There’s nothing I like more than a good mix tape, and longtime Mission Creek friend/library scientist/cool-last-name-having Sarah Dorpinghaus has gone and made us all one (actually, two as of now), via her new podcast, birthstones. The monthly all-music mp3s lean toward the new and experimental, featuring labels like Siltbreeze and Slumberland, who both made huge waves in 2008 with releases from Sic Alps and Crystal Stilts, respectively. The podcast also goes much deeper than that, though, digging into out-music from Iowa City’s own Night People label, found sound/world music offerings from Sublime Frequencies, classic gems by Suicide, and unreleased cuts from some hidden place in Sarah’s record collection. I mean, she’s an archivist, and these tracks belong on your hard drive for listening pleasure as well as for posterity.
mission freak!
music and life in iowa city
New (and old) Music: Birthstones Podcast
New Music: Cokemachineglow Fantasy Covers Podcast Pt. 3
Every year around the holidays our dear friends at Cokemachineglow release their wonderful Fantasy Covers Podcast. The mix features current bands covering their favorite songs of the past year, in this case 2008. This year’s podcast is likely the best one yet, featuring some beautiful music from the likes of Wye Oak, Pale Young Gentlemen, Roommate and many many more. Among those covered include M.I.A., Kanye West, Beck, and MGMT. Head on over to Cokemachineglow and plug into this killer mixtape for the new year.
Link to the Fantasy Covers Podcast [here]
NEW YEAR’S EVE PICK: The Picador
The more New Year’s Eve parties I experience the more I’m learning that the best approach is to keep drama and expectations to a minimum. I often have the most fun just finding a nice little bar, getting their early with some friends, drinking some beers and letting the night unfold in a natural way. Case in point: Fellow Mission Freaker Craig Eley and I rolled into an East Village bar last year with our buddy Gavin Black (of the Blacks). We showed up mad-early, there was no one else there and we had a lion’s share of drinks. By 11PM, the place was packed, we were talking to people, we’d never met, and toasting champagne glasses while the DJ spun an excellent mix of rock, soul, and rare groove. Perhaps such pedestrian gatherings aren’t your cup of tea. Maybe you wanna do a bunch of E and go see Justice or drink a bottle of Makers and rock out with the Drive-By Truckers or candy-flip and kick it Paul Oakenfold and Groove Armada. Maybe I’m just geting older. All of this to say that our pick for a killer New Year’s Eve party tonight is to swing by the Picador a bit early, find yourself a seat and let the beers start to flow. By 11PM, the place will be jumping and you’ll be sucking face with that girl / guy you’ve been crushing on in the Java House for the past three weeks. For a mere $5 you can kick it at the Picador all night. For you electronica heads, there will be a handful of DJs led by the very talented Nate Unique (from Chicago). For you rockers: there will also be live music from the aforementioned Blacks (from San Francisco and Brooklyn). The Picador has made it easy for you: just show up, hang out, and have a good time. Want some air? Go spend some time in the heat-lamped beer garden. The party kicks off at 9PM and you’ll see a bunch of Mission Freakers there having a swell time. Stop by and say hi.
WHAT: New Year’s Eve Party w. 4DJs and 2 Live Bands
WHERE: The Picador — 330 E. Washington Street, Iowa City
WHEN: WED, DEC 31 :: 9PM
HOW MUCH: $5
Preview: The Blacks w/ The Tanks, Lipstick Homicide, and Datagun
Since the inception of Tuesday Night Social Club there’ve been some seriously awesome shows made that much more awesome by the complete lack of a cover, but I think this one takes the cake (and the pie, and whatever else you got to take).
Mission Freakers (full disclosure), Datagun rev up their engines (and hopefully your hips) as they kick off a mini-Midwestern tour tonight. Dudes’ll be hitting you hard with some serious dance-floor-ready beats and post-punk depression (think Joy Division or Depeche Mode).
And because we don’t want you, like, all depressed and stuff, Lipstick Homicide will provide the necessary levity to keep the evening going. This fierce, female, foursome possess some serious chops that people twice their combined ages are still looking for. Their almost effortless power pop anthems are not only among the finest written in Iowa City but would stack up against many of these so-called pop-punk luminaries the kids are listening to these days.
Speaking of being too big for Iowa City’s britches, The Tanks have been making enough noise as of late to keep the Midwest and parts of the East Coast up all night (they were on a tour). The trio also has its new record out, which we’ve given you plenty of info about.
And because this is the last Social Club of 2008, The Mill pulled out all the stops and brought in Mission Creek Festival 2008 favs The Blacks. Back in March, this trio pretty much out-played Cursive on the third day of Mission Creek. Watch that you don’t get hit by auxiliary percussionist Justin as he flails his way through the crowd with tambourine in hand. Also, beware that you don’t get swept up in his performance and forget to listen to the awesome tunes being churned out by his bandmates. This is garage-rock of the finest order featuring performance art of the most bizarre nature.
Who: The Blacks w/ The Tanks, Lipstick Homicide, and Datagun
Where: The Mill
When: Tonight 12/30
Doors: 9 pm
Cover: FREE
Year End Guest Lists
In the midst of holiday travel and end of semester hi-jinx, the last bit of our year end coverage here at Mission Freak has kind of been buried under a mountain of snow, but we’re excited to unveil this evening the compiled lists of several of our friends within the Iowa music community. By no means is this a critical list - neither was ours, but this is more of a list of ideas from some folks who’s opinion we really respect. You’ll find some gems on here, as well as some more creative takes on this year’s best music. We hope that it prompts you to seek out some good tunes as the music industry takes a year end vacation. Of course you know lots of hot music will be coming out in ‘09 too (Merriweather Post Pavilion, anyone?), but here’s several different accounts of what blew up for some peeps in 2008. Many, many thanks to all the contributors. We love what you do. With this, we leave you until our coverage of New Year’s festivities in Iowa City next week. Enjoy, safe travels, and happy holidays.
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The Best of 2008 #1: Fuck Buttons’ Street Horrrsing
We made it. The end of our list, the end of 2008.
And at number one we find Fuck Buttons’ debut, Street Horrrsing. The album that topped my list for the year did so on it’s dual strengths of comfort and confrontation.
Street Horrrsing is a revelation in repetition. Like Phillip Glass or Stephen Reich, Fuck Buttons rely on the strength of a strong repeated phrase as the basis for their compositions. That things can change while staying the same, or that our minds can change that which has not or will not, these are the trappings of minimalist composition.
While these lads from Bristol, England lean heavily on the ever popular tropes of the genre, dudes also employ tribal beats that Glass, Reich and Co., rarely considered. The four-to-the-floor accents offer the kind of levity that keep the album from dipping into stoicism. However, it’s not the club friendly beats that really shock and awe, in fact, the reason for the album’s success is the fact that the duo spends minutes with lush synth swells; dancing, swirling keyboard figures; and skittery, tribal beats; only to explode into a flurry of distorted howls and cackles.
Street Horrrsing is constantly teetering on the breaking point. Even though the dense, layered construction of each piece is solid and re-confirmed with each repetition of a figure, after a few of these jarring displays, it becomes a sort of musical Russian Roulette — when will this lovely veneer get shattered again?
Street Horrrsing ain’t your daddy’s minimalism, that’s for sure.
Download: Fuck Buttons - Ribs Out
The Best of 2008 #2: Black Milk’s Tronic
Hip-hop in the 2000s has been ruined for me by the mere existence of 90s hip-hop. In high school, I thrived on a wave of creativity in the rap world, namely the mid-90s rise of Mobb Deep, Nas, and the Wu paired with final masterworks from the likes of Tribe and Tupac. Those artists marked a time when lyrics were intelligent, original, and purposeful and when beats were undeniably awesome. Since then, it’s all seemed like a bit of a downfall, a bland reworking of hip-hop’s promise. Sure, rap’s continued development as a commercial genre hasn’t only produced new bullshit MCs but has infected the promise of previous greats like, um, Nas and Mobb Deep. And when rap tries to avoid the “commercial” I find myself listening to (and not liking) the impenetrable or unnecessarily hyper-intelligent work of a band like Subtle. Yes, there have been some exceptions – thank you Jay-Z, thank you Clipse – but you get the point. All of this to say: I was quite pleased to hear Black Milk drop Tronic this year. At its simplest, Tronic is an album with good, original rhyming and dope-ass beats. It’s utterly refreshing, a break from the run-of-the-mill club hit production, sample for sample’s sake, and lyrics that amount to absolutely nothing. It’s not that Black Milk is even re-inventing the wheel: he just has good taste and quite a bit of talent. Furthermore, Tronic is a real album, full of fleshed-out songs (read: not packed to the brim with useless skits) and paced to demonstrate Black Milk’s wide-range of sound: from hard-hitting beats, to electro-infused grooves, to straight-up soul-inflected tracks. As underground as Black Milk wants to be, it’s tough to see him staying beneath the surface for much longer.
Download: Black Milk - The Matrix feat. Pharoahe Monch, Sean Price, and DJ Premier
Preview: Pieta Brown w/ Haley Bonar
I’m sorry to interrupt all these year-end festivities, but wouldn’t you know it, music keeps on going despite our best and ongoing attempts to encapsulate it. And thank whatever power (if any) that’s the case.
Pieta Brown is one of the best things to spring from the fertile Iowa soil, and tomorrow night we can reap what we sew, as it were, as Brown celebrates the release of her new EP Flight Time.
Seven songs, short and sweet, but Flight Time is rich and full of the kind of evocative details we’ve come to expect from the songstress. Get a load of not only her lyrical ability but her vocal performance on EP-opener “Sunrise, Highway 44″ below.
Pieta Brown - Sunrise, Highway 44
Opening things up is another Midwestern gal totting about a fresh EP. Minnesotan Haley Bonar joins Pieta and is bringing along her seasonally appropriate release Only X-mas. Bonar’s EP is five tracks of spare, delicate, acoustic-driven gems; in a holiday that’s becoming ever more synomomous with excess and gaudyness, it’s refreshing to hear something so simple and lovely. This could almost win over your resident Scrooge.
Download: Haley Bonar - Only X-mas
Who: Pieta Brown w/ Haley Bonar
Where: The Mill
When: Thursday, December 18th
Doors: 8pm
Cover $10
Best of 2008 #3: Wolf Parade’s At Mount Zoomer
So many of this decade’s finest indie rock debuts, records that marked a new era of definitive alternative music, were followed up with duds. Funeral, Silent Alarm, Franz Ferdinand - these were all followed up by relative shit. Wolf Parade, on the other hand, quietly and patiently crafted an underappreciated epic while they were busy pimping their various side projects. At Mount Zoomer is an exemplary record, concise in its nine songs and yet expansive in its sonic depth and breadth of vision. They once again follow their unique rubric of alternating between Spencer Krug’s literary prog panoramas and Dan Boeckner’s more post-punk rooted urgent anthems. This album finds the band both quite literally at Mount Zoomer (a recording studio) and figuratively at Mount Zoomer, which this critic perceives to be not a real mountain at all but a mound of the detritus of postmodern society. Allusions to technology, communication, transit, and war blur by the listener, while the two distinctive songwriters reflect respectively on the human condition in such a world. Boeckner displays more of the modern world dread that we’ve seen in the past from him, but while he’s so consistently fleeing the trappings of a world built on “100,000 sad inventions” he’s also addressing his place as an outlaw in this society. Krug meanwhile is obsessed with the spaces outside of this world - deserts, rivers, open places in the natural world. However, in the face of Boeckner’s constant suburban flight, he knows that in 2008 all of these are intertwined through the vast network of “roads” - physical, digital, and otherwise - that Wolf Parade bravely navigate through their music. What’s so poignant about this album is that it isn’t cheap and isn’t a protest record. It’s a document of the way we live. It captures the fear and uncertainty of both coming of age and being human in this era through it’s scattered images and emotions. Best yet, it never stagnates as each song sounds as good as the last. At Mount Zoomer is not only a definitive record for this band, but for this world.
Download: Wolf Parade - Call It a Ritual
The Best of 2008 #4: Paavoharju’s Laulu Laakson Kukista
Usually the album that tops my year-end list is not actually the album that I listened to the most in that calendar year. Call it lame, or self-centered, or just downright stupid, but I always feel the need to use the modest powers of my best-of list picks to celebrate something “artistically important,” or an album that really moved me even if I only actually listened to it twice. This year, as I was endlessly combing through all kinds of iTunes metadata, I was shocked and pleasantly surprised to find Paavoharju not only on my shortlist of best albums, but also at the top of my play counts. This is an album that I respect the hell out of and also cannot stop listening to; that’s why it’s perched here, as the official Mission Creek #4, but as my #1 album of the year.
And look, I’m aware of the pretension factor here—but I promise I’m not simply encouraging you to listen to a Finnish music collective to make myself look cool. In fact, as some Iowa City music fans and concertgoers might argue, this isn’t even the best Finnish album this year (that honor would go to Lau Nau). It is, however, the best album I’ve heard in a long time to so cohesively incorporate radically different musical practices into a complete and compelling whole. I don’t mean “styles” or “influences” (many mediocre bands do a great job aping their favorite records), I mean “practices”: field recording, noise, drone, dance pop, acoustic balladry, classical. Yet, no individual song can be shoehorned into any of these categories. Even the retro club hit that never was and never will be, “Kevätrumpu,” feels like it is set in an field below a glacier, not a European nightclub (the opening frog chorus helps to this effect). The synths are ramped up, the female vocals are set to sultry, and then: “Tuoksu Tarttuu Meihin,” a piano, violin, and found sound piece as ethereal as the previous song is corporeal.
In a record full of these kinds of surprises, perhaps the most surprising is that Paavoharju also have a knack for hooks. Take “Tyttö Tanssii” (available for download below), which is essentially a 60s folk ballad drenched in atmospheric sound. In a way that is decidedly refreshing from so many records brimming over with interesting sounds (and there are a lot these days), Paavoharju reward you with something you can outright hum—which is certainly why it is able to cross the false divide between importance and listenability that I set up for albums. Really, this is an album about challenging boundaries, and as such, it is an overwhelming success.
Download: Paavoharju - Tyttö Tanssii