CD Revue | Bradford & Gadette on I’m Not There

This week, Ryan Bradford and Jamie Gadette take on I’m Not There (Columbia/Sony), the soundtrack to Todd Haynes’ forthcoming Bob Dylan biopic (see Cinema Clips). The double-disc release features 34 artists covering both popular and more obscure works by the formidable folk icon. If you dig Tom Verlaine, Nels Cline, Lee Renaldo and Smokey Hormel, take note: They bolster several tracks as The Million Dollar Bashers.
RB: At least this album tries to avoid alienating non-Dylan fans by delegating covers to Sonic Youth, Jeff Tweedy and even Karen O (Yeah Yeah Yeahs). I’ve never understood the universal hard-on for Bob Dylan, but these artists mix enough of their own flavor into the songs to keep somebody like me interested. And then Eddie Vedder comes along …

JG: Wow. You’re either very brave or very stupid to dis Dylan. Maybe both. I’m definitely not a fan of his voice, but I’ve always respected him as a songwriter you can’t deny he played a significant role in shaping music as we know it. Hearing my hero/boyfriend Stephen Malkmus resurrect “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Maggie’s Farm” confirms my suspicions that if Dylan tweaked his voice just so, I’d probably be a big Dylan-head (Dylan-ite? Dylan-er?). Malkmus, like the majority of I’m Not There contributors, scores a perfect balance between Dylan’s delivery and his own signature style. A few—Hold Steady, Willie Nelson, Jeff Tweedy—pretty much sound like they always do. And yes, Eddie Vedder provides an uninspired, totally unnecessary take on “All Along the Watchtower.” They should have included Jimi’s version and called it a day.

RB: So maybe I am naive when I dis an artist like Bob Dylan, but it’s your kind of blind devotion to his untouchable reputation that warrants all these self-important biopics. If “playing a significant role in shaping music as we know it” is synonymous with playing an acoustic guitar, does that mean you’re extra giddy for Jack Johnson’s cover of “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind”? He plays the guitar and many people consider him a skilled songwriter, so what’s the difference? I think the most successful tracks are the ones that stray furthest from the source material, to provide a fresh sound to new listeners. Like I said before, Sonic Youth’s cover of “I’m Not There” provides enough sonic weirdness to make it not a cover, but rather a re-imagining.

JG: Did you just compare Jack Johnson to Bob Dylan? I think I just threw up in my mouth.

RB: And that still sounds better than Dylan’s voice.

JG: You better take cover, Bradford. A hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

Music | Fake It Till You Make It: New SLC band The Market doesn’t current success

  It started as a lark for Bryan Schuurman. “I was just kind of disappointed with how the music industry was working, so I decided to be the industry myself—to be ‘the market.’” A clever ploy, but do others get that inside joke? “[Laughs] No,” he says, “They all think I’m talking about a supermarket.” Despite the dubious choice in the band name, The Market has certainly made an impact since August of this year.

Schuurman played mostly drums in more than a dozen bands before forming The Market, but his solo project took him in another direction. “One day, my band was on a break, and I just decided to write some songs,” he says. From there, he picked up a guitar and began to write, recording his material on a MacBook in his bedroom for his four-song debut. Schuurman played all the instruments as well as produced and mixed the EP, which was originally released under the name Industry Company Incorporated (another wink at the music industry). While the EP is very raw (a fact that Bryan blames on not getting it mastered), there is undeniable talent in the lyrical arrangements. This strong impression of The Market found its way to X96, where it was played not only on Live & Local, but also on Todd Nuke’Em’s “Todd’s iPod” segment. “The first thing that caught me was his lyrics. Nuke’Em says he certainly has something to say, and he conveys this in his music in a way that relates to this generation,” “It was interesting to be exposed to Bryan’s darker, more thoughtful side.”
Radio exposure led The Market, now padded with current members Danny Wariner, Anthony Webster, Brent Redd and Scotty Moses, to a spot on last summer’s X96 4-Play local concert series. “It was a great response for a fairly new band,” Live & Local host and City Weekly contributor Portia Early recalls. “I’d say about 40 kids came to see them.” While The Market didn’t go on to open for X96’s Big Ass Show, they did well for a bunch of newbies.
Catching up with the band as they performed a set in Ogden, they joked around, giving the impression of a band much tighter than their brief years together might suggest. Of course, they’re not coasting yet. “I’m recording a couple new songs, and I’ve just been jamming with these guys to catch them up to speed,” Schuurman says.
“We also played a hoe-down in someone’s back yard,” Moses says with a laugh. “It was a neighborhood party, but it was fun.” Better yet, the party attracted more than a few new fans.
“We had a lot more MySpace people talking to us, telling us we did a good job at the Big Ass Show,” Schuurman says.
“I think there’s a lot more song recognition going on at our shows,” Wariner adds. “People are starting to know what songs we’re playing and grooving to the music.”
Fans are just perks, however, to the pleasures gained from performing. They play full speed ahead, which obviously gets the crowd riled up. Sometimes, though, “You have to fake it,” Schuurman says. “I never fake it,” Redd says. “Fake it till you make it,” Moses says, “unless you’re Brent.”
As for the future, Schuurman has it all laid out. “I’m gonna try and record some more later this year, get some money saved up for that,” he says, adding that the band won’t be in on the act. “Right now, I have a super-sweet deal where I have to do it in studio by myself—plus, it would take three times as long.”
“Probably because of the attitude problems, I guess,” Redd says.
Thankfully, there’s no faking The Market’s promising road ahead.

Music | Khaaan!: Blacksnake and BBQ get saucy

  I should have guessed that two guys who call themselves Blacksnake and Creepy were going to mess with me a little bit. But some journalists never learn. That’s why reporters have the same public approval rating as used car salesmen.
Blacksnake (aka King Khan) and Creepy (aka BBQ aka Mark Sultan) are former members of defunct punk band Spaceshits, the one-time antiheroes of Montreal’s music scene long before Arcade Fire graced the cover of Time.

The Spaceshits were famous for raising hell, inciting riots and alienating uptight club owners with their insane stage antics. Although plenty of naysayers predicted that the young rabble-rousers in the band would end up face down in the gutter (permanently, not just for an hour or two), Blacksnake and BBQ harnessed their unadulterated love of rock & roll, refined their musical chops and persevered after the Spaceshits called it quits.

Blacksnake—who fell in love with Germany during a Spaceshits tour and decided to stay there—adopted the name King Khan and formed countless bands, including a solo project called King Khan and His Lonesome Guitar. BBQ stayed in Montreal, joined Les Sexareenos (a band named after a seedy pulp novel), started cranking out solo material and adopted several names.

Eventually, BBQ—Creepy’s one man band—did a show in Germany, which led to some jam sessions with King Khan, which led to a joyful Creepy/Blacksnake collaboration called The King Khan & BBQ Show.

Shortly after the band’s inception, The King Khan & BBQ Show’s irreverent yet undeniably seamless blend of punk, psychedelic rock, doo-wop, R&B and good old classic rock & roll began to produce, as the band’s Website so eloquently states, legions of “overenthusiastic psychos who knew all of the words.”

Some of those overenthusiastic psychos who knew all of the words were members of up-and-coming bands, such as Atlanta’s Black Lips—who are definitely in the process of amassing hordes of overzealous fans who know all the words to their songs. The Lips were so taken by The King Khan & BBQ Show that they formed a close friendship with the duo, collaborated on a few obscure 7-inches and dubbed King Khan the secret fifth member of their band.

The King Khan & BBQ Show live performance has developed a small but devoted cult following. Audience members are converted by the band’s catchy R&B and rock & roll rhythms and charmed by their sentimental-yet-profane lyrics.

The King Khan & BBQ Show has also produced a string of kitschy music videos. The video for “Waddlin’ Around” features a snaggle-toothed sock monster in hot pursuit of puking puppet versions of Khan and BBQ.

Mind you, the name of the band is The King Khan & BBQ Show, not King Khan & The BBQ Show, as BBQ adamantly pointed out in an e-mail. If you’re unfortunate enough to put the ‘the’ in the wrong place, prepare to get growled at by BBQ.

In fact, my first round of questions received a rather volatile response from BBQ. I was convinced he hated my jaundiced journalist guts until I got King Khan on the phone.

“Don’t mind BBQ,” Khan said, in the same tone of voice that my grandma once used to smooth over my grandpa’s pissy outbursts, “He gets a little grumpy sometimes.”

Khan—an extroverted father of two young girls who alternately sports a World War I helmet and army fatigues, and a makeshift Tina Turner costume, complete with a fringy purple dress and wig, onstage—talked with me for nearly an hour with tremendous energy and enthusiasm about Haitian and Turkish voodoo; hexes; gypsies; Indian witches; black magic; mustache-growing contests; Georgia; Florida; Brooklyn, N.Y.; New Orleans; Berlin; hot dogs; beer; salacious botched interviews with French journalists; and burning upside-down cop cars in Montreal, among other engaging and unprintable topics.

Khan even admitted to blowing chunks outside of a famous Chicago hot-dog restaurant, much like the puppet version himself in the “Waddlin’ Around” video.

Somewhere in the midst of our conversation which ranged topically from the Brazilian reverence for a nice butt to how Khan almost met the one and only Fats Domino in New Orleans, I told Kahn to apologize to BBQ on my behalf for my subpar questions.

“Oh, don’t worry about. It’s OK, it’s OK,” he said, with a slight laugh. Then, under his breath, he added, “It’s kind of a joke.”

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that BBQ was pulling my leg, but when it dawned on me, I put my head in my hands and laughed.

Of course, it’s possible that a person who has toured extensively with a one-man band and appeared in multiple photos with a bucket on his head is in a chronically bad mood. Perhaps BBQ was only half-joking when he said “the only thing I fear is half-thought-out questions like these.”

In any case, it’s an honor to be duped by Blacksnake and BBQ—even if they think my questions are subpar.

Eagle Twin

UT riffers melt audience's faces

Posted // August 30,2012 - The Riff. The almighty ostinato. What is the Power of the Riff? Well, it’s a two-day, bi-coastal metal festival and, as of about a week ago, it’s from whence   Eagle Twin came. “I’ve come to think of riffs as these bigger-than-life things,” says singer-guitarist Gentry Densley. “They’re kind of universal in a way, you know? Like mythology—where it’s passed down. And there are certain archetypal things about it. It’s almost like this big entity you can channel through instruments and walls of amps. I don’t know what the power of it is, but it definitely can move people.”
Densley and drummer Tyler Smith played the West Coast edition of record label Southern Lord’s popular festival. Virtually every band on the schedule, whether considered stoner, doom, sludge, punk or experimental, is quite handy with the riff—which, by the way, is a short repeated musical pattern. In metal, that’s the low, guttural guitar sound that causes fans to thrust devil horns in the air. For unifying an audience, it’s as good or better than an anthemic chorus because it’s the harbinger of awesomeness present and yet to come.
Eagle Twin is especially adept at riffage, which Densley also likens to language. “There are different kinds of cadences or phrases or things that you can add to and subtract from,” he says. “It happens best when you let it flow.”
Since forming in 2007, Densley and Smith have cultivated such fluency. Their shows are legendary face-melters where the songs can go on walkabout through hyperbolic forests to emerge “exhausted and hoarse,” holding the severed heads of nonbelievers. Densley ascribes this to spontaneity and an unspoken negotiation between him and Smith. Densley says the fun for Eagle Twin is blurring the line between transparency and ostensible magic and “being able to shift on a dime. You gotta get the other guy on the same page—or not. You just juxtapose two ideas and … hammer it out in the moment. People tell me they like to watch that kind of chaos solidify into something.”
Eagle Twin coalesced similarly, although not through chaos. Densley is a local, almost mythical, guitar hero since his days in post-hardcore/jazz group Iceburn. That band predates, by no small margin, even the Napster-era Internet and still enjoys a cult following. Several projects later, Densley wound up in Form of Rocket with Smith. “Smashy Smashy kinda turned into Eagle Twin, in a way,” Densley says. “A lot of the ideas carried over. They just kept getting heavier, slower and louder. And a little more focused.”
Now paired as Eagle Twin, the duo has already released their sophomore album, The Feather Tipped the Serpent’s Scale (Southern Lord), and is gaining traction. They have toured the United States, are heading to Australia and New Zealand with Russian Circles later this fall, and return for a November jaunt with Earth. Even better: Guitar World recently premiered the track “The Ballad of Job Cain Part II,” giving Densley a taste of long-deserved recognition. Densley says, “That was pretty awesome,” but modestly credits the efforts of Southern Lord and his publicist, Dave Brenner.
He’d also probably balk at lofty appraisals of his band, or giving Eagle Twin its own mythology. It’s not like they came together across vast deserts or galaxies. But there’s something there.
The Feather Tipped the Serpent’s Scale picks up where 2009’s The Unkindness of Crows left off. In Crows, birds engaged the Sun, got burned and fell to Earth as blackened serpents. When writing Feather, Densley did “my own weird research into snakes and horned snakes and different native myths” and borrowed from poets Ted Hughes (the primary muse on Crows) and Federico García Lorca, as well as the Bible. Initially, Densley says, Eagle Twin wanted to “get back to the egg,” whether a bird’s or a snake’s. They wound up resolving to crows, but the concept is the same.
“It’s about following the arc of life,” Densley says, influenced by a period where “things were getting pretty dark in [our] lives.”
The Feather Tipped the Serpent’s Scale, then, is about suffering, punishment and ultimate transformation as the crow-snake-crow experiences a corporeal and spiritual shift. Densley realizes this is “pretty epic” and is willing to negotiate its interpretation. “It’s kind of like the music takes from everywhere but allows you to form your own aesthetic through your own filters.” As to its impact, Densley leaves that open, too. “I’m a realist and I’ll keep my day job … for now. Everything kinda builds on itself. I’m just happy to leave a good lineage. Maybe the music will outlive me.”

Music | Ch-Ch-Ch-Changey: The Legendary Porch Pounders’ Dan Weldon flips his guitar.

  As one-half of local treasures The Legendary Porch Pounders, Dan Weldon is famous from his home base of Ogden to Provo to Sun Valley to Austin. But before he and Bad Brad Wheeler found blues-folk alchemy together, the 50-something singer-songwriter-guitarist put a lot more interesting stickers on his guitar case. He’s been to Korea, Japan, Turkey and still other countries and, as Jon Bon Jovi once intoned, “seen a million faces and … rocked them all.”

Spangly stardom and filthy lucre may not have been in the cards for Weldon when he played with cover band The Movie Stars on those United Service Organization tours, but he gathered experience and stories aplenty. Like that time in Korea, must’ve been 1982 …

“It was my very first USO tour, and we’d just gotten to Korea,” Weldon begins. The band was doing 45-minute shows, and the rest of their time was theirs to make merry. Early in their Seoul engagement, Weldon got wind of “this huge music store, about the size of one of our small malls” with “hundreds of Fender guitars.” At the time, Weldon was sporting “this wild Dean guitar”—a pointy job like late Pantera guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott once played. The guitar was too flashy, too mean, for smilin’ Danny Weldon—“It definitely didn’t fit my personality”—and he was on the prowl for somethin’ better, namely a sweet little Telecaster. A trade on his mind, Weldon’s wheels started to turn. How does a Yankee, speaking virtually no Korean, wheel and deal with his no-English Korean counterpart?
“My guitar was blacklisted in Korea; they couldn’t import it,” Weldon says. “So I knew it was valuable there.” Weldon ran back to his hotel, grabbed the guitar and returned to the shop. “I could see the guy eyeballing it, and he’s really lovin’ it.” They settled on a word to describe the deal: “changey.”
The shop owner produced a scrap of paper, and the two men scribbled figures. Weldon, however, wasn’t able to convince the proprietor of the Dean’s value—“he thinks I’m just makin’ it up.” Then Weldon recalled that his bandmate had a copy of Playboy, and in among the cheesecake photos and really good articles was a featured ad for the Dean guitar that even showed its retail price.
Two cab rides later, Weldon was back at the store. The shop owner snatched the magazine out of Weldon’s hand. “[He] starts thumbing through it, not even caring about the Dean. Then he gets on this little intercom and the next thing you know, there’s 30-40 little Koreans that come out of the woodwork and they’re all thumbing through this magazine, goin’ crazy with it. They’re feeding me coffee and pastries and stuff just so I’ll sit there patiently.”
Eventually, they got back to business. Weldon got his Telecaster and an off-brand case with electric blue fur lining. En route to the hotel, he realized he forgot to keep his semi-sentimental guitar strap, a gift from his ex-wife, attached. “I knew, after all that, that I’d never be able to convince this guy that it wasn’t part of the trade,” Weldon laughs. He couldn’t go back anyway—The Movie Stars had a gig.
With the USO, says Weldon, sometimes they played for 10 people, other times many more. This particular show was at a nicer theater, there’d be good sound, good lights—and about 1,000 people. Tonight it behooved them to be “on.”
Weldon strapped on his new Tele, and the band went into “Too Much Time On My Hands” by Styx. “We’ve got a smoke machine goin’, everybody’s waiting to see this big band from the United States rock out,” Weldon says, imitating the tense, pulsating synth part: “Be-bo-be-bo-bow-bow-bowbow.”
In the song, the tension is released by a big, sustained power chord. But Weldon, a feel player, fretted the chord without looking, forgetting that the scale length on a Fender guitar is shorter than a Dean’s.
“Sometimes you can get away with hittin’ a bad chord,” he recalls, “but I hit the worst one I’d ever heard. It was freakin’ terrible. The band looked at me in amazement and I just stopped playing, held my guitar out, and flipped it off. The audience thought it was part of the show; they just went crazy.
“I hit the second chord and it was back on.”

INVDRS

Heavy Hitters: INVDRS resurrect black metal in Salt Lake City.

You’d think that describing yourselves as the only “true” black metal band in Salt Lake City would get your ass kicked somewhere along the line. But to date, nobody has yet stepped up to prove INVDRS wrong. In fact, over the past couple of years they’ve nearly single-handedly brought local interest back to the genre and reinvigorated the fan base that had given up hope of seeing another dark spawn from Zion.

Forming out of the disintegration of the band Spur in 2006, drummer Gavin Hoffman and guitarist Dave Moss looked to start a new band with a greater metal focus. They picked up bassist Sean McClaugherty and former God’s Iron Tooth singer Phil White, forming the new group based on one successful practice session while White was in town on vacation. The combination worked so well it prompted White to pull up stakes from Long Beach, Calif., to join the group. Playing random gigs and producing a three-track demo, the group quickly gained a following at Burt’s Tiki Lounge as the act to see, prompting interviews and reviews among metal worshippers and a spot on SLUG Magazine’s Localized showcase.

“I’m not one to actually pay attention to that type of thing,” Hoffman says about the fan base they’ve gained. “If we play to five people or if we play to 200, doesn’t matter to me. It’s gonna be the same show, with the same volume and the same intensity, regardless. However, the feedback we have gotten from people has been incredible.”

With momentum behind them, the group made their way into the recording studio with producer Andy Patterson, working on-and-off for a good year—or, as the band described it, “a pain-in-the-ass year.” While feeling some trepidation that they were entering the studio sooner than they were ready, INVDRS pressed on to record the best they could, throwing out the bulk of their material and keeping only what they felt was the finest. To add to the already stressful process, near the end of recording their deal with a local label fell through.

Once Patterson completed the final mix of the album, though, the band landed on its feet, signing with Oregon-based Corruption Recordings and hiring artists Sri Whipple and Damon Smith to create the impressive album art.

Reflecting on the now-finished album, Hoffman says, “As its own entity, I’m very pleased with the finished product. But I think it could have been better, which is a pretty standard way of looking at it, being as picky as we are.”

Exploring the album, Electric Church is damned heavy but somehow powerfully rhythmic. Tracks like “Black Altar” and “Church Burner” carry measures and beats that could give you a heart attack live, with thunderous chords howling from the amp. Throughout the short, eight-song experience, White’s vocals echo throughout every track as if he were gargling nails in his throat, raw emotion pouring into the mic and the singer not caring if he lost his voice mid-session, especially on songs like “Death Dealer” and “Hammers of Hell.” But the entire record bleeds passion. On every song, you hear four guys giving their all, as if nothing else matters but to drag you through the destruction and filth they concoct, leaving you deaf in their wake.
Upon the album’s completion, the band faced a lineup change, as McClaugherty’s life started to change pace due to his job, family and college. Taking his place is Julie Stutznegger (Azon), who has been a major supporter since INVDRS inception, adding a whole new level of enthusiasm and musicianship to the group. You can catch the new lineup at the Electric Church album release party this Saturday. 

Miike Snow

Happy Accidents: Miike Snow’s jackalope hops along the path of least resistance.

If you take Swedish production duo Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg—who make songs as chewy and artificially flavored as Swedish Fish candies—and mix them with Andrew Wyatt, the hairiest frontman in pop music, the result could be as scary or intriguing as, say, a jackalope. Branded as Miike Snow, though, in 2009, the trio delivered a fan-friendly self-titled debut album full of pop-dance cuts with insightful lyrics. Their ever-changing live shows feature a perverse amount of digital equipment smothering everything in heavy delay and synth. All three are well-seasoned pop-inclined producer-songwriters with loaded résumés. Wyatt was the in-house producer for Downtown Records for years and part of bands The A.M., Fires of Rome and Black Beetle. Karlsson and Winnberg, under the guise of Bloodshy & Avant, have written and produced for Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears; they’re responsible for Spears’ Grammy-winning “Toxic.” In the flippant fashion that Miike Snow has become known for, Winnberg claimed in one interview he keeps the award in a box in his attic. After the trio met through a friend, they hit it off because of a shared snarky humor as well as musical inclinations, and they began recording together in 2007. Success has come easily for them since, partly because of their collective track record and partly because they take advantage of what comes their way. For one thing, there was never a lengthy discourse to choose their band name. It came via an e-mail from a guy named Miike Snow—easy enough. As they released their first single, “Animal,” in March 2009, they wanted an image to stand behind, allowing the music to stand on its own— being recognizable pop stars is their worst fear. They asked Winnberg’s tattoo artist for help, and she almost instantly decided on the mythical jackalope. They quickly agreed and used it as their professional facade, not revealing their true identities until June 2009. Jackalopes are said to only breed during electrical storms—fitting for a band that’s so hard-wired and techsavvy. However, their approach to songwriting is more like rolling thunder than lightning bolts. There’s no pop psychology, no magic formula for success. “Our music isn’t very calculated. We just play around and whatever comes up, we go with,” says Winnberg by phone from the road. Miike Snow pulls from various music traditions, but is irreverent toward them overall: sonically dissonant yet poppy, lyrically abstract yet hook-filled; mainly, it’s a compilation of happy accidents. In the studio, sessions are loose and have a revolving door with bandmates coming and going. Whether making original songs or remixing cuts from Vampire Weekend or Passion Pit, the only stipulation is making something unique and fresh. “We like stuff that doesn’t sound like anything else, (as if) maybe someone is falling on the keyboard,” Winnberg says with a laugh, noting his own affinity for hardware and gear. “The weirder the gadget, the better. We use our gear in a completely different way than the original purpose.” He says he and his bandmates are total music nerds— geeky to the point of obsessive—which comes across in the music’s pristine production values, despite the laissez-faire approach to recording. They bring that same musical awareness to their live shows. Unlike many up-and-coming dance-pop acts that might sing along to tracks on a computer or iPod, Miike Snow play real instruments. “If we are going to play 200 shows or more (a year), we’d be fed up if we just had to push a ‘play’ button,” Winnberg says. However, they can’t perform like a typical rock band because of the intricate soundscapes they produce. Essentially, they had to invent their own way, with miles of wires coming from dozens of machines. And, at times, the system fails. “There are a lot of happy accidents. When a machine drops out—and that happens a lot because there is so much that can break down—someone has to fill that spot, and it might be cooler than the original recording,” says Winnberg. “[The music] constantly changes. We want it to be as organic as possible.” An open structure and no set length to each song creates something new every time they play “Animal” or “Plastic Jungle.” While Miike Snow aren’t as tangential as Phish or Miles Davis, Winnberg says there are influences of jazz and improvisation when the songs are played live. Adding to the performances this tour, they hired a former Thievery Corporation light engineer to create a psychedelic ambiance. As our phone conversation ended, Winnberg hinted that big improvements were in store for their upcoming fall tour. “It will be pretty crazy, something that hasn’t been done before. It will be pretty mind-blowing.”