than on Medusa — how do you see your musical evolution?
Cliff: I feel like for the new album we put a lot of emphasis on trying to carve out our own sound. It’s always an ongoing process, but I feel the new album is more our own thing for better or for worse. I like it. I feel like there’s this thing in music where it’s a lot easier to be successful if you sound like something else that’s already successful and it’s something that’s always frustrated me because I want to make our shit sound like us, you know? I constantly have this thing where I hear some new band thatI’m like this is obviously just ripping off this other thing that is already popular. And every single time without a doubt that band gets huge. I’m not knocking things that sound like other things. I just mean it’s a weird phenomena. I guess people just like what they’re familiar with. So I don’t know, maybe people won’t like it as much. But I feel like we’re doing our thing more.
Lindsay: Sure that’s how it works.
AF: Was there a most exciting moment in production on the album?
Cliff: Not really. It was something we were working on for a long time.
Lindsay: Yeah, I felt like it was a bonding. We also reworked so many of the songs. One of the songs on there I think we re-recorded four times over a couple years. We just kept thinking it wasn’t right yet. Eventually we were like ok. We could have reworked it forever. You’re always reaching for something that’s just a little bit ahead of you.
Cliff: This is the only downside of working ourselves. We do all the recording stuff and songwriting ourselves. Sometimes it’s hard to know when to stop. But I like where we ended up.
AF: Can you describe your songwriting process?
Cliff: We always have a bunch of stuff that we’re working on. Since we’ve been doing GEMS I’ve taken on more the producer role, but we still go back and forth a lot. Lindsay with often start with a song idea where she’s real focused on the emotion and what she’s trying to convey. A lot of times it’s more like about the chords, or the feeling in the chords, or even a non-verbal melody. And I’ll make the beats. We always talk about honing in or sharpening in to the core emotion of each song. A lot of times when we start the lyrics are just gibberish, it’s more about the vibe and the emotion that’s coming through. And then as we rework it we hone in on some kind of thread lyrically.
AF: As a unit you have a pretty chic aesthetic, can you tell me a bit about how visuals factor into the project?
Cliff: Yeah it’s not really a conscious thing so much as it’s all an extension of us in our own weird little world. Actually I think it might also be a product of growing up in the suburbs of DC and living around DC. DC is a pretty cool city, but there’s not really like a lot of cool stuff around. The city is cool especially for the architecture and stuff. But the suburbs of DC, like Fairfax and Tysons Corner, it’s not like you’re growing up in New York or LA and you’re surrounded by cool shit. I felt like we felt like we had to create our own world as an escape from all that.
AF: Are there other projects you’re into?
Cliff: I’ve been really digging the new Autre Ne Veut album. We’ve been listening to that on the road here on tour with them. It’s been fun. I feel like we haven’t listened to any new music in a while. We listen to the radio a bunch, because the aux input on our van is broken, so our options are CDs or the radio– and we can’t even burn CDs now because our laptops don’t have a CD burner. We try to see live music a lot. Like Holly Herndon, we saw her at FORM Arcosanti, this festival that another band we toured with called Hundred Waters put on– that was pretty mind blowing. And recently we went to FYF in LA. FKA Twigs, Mac DeMarco and D’Angelo were some standout acts.
Lindsay: Yeah D’Angelo. He has such control over all of these other musicians. He addresses this group of musicians and they all read each other’s minds everything is so fluid. Great performance.
AF: I know you’re on tour right now, is there anything else exciting on the horizon alongside the release of the album?
Lindsay: We have an apartment in Highland Park right now, that I really like. And I’m excited for when after this tour we go back and to record and make music again. Keep working on new stuff really. Because we’ve been working so hard on this album, getting it out and getting ready for tour, and I’m really excited to sit back down and start writing again.
You can find more on GEMS on their website.
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“We went overseas for about two years and became a really good band, and now we can do whatever we want.” Ezra Furman, the eccentric Chicago native who sold out Rough Trade on Wednesday strikes me as someone who’s always done whatever he wanted. He can do such things as wear red lipstick, a striped boat neck shirt, and tiny shiny gym shorts with oxford shoes and still look sexy, for instance.
Furman has just released his third full-length record Perpetual Motion Peopleon the acclaimed Bella Union label, and it’s a true gem. Tossing together rock n’ roll, folk, and delicious sax licks; PMP rests in a unique niche of contemporary music in that it doesn’t sound quite like anything else. I suspect one of the best compliments you can pay a musician is that their sound is truly their own, and true to that: Ezra Furman doesn’t sound like Mac Demarco, or Sunflower Bean, or Foals. Ezra Furman sounds like Ezra Furman.
Lyrically the album is brilliant. Furman not only possesses a knack for writing pop songs, but for equipping them with profound wit, wisdom, and heartache that stretches far beyond his 28 years. A personal favorite comes from the ennui-charged “Ordinary Life”: “way back in our mothers’ wombs, folded like notebooks, we had no idea of all the tote bags and the meathooks waiting out in the world.” A grim remark rendered cheeky when you realize it’s coming from someone who’s endured severe depression and mental illness, as Furman has. In a beautiful letter printed on the album’s lyric sheet Furman confesses that for the majority of his life he was gripped by a fear that he would die at 17. It’s no wonder his songs strike so deep.
Yet there was no shred of a tortured soul on Wednesday evening. Opening for Furman was Emily Einhorn and fellow Chicagoans J. Fernandez. Ezra could be spotted at the back of the crowd, politely chatting with fans and cheering on his supporting bands. You gotta love a headliner who watches the early sets with the sweaty rest of us. When Furman and his band (The Boyfriends) took to the stage the floor was packed out with admirers. They opened with “Day of the Dog” a track off of 2013’s album of the same name. “Well, this is interesting. This isn’t how I remember New York. I remember five people in the crowd at Arlene’s Grocery in 2007.” Clearly absence has made the heart grow wholly fond.
I could gush about Ezra for paragraphs, but his band demands some serious fawning. Not one of them is assigned a solitary task; Ben Joseph swapped between keyboards, guitar, whistling and singing, as did bassist Jorgen Jorgensen. Though he didn’t have a mic, drummer Sam Durkes insisted on mouthing the lyrics and whistling between beats. But the most dazzling to watch was sax-man Tim Sandusky, who produced, engineered, mixed and mastered Perpetual Motion People. He flailed around the stage filling out each song with defining woodwind phrases that congeal Furman’s sound.
Ezra played the majority of Perpetual Motion People as well as Day of the Dog, and the crowd ceased to dance throughout. During “Wobbly” Furman shelved his guitar for a shimmy break. He twisted around the stage with a strange mixture of girlish flirtation and proper sex appeal, though a clumsier side emerged while dancing by the drum kit and accidentally knocking the crash cymbal to the floor.
It was a show no one wanted to end. And though it had to, Ezra Furman was kind enough to gift us not one, but two encores, the latter of which being a smashing rendition of Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.” Higher and higher indeed, Ezra.
Once during a sticky New York City summer weekend amongst a web of personal chaos, I called up a friend and sometimes lover from my couch and said: “Let’s go on an adventure.” An hour later we had taken his friend’s car and were driving lesisurely to Coney Island. The best word for a lover and friend I’ve come up with is “sex friend” – straight to the point – but “Homeshake” is far more fun.
Homeshake is the solo project of Montreal-based musician Peter Sagar (formerly guitarist for Mac Demarco). He left life on the road to create a calmer exhistence and get in touch with his own groove. This track, off his sophomore effort Mid-night Snack due out September 18th via Sinderlyn, feels like the calm undercurrent below anxieties, and reminds me of my own day at Coney Island: footage cutting from stoned serene stares to nearly puking your brains out. A dreamy effort reflective of Sagar’s switch from guitars to synthesizers, the duality of the song’s nature (it would be great for both solo meditation music and creating partner orgasms) is reflective of a project that demonstrates the beauty that occurs when you throw away what you should do and follow your instincts. Watch “Give it to me” below.
If you like your shower with a side of jazz and Twilight Zone, Homeshake’s new album on Sinderlyn/Bad Actors may be your spirit animal. Homeshake is the side project of Peter Sagar, better known for playing guitar with Mac DeMarco. Following the Dragon Ball Z-inspired release, The Homeshake Tapes, In the Shower is similarly strange and eclectic, with smooth, sliding vocals and wonky instrumentation. The name fits, albeit at times a la Psycho, with creepy voiceovers and unsettlingly discordant refrains.
Working out of Montreal, originally from Edmonton, Sagar draws intense inspiration from his frosty homeland. The album was recorded this last winter at Montreal’s Drones Club with the help of close friend Mike Wright. The feel is cool, in both senses of the word, with subtly grooving basslines and funky, tremolo-soaked guitar riffs. Homeshake’s bread and butter is the music Sagar jams on with his friends, and even the band’s name was derived from their handshake back home.
“Chowder,” second on the album and the first to catch my ear, is an off-kilter love song steeped in extraterrestrial vocals and guitar that smacks of a Brazilian bossa nova. Strangely clever lyrics add charm: “Sitting there just staring at the trees / Jonesing for a little of that cream / We’ll lock the door behind tonight / And leave a light on for your eyes / She’s my chowder and I love her so much.”
“Making a Fool of You,” the standout at number four, is funky, melodic, and mellow. The catchy refrain is accentuated with warbling guitar and a stop and go rhythm that delivers an elastic groove. Sagar’s runny vocals lend themselves well to the sedate track.
“Michael” is next, adding an upbeat, instrumental interlude to the mix that quickly dissolves into “Cash is Money.” A steady ditty about taking a woman for all she’s worth, Sagar exercises his funny bone: “She can’t believe it but I don’t love you anymore / I just don’t feel it even though the cash flow keeps me warm.” “Slow,” at number eight, introduces a dreamy vibe with meandering complexity that is a stark contrast to the stripped sound of earlier tracks.
And then, there’s “The Shower Scene.” Set over a slow, jazzy jam and running water, the voiceover returns, tinkering between a pornographic Family Guy character and the masked omen of death in the Saw franchise. Not exactly what I want to hear in the deadliest room of the household, but hey, it’s cool if that’s your thing.
In the Shower is an altogether odd experience. Light humor and several delightfully funky melodies add substance, but the utterly unsettling gimmicks cheapen the concept. The album won’t leave you feeling clean, but if you let it wash over you, you’ll be sure to uncover a couple of gems.
The fourth annual 4Knots Music Festival is slated to wash ashore at South Street Seaport this Saturday, July 12th, and we couldn’t be more excited. The festival, curated by The Village Voice, gets better each year, with Dinosaur Jr., Mac DeMarco, Re-TROS, Dead Stars,Those Darlins, Speedy Ortiz, Radkey, Viet Cong, Nude Beach, and Juan Wauters slated to grace the 2014 celebration – and it’s all FREE. There’s also an after party at Webster Hall following the day-long extravaganza, and you can get $5 off tickets with the code VOICE by clicking here.
Though 4Knots might seem relatively new, VV cut its festival booking chops on the now-legendary Siren Music Festival, held every summer at Coney Island from 2001-2010. As our anticipation grows for 4Knots 2014, we thought we’d take a look back at some of the best performers to grace 4Knots and Siren stages.
2001 – Peaches
We’re sure Rainer Maria, Guided By Voices and Superchunk were all lovely, but come on… at the time, the gender-bending, sex-positive performance artist was riding on high on the release of The Teaches of Peaches, her debut album that featured hits like “Fuck the Pain Away” and “Set it Off.” The quirk and kitsch of Coney Island was a perfect backdrop for Peaches, who looked every bit the part of sideshow provocateur in her bright red lingerie.
2002 – Sleater-Kinney
2002 was kind of THE banner year for Siren Fest, helped in part by the fact that there was a dance-punk renaissance happening in NYC. We can just picture Karen O smooching Angus Andrew at the top of the Wonder Wheel (they were deep in lurrrrv when their bands – Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars, respectively – played the fest), and I’m sure like-minded rockers Les Savy Fav, Mooney Suzuki, The Donnas, and Rye Coalition tore shit up, while The Shins mellowed crowds out with “New Slang” years before it rocked Zach Braff’s world. But Sleater-Kinney is the best band EVER, and their live performances were unparalleled. Even some dude who writes about music a lot agrees.
2003 – !!!
No, I’m not so excited about the history of 4Knots/Siren Fest that I’ve resorted to superfluous punctuation – !!! (usually pronounced Chk Chk Chk but otherwise represented by any three repetitive monosyllables other than Yeah Yeah Yeah since that was taken) gave every ounce of energy they had into converting a boring old rock show into a full tilt dance party. The band had a rotating, often huge lineup of talented musicians, fronted by lead singer Nic Offer, whose spastic showmanship mimed the outsized gestures of arena rock performers like Mick Jagger, but in a weirder, disco-punk context. !!! were known to encourage audience participation, adoration, and most of all satisfaction – you could rest assured they’d at least give you your money’s worth. But Siren Fest, just like 4Knots, has always been free.
2004 – …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead
TV on the Radio were still a baby band, Mission of Burma were already and aging punk dad band, Har Mar Superstar probably grossed everyone out (that was his thing), and Death Cab for Cutie probably made everyone too sad. Blonde Redhead is an amazing band that almost no one appreciated or remembers. …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead smashed their gear and dove into the audience.
2005 – Dungen
While Q And Not U kept dance-punk alive, and Spoon continued the mellow indie dude vibes set forth by Death Cab the year before, Swedish psych rockers Dungen, who had apparently just visited Other Music, like, that day, must have thrown the audience for a real loop. Ta Det Lungt had just begun to help them establish an international reputation, and even though none of their songs were sung in English, there’s no doubt the weed cloud hanging over the Cyclone after their set helped with the language barrier.
Scissor Sisters’ nearly full frontal frontman Jake Shears in 2006
I bet Celebration was so, so fucking badass that year because Katrina Ford is a goddess and I’m excited for their upcoming album and I’m excited for their show at Baby’s All Right on July 25th but Jake Shears literally stripped down to a Speedo.
2007 – M.I.A.
Just look at how sweet M.I.A. was before all the Vanity Fair hoopla, before the SuperBowl middle finger, before H/Bollywood got its hands on “Paper Planes,” before the trainwreck that was /\/\/\Y/\… M.I.A’s music has evolved a lot over the years, but she’s always been one of the “Bad Girls,” with enough swagger to last for decades. Though we couldn’t have known it then, her Siren appearance was a rare treat, free of backlash and media sniping and all about the jams. The Black Lips put on a great live show, and are also no stranger to controversy, having recently talked shit on Drake and Lorde, that one time Jared Swilley and Nathan from Wavves got into some fisticuffs in a Brooklyn bar… and oh yeah maybe they’re racist? 2007 Siren, you were a real breeding ground for dissension.
2008 – Times New Viking
While Broken Social Scene is great at cramming a ton of talented musicians on stage, I have to hand it to my Columbus, Ohio hometown heroes Times New Viking for blasting such a huge crowd with their lo-fi gems. I have super fond memories of seeing them play dive bars and basements and living rooms, but their gloriously dingy pop songs harbor all the rickety charm of Astroland, where any ride on the Tilt-A-Whirl in 2007 might have been your last ride on anything, ever.
2009 – Monotonix
When Monotonix crowd surf, they don’t just flop along in a sea of sunburned arms like most bands. First of all, these dudes get pretty much naked except for underpants, socks, and copious amounts of body hair. Second of all, they spend the majority of their set in the audience, as opposed to the casual one-and-done method of even the punkest punks. Third of all, they take their instruments into the crowd with them. These nutso Israelis played over 1000 shows in five years, 400 of them happening between 2006 & 2007, so fourth of all, setting themselves on fire and shit was routine for them.
2010 – Screaming Females
The thing about festivals is that sometimes they’re less than ideal scenarios for the bands that play them. It’s hot, it’s bright, and the sound engineering can be really questionable. After insisting on using his own drums rather than the rented kit Siren provided, Jarrett led Screaming Females on a rambling pre-set jam session to ease any jitters. They also turned their monitors off, because according to this adorable blog post he thought it “better to have no mix than a crazy one.” Anyone who’s heard Marissa Paternoster playing guitar knows she shreds; I can’t imagine headliners Matt & Kim (the only band to play Siren twice!) played a better set than Screaming Females in their 2 o’clock slot.
2011 – Titus Andronicus
Though it made everyone a bit sad when Village Voice moved their annual shindig from an awesome beachfront amusement park with tons of history to, well… a mall with an Uno’s Pizzeria, they at least had the respect for tradition to rename the fest 4knots (the speed at which the East River flows) and booked another expertly curated lineup, which included headliners Titus Andronicus. Their appearance came just after gaining tons of recognition for their intelligently rendered album The Monitor, loosely based on Civil War-inspired themes, not to mention their aggressive live shows. The lineup has since changed but our favorite incarnation of the band featured Amy Klein on violin and guitar. Ahhh, memories.
2012 – The Drums
We’ve always appreciated the swagger of Jonny Pierce, and his band’s beachy vibes practically scream outdoor dance party, so The Drums were a perfect fit with 4knots. 2011’s Portamento saw the group shift from surfy to synthy (the title is a tribute to the analogue settings Pierce and bandmate Jacob Graham bonded over as kids), so we couldn’t be more excited about the upcoming release of their latest album, slated for sometime this year.
2013 – Parquet Courts
There’s a reason these Brooklyn punks quickly gained a well-deserved reputation as one of the best live bands to see, and their ultra-sweaty performance at last year’s sweltering 4Knots is a perfect example. The two things I remember most about last year’s 4Knots were The Men covering Iggy Pop with a rousing horn section, and Andrew Savage extending “Stoned & Starving” with a ten-minute long rant about social media and commodified music that felt both prescient and tongue-in-cheek. You really never know what to expect from a Parquet Courts set except that it will be rowdy. Similarly, we never know what to expect from a Village Voice music fest – so make sure you’re at South Street Seaport on Saturday for this year’s 4Knots!
The whirlwind is over for another year. South by Southwest, Austin’s prolific music festival, drew to a close this past weekend after an onslaught of performances by close to a thousand acts from all over the globe. AudioFemme was on-hand to witness the spectacle and to attempt to cover as many of these performances as is humanly possible. For us, SXSW represents a chance to catch bands on the rise, to see what they bring to an audience in a live setting, and to chat with them as well as with others in the industry. For those who live, breathe, and love music, there’s nowhere else to be come mid-March.
But when Zachary Cole Smith, lead singer of Brooklyn band DIIV, drafted a disgruntled tumblr post early in the week about corporate greed running rampant at SXSW, I couldn’t simply dismiss it with a roll of the eyes. SXSW is a thing that exists largely due to corporate sponsorship, as is made evident by the towering Doritos advertisements, free booze, and brand names attached to most any showcase. These are all brands that are geared toward a young, music-loving demographic, from Doc Martens to Dolce Vita, from Spotify to Hipstamatic, from Taco Bell to Tito’s Vodka. There’s no better place to sell wares to a generation that can’t focus on anything for longer than five minutes than to drop a banner behind a stage where Macklemore and Ryan Lewis are jumping around. And there’s no better way to keep the ads coming, straight to the email inboxes of that hip demographic, than to make everyone RSVP to corporate-sponsored events.
So when Smith denounced SXSW as a “glorified corporate networking party” he wasn’t incorrect. Diiv has never been afraid of name-dropping, dating models, or posing for fashion photographers, and later admitted to having a blast at SXSW despite the cynical outburst. Though the post made some waves, there wasn’t a single person who disagreed wholly with the statements therein; if anything, a resounding “DUH” was heard throughout the festival. And we partied anyway.
Avoiding the corporate goons, as it turns out, isn’t all that hard. We recommend taking off the badge and trekking (or pedi-cabbing) over to Austin’s Eastside, where entrance to free shows – night and day – don’t require so much as proof of drinking age. There, the quality of local artisan food trucks is leagues above lukewarm free tacos, and girls sell vintage clothes to help save their dying pit bulls. It was home to some of the most inspiring performances I had the pleasure of seeing at SXSW this year, including a rambunctious 45-minute set from Thee Oh Sees, Impose Magazine’s expertly curated showcases, and several raucous Burger Records’ shindigs to name a few.
Burger Records represents a paradigm in stark contrast to Smith’s blithe assertion that “music comes last” at SXSW. Label founders Sean Bohrman and Lee Rickard have spent the last six years putting out limited run cassettes and vinyl to an adoring audience, breaking artists like King Tuff and Ty Segall. If you want to know what’s next in terms of noise punk or kitschy garage or lo-fi pop, you could do much worse than to spend a few hours perusing Burger’s catalogue. At SXSW, Bohrman and Rickard made it extra easy, throwing two large showcases and several satellite parties (including one at Trailer Space Records that had to be shut down by the fire department), giving the sunburned masses at SXSW a rare opportunity to absorb as much Burger in one sitting as their damaged ear drums and short attention spans could allow. Frenzied sets by Audacity, Nobunny, Lovely Bad Things, Useless Eaters and Gap Dream – among many, many others – proved that there’s a lot of diversity and innovation within Burger’s staple sounds, and much to get excited about.
[jwplayer config=”AF01 YT” mediaid=”2420″]Lovely Bad Things
If there’s anyone more genuinely stoked about repping their local scene than Californians it’s probably Canadians. I finally got to see Young Galaxy perform during Pop Montreal’s day party at The Liberty and my high expectations were met in every way. This is a band who make songs about loving music wholeheartedly; on the b-side for the lead single from Young Galaxy’s newest album, Ultramarine (out April 23rd on Paper Bag Records) lead vocalist Catherine McCandless sings “I wouldn’t mind dying at all / If it weren’t for the songs I’d miss”. Though they didn’t play it during the six song set at The Liberty, they closed out with newest single “New Summer”, an anthem to warm-weather flings and driving in cars with the “windows down and the stereo loud”. Most poignant of all was the band’s affirming rendition of “Pretty Boy” (also on the forthcoming record). Maybe it’s the fact that the band’s drummer is out as a lesbian, that I have friends struggling with gender identity, or the current political climate toward trans and gender queer folks, but it felt huge to hear McCandless singing “I felt your pain when you changed your name / We were each other’s only family” and then follow that up with “I know you feel isolated / and I hear what you won’t say / Who cares if they disbelieve us, don’t understand / You’re my pretty boy, always”. That’s some pretty heavy shit to mask with upbeat synths and pop rhythms, but that’s Young Galaxy’s bread and butter. Tackling those epic sorts of feelings and making people dance to it is what they do best. And after playing six shows in four days, those emotions still felt authentic.
Playing zillions of shows in one week has got to be taxing, which probably contributes to the jaded attitudes that some bands have in their approach to SXSW, but there are just as many artists who embrace it. Captured Tracks wunderkind Mac DeMarco (also from Canada, go figure) claims to have played seventeen shows over the course of the week and that probably wasn’t an exaggeration; his name popped up on more bills than any other. I caught his last set on Saturday night at The Parish, where he started the evening by watching labelmates Naomi Punk from the side of the stage. He mentioned several times that he was getting sick, but that didn’t stop him from delivering an energetic performance. While he wasn’t swinging from the rafters as he had literally done at some shows a few days prior and didn’t put up much of a fight when then sound guy told him he was out of time, he retained the air of bratty whimsy for which he’s known as he mashed up favorites “Freaking Out The Neighborhood” “My Kind Of Woman” and “Rock and Roll Night Club” with the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and Rammstein’s “Du Hast” (no, really).
[jwplayer config=”AF01 YT” mediaid=”2416″]Mac DeMarco “Du Hast/Freaking Out The Neighborhood”
Zac Pennington from Parenthetical Girls is yet another performer who proves that attitude and persona are everything. Before his band’s set, he got into a bitchy spat with Valhalla’s sound man. During the set, he paraded around an audience mostly filled with bros in attendance to see Maserati, draping himself over staircases and belting it out from the top of the circular bar like a cabaret version of Coyote Ugly. Similar bravado appeared elsewhere as well – Mykki Blanco’s ferocious party jams transformed the mermaid grotto behind Easy Tiger into vogue-fest, followed by Angel Haze’s provocative mile-a-minute raps. During “New York” Angel Haze descended from the stage, moving through an awed audience, and danced with yours truly while Edinburgh-based rappers Young Fathers looked on. Young Fathers brought slick production, badass style, and sick dance moves to their SXSW performances, and was the one act that hands-down truly blew me away this year when I saw them Tuesday night at The North Door (look for an interview on AudioFemme soon).
Not that there wasn’t plenty to be blown away by. Waiting in line to see Phosphorescent, Metz and Youth Lagoon at Red-Eyed Fly, I ran into Ahmed Gallab, better known these days as Sinkane. Ahmed and I go way back, having known each other from our years in Ohio where we met over a decade ago. I’ve seen every band he’s ever played in, from the Unwound-esque Sweetheart to Pompeii This Morning (in which he played bedroom-produced dream pop before that was even a thing) and then, after he was asked to stand in for Caribou’s drummer through two tours, in Of Montreal and Yeasayer. His Sinkane project is different in that it is wholly his endeavor, and his personal signature is always apparent. He uniquely marries funk and psychedelica and Afrobeat and through consistently stellar live performances is finally starting to get the attention he deserves – even, it seems, from R&B megastar Usher. Usher invited Ahmed on stage and performed Sinkane’s “Runnin'” to a packed Fader Fort, with Afghan Whigs as the backing band. Watching this from backstage was one of my favorite moments of SXSW, not just because Ahmed got to play with such heavyweights but because they were singing his song. And it could only have happened at SXSW, in part because of the corporate sponsorship Diiv railed against. The fact of the matter is that bigwigs bring in big acts, allowing smaller bands who are trying to make it big the opportunity to meet those that inspired them and, dare I say it, connect, network, and collaborate.
That goes, too, for folks like myself who might easily be lumped into the “industry vampire” designation Zachary Cole Smith’s tumblr post pointed out. Not only do I get to spend a week basking in the sun (or, you know, burning to a crisp) and drinking free bourbon that tastes like maple-syrup infused cake frosting, it’s an opportunity for me to meet other people who actually really do care about music, to trade notes, recommend bands, invade pedestrian bridges at 2am because Merchandise is playing a show on one. Sure, it’s disappointing when bands have technical difficulties due to the strain of quick set-ups or shortened sets thanks to lightning-fast turn over, but just as often it’s inspiring to see a band make it work despite those constraints. It’s also exhilarating to walk down a bustling street and actually hear music coming out of every bar, flowing together, washing over the crowd. With any huge event like this, there are bound to be positives and negatives. It would be nice if all this was just a random grouping of DIY efforts and corporations didn’t have any hand in it, but that’s not the case. Even so, it manages to fulfill many of my music-loving fantasies, and that’s what keeps me going back over and over again.
[jwplayer config=”AF01 YT” mediaid=”2421″]SXSW Vine Compilation. In order of appearance: Avan Lava, Young Fathers, Nicholas Jaar, Radiation City, The Coathangers, Colleen Green, Psychic Twin, Parenthetical Girls, The Soft Moon, Marnie Stern, Palma Violets, Destruction Unit, a breif tour of 6th St., Bleeding Rainbow, Thee Oh Sees, Mykki Blanco, Angel Haze, Bridge Party feat. Merchandise/Parquet Courts, Metz, T.I. / Pharrell / B.O.B. etc., Sinkane / Usher / Afghan Whigs, Usher encore, Young Galaxy, Sam Flax, Lovely Bad Things, Audacity, Nobunny, Chris Cohen, Mac DeMarco, Conner Youngblood, Brooke Candy, and a night ride in a pedi-cab.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
Ticket Giveaways
Each week Audiofemme gives away a set of tickets to our featured shows in NYC! Scroll down to enter for the following shindigs.
