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(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.)

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[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