Exploring The World Of Indie Rock
The Travels And Trials Of Tapes 'N Tapes
originally published October 25, 2006
It feels like indie is the new mainstream. And though that’s a dubious statement at best and one that would do better given the lengthy essay treatment, it does carry some weight. Much like self-released sensations before it - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, for instance - Minneapolis rock quartet Tapes ‘N Tapes found itself elevated from playing local dive bars to touring the country regularly after a handful of well-placed and favorable reviews in the press. One could attribute this sort of success to a strong work ethic, strict determination or hook-laden songs, all of which Tapes ‘N Tapes possesses. But vocalist-guitarist Josh Grier gives all the credit to a mysterious “indie marketing guru” by the name of Clell Tickle.
“Oh, Clell’s great,” Grier reports via phone from his suburban Minnesota home. “He beat the shit out of a lot of people for us. You’ve never met a more aggressive little man than Clell.” Of course, Grier is referring to the hilarious and oft-blogged-about YouTube short starring New York City comedian Aziz Ansari as an oddly-named indie rock mob boss of sorts. If you haven’t seen it, you’re missing an amusing mockumentary of today’s independent music scene, complete with cameos from Ted Leo and Devendra Banhart. Unfortunately, there is a real human being named Clell Tickle, something Grier has contemplated amidst the hype surrounding the clip.
“He’s supposedly a real estate agent in New York,” Grier muses. “I wonder if he even knows. Now people probably think he’s some mercenary or something.”
This past July, the group released its album The Loon on XL Recordings. Tapes 'N Tapes makes the kind of hook-laden, guitar-centric rock that harkens back to some of the Pixies' finest moments. Although some of The Loon's tracks are easily labeled derivative by naysayers, it's important to keep in mind that this is a band still finding its sound, with only one proper album so far. Before hitting the road for a headlining tour that is bringing the band to Georgia and, in early November, taking it to the European mainland for the first time ever, Tapes ‘N Tapes played a series of dates with the similarly melodic Scottish lads in the Futureheads. Hearing Grier tell it, it was an experience both thrilling and humbling. “Those guys are super nice,” he says. “They’re pretty amazing musicians. Besides having good songs and all that stuff, they’re incredibly proficient. One night they were backstage doing vocal warm-ups and stuff. After that, we were like, ‘Maybe we should do vocal warm-ups.’ It’s like we’re just fucking around compared to them.”
Tapes 'N Tapes played its first major television gig on the "Late Show with David Letterman" in late July. Aside from typically surreal encounters such as running into Greg Kinnear in an elevator, the late-night TV music act process is a tad awkward for the uninitiated. “We loaded our gear in at eight in the morning and kind of set up,” Grier says. “Then we came back at around 2 p.m. for a run-through. They had us do it three times, because the song has to be three-and-a-half minutes; it can’t be longer. So we ended up having to cut like a minute from ‘Insistor.’ They were timing it and stuff. It was weird to have your first time on television consist of you playing a song differently than you’ve ever played it.”
Aside from the usual tour dates on the current trek, Tapes ‘N Tapes will perform a Halloween show at The Black Cat in Washington, DC, something that the band’s website hints will be a big deal in terms of costuming. And yet, pushed to reveal the excellent costume the group seemingly plans to unveil on that spooky night, Grier’s lips don’t spill any secrets. “I can’t divulge at this time,” he says. “There’s some internal struggle at this point. I am fighting for it, but there is some dissension. I know what I’m going to be, but I don’t know about the rest of them yet. The Black Cat in name alone is perfect for that night, but it’s also such a great venue.”
At press time, the band had already begun its latest tour, which means Grier and company aren’t working on much new material. That said, it’s not like the yearning for fresh songs isn’t rearing its ugly head within the group. “Right now, while we’re at home, I’m working up a few demos so we can start playing them live,” Grier says. “We’ve been on the road so much that we haven’t had much time for writing. Hopefully we’ll get some new material soon, though, since we’re kind of itching for new songs.”
With the buzz surrounding the band and the continued critical praise that’s getting heaped upon these four Minnesotans, it stands to reason that the pressure for a fulfilling sophomore effort would be similarly building. But that inflicted stress isn’t always the typical kind one might expect of a rock-and-roll band in such a make-or-break position.
“You know, I feel like there’s more pressure on us internally as a band,” Grier says. “For me, I’ve been playing some of these songs a couple hundred times. I think there’s more pressure within the band to have new songs and keep it exciting for us than there is from the label or other people’s anticipations. The good thing for us is that we’ve been playing a lot of places we haven’t played before. If we were going and playing the same cities every night, we’d probably all start to go crazy. But since there are new crowds all the time, that helps a lot.”
It’s a level-headed sentiment that simply underscores what Tapes ‘N Tapes is all about. Far from the prima donna antics of stadium rockers, these are just four Midwestern fellows who enjoy creating energetic and highly listenable music. Write, tour, rinse, repeat. “Initially, there’s a lot of mental shock being away from your home and stuff,” Grier says of his relatively new road-ridden life. “When you get a break for a while, that makes it a lot easier, too. But it’s just one of those things that’s such a great opportunity that you just have to seize it. If you’re going to be a pro musician, you’re going to tour, you know?”
WHO: Tapes 'N Tapes, The Annuals, Iron Hero
WHERE: Tasty World
WHEN: Saturday, October 28
HOW MUCH: $7
Tremble With Fear, And Maybe Also Delight
Chunklet Magazine Hosts Two Nights Of Comedy And Music At The 40 Watt Club
originally published October 25, 2006
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27
Patton Oswalt
Patton Oswalt’s comedy hinges on razor sharp observational skills and a complete unwillingness to pull punches. For example, during a recent roast of universally-mocked-yet-strangely-loved actor William Shatner, Oswalt pulled a paper bag from his pocket and asked the guest of honor to act his way out of it. Oswalt has played Athens multiple times and chose our town as the place to record his 2003 debut album, Feelin’ Kinda Patton. One of multiple headliners on the Comedians of Comedy Tour, Oswalt should be at least somewhat recognizable to your parents from his lengthy run on the CBS television show "King Of Queens," so bring them along as well.
Zach Galifianakis
This appearance marks Mr. G’s third time in Athens. Currently playing the role of Alan Finger on Comedy Central’s "Dog Bites Man," Galifianakis is also the host of the VH-1 program "Late World With Zach" and appeared in the feature films Out Cold, Corky Romano and Heartbreakers. Also a featured performer on the Comedians Of Comedy Tour, Galifianakis can be seen in the video for Fiona Apple’s “Not About Love.” I’ve yet to catch anything involving him, but he comes highly recommended from solid sources.
Pull The Strings Players
This Nashville, TN puppet troupe is highly anticipated this weekend, and its performance will center on a character named MC Homo Side, the world’s first gay gangsta rapper puppet. The recorded bits available online are hilarious and raw and I may be looking forward to this more than anything else this weekend. There’s a chance the troupe will deliver a special Halloween show in the 40 Watt parking lot as well, so keep your eyes peeled to catch it all.
Elf Power
Local favorite Elf Power almost needs no introduction, especially here in town. Having grown over the past 11 or so years from a fuzzy, home-recorded project full of rock knowledge and aesthetics to a wonderfully realized song-based band, the members of Elf Power have never significantly changed the elements that fed their art. Those elements include everything from gorgeous and moody 1960s psychedelic folk, 1970s glam and pop, 1980s hardcore and punk and 1990s indie and college rock. But a band's influences are rarely the whole story, and members of Elf Power have always made good use of respecting their elders but making their own, specific brand of rock. The band's most recent album, titled Back to the Web, was released earlier this year via label Rykodisc, and an international tour just wrapped [see story here].
Tickets for Friday's show cost $10 in advance and $12 at the door, and are available at SchoolKids Records or at www.40watt.com.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28
The Melvins with David Yow
The Melvins
The band that virtually defines the bridge between punk rock and heavy metal, all the while avoiding the somewhat-sleazy, market-driven "crossover" genre, The Melvins once again return to Athens. Joining them this time around is David Yow, whose pedigree includes the incomparable Scratch Acid and the one-time world-dominating Jesus Lizard. Whereas The Melvins are apt demonstrators of the heavy-as-earth rock-and-almost-no-roll genre they largely created, Yow is the entirely untied, super-humanly-animated frontman that most bands wish they had. With a dangerous disregard for personal safety - or, for that matter, personal space - Yow personifies rock and roll by keeping it dangerous. That’s really all I can say, except that he's the first man I ever saw naked onstage. But that’s another story.
Big Business
Playing original material and performing as part of The Melvins, the band formerly from Seattle and now of Los Angeles is the only bass-and-drums duo worthy of its reputation since the split of God Head Silo. I have only seen Big Business once, but was utterly blown away. Earplugs are required equipment for this show, as the group's tones regularly reach dangerous levels. Categorized by some as “hipster metal” - metal played by those with a taste for the ironic and intelligent rather than the sincere and somewhat goofy - Big Business is a great argument for disposing of genre categorization altogether and just rocking the fuck out.
Harvey Milk
The members of Harvey Milk have enjoyed their greatest success, notoriety and attention eight years after their original demise. Buoyed recently by several releases - the DVD Anthem, the re-release of the album Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men and newest album Special Wishes - the Athens/ New York band seems to have none of the cash-in mentality that would strike most acts when presented by nearly unending and fanatical interest. Rather, the band has played a smattering of shows over the past year or so and continues to work on its own schedule. Harvey Milk has always cultivated its own musical field, yielding classic-rock-styled jams, tender and pretty interludes and mind-numbingly intense and dense walls of noise and sound. Stunning to hear and incredible to witness.
Timmy Von Trimble
Timmy is the curious creation of Jon Wurster, who has performed with Robert Pollard, Superchunk and The Right Profile. He is, in my humble estimation, one of the funniest people making fun of things today. Timmy is a two-inch tall comedian who regularly appears on East Orange, NJ radio station WFMU and who will, reputedly, alienate everybody. Sounds like good times, and right in line with the contrarian and confrontational philosophy of Chunklet Magazine.
Tickets for Saturday's show cost $13 in advance and $15 at the door, and are available at SchoolKids Records or at www.40watt.com.
Lessons Learned
Back From Tour, Elf Power's Jaunt Lacked High Drama - That's Not Very Rock And Roll!
originally published October 25, 2006
Jimmy Hughes, Derek Almstead, Andrew Rieger, new pal Beatle Bob and Laura Carter tolerate Heather McIntosh and Josh Lott's antics. Life on the road!
Elf Power's tour from South to Midwest to Northeast and back down the coast to Athens contained no arrests, no fistfights, no groupies, not even minor vehicular mishaps. No high drama whatsoever! How un-rock-and-roll is that? Flagpole managed to get hold of bandmembers Derek Almstead (bass), Andrew Rieger (vocals and guitar) and Jimmy Hughes (guitar) - at various times over the past week to talk about how things went on their recent travels, and despite a tape recorder malfunction and the drinking of several screwdrivers, the overall impression of the tour was one of professionalism, of having figured out how to make something work without taking quite all the romance out of it.
For one thing, there were a few near celebrity encounters. Clyde Stubblefield, who drummed for James Brown, plays every Monday night at the King Club in Madison, WI, where Elf Power played on a Sunday night. Rieger mentions that they also played Blueberry Hill, in St. Louis, where Chuck Berry gigs once a month. Berry didn't show, but infamous scenester Beatle Bob, “local legendary icon, danced like a mad fiend through [the] set yelling out compliments between songs like 'top of the pops!' 'outstanding!' and 'exemplary!'” says Rieger.
Almstead adds, “Supposedly Kevin Bacon had been filming a movie that week in Columbia, SC, so he had come into Art Bar a few nights that week and they were talking about it like 'Kevin Bacon might show up tonight!' But he didn't.” So that was out as a possibility for major excitement for those of us who live vicariously through the exploits of musicians on the road.
Facial hair was experimented with in small degree. “Josh [Lott, the band's drummer] grew a hilarious mustache,” says Almstead, trying to recall the technical term for the specific iteration (it appears to have been a variation on the Fu Manchu). “I was against it at first because I thought it would give us a 10 percent drop in our merchandise sales, but somewhere along the line, we realized that it had increased our merchandise sales.” As to whether the next tour would feature all bandmembers sporting upper lip growths, Almstead responds, “I think there might be a law of diminishing returns.”
So is the band - cellist Heather McIntosh and multi-instrumentalist Laura Carter were also along for the ride - touring in its own customized bus these days, since Warner Bros., through its newly acquired Rykodisc label, released Elf Power's new album Back to the Web? Not unless you understand “bus” to mean “nice rental van.” And the band still plays a lot of less fancy venues, from a sports bar in a strip mall in Charleston patronized by regulars who did their best to ignore the music to Vamp's, in Toledo, OH, which Rieger describes as “an insanely huge three-story dilapidated Masonic lodge. The first floor was a crazy hip hop dance party. We played in a ballroom on the second floor. The third floor was goth dance night, and these grizzled veterans of the Toledo goth scene looked stuck in a time warp circa 1986. The promoter took me through a secret hatch onto the roof to pay me as it poured down rain. I was scared his goons were gonna hurl me over the side!”
These experiences were more than balanced, according to Rieger, by New York's Union Hall having a full bocce court on-premises; Richmond, VA's Hyperlink Cafe being packed and not being some kind of Internet craze venue; and, in Asheville, NC, “a random assortment of freaks going nuts at the show, led by a kid dressed in a Peter Pan outfit, maniacally writhing like a possessed beast.”
What's the craziest they got? It might've been eating breakfast at the dinner hour every day for about a week, until they got grossed out by it. Or it might have been beer pong in Portland, ME, for which Rieger possesses a certain degree of skill, according to Hughes: “I sat there for a while just watching Andrew taunt the other pong players, but the beautiful thing was, the taunts weren't just threats. Andrew and his teammate were quite triumphant. I was impressed.”
It's no myth that shows in other cities tend to start earlier than in Athens, especially on weeknights, and that Almstead has “specific tour crowd psychological rules. One is that if you give a person a chair, they will sit in it, and that can be an audience killer. It's always weird to go to clubs where they have a bunch of tables and chairs set up in front of the stage and you're a rock band. And then the rooms where you go and play an art space or gallery or something like that and all the lights are focused on the whole audience and there's no delineation between what's the show and what's not the show as far the lighting is concerned. People tend to wallflower out away from the light.”
It's a good idea for everyone to have a role on the tour as well as in the band, whether it be driving the van, doing sound, loading up or whatnot. The best advice for those on tour, according to the band, is “Hide your drugs.” No, that was a joke. The real best advice, according to Almstead, is to find something to do in the van, like navigating or playing video games, even if you've planned your tour out to where your trips are no longer than four or five hours driving between shows. Otherwise, he says, “you get into this really weird state of mind where you're sleeping all day, then you wake up and you're kind of dazed and you get to the sound check and then you eat.”
In some ways, this self-imposition of structure, which can exist with improvisation and goofiness, is indicative of the whole tone of the band and its members, as well as good life advice in a way. If you're lucky enough not to have a regular kind of job with structure built into it, you could end up degenerating into nothing but a couch potato; a little potato-ness isn't bad from time to time, but what you really want is something to keep you on track so your output doesn't suffer. This is the real lesson: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and probably a pound of drama, too.
No More Imaginary Life
Athens Rapper BadKat Releases Her Debut EP
originally published October 25, 2006
For local emcee BadKat, that the songs on her debut EP turned out as laid-back as they did surprised even her. "I was really surprised at how downtempo the whole thing was," she says. "It totally caught me off guard. I've always considered myself a hard rapper. All I used to do was battle rhyme, y'know? I've got books and books of them. Something about being in Florida as long as I was… I think I was looking for a higher place, maybe even spiritually, and once I left, I think that came out with how mellow the album was."
Dean Jennings
BadKat and Big Earl
BadKat - her papers say Kathryn Roberts - moved to Athens from her home state of Florida in early 2006, and quickly dove into the local hip hop scene. Taking part in several casual performances led to sets opening for other acts, and her fast friendships with local hip hop community heavyweights like Dreaded Mindz's Montu Miller or local emcee Ishues allowed her the opportunity to contribute even more. As one of the organizers of this month's "Hip Hop Homecoming Week," BadKat says she was able to help foster an event she hopes will inspire more like it. "It was great, the turnout was awesome," she says. "As far as what that festival means, and what it did, I saw a thousand new faces. It had enough success to be a stable regular event, which is really what we were aiming for. And we showed small and local business owners that supporting hip hop was viable, and getting them tied in really works with what hip hop is all about, it's so much more than music and what people are playing on a Friday night. It has so much to do with the philosophy of working together and representing the community and showing love enough to help out."
Coming to hip hop in high school after a long love affair with reggae, BadKat found inspiration in progressive groups like De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest, and upon moving to North Carolina for college, delved even deeper into East Coast emcees like the Wu-Tang Clan and Nas. "Hip hop music is a byproduct of hip hop culture," she says, discussing the influence the music had on her life and the potential it has for others. "People can tap into the music because music's such a powerful thing. You can listen to it, can be inspired by it, you can be moved emotionally, spiritually. But beyond that, hip hop is a culture that breeds through the music. Hip hop's a voice, and just like punk rock, gives people a chance to identify with themselves and express their creativity and passion."
Unreleased is the title of BadKat's debut EP, and it was her first experiment with fully realizing recorded songs. She started working on the disc this past spring, and recruited local engineer Daniel Collins of PigPen Studios for his expertise. "Daniel's a great guy. I enjoyed his personality and willingness to engage, especially," she says. "That was something I'd been missing down in Florida studios, where people didn't care whether you finished something or not, as long as they got paid for their time. Daniel was very focused. Whenever I was in there he was focused. It was very laid-back, but at the same time we were working hard. I like an engineer to be very creative on the boards, and I need their input because I can't tell you what buttons to push to get the sound in my head out."
A number of local producers contributed the beats for Unreleased, including VereenCorps and Bottle Rocket Bangers. "The majority of the beats went through a strenuous get-it-ready process," says BadKat, "where the producers would get their beats to me, then I'd toss it around, ask for some changes, work through it again and then take it to Daniel. In the mixdown process was where I tried to get Daniel more involved, whether it was adding more breaks or drops, or moving samples of vocals around. It was a lot of playing through the whole thing."
The end result is an eight-song collection that stands apart from BadKat's stage performances, which tend towards a sharp and biting wit and rapid delivery; while tracks like "Meaning of Self" retain an incisive, political edge, touching on topics from feminist theory to capitalist corruption, numbers like "How Many Days" and "Imaginary Life" are decidedly more introspective. The Renegadez's emcee Son 1 shows up on the track "Revenge." And then there's "Rock You Right," the swinging, charging collaboration with Ishues that's geared towards the dance floor and built around Bottle Rocket Bangers' unrelenting sound. "I love that song because it's a moment where we were inspired to make that song where I'd never heard a track like that," says BadKat. "I was looking for something that'd come real fast and make a great club track, and when I heard that, I knew that was it. That's the one I need to get deejays to put on their mixes."
This weekend's show will coincide with the release of the EP, and BadKat says the first 100 people who show up and pay to get in will receive free copies of the album. DJ Bulldog Purp, AKA DJ ICue, will be on hand to handle the turntables, and BadKat says he may present much of her music in a chopped and screwed, Texas-style fashion. Southern Poetic Conneckshun, long absent from local club stages, opens up and Montu Miller hosts the evening, aiming to celebrate another versatile new addition to the local community.
WHO: BadKat, Southern Poetic Conneckshun, DJ Bulldog Purp
WHERE: Caledonia Lounge
WHEN: Saturday, October 28
HOW MUCH: $5
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