What's Better Than Man Man?

Photo by Sandlin Gaither

So, the other day, I was listening to Rabbit Habits, the terrific and addictive new album from Philadelphia quintet Man Man — experimental loons whose growly, vaudevillian indie-rock sounds like the best drunken-hobo campfire party you've ever been to. Then I began thinking about all the music that's come outta Philly over the years, and I wondered how Man Man — tagged by many as the hottest band from the city right now — fit into that history. So I rang up singer Honus Honus, rattled off a bunch of notable Philadelphia acts, and asked him whether he thought Man Man was better or worse than each:

Boyz II Men: "We're worse. They were such fresh dressers. They looked like nice boys, but they were men. We're just Man Man."

The Dead Milkmen: "We're worse. Come on — Big Lizard in My Backyard? 'Taking Retards to the Zoo'? 'Bitchin' Camaro'?!"

DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince: "We're worse! Because the Fresh Prince is a Scientologist and everyone knows that they rule, and DJ Jazzy Jeff, he has cool prescription glasses."

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Interview: Chris Walla

Photo by Autumn De Wilde

I caught up with Death Cab for Cutie guitarist and producer Chris Walla the other day while he was in New York City. We spoke about his new solo album, Field Manual; a bit about the upcoming Death Cab album, Narrow Stairs, which arrives in the spring; and why Houston is such a weird city to play a show.

What did you take away the most from doing this solo album?
I think it was really good for me to work with a different producer. I've never sung behind a microphone before for anyone. Like, if I'm singing, I'm singing for something I'm producing, or I'm singing for myself. I guess I've done it like one other time, but it was just harmonies — I sang a little bit on [The Decemberists'] The Crane Wife. Like in the super rock part of 'The Island' there's some way-up-there, kinda like Queensryche harmonies and the band was way into it but it's waaay at the top of my range. But that's the only other time I've had much feedback from anyone else. And it's like, in a situation like that, I'm not delivering the story. I'm not selling it. It's my job description in that situation to match the guy who's selling it. So getting to a point where I'm singing and having to sell whatever story is happening and really just getting that across, and getting the tone and mood of the thing right, was really fascinating for me.

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NYT on Seattle: "Crunchy and Aerobic"

Shelby Lynne at The Triple Door on Nov. 5. Photo by Lil' Scoop.

Rob Hoerburger has a fantastic profile of the country artist Shelby Lynne in today's NYT Magazine. The piece revolves around Lynn's quixotic quest for commercial success. Here, she delivers what has got to be one of the all-time paradoxical quotes, this coming from an artist about to release an album of Dusty Springfield covers: "What Carrie Underwood is singing about has already been heard. It’s in a beautiful package. But my duty is to take the hard route.”�

Of local relevance is the setting for most of the article: Seattle. Hoerburger tagged along with Lynne for the November days leading up to an invite-only gig at the Triple Door (which we reviewed here), which fuels the piece's funniest passage: "Seattle turned out the biggest sea of bald heads I’d seen in a concert hall, perhaps a sign that they knew the music’s provenance." Other locally relevant excerpts, including a section which finds Lynne nursing a noonish pint at the Cyclops, appear after the jump.

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Interview: Jimmy Eat World

These days, tons of bands try to be simultaneously sensitive and muscular — not to mention radio-friendly — with stirring guitar crunch, sweetly rendered vocal harmonies and heart-on-sleeve lyrics tackling the personal and the political. But few do it as well, or as genuinely, as Jimmy Eat World, which helped pioneer the whole melodic-emo genre upon its 1993 formation. Fortunately, the Arizona quartet hasn't been one of those acts relegated to forefather obscurity while its spawn enjoy multi-platinum success: The band's sixth album, Chase This Light, debuted at number five on the Billboard charts in October. Jimmy Eat World performs tonight — along with Modest Mouse, Spoon, and others — at 107.7 The End's "Deck the Hall Ball" in Everett. I chatted with frontman Jim Adkins the other day:

I see you're on the radio-station holiday festival circuit at the moment. Are those kinds of shows strange to do?
Well, we've played all kinds of places — headlining shows in clubs, opening support slots for stadiums, festivals in the middle of nowhere for nobody. We try to do different things and go to new places. We went to South Africa over the summer. That was a big, big first for us.

Cool. What was that like?
It was insane. We got to do some crazy safari things.

Oh, like Ernest Hemingway?
We weren't actually hunting; we were just looking. We'd be five feet away from a rhinoceros, on the rhino's turf.

Which was more intimidating — the rhinoceros, or dealing with sketchy club owners back in the day?
The rhinoceros, for sure. There's all kinds of club owners and promoter people out there, but we never had a scary bad time.

So Chase This Light is doing pretty well. Have you been able to step back and assess the album, creatively speaking?
My objectivity kinda comes and goes. Right now I'm in the execution phase, as opposed to the creation phase.

Would you say there's "art" in the performance aspect of being in a band, or is the art only in the creation part?
Oh, yeah, definitely in the performance. I think when you really start playing it for people and there's different reactions to different aspects of what you're doing, it teaches you a little bit about it. When you're in the studio and you haven't seen the sun for two weeks, how people are going to interpret it is the least of your worries. Until you get out there, it's still somewhat of an academic exercise.

So do you come to know your own songs better through the way others interpret them?
Maybe not what their interpretations are, but what they choose to react to. There's what you're setting out to accomplish within the song when you're writing it and recording it, but after you live with it for a while as a done piece, it sorta takes on the life of...it's like what someone else's record does for me. I don't really get into an album for at least six or seven months after I've had it and listened to it.

Really?
Oh, yeah, I mean there's definitely things, at first listen, you're like, "Oh this is kick-ass," but a record doesn't really become special to me until I've had it for a good half a year and had time to listen to it, and once you make your own associations with what's happening in your life with the record, that's when it truly becomes something that's less of an abstract "I like it," and more of a concrete "I like this because..."

When you think about your past material, you must have a different relationship to it now that you're a different person, and you're not the same band you were 10 years ago. Do those older songs that everyone wants to hear you play still mean something to you?
Yeah, but it is different and that's encouraging. If it did always feel the same, I think we would have stopped a long time ago.

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Taking a Dip in...

Steve Earle wasn't singing about Seattle when he coined "Guitar Town", but he just as well might have been. Thats why I find the Dating Pool, a band consisting of keyboards, cello, horns and percussion so interesting. I chatted briefly with front man Andrew Blakehall about the choice to go "guitar free" and their plans for tonight's Clash.vs. Ramones show.

Tell me a little about the Dating Pool, how did you form?
Craigslist. Definitely the best medium for meeting prospective band mates, other than already being friends with them...

When will you be gracing us with your debut?
It's an arduous process, partly because you want every increment of your song to be perfect, partly because you start to get ideas as your actually lay down each track. You hear things in a different way. Because our songs are so ripe with tempo, rhythm and time signature changes, it makes each (pro tools) session a monster unto it's own. In terms of releasing the album, we are hesitant to commit to an absolute date, but we're pushing for late March.

Where are you drawing inspiration these days?
There's a long list, but I would say the biggest inspiration is a local band called the Harborrats, they're singer\songwriter Sam Russell is one of those rare one-in-a-million musical visionaries who blend brilliant songwriting with a clear and poignant message, which is conveyed in every musical utterance which emanates from his music. Every time I see them live I get that "time standing still" feeling. That moment where you feel like everything is perfect.

Tell me about your name.
It's a metaphorical extension of the adage that being an a band is like dating four people at the same time. In Seattle there is this whole pool of prospective people to play music with, and you try a few out here and there. Sometimes the projects go miserably wrong, as it did with my stint with the Math and Physics Club, and sometimes you fall in love and it all goes wonderful, and the music is like what first kisses and the smell of your boyfriends\girlfriends neck in the morning those first few mornings after they've spent the night.

You've made a choice not to use guitars?
When I first started messing around with songwriting, I wasn't able to grasp the guitar. It didn't feel right somehow. My girlfriend at the time had a Korg X5 keyboard which I began to play obsessively. It sort of naturally progressed into my instrument. I loved how I could play the same fundamental chord progressions that a guitarist could play, but I could also use different synthed sounds (mainly piano, organ, bells, and strings). As I began laying down the piano and vocal takes on my Tascam four track, The songs began to evolve and take on lives of their own. I should state here, that, in the songwriting process, I think there is a point where each song forges it's own entity, and becomes like saplings, and we musicians the musicians who gave birth to them , both the gardeners and the soil. Some of our children (the songs) need to be tended to a lot, worked and reworked, so that they can grown healthy, robust; while others can just be let alone. When the gardener has a clear vision of how he wants his arboretum to look, and, if he has spent enough time in the company of his plants, they become more alive and more individual as they grow. The great songs began to ask (sometimes command) their songwriter to decorate them. Sometimes the panoply calls for elaborate garlands and overflowing double bass\distortion pedals\ backbeats etc. Sometimes they call for simpler things, in my case the garden which began to forth from me, always summoned unto me to bring them the same four things: cello, horn, vibraphone, and drums.

You've got two shows coming up this week. What will you be playing at the Clash.vs.Ramones show?
We're not supposed to tell the individual songs, but we've sided with the Ramones. I should mention it will only be myself, (Andrew Blakehall) our cellist (John Simpson) and trombonist (Karl Benitez).

What can we expect to hear on December 9th?
Seattle is a phenomenal city with a wealth of talent, but we've all been to the local show where a band gets on the stage and bumbles through a set in which all the songs sound essentially the same, where all the changes come in predictable places, and where all the tempos and rhythms are so constant that the life is slowly bled out of the audience. Though we're a new band, we're laboring to prevent this from happening. As a songwriter, getting on a stage and performing these songs you've been writing for years can be a horrifying experience, hoping that people will be moved, be cathartically freed, feel validated -by at least one or two of the songs that you play, is intimidating. Though Keegan (drummer) John (Cellist) Karl Be(Trombone) or Alice (Xylophone) might name drop different bands, in my case, if just one person who owned say, a Neutral Milk Hotel or Belle and Sebastian CD came up to us after the set and say they loved us, it would certainly be enough for me.....

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Interview: Chino Moreno (Team Sleep/Deftones)

Though recording and touring the world with Deftones has taken up nearly all of his time since the early '90s, singer Chino Moreno still has managed to nurture side project Team Sleep for the past decade-plus. Combining elements of shoegaze, trip-hop, and ambient electronica, Team Sleep ratchets up the atmospherics found in a lot of Deftones songs, but subtracts the skull-splitting riffs and screams. The quintet comes to El Corazon tomorrow night, the third date of a rare tour; I caught up with Chino shortly before they hit the road:

So these are the first dates you guys have done in a couple years, yeah?
Yeah, a few years. Since we’ve been around I’ve pretty much been busy obviously doin' deftones stuff. That's the priority. Team Sleep is fun stuff to play, and it’s not anything I look at, like, 'Oh, this is like my make or break thing.' It's more just a fun thing. If I'm not on tour, even if I'm at home I'm gonna be working on some kind of music whatever it be. That's what I do for fun.

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All Aboard

Busdriver plays Nectar Lounge on Wednesday, Nov. 21.

There's music that reveals its intent and structure within the first 30 seconds, providing easy, straightforward thrills. And then there's music that proves puzzling at the outset, yet usually rewards a similar high if treated with patience.

The work of Busdriver (aka Regan Farquhar) typically falls into the latter category. One of underground hip-hop's more challenging artists, Bus' flow is both instinctive and adroit: lightning-fast runs, dazzling flashes of poetry, and impressive vocal shape-shifting. He leaps from impish, singsongy elocution to a haunted half-speed croon to a sporadically manic attack that, strangely enough, comes off like Mike Patton's distant cousin (during his early Mr. Bungle days, that is). Marry all that to peculiar imagery, confusing allusions, odd couplets, illogical tangents, and experimental production, and you've got the aural equivalent of a David Lynch flick: beautiful, if at times utterly baffling. And like that infamously aloof filmmaker, Bus isn't all that interested in offering keys to his kingdom. In fact, he figures few really care that much at all.

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Reviewing the Reviews with Fog

Minneapolis native Andrew Broder spent his first couple of albums under the Fog moniker crafting charming, headphones-paradise tunes out of turntables, guitars, strangely affecting vocals, found noises, and lots more sonic oddities. Yet Fog concerts—with a full band backing Broder—began evolving into somewhat more straightforward, guitar-centric indie-rock experiences that had little in common with the records. And so, feeling he'd outgrown the bedroom-pop aesthetic, Broder decided to bring the sound of Fog's fifth full-length, the recently released Ditherer, in line with the now-trio's live vibe, without sacrificing too much of that quirky charm. I caught up with Broder at a laundromat in Buffalo, New York, during an off day on Fog's current tour—which comes to the Crocodile on Wednesday, November 14th—and as he waited for his clothes to dry, I read him excerpts from some Ditherer reviews and asked him to comment:

"Broder seems to take a perverse pleasure in toying with our expectations . . . in much the same way I imagine David Lynch smirks to himself while giving direction to a gaggle of Polish prostitutes doing the Locomotion." (Tiny Mix Tapes)

You know, I mean . . . I like David Lynch, I guess. Yeah, I dunno if it's a perverse pleasure, and I don't know if there's that much thought going into the "subverting expectations" element of it. There's a little of that, but then you're sorta getting into Frank Zappa territory, where you're like, "Heh heh heh, what am I gonna think up next?!" And that can get a little bit on the contrived side. So, yeah, the element of surprise is one that I appreciate in music quite a bit, so the goal is to figure out a way to keep that without it seeming like you're playing a joke on people.

"Dude uses an Arcade Fire’s worth of instruments and sings surrealist lyrics with a kind of deflated Charlie Brown lilt, but his jams manage to mirror/mock/satirize our modern American hustle and flow." (The Village Voice)

That's all right. That's okay. Except for the Charlie Brown part. Because I will say that with this record, I really wanted to do the singing differently. When I go back and listen to the old records, I really don't like the singing 'cause it sounds like I don't enjoy singing, which I didn't. It sorta sounds like I have a gun to my head. I didn't really have a concept of how to do it for a while, so I made up my mind that on this record, it was time to get into it and try to sing well and sing as though I wanted to be singing. So the Charlie Brown thing definitely applies to the previous work, but I dunno about this record.

"The remarkable aspect of Ditherer is that all of this seemingly impenetrable mass of ideas has been streamlined into 11 relatively concise and surprisingly accessible pop songs." (All Music Guide)

Hmm. That's cool. Yeah, that's decent. I think they're pop songs; I would agree with that. When I think of pop songs, I just think of a song that you can sing and hum along with. That, to me, is a pop song and that can be anything. A pop song is just a big musical idea condensed into a smaller amount of time with a structure and a form of some sort. So, yeah, I don't have any problem with them being called pop songs. I love pop songs. I mean, we listened to Paul Simon in the van last night, so it's all good.

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Weekly Exclusive: Billy Joel Sets the Record Straight

In her preview of Billy Joel's Thursday night show at KeyArena in this week's Wire, Erika Hobart recounts a well-trod story, first reported in the New York Times, of Billy Joel throwing a total shitfit onstage in the Soviet Union in 1987, overturning his piano after bright lights flooded the audience and declaring: "It's my show!" Hobart's writeup gives the impression that Joel was upset with audience members, whom he compared to "an oil painting in this corner of the room."

Well, it turns out Billy Joel is already in town — and he reads the Weekly. How do we know this? Because we just returned a call to a downtown hotel that shall remain nameless, where Joel is staying under a clever pseudonym that shall remain nameless. Joel wanted to set the record straight about that night in Moscow. Here's his take on what transpired (we swear we're not making this up): "Remember, this was the Soviet Union in 1987, and they'd never had a major rock concert before. There was a film crew filming a documentary, and they turned very bright lights on the audience. The audience was having a good time — until they turned the lights on. They froze; they turned paranoid. There was a lot of anxiety — why are we being looked at? And whenever they turned the lights on, anyone who was overreacting was being pulled out of the audience by a security guard. I wasn't yelling at the audience — I was yelling at the film crew. So I threw the piano, and that got their attention. Then they stopped lighting the audience, and everybody started rocking out. That was the reason for that action — not because they looked like an oil painting. That was something I said to a reporter after the big shots in the Communist Party, despite our best efforts, sat in the front row at one of the shows. They looked like an oil painting. The regular people in the back were rocking out. Hey, I hate the camera being on me. If you looked like me, you wouldn't want the camera on you either."

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Interview: Brandi Carlile

Right now, Brandi Carlile is arguably the biggest music star in the country who hails from Seattle. The alt-country/pop singer-songwriter's second major-label release, The Story, has been selling well, remaining on Billboard's Top 200 albums chart ever since its April release. And her songs are all over radio, prime-time TV, and VH-1 thanks to a style that crosses Melissa Etheridge, Lucinda Williams, and Coldplay, and is quite obviously appealing to the masses. Tonight, she returns to town — specifically, to the Paramount Theatre — to wind up VH-1's successful "You Oughta Know Tour," which has had the 26-year-old Carlile out around the country for the past two months with opener A Fine Frenzy (the band fronted by Alison Sudol, another Seattle native though she now lives in L.A., whom you should get there early to check out, if you're going).

I chatted with Brandi a couple of weeks back; after the jump, read what she has to say about the tour, her new songs, fears of upsetting people with her songwriting, and why she's typically angry onstage.

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