Quiet Riot Plays B.B. King's on Feb. 1st w/ All Points West (Spread Eagle) and Saviour

I’ve never figured out why there seemed to be a mainstream backlash against Quiet Riot. When Quiet Riot last came though New York (they played the St. George Theatre in Staten Island in 2006), I asked some of my friends who have mainstream musical tastes (i.e. Nickelback and Poison fans) if they wanted to go with me to the show and they gave me looks like I asked them if they wanted to see (i.e.) The Wiggles open for Miley Cyrus. My friends missed a fabulous show – Rehab (which the band was touring behind at the time) has to be one of the band’s strongest discs and it showed them moving toward a 70’s “classic rock” sound that was akin to Rod Stewart & The Faces. Adding to the mix, love him or hate him, Kevin DuBrow was one of the best front-men in rock.



With the blessing of Kevin’s mom, drummer Frankie Banali reactivated the Rehab lineup of Quiet Riot and recently added vocalist Keith St. John from Montrose. This new lineup of the band is making their first appearance in NYC on Feb. 1st with a show at B.B. Kings. There are a strong set of bands opening for Quiet Riot (unlike the terrible Iron Maiden tribute band that opened for QR in Staten Island) – Ray West’s All Points West and long-running Long Island metalers Saviour. Tickets are $18 in advance and $22 DOS.

Links:
Quiet Riot

The Residents - "Rivers of Hades" CDR Review (Ralph Records)

The Residents’ Rivers of Hades is currently available as a CDR which Ralph is selling through its eBay store. The band describes this release as “music conceived as an aural art piece to accompany the release party of The Residents toy figures recently designed by Steve Cerio. The original music was conceived to utilize two DVD players that were programmed to randomly play abstract bits of music. They would play 5.1 surround audio and each would play different things. The project (which required 12 speakers placed in a circle around the gallery) was entitled “Chaos is not just a theory”. In Greek mythology, Hades was a child of Chaos.

As these kinds of things go, it never quite worked out. The gallery never agreed to provide the sound system and some people felt it would be unpleasant for attending guests (correct) so by the time the toy release actually happened (there were several lengthy delays) The Residents had lost interest and had moved into other projects which did not allow them to even attend the toy release opening. “

A track from this project, “Hades” (which includes the music that ended up as "Acheron River"), first surfaced on the Ten Little Piggies compilation and The Residents adapted the music on Rivers of Hades from part of the music written for “Chaos is not just a theory”.

River of Hades is an instrumental disc which contains a mix of dark cinematic soundscapes and polyrhythmic and syncopated percussion. “Acheron River” starts with a percussive intro which leads into dark, cinematic synths and woodwinds. “Cocytus River” is a dense cuisinart of sound which is similar to the blend of percussive and cinematic music heard on THE UGHS!. “Lethe River” is less musically dense than its predecessors on the disc and its hazy atmosphere has a constant undercurrent of a pulsing organic beat. “Styx River” sounds like a couple of kids running amuck on Bill Bruford’s electronic drum kit and there are a couple of rock guitar riffs (Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak”?) thrown in for good measure toward the end of the song. The final cut, “Phlegethon River”, reverses the percussive/cinematic blend of “Cocytus River” and is (predominately) sweepingly atmospheric.

Tracks:
1. Acheron River - 3:23
2. Cocytus River - 13:14
3. Lethe River - 8:33
4. Styx River - 11:01
5. Phlegethon River – 8:46

Links:
The Residents

The Residents - "present THE UGHS!" CD Review (MVD Audio)

To call The Residents “prolific” would be an understatement as the band seems to releases new and archival releases almost monthly. If you follow the band closely though, there are a number of themes that reemerge across the years and most of the band’s recent projects first surfaced on 2009’s Ten Little Piggies compilation (see previous review). The Residents will be releasing a new CD next month, Coochie Brake, which is the second release under “THE UGHS” concept so I thought this would be a good time to go back and review THE UGHS! disc (originally released in Nov. ‘09).

THE UGHS! is a return to the minimalist avant-garde music of the band’s Eskimo era. The band described the concept behind THE UGHS! as “[w]hen The Residents begin work on their 2007 opus to insanity, The Voice of Midnight, the group felt the need to shake things up, consequently they created an alter ego through which they could act out new roles. Proudly, The Residents christened this conceptual alter ego as THE UGHS! The group then fashioned "written music" from the raw, impulsive ideas created by The UGHS!, building the musical structure of The Voice of Midnight on these pieces. Two years later these original UGHS! recordings were rediscovered; freed from its previous role supporting The Voice of Midnight's narrative, the music suddenly sounded as fresh as when it was first recorded. The time had come to resurrect THE UGHS.”

THE UGHS! is a primal, percussive-based album that, aside for some inarticulate grunting and chanting, is all instrumental. The band uses this rhythmic foundation as a base to which they add a variety of instruments which twist and turn the music in different and often unexpected directions. The disc starts with “The Ughs”, which mixes industrial percussion with a prominent jew’s harp and xylophone and jumps from there into the free-form freak-out of “The Dancing Duck”. This later track builds up a wall of organic and industrial sounds over which soft woodwinds and crazed duck quacking are layered. On different numbers on the disc, the band works in assorted organic and electronic percussion, reeds and strings along with ambient synths. The music ranges from the Middle-Eastern note-bending tribal stomp of “Floating Down the Nile” to the movie soundtrack gone astray (“Squeaky Wheel”) to the free form jazz of “The Horns of Haynesville” to the King Crimson sounding “In the Dark”.



For anyone who got lost in some of The Residents’ recent narrative-based projects, THE UGHS! is the perfect road out.

Links:
The Residents

Fort Frances - Chicago Alt-Country Trio Plays Pianos on Jan. 28th

Ghosts of California by Fort Frances

DOWNLOAD: Fort Frances - "Hard Earned Heart" (from the band's 2011 debut The Atlas)

"Wilco is an easy comparison to make here, and it’s an apt one; there are times during The Atlas when David McMillin sounds as if he’s channelled Jeff Tweedy." - - Tympanogram.com

What initially began as a solo project for singer/songwriter David McMillin gradually transformed into Fort Frances: a three-piece band whose debut album represents more than two years of drawing their own map for musical exploration. With an all-instruments-on-board approach to writing and recording, their heavily textured style introduces you to a band with a Beatles influence that shines through every note.

Produced by Sam Kassirer (Josh Ritter, Langhorne Slim), The Atlas was recorded in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere Maine. If you listen closely to the album, you will discover some of the hidden secrets of what it means to make a record: trumpets in the open New England air, lampshades substituted for drums, dog barks and a continuing directional thread that runs between each of its 10 songs.



Fort Frances are headlining a show at Pianos on January 28th (11PM set time) and cover is $10. Also on the bill is Camden Joy (10PM), Life in a Blender and Mark Donato.

Links:
Fort Frances

Meat Puppets - "Monsters" CD Review (MVD Audio)

DOWNLOAD: Meat Puppets - Live at Georgia Theater, Athens. GA 11-08-89

The Meat Puppets kicked off the tour for Monsters tour in December of 1989 at The Coach House in San Juan Capistrano and, in a review of the show, the L.A. Times said: “As individual and uncompromising as the band's approach is, it is still difficult to fathom why the Meat Puppets haven't found the larger success of the Replacements, Bob Mould and other contemporaries. There is a distinctive, imaginative song craft at work in the Puppets' recent material which, coupled with the trio's blistering musicality, could easily snare fans from such disparate camps as R.E.M. and Metallica.“

The Meat Puppets released their 7th album, Monsters, in 1989 and, while the band came extremely close to signing with Atlantic, this disc was their final for SST. In the liner notes, Derrick Bostrom mentions that this disc was the Pups attempt to take their career more serious and "[court] the major labels in earnest". Listening to this disc for the first time in twenty years, I can hear the sound that band Nirvana and Soundgarden capitalized on in the early 90’s. This disc was recorded instrument by instrument and Bostrom used a drum machine to lay down the initial drum tracks, all of which gives the music the sort of ‘high gloss’ radio-friendly finish first heard on Mirage. Derrick Bostrom comments in the liner notes :"We...kept the electronic drums a secret to see if anyone noticed. Not only did no one notice, but some people even said that Monsters was the 'livest' sounding album that we'd done yet!"

Monsters is a big alt-rock album that could and should have been the hit that Nevermind was…but the Pups seemed to be cursed by bad timing and a lack of interest in sticking with one particular style of music. In the liner notes to Monsters, Curt Kirkwood said “We could have done Up on the Sun the first time around, but we didn't want to. The sound of that first record wasn't an accident...we needed the debut to have a ferocity and weirdness to it.”

As compared with Up on the Sun, Curt dominates this album with controlled vocals (that are in-key) and some chunky guitar riffs that are a mix between Billy Gibbons and Jimmy Page. “Attacked by Monsters” and “Party Til the World Obeys” are an indicator as to what Nirvana would became and “The Void” isn’t that far off from Alice in Chains 1991 debut CD. Never keeping to one style, “Light” shows Cris and Curt singing in Byrdsian harmony. One of the disc standouts is “Touchdown King”, which is the jangle-pop song that R.E.M. never wrote. Curt flexs his guitar hero muscles with the ZZ Top-style instrumental boogie “Flight of the Fire Weasel” and two very different takes of this song have been added as bonus tracks. The disc closes with the mellow, psychedelic and layered “Like Being Alive” which is a precursor to the similarly-veined bonus track “Wish Upon a Storm”.

As a point of interesting trivia, Derrick Bostrom notes that Curt was unhappy with the final mixes of "Attacked by Monsters" and "Like Being Alive" so he replaced these tracks with his rough mixes. This reissue also includes the promotional video for "Light” which features concert shots of the band spliced with footage of the desert.



Meat Puppets – “Monsters” Bonus Tracks
"Wish upon a Storm" – 4:27
"Flight of the Fire Weasel, Pt. 1" – 4:25
"Flight of the Fire Weasel, Pt. 2" – 4:44

Links:
Meat Puppets

Town Hall: Brooklyn Indie-Folk Band Cover Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle" / New EP Available as Free Download

Town Hall "sold me" with their acoustic re-interpretation (and the vocals trade-offs between Stefan Weiner and Phoebe Ryan) of Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle" so I gave the band's new EP, "Sticky Notes & Paper Scraps" a spin. This is a mellow "late night" disc that is powered by the two vocalists with instrumentation like mandolin and omnichord carefully woven in beneath the vocals. Most of the songs fall into the "alt-folk" genre but the exceptions are the Appalachian/alt-country track "Pandora" and the indie-pop of "Mary A. Longden".

I'm going to have to see the band live after listening to this...

This EP release marks the beginning of three crazy months for us. Between now and our full-length album on March 12th, we’ll be releasing a series of cover videos, filming (and drawing?!) three music videos for singles off the LP, and to top it all off, Jesse will be teaching music to children in Africa.

Needless to say, we’re going to need your help- the most valuable thing you can do for us is share the music. Put it on your Facebook, Tweet about it, send a postcard to your weird Aunt Sally… give it to your friends, your enemies, even complete strangers.

Why?

Well, we put our hearts into it, it’s pretty good, and it’s free. There ya go.

Love and gratitude.

-TH

Links:
Town Hall

Il Abanico - LA-to-Brooklyn Post-Rock Band Plays Goodbye Blue Monday on Feb.11th

Los Angeles-to-Brooklyn post-rock band Il Abanico plays music that sounds like one of the bands from the Teen Beat / Slumberland roster crossed with a heavy Latin influence.

Il Abanico is an Indie/Experimental band created in 2010 by Nicolás Losada (guitar) and Juliana Ronderos (Voice). They expose their personalities with innovative melodies, an upbeat rhythm section and unorthodox guitars. Originally from Bogotá, Colombia, this duo spent fall of 2010 composing what would become their first work “Crossing Colors” (February 2011); a 5 songs EP, recorded in well renowned Studio G (temporal studio for the Black Keys) in Brooklyn, NY. Established in Boston, MA, and playing around the east coast area, Il Abanico started to play with a full band. The new band members captured the attention of many blogs and interviews because of their diverse nationalities.



Il Abanico has recently moved from Los Angeles to Brooklyn and the band is playing their first show as a "local band" at Goodbye Blue Monday on Feb. 11th. This show is free and Jahn Xavier (who has probably done a million things over the past 20+ years and I'm still going to remember him as "X Sessive" from Richard Hell's band or from his stint leading The Nitecaps) & the Bowerytones, The Nu-Sonics, Mic Raygun and Band of Outsiders are also on the bill.

Links:
Il Abanico

Lou Reed - "Walk on the Wild Side" CD Review (XXL Media)

Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side CD (XXL Media) is a re-release of Lou’s live-in-the-studio performance from Ultrasonic Studios which was recorded on Dec. 26, 1972 in Hempstead, NY. At the time this show was recorded, Lou’s second solo disc, Transformer, had come out the month prior and the songs on this ten track disc are predominately drawn from Transformer and the Velvet Underground’s back catalogue (Lou amusingly refers to one of the Velvet’s tracks as a ‘blast from the past’).



This disc is an important addition to Lou Reed’s catalog as his performance and the sound of his backing band, The Tots, sound like a logic extension of the Velvet Underground’s Loaded. In addition to the accessibility and spontaneous urgency of the performance, Lou seems (surprisingly) cheerful and upbeat, both of which stand in sharp contrast to some of his later live discs, specifically the heavy metal bombast of Rock & Roll Animal, which was recorded a year later, or Reed’s venom spitting performance on 1978’s Live: Take No Prisoners. Lou re-interprets most of the Velvet Underground tracks – playing a languid “I’m Waiting for My Man” and he adds back the verse that was dropped from the Velvet’s version of “Sweet Jane” during Loaded’s final mixing – and he gives a “punch” to the Transformer songs that David Bowie wasn’t able to capture in the studio. Lastly, this is the only legit live recording of “Walk It Talk It” and “I’m so Free” and the early version of “Berlin” (from Reed’s self-titled debut) only appeared elsewhere on the now hard-to-find live disc Le Bataclan ‘72.

For completists, there is one minor downside…this disc is missing two tracks that were part of the original radio broadcast. The first track is a brief interview that took place midway through the set where the interviewer asks Lou where Doug Yule is. The second missing track is “Rock n’ Roll”, which Reed closed the set with.

Links:
Lou Reed

Meat Puppets - "Up On the Sun" CD Review (MVD Audio)

DOWNLOAD: Meat Puppets - Live @ McCabe's Guitar Show, Santa Monica, CA 5-3-85 (Up on the Sun tour)

In 1985, the Meat Puppets released their third full-length, Up On the Sun, and this disc was the turning point for the band’s sound. There is no sign of the band’s hardcore roots on any of the disc’s twelve tracks as the music continues on the acid-drenched, country-punk path that the band started down on Meat Puppets II. The music on this disc has held up well over the years and there seems to be an ongoing debate among fans over whether this disc or Meat Puppets II is the band’s strongest.

Looking back at this disc, it must be near impossible for anyone who wasn’t there to understand how a bunch of speedballing freaks who were recording for Black Flag’s label could transform themselves into a punk version of the Grateful Dead. In an interview with Goldmine Magazine, Derrick Bostrom described some of the impetus behind the band’s evolution in sound: “Being with SST gave us the opportunity to do even more gigs, expand our base,” Bostrom said. “And also play to their audience, which we found somewhat distasteful. So it led us to, like, blow off punk rock, and kind of go into the more mainstream sound. We started doing country-rock, or Creedence-y sort of stuff, or whatever we’re kind of still known for [today]. “

Curt’s cover art for Up On the Sun, which shows a coffee mug adorned with a pot leaf, establishes the mood for this disc. Cris and Curt mix intertwined, noodling jams with mellow vocals and deliciously off-key harmonies to come up with a sound that pre-dates the “jam bands” that started to surface in the later part of the 80’s. The music, which is a mixture of mellow jams and blissed-out shoegazing, combined with Curt’s surrealist lyrics led Robert Christgau to declare “Curt Kirkwood is the David Thomas of endearing sloppiness “.



“Up On the Sun” Lyrics
A long time ago / I turned to myself / And said,”you are my daughter” / I saw that the image / I saw there was well, / “so you are my daughter” / Well then maybe we’ve got / Something to talk about. / Who told you so? / That gold burns slow / Like coal camper’s candles / All lost in the snow / Lay down — you’re on / The warmth that I’m weaving / Is for you alone / Up on the sun where it never rains or snows / There’s an ocean / With a wind that never blows / And if you see it closer / Then the finer points will show / Not too much more / Too much more

This is a fun and undemanding disc that you can ‘sink into’ and sail away. Two of the stronger tracks are the refelctive title track and the instrumental “Maiden’s Milk”. The later features an intertwined bass and guitar jam mixed with the band members whistling in harmony.

There are a strong set of bonus tracks on this reissue (the first four tracks are from a scraped recording session for what Derrick Bostrom called a “psychedelic epic” and the last track is an extended instrumental demo of “Hot Pink” (from 1983). The disc also holds a video of a live performance of “Swimming Ground” (which is surprisingly not apparently posted to YouTube).

Up On the Sun Bonus Tracks
1. "Hot Pink (Demo Version 1)" - 3:56
2. "Up on the Sun (Demo Version)" - 4:29
3. "Mother American Marshmallow" - 4:28 (Early version of “Maiden’s Milk”)
4. "Embodiment of Evil" - 1:53
5. "Hot Pink (Demo Version 2)" - 8:35

Links:
Meat Puppets

The Buddies (x-Welcome to Ashley) - Live Video From Bowery Electric, NYC 1/6/12

After watching a show at Pianos a couple years ago, where the European opening band made their NYC debut to an audience of three (myself and two other bloggers), I'm always impressed when an out-of-town opening band can fill the room.

Last Friday night, The Buddies played a strong 40+ minute set of memorable whiskey-drenched songs reminiscent of The Replacements or a "Southern rock" version of The Pogues and the crowd stayed at the front of the stage throughout the band's set. The band wrapped up their set by playing their final number, which sounded like an Irish drinking song, from the center of floor and it was met with an enthusiastic response. Obviously, I wasn't the only convert that night as The Buddies have been invited back to Bowery Electric and are playing a show on April 21st.



The Buddies combines three members of Chicago post-punk band Welcome to Ashley (bassist The Mouse [aka Jeremy Barrett], guitarist Pete Javier and vocalist Coley Kennedy) with Justin, Kim and Scott Collins from Nashville's Pale Blue Dot and the band just released their first full-length F*ck the Buddies.

Links:
The Buddies

LA Guns (Phil Lewis) Cancel January 29th Show at Bowery Electric

There must be something about NYC that disagrees with the members of L.A. Guns.

Last November, the Tracii Guns-led band was scheduled to play a poorly publicized show at Club Rebel. All I can find online about the show is a one line comment: "L.A. Guns (Tracii Guns version) were supposed to headline but had a dispute with the club and walked out."



The Phil Lewis / Steve Riley lineup were scheduled to play Bowery Electric on Jan. 29th and the show description listed on Reverb Nation read "Shar Gorgiiss's BIRTHDAY BASH With LA GUNS Phil Lewis and Steve Riley with Panzie* The Mighty Pragmatics, and Suicide Boulevard." I don't know what happened but it looks like Wildstreet is now playing this show in place of LA Guns.



The Phil Lewis lineup's recent signing to Cleopatra may be what derailed this show as the band announced that they are: "currently in pre-production and expect to start tracking in early February with legendary producer, and old friend, Andy Johns (LED ZEPPELIN, THE ROLLING STONES, CINDERELLA, VAN HALEN, as well as the last three L.A. GUNS albums). A CD and vinyl release, as well as bonus tracks available only on iTunes, is set for early summer. A nine-month world tour following the release is also currently being planned."

Links:
LA Guns