St. Louis Music Blog

All credit goes to Jaime for tipping me off to this show: Beach Boy Brian Wilson is kicking off his U.S. tour tomorrow night at the Sangamon Auditorium in Springfield, Illinois. Tickets are still available, believe it or not. Although Wilson just signed to DIsney Records and plans to record two solo albums (one of Gershwin covers, one of Disney classics), this show is going to feature Beach Boys and solo hits. Power-pop fans take note, too: Wilson's backing band features members of beloved cult act the Wondermints.

At 11:15 p.m., just before Leonard Cohen left the stage after performing nearly three hours of music, he locked arms with his six-piece band and trio of female singers. The packed Chicago Theatre crowd stood rapt as he started to say his farewells. After an a cappella reading of "Whither Thou Goest," a Bible-inspired song popularized by Guy Singer, he imparted some wisdom of his own. It went approximately like this:

"I hope in your life you are surrounded by friends and family," the white-haired, suit-clad Cohen said, his gravelly speaking voice not far from his baritone vocal intonations. "And if you aren't, I hope that you are happy in your solitude."

Making reference to the torrential rains that plagued Chicago earlier in the evening, he warned patrons to be careful, adding "and if you fall, I hope you fall on the right side of luck."

The 74-year-old Cohen finally seems to be after a tough few years, which found him fighting in court with an ex-manager over missing funds, a battle that halted his musical momentum. But he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, and this current U.S. tour, his first in fifteen years, is drawing rapturous reviews.

(Earthworms and Fresh Heir are currently touring around air force bases in England and Europe. Mathias from Earthworms is keeping a diary for us while he's away. Read on below for the fifth and final installment. The first one is here, second one is here, the third one is here and the fourth one is here.)

The next morning, we had to get up pretty early for breakfast with the staff before we hit the road to Mildenhall, UK. The bus ride to Mildenhall took about eleven hours. The bus was more than comfortable, so we didn't have any issues with that. Fresh Heir had a band meeting in the front of the bus, while Earthworms were in the back writing a new song over a Splitface beat. It's called "Down By The River" - look for it on the new album. We watched a few skate videos, and eventually made a stop in Genk, Belgium to stretch and stock up on supplies. If you hang out with us, you know of course that "supplies" means "beer."
 


There was a street market near where we stopped and some cool shops as well, so a few of us went for a stroll and checked it all out. When we got back to the bus, the group as a whole went on a bender for the ages on the way to Mildenhall. The first beer was popped open sometime around 1 p.m. It was 9% alcohol, as were many of the rest. I stuck to the 5% Jupilers, as I was the tour manager and had to keep my wits about me. We drove through Belgium and part of France on our way to England. In France, we went through Dunkerque.. a bigger city than I had expected. I am infatuated with WWII history, so it was cool to see a place where some historic shit went down.

(Earthworms and Fresh Heir are currently touring around air force bases in England and Europe. Mathias from Earthworms is keeping a diary for us while he's away. Read on below for the fourth installment; the first one is here, second one is here, the third one is here.)

Greetings from... Soulard. It's true, we're back from Europe. I didn't have any good opportunities the last few days of tour to write the last blog, so I am doing it now. Not quite as sexy, I know, but there are stories to be accounted for yet.



After a very informative lunchtime meeting with General Jones at Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, it was off to the Netherlands. Our plane landed in Brussels, Belgium, and we proceeded to get back into the comfortable confines of our tour bus and drive to Brunssum, Netherlands. We met with our contact Harvey, and settled into our rooms in the Eisenhower Hotel -- where we proceeded to get drunk in Frank's room before we all passed out. The next day, we had a few hours to kill before sound check, so we hopped on the bus and rode into a town called Heerlen.

(Earthworms and Fresh Heir are currently touring around air force bases in England and Europe. Mathias from Earthworms is keeping a diary for us while he's away. Read on below for the third installment; the first one is here, second one is here.)

Greetings from Camp Bondsteel, Kosovo!
Kosovo... is bananas. It is very difficult to know where to begin. In the two days we have spent here, we have had a week's worth of experiences. It has been unbelievable. We flew in from Frankfurt after our show in Schweinfurt, Germany, via a short layover in Budapest, Hungary (chalk another country off the list). We were met by our contact, Renee, and our on-base liaison, Lt. Jessica Felix. Both ladies have been extremely resourceful and extremely awesome. 

As soon as we got off the plane in Pristina (the capitol city), it was apparent that we were not in Kansas anymore. The airport was very basic, and we all stuck out like sore thumbs. We boarded a bus that took us across the city and a series of smaller villages, until we got to Camp Bondsteel. The bus trip was nothing short of eye-popping. This is a country that has seen a lot of brutality in the last ten years, and the evidence is still here. We didn't see missiles sticking out of buildings, but we did see the destruction that they caused.

Serbia really did a number on Kosovo (before the US did a bigger number on Serbia), but the people here are strong. The country is in a process of rebuilding, and a lot of the destruction has been replaced with new houses. There is no real industry other than agriculture in Kosovo, so the economy is in shambles. People deliberately don't put windows and doors on the upper floors of their houses in order to not get charged taxes for them, and the electric company expects everyone to pay an equal amount, no matter how much electricity they use. Street signs often have the name of the street or town in two languages, Albanian (the official language of Kosovo) and Serbian. More often than not, the Serbian pronunciation is crossed out with spray paint. There are still a lot of hard feelings here.

(Earthworms and Fresh Heir are currently touring around air force bases in England and Europe. Mathias from Earthworms is keeping a diary for us while he's away. Read on below for the second installment; the first one is here.)

Good people of STL,
After a few days of wall-to-wall crazy, I am finally able to take a few minutes here on the tour bus to write some more about our adventures in Europe. Since we last spoke, Earthworms and Fresh Heir have played two shows and traveled from the German Alps to the German countryside. All of it is beautiful. Our first show in Garmisch at the Edelweiss resort was at a spot called Zuggy's Base Camp. The crowd wasn't huge by any means, but the 40 or so people who were there showed us a lot of love. Shouts to Sylvia and Mark.. a couple who hung out with us after the show and bought us some very tasty and potent Bavarian beers. Sylvia is a beautiful German lady who is approaching 40, but looks 30.

Mark is a career military man - 35 - who has one last tour of Iraq to look forward to. We had some great conversations. They look forward to retiring to Oklahoma in nine years when Mark's time in the military is up. We also met a great guy named Trevor who works with kids and spends most of his free time skiing. Trevor is a hip-hop head who completely appreciated our set, and knew every word to our A Tribe Called Quest cover of "Scenario." The marketing manager of Edelweiss is a really good guy named Brad -- he showed us a fantastic time and made sure we were given the rock star treatment by the resort.

Technological difficulties have prevented video from being beamed to us, but the Monads have checked in from Europe with some photos showing that they're alive and well. Well -- mostly: Their blog has some photos of injuries they've sustained. Reassures Matt Shivelbine: "Don't worry though, nobody punched anyone. We're all getting along fine - we just keep losing fights with inanimate objects."

Below, here are some snaps of the band in happier, non-injured times. Here's part one of their tour diary.

Speaking of bands traveling overseas: Starting April 9, Earthworms and Fresh Heir will be embarking on a tour of U.S. military bases in Europe. The trek will take them to bases in Germany, the Netherlands, Kosovo and the U.K. (Full dates here.)



"We hope to bolster our resume with this tour, and afford ourselves more opportunities similar to this one as a result," says Earthworms member Mathias."Also, we hope just to have an eye-popping, life-changing experience going to all of these places. Kosovo is a war zone. I look forward to this show the most, because those troops are deployed in a dangerous place and will really appreciate it when an American hip-hop band shows up to make their heads nod for a couple of hours. None of us have toured outside of the US -- visited yes, toured, no -- so this is a big deal for everybody."

Mathias said the trek came about after AFE (Armed Forces Entertainment), an organization dedicated to bringing American entertainers overseas to entertain those in the military, found Earthworms via CDBaby and liked what it heard. The tour was booked by Lt. Jarod Trujillo, who has a radio show on the Armed Forces Radio; Mathias says Trujillo is going to be promoting the concerts and playing Earthworms music on his show. Questions emailed to Trujillo weren't returned as of yet, but in a separate press release sent out by the band, he said, ""The Earthworms have a fresh and original hip-hop sound that reflects influences from across the entire spectrum of music. What's more, they put on an amazing live show that is like one big party."

(Last week, we told you that the Monads were going to be invading Europe. The band is going to be kind enough to send along some dispatches from the road. Here's the first installment!)

Hey all, it's your good friend Patthew writing you from far across the Atlantic Ocean in a country called Belgium.You can look it up on your map if you like.

Wikimedia Commons

So let me give you a brief account of what's occurred so far. So we get to the airport Wednesday morning, all of our stuff in hand, having done a walkthrough and getting the okay on everything -- and they won't take the bass and the enormous case we had for it. So we had to leave ole blue back in the states.

Traveling a little lighter, we get to the gate only to find that our first flight, the connection in Newark, has been delayed an hour. Originally we thought we had an hour and a half window, suddenly we didn't. So after a cramped couple of hours to Newark, we make a frantic rush through the Newark airport to make the flight to Belgium. To get an image of what it may have looked like, watch the scene in Home Alone when the family is trying to make their plane, not realizing poor Kevin has been left at home...alone, much like the title of the movie.

Chicago hipster hip-hop duo The Cool Kids just wrapped up a five-week North American tour that took them pretty much everywhere in the Midwest except, it seems, for St. Louis. Still, the pair have a strong connection to our fair city on the banks of the muddy Mississippi.

Courtesy of Beer City Records, here's a new video interview from local metal annihilators Head On Collision, filmed when it was in San Francisco during a recent tour. The band's Ritual Sacrifice CD is out now.

As you’ve probably noticed, lately I’ve been seeing a fair amount of shows out of town. Call it wanderlust, call it spring fever, call it my favorite bands playing Chicago instead of St. Louis. But more often than not, my road trips to see live music involve the pursuit of a specific feeling, an amorphous but profound rush of energy and emotion I can’t get from anything else.

After trips to Kansas City and Chicago in the last week, I was iffy about trekking up to Chi-town again to see Swervedriver (due to fatigue, not desire). Fronted by vocalist/guitarist Adam Franklin, the U.K. group never grew beyond a cult following here in the ‘90s, despite releasing three solid, influential albums domestically (1995’s Ejector Seat Reservation didn’t come out here) and touring with Smashing Pumpkins, Hum and Soundgarden. Swervedriver’s sound is comparable to those bands, along with the Stooges, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. – albeit with a decidedly British-rock/vaguely-shoegaze bent.

(photo of Swervedriver by Will Jones)

The high-profile return of My Bloody Valentine, a band comparable in volume and pedal-effects, arguably overshadowed Swervedriver’s 2008 reunion (although that feels entirely appropriate, in light of its underdog reputation). The added hint that this return is temporary -- Franklin has a fantastic new project called Magnetic Morning with Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino, to go along with his solo career -- put me over the edge in favor of trekking up I-55 on Saturday afternoon.

And good Lord, I’m so glad I went. The 90-minute set was a sonic assault, so intense and interlocked that (cliché alert!) it felt like Swervedriver had never been away.

"Sci-Flyer," live in San Francisco:

Last night, Sigur Ros played Kansas City's Uptown Theater, in advance of the June 24 release of Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (translation: "with a buzz in our ears we play endlessly"). Co-produced by Flood, the album features the single "Gobbledigook," which live featured a brass band, the four core members of Sigur Ros and touring ladies Amiina joyously recreating the Radiohead-like song -- complete with a confetti canon.

(Entire Flickr set here; slideshow here.)

Opening act, Sigur Ros trombonist Helgi Hrafn Jónsson

Jonsi Birgisson

The show wasn't quite as ambient or as well-paced as the other show I saw (here in St. Louis at the Pageant in 2006) -- and it was hot and humid inside the venue -- and so the experience wasn't quite as transcendent as perhaps I wanted it to be. (Even the presence of Sigur Bros -- translation: frat-dudes who like Sigur Ros -- didn't spoil the show, however.) Whether unfair or not, I like my Sigur shows sad and mournful, conjuring the solemnity of a church service and provoking emotion through langorous, stretched-out classical/orchestral flourishes. In Kansas City, the white-clad brass band distracted from the songs, making them too busy and almost too gimmicky. Just as soon as the band hit a groove -- due to tinkling percussion and wistful soundscapes, more often than not -- something shattered the mood; instrument changes, the addition (or subtraction) of people onstage or simply the performance of a song that slowed down or sped up from the previous one. Perhaps the group is still trying to figure out how to assimilate its brighter, brisker new material with old songs.

A member of Amiina:

Birgisson:

#remunited

(Photos and review by Annie Zaleski; entire Flickr set here.)

My car battery conked out at milemarker 187 (that’s Chenoa, Illinois, for those of you scoring along at home) on I-55 north yesterday afternoon. Thankfully, I was in the parking lot of a Route 66 gas station (and more specifically, its ApolloMart), so it wasn’t too much trouble for AAA to brave torrential winds and jump it. George of Pop Pop’s Star Repair – who I highly recommend you call if you’re stuck about 100 miles outside of Chicago -- suggested I drive ten miles to a Wal-Mart and replace my battery. Two-ish hours later, I was back on the road.

Despite all of this car drama, the thought never occurred to me to come back to St. Louis. I mean, sure, I figured that if my electrical system was fried then I was fucked, but I somehow rationally knew that it was my battery and everything was going to be fine and I had to press on. After all, I was going to be inconsolable if I missed R.E.M., Modest Mouse and the National in Chicago.

As it turned out, I missed most of the National's set and much of Modest Mouse's set. (Ah, well.) But my seven-and-a-half-hour trek was completely justified when R.E.M. took the stage at around 9:30 p.m. The band stormed out with Accelerate’s corrugated-electric first track, “Living Well’s the Best Revenge,” and then reversed the order of Life’s Rich Pageant’s knockout beginning, with raucous readings of “These Days” and “Begin the Begin.” The crowd-pleasing modern-rock staple “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and a rare airing of Murmur’s hypnotic-folk “Pilgrimage” followed.

As this five-song opening showed, the pacing of the setlist was superb. The two-hour show contained songs of extreme loudness (uptempo numbers from the new album Accelerate like “Horse to Water” and “I’m Gonna DJ”) and quiet introspection (a gorgeous rendition of “Find the River,” the California piano snapshot “Electrolite”), but the energy never flagged.

One of those insane Missouri summer storms marred the drive to Columbia on Saturday afternoon. You know the type: blinding sheets of rain, jagged forked lightning and plenty of dark clouds with graying wisps that could turn into funnels under the right conditions. This uncertainty put Death Cab for Cutie’s Saturday night outdoor show in jeopardy.

But the skies eventually cleared and it had turned into a beautiful night by showtime. To wild cheers, the quartet launched straight into “Bixby Canyon Bridge,” the first song on its new album, Narrow Stairs. “Bridge” built from vocalist/guitarist Ben Gibbard singing over music that sounded like ambient R.E.M. into a loud, squalling rocker, resembling a conductor leading a symphony into a thundering denouement. The Seattle band kept that momentum going straight into a charging version of Transatlanticism’s “The New Year” and The Photo Album chestnut “Why You’d Want to Live Here.”

"Soul Meets Body" from Columbia. (My camera broke. Just imagine pictures in your head, from this video.)

The Cure
May 19, 2008
The Starlight Theatre
Better Than: Sitting in a dark basement, shrouded in candlelight, listening to the Cure.
By Annie Zaleski

Dear Diary,

Oh my goth. Last night I saw the Cure for the very first time. I wasn’t the biggest fan growing up – my heart belonged to Morrissey as a mopey teenager, you see – but the older I get, the more I appreciate the breadth and depth of the band’s catalog.

After a quick four-hour drive to Kansas City from St. Louis, I raced to the bathroom to apply my dark lipstick. (MAC Viva Glam, natch.) Shit. Smeared it a bit on my lower lip. “Fuck it!” I thought. “I’ll just look more like Robert Smith!” Sat through the U.K. instrumental act 65Daysofstatic, who are perhaps the loudest band I’ve ever heard. Like an industrial version of Explosions in the Sky – or a perfect match for Placebo – the synth-terrorists created a sonic boom of sound that was mixed at almost painful levels, even with earplugs. Still, they were a nice enough diversion for a half-hour set.

And then, before it was even dark – how odd -- The Cure came onstage! Guitarist Porl Thompson sported fetching, red high heels and a sheer shirt/vinyl pants get-up that was trés chic fetishwear. Wiry, ageless Simon Gallup, the group’s long-time bassist, hunkered down at stage left. Drummer Jason Cooper, looking a little bit like Bryan Adams, settled in behind his kit. And finally Robert Smith strode onstage. Often (not so nicely) nicknamed Fat Bob, he instead looked like a giant goth teddy bear, his artfully bed-headed hair matching an all-black ensemble.

Photo by Scott Spychalski; click for slideshow, courtesy of the Pitch

(Last week I was on vacation in Chicago; I saw a bunch of shows, including a rare appearance by Swedish electro phenom Robyn.)

Robyn’s self-titled album has been out in her native Sweden for a full three years. But amazingly enough, Robyn was just released in the U.S. a few weeks ago; it took the former ‘90s pop tartlet (“Show Me Love,” “Do You Know What It Takes?”) just that long to secure a distribution deal.

Then: Robyn, "Show Me Love":

Still, the wait for Robyn’s domestic release was well worth it. A glorious, witty distillation of ‘80s new-wave, modern electro, flamboyant gay disco and hip-pop, the disc proves that female musicians can be sexy, playful and smart – without dumbing down their music or cheapening their image.

Her set was all this and more last Wednesday at the Chicago club Park West. (With its curtain-lined stage and tasteful booths, along with open space near the front, the venue had the look of a modern jazz club; think a much larger version of the late club Finale.)

[In weeks leading up to and after SXSW, bands route their tours toward and away from Austin. One of these groups is St. Louis' own So Many Dynamos, a band whose spiky keyboard-rock, gnarled riffs and complex time signatures call to mind everyone from Q and Not U and Pattern Is Movement to Battles and Broken Social Scene. The quartet is playing house parties over the next two days; message 'em on MySpace to get more info. Guitarist/Riverfront Times freelancer Ryan Wasoba was kind enough to keep a diary of the band's first few weeks on the road to Austin. Here's the final installment.]

(photo by Jaime Lees)

"Search Party," from Flashlights

Visalia, California, is as close to the Midwest as you can get in California. There is nothing intrinsically cool about Visalia, but there's a pizza place and a bar and a promoter with the ingenuity to bring indie rock bands there. People like us more than they should in Visalia, and I will never understand why, unless we are appealing to their secret Midwesternhood. We play two shows, one at the aforementioned pizza place and one at the aforementioned bar, and they are both fun and are both free and are both filled with very good people and very good beer.

We are set to play two shows in Los Angeles. One is at the Knitting Factory, a reputable venue that we have played before, and one is at a place called the Purple Loft, which we know nothing about and were invited on by another band. The Purple Loft show is a private party thrown by a girl who plays drum machine party girl music (see: M.I.A., Fannypack). There are DJ's, kegs, a VIP room, bands, security, and port-a-potties. It is, as far as my perception goes, a very blatant attempt at L.A. cool. The bands are intended to be more trophy-like background music than attention-deserving performances, more "check out how cool I am for knowing these bands" than "check out how cool these bands are." Eventually two girls dance for us out of either pity or the influence of ecstasy (or perhaps both).

Earlier in the evening, a car and a van pulled up with ten mostly Asian kids in it, driven by two of their parents. They run up to our van, we roll down the windows, and they say "So Many Dynamos? We drove two hours to see you guys!" The show is 21+ and they can't get in. We feel bad, so we invite them to get food with us. We end up at a fried chicken restaurant, hanging out with these kids and eating Yuca fries. It's the fifteenth birthday of one of the kids, so his mom (who works for fucking NASA) drove him and his friends down to see us. These kids are cooler than anybody we met at the very-L.A. party we played later.

Today is our day off. We will play the Knitting Factory tomorrow and will travel to Austin for South By Southwest and will continue our tour. We are staying with Michael Davis, a former St. Louisan who now has an apartment in the Fairfax District. It's Saturday night, and we're tourists in Los Angeles. I think we should be partying or barhopping or trying to climb up the "W" on the Hollywood sign on meth or something like that, but we're not. We're sitting in an apartment, drinking Tecate, watching Saturday Night Live, discussing albums and eating pasta. We're being our little Midwestern selves, and I am very cool with that.

(posted by Annie Zaleski)

[In weeks leading up to and after SXSW, bands route their tours toward and away from Austin. One of these groups is St. Louis' own So Many Dynamos, a band whose spiky keyboard-rock, gnarled riffs and complex time signatures call to mind everyone from Q and Not U and Pattern Is Movement to Battles and Broken Social Scene. The quartet is playing a house party on Wednesday, March 12, and at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 13, at the Billiken Club's stage at the Twangfest/KDHX party at Jovita's (1619 South First). Guitarist/Riverfront Times freelancer Ryan Wasoba was kind enough to keep a diary of the band's first few weeks on the road to Austin. Stay tuned for one more installment of his observations in the coming days.]

"Progress," from Flashlights

If the cops break up your house show in Laramie, Wyoming and some guy says "FUCK IT! Let's move the show to my house!" that means you pack your shit up and play at that dude's house. When the cops come to that show and break it up, the show is officially over.

There are at least three dogs at our show in Billings, Montana, and one of them is a total badass at fetch. He actually THROWS the fetched item back at you. We play an early show at a brewery that must be over at 8 and nobody can drink more than three beers. By following these rules, they don't have to get an actual liquor license. Montana people are like Colorado people with a heightened sense of Midwestern self-necessitated cool.

Missoula, Montana, is a strange college town nestled in between some mountains. It's beautiful, and they take much pride in some glossy magazine calling them a "top ten party town" in our country. We play with a band called Sharktopus, and unfortunately, they don't have shirts.

My favorite dog of all time is Miles, a shih-tzu that lives in an apartment in Spokane, WA. His roommate is a show promoter, lucky for me. I think we play shows there just to hang out with this dog. We are dog people. Spokane people are exactly like Montana people. Spokane and Missoula are also 2.5 hours away from each other across treacherous Idaho mountains. Everything in Idaho is somehow treacherous.

We play a shed in Bellingham, Washington, with mattresses all over the walls and a balcony. It looks like a place that Jimmy Eat World would shoot a music video in for cred. The cops almost bust this show due to a noise complaint. Apparently, the noise complaint was not for the show but for some kids drinking in their car and listening to metal very loudly. After the show, I witness a drunken disaster that involves V8. This is a first for me.

Seattle didn't intend to be cool, coolness just kind of landed on them twenty years ago and they've been trying to cope with it ever since. We play with Mahjongg, a band we love, and Calvin Johnson, who I had a hard time paying attention to. Our friend Robbie, who put out our last two albums and has subsequently wasted more money on us than anyone else, gives us the gift of a night in a Holiday Inn Express. Perhaps this makes me a bit of a hypocrite.

I hear Portland is cool, from cool people, but I have yet to see it. We eat fondue and drink beer with Rachel Demy, tour manager extraordinaire and ladyfriend of Chris Walla, which makes her our former babysitter. We spend the most money we've ever spent on the least amount of food. I take a quiz for my online Macroeconomics class, which I wish was a joke. Our show is very "eh," and we're constantly distracted by this fact: We must immediately leave our show and drive to San Francisco for a 10 a.m. load in. We must defy logic of time and distance to make this happen. Oregon is very foggy at night.

San Francisco is like a more overt version of Seattle; perhaps it's Seattle-meets New York. It's undeniably cool, but people tend to try slightly harder to achieve this level of cool. Perhaps it's more "cool upkeep" than anything else. We play a day show with the Mountain Goats for the Noise Pop Festival. As the room fills up, I realize that I should know way more about the Mountain Goats than I actually do. Yenie Ra is at the show. She is our good friend, and recently became our manager. It's nice seeing her in person.

We stay in Oakland with Sam Pura. He runs a studio and is recording Heavy Heavy Low Low, a band we once toured with. They want Aaron to sing on their record, so we spend a few hours writing a vocal part and recording it for the song. The record credit will read "Aaron Stovall appears courtesy of So Many Dynamos, LLC", because we're a business now. That's why we keep our receipts. On our way to the beach, I drive our van with the gas pump still in it, damaging the connecting hose, but that's old news now.

The next day we play a college show to college kids at the college coffee shop on a college campus. It's very college, and it makes us feel very old. We were college-aged when we started doing what we do, and now I feel very disconnected from these people. I am 24, sitting in a cafeteria that I snuck into, eating mashed potatoes and feeling very uncool.

(posted by Annie Zaleski)

[In weeks leading up to and after SXSW, bands route their tours toward and away from Austin. One of these groups is St. Louis' own So Many Dynamos, a band whose spiky keyboard-rock, gnarled riffs and complex time signatures call to mind everyone from Q and Not U and Pattern Is Movement to Battles and Broken Social Scene. The quartet will be playing a house party on Wednesday, March 12, and at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 13, at the Billiken Club's stage at the Twangfest/KDHX party at Jovita's (1619 South First). Guitarist/Riverfront Times freelancer Ryan Wasoba was kind enough to keep a diary of the band's first few weeks on the road to Austin. Stay tuned for two more installments of his observations in the coming days.]

"We Vibrate, We Do":

"Cool" is a relative term -- and its perception varies by geography. New
York is cool for thousands of legitimate reasons. Los Angeles is cool because it’s where they make movies, and tall buildings that house failing record companies live there. Seattle is cool because some dudes wore flannel, broke guitars and knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous down to No. 2 on Billboard in 1992.

The Midwest has not contributed as much to American culture and is not generally considered cool. But this lack of coolness grounds the people of the Midwest; the area isn't cool, so the people that live there have to be cool to make up for it. This, along with my hometown pride, is why I think people in the Midwest have less of a tendency to completely suck.

The tour begins in Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha's claim to coolness is Saddle Creek Records: Bright Eyes, the Faint, Cursive, etc. We are playing at Slowdown, a venue recently opened by the folks at Saddle Creek. The Show is the Rainbow, our friend Darren Keen's multimedia one-man band, plays with us. Everybody is very kind and there is very little pretension. A band called UUVVWWZ (pronounced Double-U, Double-V, Double-W, Z) plays and they are rad and certainly into cooler music than I.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota is a similarly uncool-and-therefore-really-cool Midwestern town. There is a tour bus outside of the show, which is odd because we are headlining. We play the 6 to 9 p.m. early show along with We All Have Hooks For Hands, the resident ten-piece/two-drummer band with horns. The late show (and tour bus owners) are called Cinder Road. They have two techs, a tour manager, and a traveling soundman. Their two merch girls sell shirts, CDs, panties, customized guitar picks and 8x10 glossy photos. They are L.A.-cool, which is Midwestern for "trying to hard to be cool and therefore not cool at all." I think they played to eleven people and they probably stayed in a Holiday Inn Express.

We take backroads from Sioux Falls to Denver because a British woman's voice on our GPS told us to. This means we don't have to drive past the spot on I-80 where our van flipped over last year. Two hours outside of Denver, we pass a white Dodge Sprinter with a trailer driven by and filled with dudes. With a sharpie and a notebook, we ask them what band they are. They are Finch. This is funny to us at the time, and still is now.

Finch is an emo band. Emo, despite its many incarnations, was a highly Midwest movement, and the late-'90s Midwestern touring-machine emo band is a model that we've followed for years. This is why I think So Many Dynamos has more in common with the Get Up Kids and Braid than most of the bands we share stylistic comparisons to. Modern emo, in all of its guyliner/combover glory, is a bastardized, sloppy conglomeration of Midwest angst and L.A. cool.

At a standard house show, people drink beer and sneak off to smoke pot. In Denver, at the house we played at, people openly smoke weed and sneak off to (apparently) do other drugs and (we suspect) have threesomes. The Photo Atlas plays after us, people dance, and all is well. People in Colorado are not so much "cool" as they are "chill," which makes them somewhere between 40 to 110% hippies.

We wake up in a mountain. We play at a college in Boulder and the opening band is very young. It is their first show. We debate the gender of the keyboardist; either a girl going through his awkward phase or a boy going through his very awkward phase. We play the college because they pay us more money than they should to play there, and we are bummed because they're sending a check to our house. This is a good thing in the long run, because two weeks from now in Oakland I will drive our van with the gas pump still in it, damage the gas station's hose, and we will have to pay the damages. These damages are the same price as our payment for the show, which is comfortably sitting on our coffee table 900 miles way.

(posted by Annie Zaleski)

This is what happens when insomnia + an Internet connection + boredom collide.

File under bands I never knew still existed: Deep Blue Something. You know, the '90s group with the song "Breakfast at Tiffany's," a.k.a. the song you can never forget because it's so catchy/annoying. I'm not even going to link it, because most readers have probably already started at least humming it to themselves and already regret reading this. Sorry. Anyway, DBS is currently touring and releasing new music sometime soon. Huh.

In that band's MySpace top friends is an amazing band called the Ocean Blue. They sound like Echo & the Bunnymen and the Church -- all watery riffs and melancholy, wistful lyrics -- but are from Hershey, Pennsylvania. Notable hits: "Between Something and Nothing" and "Ballerina Out of Control." Both of these songs, along with a cover of the Smiths' "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," are on their MySpace. Plus, check out links to buy lots of old/new tunes. God, I love that band.

In TOB's MySpace friends -- likely because his band did a killer cover of an OB song? Death Cab for Cutie's Chris Walla, whose solo record, Field Manual, comes out January 29. Having lived with it for about a week now, I have to say that I dig the rock/ parts of Manual, but not so much the slower, ballad parts. Ah well.

Oh, and what's Walla's MySpace headline? "We will get what we deserve!" -- which is a quote from So Many Dynamos' "Search Party." Walla and the band worked together last year.

Gee, it's like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, only somewhat less interesting.

The Ocean Blue, "Ballerina Out of Control":

The things you learn via MySpace.

First, last week Riddle of Steel let slip that it's playing at SXSW -- which happens to fall during the same week 1985 is released to the non-regional masses (that would be Tuesday, March 11). Once its show is completely confirmed, I'll update.

Second, Small Stone Records signees Shame Club posted its showcase day and time via a bulletin last night. It's one of the coveted evening showcases; the lineup is pretty killer.

Friday 03/14/2008 @ Room 710, Small Stone Records Showcase stage

8 p.m. Shame Club
9 p.m. Roadsaw
10 p.m. Dixie Witch
11 p.m. Puny Human
12 mid Brain Police
1 a.m. Sasquatch

From the murmurings I'm hearing, St. Louis is going to be represented in a major way in Austin this year. I'll have more details once they're confirmed.

-- Annie Zaleski

When we spoke with the head Swervie a few weeks ago -- in advance of his pretty awesome, although under-attended Bluebird show -- he had this to say about a reunion:

Well, it's great that people still talk about the band. It's been ten years since Swervedriver has done anything and twenty years since the band formed. Obviously a lot of bands have been reforming lately. A lot of these bands you go and see them, and it's really quite awe-inspiring. I went and saw the Pixies when they reformed and it was kind of spine-tingling. So, who knows? Perhaps.

Well, if by "perhaps" he meant "nobody knows this yet, but we're totally getting back together in 2008." The release I received today:

After almost a 10-year long absence, the revered UK band SWERVEDRIVER plans to reform for an early 2008 worldwide tour. Swervedriver is Adam Franklin on guitar and vocals, Jimmy Hartridge on guitar, Steve George on bass, and Jez on drums. Swervedriver formed in Oxford, England in 1989 and released a series of EP's followed by their debut full-length, Raise, in 1991 on Creation Records in the UK and A&M Records in the U.S. Mezcal Head followed in 1993, then in 1995 Ejector Seat Reservation came out on Creation in the UK, but was only available as an import in the US. Their last release, 99th Dream, was released by Zero Hour in 1998. Tour dates for Swervedriver will be announced shortly. Adam Franklin is in the midst of a U.S. solo tour in support of Bolts of Melody, which was released this past June on Hi-Speed Soul. See remaining dates below.

-- Annie Zaleski