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Monday, August 31, 2009
Grupo Fantasma song featured on ‘Weeds’ finale
The soundtrack to Showtime’s herb-centric comedy ‘Weeds’ has become infinitely more interesting since lead character Nancy torched her suburban home in Aggrestic and started border hopping in Southern California. If you tune into the show’s season finale tonight be sure to pay extra attention to the bed music which we’re told will feature a song by local cumbia-funk faves Grupo Fantasma.
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ACL interview: Clutch, heroes to hard rock-loving nerds, brother to ‘Ace of Cakes’ Mary Alice
(Clutch is scheduled to play the Livestrong Stage at 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 4.)
Here is one reason Neil Fallon, singer, co-songwriter and lyricist for the hard rock band Clutch, is a hero to nerds who also love hard rock.
So, Neil, what are you reading these days?
“Well, I’m reading a short book called ‘The Big Time’ by a guy named Fritz Leiber,” Fallon says. “Do you know him?”
Yeah, I know Leiber. Science-fiction and fantasy writer of some note, known mostly for his sword-and-sorcery tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. “The Big Time” is one of his best sci-fi novels.
“Well, I’m reading all of the Hugo and Nebula winners in sequential order,” Fallon says (emphasis ours). “That one won the Hugo in ’58.”
Some rock bands are known for their groupies on the tour bus. Some are known for their drug and alcohol intake.
I have no idea what Fallon’s relationship to those things are, but I do know that he is reading a whole lot of sci-fi on the bus. In. Sequential. Order.
Here’s another reason the members of Clutch are heroes: They won the rock ‘n’ roll career sweepstakes when it looked for all the world like they had lost.
Clutch started in Germantown, Maryland, a D.C. suburb, in 1990. I first saw them in a frat house that doubled as a DIY venue on Halloween 1992.
“I remember that show,” Fallon says. “Just about every other girl was dressed like a ‘Teen Spirit’ cheerleader.”
Throughout their career, Clutch bounced from label to label, practically by the album. In nearly 20 years as a band, they have released records on (deep breath) Atlantic, Columbia, DRT, Earache, Eastwest and Megaforce. None of the record execs seemed to have any idea what to do with a band whose sound could move from mid-tempo hardcore punk to Helmet-style noise rock to something slower and heavier and bluesier.
And Fallon’s lyrics were equally confusing, wise-acre rhymes bellowed like a lumberjack at classic rock karaoke night. Everybody knew someone like Fallon in college - the dropout who was far smarter than he let on, the sometimes-quiet guy who was usually the cleverest, funniest person in the room.
Clutch thought nothing of welding giant riffs to songs with titles such as “Bottom Up, Socrates,” “Escape from the Prison Planet,” “When Vegans Attack,” “Burning Beard” and “Sleestak Lightning” and a dozen more, equally smart and funny.
And save for the occasional keyboard player, the line-up has remained the same: Fallon, guitarist Tim Sult, bassist Dan Maines and drummer Jean-Paul Gaster.
But labels were baffled, so Clutch did what bands should do: They toured. Constantly. On and off for most of the ‘90s and ‘00s. It’s the oldest business model in music, reaching back to the days of wandering minstrels.
These days, Clutch has one of rock’s most devout fanbases and they’re finally putting out their own albums, including the new and excellent “Strange Cousins from the West” full-time on their own Weathermaker Records at one of the best possible moments.
“We found ourselves off of DRT Records after our last album, thank Christ,” Fallon says. “We were in a position to cut out a lot of middle people. By the end of our time on DRT, we were already doing everything ourselves so it was like, ‘Why add more cooks?’”
Fallon says they banged out “Strange Cousins” as quickly and economically as possible and designed an admittedly nifty die-cut package for it. (“People don’t have to buy CDs anymore, so you might as well make the packaging pretty nice.”) There it was, in Target, on sale for $9.99. One gets no better access to the mainstream than that.
“Look, we don’t think we’re going to have a gold record on Weathermaker’s wall any time soon,” Fallon says. “You can build a house out of sticks really quick but it won’t last. The people who are coming to the live shows are real music fans, not fans of a hit. Their attention span is much, much longer, if not permanent.”
But there’s really only one thing anyone wants to know from Fallon these days: What’s it like having a sister - Mary Alice, the office manager from the cult cooking show “Ace of Cakes,” - who is as famous as he is, if not more recognizable?
“I’ll tell you what, man,” Fallon says. “Cake fans are way spookier than rock ‘n’ roll fans.”
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XBox is the new ACL stage sponsor; two other stages named for Livestrong Foundation, wildflower center
Austin City Limits Music Festival organizers announced Monday that the two remaining, thusfar un-sponsored stages would be named for the Livestrong Foundation and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.
In addition, Xbox360 has moved stages. It was once sponsoring the former WaMu stage (a.k.a. the gospel “tent”). They will now title the stage hosting STS9 (Sound Tribe Sector 9), Girl Talk, Raphael Saadiq, and more.
The Livestrong Foundation and the Wildflower Center are non-profits; no donor funds were utilized to acquire the stage name rights, which were a gift of the Festival. C3 donated naming rights to one of the two main stages at Lollapalooza to Olympics 2016, the organization trying to bring the games to Chicago. AT&T didn’t renew its sponsorship contract at Lolla either.
Two stages without paid sponsors? Ouch.
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Review: About Blank at Lucky Lounge
Words are meaningless when you have a trumpeter, a trombonist, two saxophonists, two drummers, a conga player, an electric guitarist, an upright/electric bassist, a DJ, and four female dancers with headdresses that the aforementioned bassist, Kyle Clayton, dubbed the Skanks.
It wasn’t that the dancers were “easy” — they wore modest spaghetti-strap tank-tops and long, flowing dresses — but their name hit the spot for “About Skank,” the gleefully spastic ska song Clayton’s instrumental jam band played while the girls busted a move. That song title was in turn a play on the band, About Blank, who at this point in its CD release show for its debut album, “Rise,” had swelled way beyond its normal size.
It’s not exactly kosher to play in Austin and not have words. Sure, Explosions in the Sky pulls it off. But they have a built-in audience from “Friday Night Lights.” Then there’s Ephraim Owens. He makes it happen. But he’s practically a novelty act, in that he’s playing a dying form, traditional jazz. After that it gets pretty thin. This is a singer-songwriter’s town.
No one seemed to know that, though, Saturday at Lucky Lounge. The place was choked with people bobbing their heads in time—and chances are the majority of them came for the drink specials and hadn’t a clue who was playing. There’s hardly a more complimentary acknowledgment of a band’s virtuosity than to win over a crowd without any advance hype.
About Blank did it with endless grooves. And with the dexterous hopscotch matches between the trumpeter, Erik Telford, and the tenor saxophonist, Kevin Gibbs. And, most emphatically, with the avant-garde guitar work of Danny Anderson, who veered with facility between tonal precision and industrial combustion, as on the mind-erasing “Black Magic Marker.”
It’s almost hard to believe this glorious night of accessible fusion was free of charge.
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Review: The Sword at Mohawk
Like AC/DC , the Sword does one thing, but the band does it about as well as anyone around right now and if you’re in the mood for that sound, little else will satisfy, as the sold out crowd at Mohawk Friday night could attest.
Its rhythm is a gallop, for the most part, the rush into battle that classic metal embodies. The sound is a thick, chugging dual-guitar clash that often breaks into the sorts of harmonies that recall British heavy metal acts such as Iron Maiden and Judas Priest - think, well, the clang of swords against armor or the singular congress of a thousand arrows raining down on an enemy. Subject matter ranges from traditional mythology (Norse, Greek) to the 20th century equivalents (the fiction of Robert E. Howard and George R.R. Martin).
It’s a form rather than a formula and a metal one at that, but not so extreme that it’s cultish (singer/guitarist J.D. Cronise’s fondness for singing rather than screaming or going all Cookie Monster is a big part of that). But nor is it poppy or especially commercial-sounding. In the weapons of our own era, The Sword is like the AK-47 or a shoulder-fired Stinger missile - not too complicated once you figure it out, but fearsomely effective and all the more popular for it.
The Austin quartet returned to the Mohawk as conquering heroes complete with a large gong and solid light show, exactly what you’d expect from dudes who spent the spring opening for Metallica. (They also looked very fit - opening for Metallica must put you personally in shape as much as it does your playing - and there must be a painting somewhere aging on guitarist Kylre Shutt’s behalf.)
The band thundered tightly through material from the 2006 debut (Age of Winter) and the 2008 follow-up (Gods of the Earth). Four new songs made their debut, material that didn’t deviate too far from already conquered lands, but showed there was still room for further exploration.
Locals Pack of Wolves and Rat King also delivered solid set, the former mixing the chug and bellow of early thrash with the thrust of hardcore punk. This was metalcore without the overly technical histronics. Rat King’s set welded complicated, detailed riffs with former Sea of Thousand singer Craig Moore’s hellish scream.
We await new albums from all three bands and raise our fists in salute.
This was only the first of a two night stand at Mohawk. How was the second night? Anyone go to both?
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Boston Globe loves our Kat
“Austin’s Great Jazz Hope” Kat Edmonson received a rave writeup in the Boston Globe today. She’ll be playing the prestigious Tanglewood Jazz Festival Sunday in Massachusetts.
“Edmonson might be the most promising American jazz singer to come along since Cassandra Wilson,” wrote Globe jazz critic Steve Greenlee.
