I love watching country music videos when I’m hungover. Besides the really schlocky and profit-driven-patriotism that is a sad sub-genre of contemporary country, by and large country music videos are awesome: dynamic acting, melodramatic and rousing score, beautiful acoustic guitars, and really great storylines. Because with country, you really have to feel; whereas in indie rock you can sing about butterflies or old movies or your own fragmented urban existence, in country, you sing about life and death and love and heartbreak. By definition, country music is narrative music, and while at the beginning of country music videos that little text box tells you who the director is, at the end it tells you who the songwriter is. Because that’s really what it all comes back to in country music: the songwriter. And Lucinda Williams, first and foremost, is a fucking brilliant songwriter.
Author Archive for craig
Nothing like waking up to good news, especially when it involves my personal hometown hero Greg Gillis. I pre-ordered Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals album sometime back in 2007, only to wait and wait as the thing was delayed until, well, right now. The mysterious and legendary head of the Illegal Art label, Philo Pharnsworth, sent us pre-order nerds an email that the album can now be snatched in delicious mp3 320 kbps format. Even if you didn’t pre-order, the album is available Radiohead-style (read: “free!”) from the Illegal Art website. Jump on it.
With each release Gillis smooths out his style, from the IDM leanings of his sophmore effort Unstoppable (2004), to the club-friendly mash-ups of Night Ripper (2006), to the even more refined mix of the new Feed The Animals. Here the music seems more like an exceptional mix tape than the genre-pushing collage that thrust Gillis into the limelight, aligning him closer to Mission Creek alums The Hood Internet, or other ‘net DJ stars like Siik or Certified Bananas. [This is especially true due to the short shelf-life of music like this and it’s popularity. I mean, I understand that Gillis essentially had to include R. Kelly’s “I’m a Flirt,” but the Hood Internet version is already the definitive interpretation.]
That’s not to say that the music itself isn’t awesome; these are guaranteed ass-shakers that will have every music geek in the world laughing out loud AND singing along. Additionally, I’m only 80% through my first listen, it’s 10 am, and I haven’t had breakfast yet. So judge for yourself with the sample below. As you’ll soon hear, you can expect everything from AIR to Dexy’s Midnight Runners to Tag Team to Busta Rhymes to Lil’ Wayne, with a little Tom Petty thrown in for good measure. I’ll let you do your own careful listening.
Download: Girl Talk - What It’s All About
Tomorrow afternoon, Exodus Music Festival awakens from a several year hiatus, and this beast is poised to reestablish itself as one of the most fun and musically adventurous days of music in the state. The promoters of this year’s fest have done a killer job incorporating the Iowa City old favorites, the Iowa City new school, as well as great bands from other parts of the country. Here at Mission Creek, we look on in awe (and often in horror) as more and more giant corporate-sponsored festivals throw absurd sums of money at bands in the name of an afternoon of fun (and profit); Exodus, like us, is keeping things local, homegrown, and community-oriented. This year, they’ve also partnered with Earth Expo to think not just about the local community, but the global one. That’s a message we can all get down with. And its $12 bucks, BYO everything, and on a farm.
So as you’re chilling out on a blanket with some organic grub, tasty beer, and whatever other supplements you need to survive a day-long music fest, here are some of the jams that you absolutely have to catch. But seriously, every band on the bill is worth checking out.
MC/VL: Minnestota hip-hop duo take the fun and playfulness of early career Beastie Boys into the 21st century. White guys decked out in mullets and super-ironic stashes, they have old-skool flavor but back it up with tight rhymes and innovative samples, including many from the world of indie rock. [Myspace]
School of Flyentology: We can’t stop giving these dudes props for slaying it at Mission Creek with Steve from the Hood Internet, but they actaully deserve more respect for quietly establishing the most progressive and interesting dance party in Iowa City, every Tuesday night at the Yacht Club. I saw one of the duo last night, and he said they’ve been working hard on the set. When these guys work hard, you better believe that means you working it even harder on the dance floor. Or grassy lawn or whatever. Might want to pack some bottles of water.
Miracles of God: Samuel Locke-Ward has been written about one million times on this blog. I caught the end of the Miracles of God set on Tuesday night at the Mill, and it was great. Locke-Ward will be heading off on a summer tour soon with the Teddy Boys, so come wish him well, and listen to the best, most concise and interesting pop that our fair city has to offer. [Myspace]
Skye: Ex-Skursula violist is keeping the dream alive with delicate songs sung beatifully, and the trademark birds and bees and cuddly things that we’ve all come to love about Skye’s lyrics. Her solo show is a loop pedal extravaganza, which makes it temping to make the comparison to Andrew Bird, but that wouldn’t really make any sense. Skye is in a class by herself.
If there’s one thing that’ll get me writing a Sunday morning post it’s a new Alanis Morissette album. I’m not kidding here; Jagged Little Pill (1995) is one of the few albums, like Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983), to move 30 million units and still be awesome. While Googling around this morning I found out that a new Alanis record, Flavors of Entanglement (wtf is up with that title?), comes out June 10th and features Guy Sigsworth at the helm. How did I not know this? Sigsworth is one of my favorite producers, getting his start on Seal’s “Crazy” (an undeniably great song), working with Bjork, being a member of Zach Braff darlings Frou Frou, and programming strange, really dramatic, quasi-religious songs for Lamb. It’s an interesting, though not necessarily mind-blowing career. His work often eschews innovation in favor of listenability, which makes complete sense given the kind of artists he works with (ed note: Bjork? Listenable?). Sigsworth is at his best is when wrapping great vocalists (Seal, Bjork, Imogen Heap) in a more interesting sonic space that doesn’t threaten to steal the spotlight. In this way I think much of Sigsworth’s work can be seen alongside the brilliant production that William Orbit did for Beth Orton and what Ben Watt did for Tracey Thorn in Everything but the Girl…
I think it was Edwin Way Teale who said, “The world’s favorite season is the spring. All things seem possible in May.” Indeed, May is a month when all things, in fact, might be possible: graduations, really bad karma, inappropriate dorm touching finally being prosecuted, music, sunshine, lollipops, etc. etc. And with just three more days of magical May remaining it is time to get out and do your thing before June, which someone once said “is a skanky-ass bitch.” When all things are possible, however, one might succumb to paralysis and fear at the sheer scope of possibilities. (What would the world be like if anything was possible?) That’s where we step in with our weekly list of things to do, which, for this weekend only, you can imagine as merely three out of an infinite number of possibilties.
Thursday
Johanna Kunin w/ Caleb Engstrom, Skye Carrasco / Public Space ONE / 8 PM / $3
Read just below this post for the full skinny. This will be a very nice show, and will give you plenty of time to prowl the night afterwards.
Friday
Dave Zollo and the Body Electric / The Mill / 9 PM / $6
I’ll let the Mill’s website do the talkin’ for me: “Equipped with a ‘rode hard and put away wet’ whiskey-soaked rasp and a deep bag of keyboard chops that echoes some of the greats of country, rhythm & blues and gut-bucket rock, Zollo and the boys are sure to move your feet.”
“Rode hard and put away wet”?? I’ll go to this show, but I’ll feel weird about it. And I’ll also start trying to work that phrase into as many casual conversations as I can.
Zollospace: http://www.myspace.com/davidzollo
Saturday
Mutators w/ Modern Creatures, Wet Hair / 115 N. Dodge / 9:30 PM
Why not end the weekend with a little house party of the experimental music variety? Local impresario, artist, and kind mastermind Shawn Reed plays in Wet Hair, and the other two bands are from Vancouver, which ups the “cool factor’ by about one million per cent. See you there, if you dare.
a one: http://www.myspace.com/mutators
and a two: http://www.myspace.com/moderncreatures
and a three: http://www.myspace.com/nightpeoplerecords
Writing blog blurbs about upcoming concerts lends itself to a style that is somewhere between a promotional one-sheet (”They sound like Pavement-meets-Dolly Parton!”) and the new-new-music criticism (”dauntingly terrifying, vaguely unsettling, yet somehow perfect, like dumping too much hot sauce on a batch of scrambled eggs the morning after your first date with a transvestite.”). Here, those things fall mostly flat, because in the most un-pretentious way possible, David Strackaney (stage name Paleo) is a serious artist and unflinchingly earnest. His songs, which sound like contemporary folk, work by cutting through the bullshit. I’m reminded of a radio essay I heard once about George Burns, where the thrity-something woman interviewing him felt exposed and shallow in his wizened presence, like so many of the teenage girls that she was convinced she could see right through. Certain perspectives reject trivia and posturing; they have (or at least seem to have) a broader perspective on life and art and “the important things,” which are the things, that, from where you sit, are just out of reach and unprioritized. So perhaps Paleo is an old soul, perhaps I’m a douchebag; either way, his music penetrates me, which is why I keep letting it back in. He wrote a song a day for a whole year–it doesn’t take a genuis to see that a project like that is much about discipline as it is about songcraft. I’m thrilled, and a little bit nervous, to be involved in Public Space One, a project that he once ran. He produced the brilliant new These United States record. He puts out all of his records himself.
I have a good feeling, or perhaps a hope, that something about Paleo’s performance at the Mill on Friday night will catch you off guard. It might be the warble in his voice, his unassuming yet commanding stage presence, or the emotional precision of his music. Even it it’s a stopover on your ride to Old Time Relijun, it’s a good place to visit. Stay too long, and you might just end up in love with the guy.
Download: Paleo - What Is Love?
Paleo plays with Old Time Relijun, Dead Larry, Adam Matthew Havlin, and The Zebras at the Mill on Friday, 9pm showtime, $6.
“What will the future bring? I can’t even wake up early in the morning…” That’s pretty much the way I feel during this (and every) finals week, wondering how, over the course of the last 15 weeks, things get to this point. The answer is, they just do (”they just do”= music + booze), and Head of Femur know this. That line is from “Isn’t It a Shame?” the closing track on their stellar recent release, Great Plains. The rest of the record is filled with a sound that is actually stripped down from their last record (could you go any bigger than Hysterical Stars?)yet still manages to convey the epic space–both internal and physically real–of their midwestern subject matter. It’s a rock/pop/prog exercise in representing the features of a featureless landscape; in short, it’s what we do everyday, set to music.
If you don’t know anything about HoF, here’s the scoop. They were Nebraskans transplantedto Chicago by the fall of 2001, and soon the trio of Mike Elsener, Ben Armstrong and Matt Focht had some songs on their hands. They end up signed to Greyday for their dubut, and end up on SpinART for their sophomore effort, the aforementioned Hysterical Stars. In the meantime they are touring with a gazillion people, Polyphonic Spree-style, with harps and bajos and who knows what else. The sounds, of course, are killer, and they take to road with my some of my favorite bands, like Arhcitecture in Helsinki and Andrew Bird.
And now, dear reader, they are passed along to us. “Stripped down” to a “more manageable” five piece (this is seriously what people are writing. Do you understand yet how HUGE this band’s sound is?), they take the stage at ICYC this Sunday with Des Moines’ Poison Control Center and Heavenly States. You’ll be there if you know what’s good fer you.
Download: Head of Femur - Climbing Up Fire Escapes
It’s 4:30, which means that the better part of 4 hours and 30 minutes–that’s a mighty long time–the red alarm has been going off in Mission Freak Central letting me know that shit is late. This alarm (which actually isn’t an alarm in the physical sense, but a telepathic connection that we can use to harrass each other) makes me really twitchy. This in turn makes it difficult to type, and since, as we already know, shit is late and you got things to do, means we need to cut straight to the sausage race.
Thursday: Ill Ease, Liberty Leg, Glaciers of Ice :: Hall Mall / 9pm / $5
ILL EASE
http://www.myspace.com/illease
One-woman-band from Brooklyn, opened for Battles here last year. Plays all instruments, incites parties.
LIBERTY LEG
http://www.myspace.com/libertyleg
Spatoon spitting alt blues rock.
GLACIERS OF ICE
Warped hip hop from David Morris.
Note: David Morris is a good friend of the Creek. I’m currently borrowing a keyboard and turntable of his, though not one of the two turntables he’ll be playing tonight. He came with us to SXSW. Nevertheless, because shit is late, I stole the info on those other bands straight outta the Facebook invite. Suckas.
Friday: Kelly Pardekooper w/ She Swings, She Sways :: The Mill / 9pm / $6
Kelly Pardekooper played an absolutely amazing set at The Picador as part of the Mission Creek Fest, confirming his status as a local legend on and off the stage. His music is great, he’s a nice guy, and from at least one story I heard, he knows how to drink one or two beers as well. While chatting after the show, and with no disrespect to his past players, he told me that the band he’s playing with for this show is one of–if not the–best he’s ever assembled. He told me to be there, and now kids, I pass that message on to you.
Saturday: Mac Lethal w/ Grieves, Dj Sku :: The Picador / 9pm / $8
Kansas City hip-hop on the Rhymsayers tip. You know you want to taste it.
Thanks to staff photographer Kristin Wood for these great shots of this year’s fest. Click on the links for full galleries of some of this year’s most memorable performances.
Day One Gallery, feat. Vandaveer, These United States, Pieta Brown, 4th of July, Birth Rites, Wheelers, MC/VL, and Datagun.
Day Two Gallery, feat. Neva Dinova, Cepia, Oh Astro, Great Lakes Music, and The Western Front.
Day Three Gallery, feat. Cursive, Mayflies, and the Gglitch
Day Four Gallery, feat. Dan Deacon, Baby Teeth, Bird Names, and Porno Galactica
[Ed. note: trusty John Schlotfelt also took some snaps that I gallerized right here. Enjoy!]
(Ed.’s note: infrequent but beloved Mission Creek writer Sam Edsill will be doing daily festival reports along with John C. Scholtfelt. If you missed the shows, enjoy the narratives. If you were there, leave comments and discuss your own experiences.)
It’s mid-afternoon as I write this, but the buzz from Mission Creek’s opening salvo of music hasn’t quite worn off yet. (Fortunately for me - and my day job - the buzz from several pints of Fat Tire and Leinie’s Red has). My stylish hot pink festival pass has survived its first 24 hours. Three more days to go, little guy. And now, the rundown:
