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Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Video: HAAM Benefit Day at Whole Foods
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Young Mariah hits the big screen
2008 Jay Janner AMERICAN-STATESMAN
We first caught up with local r&b sensation-to-be Mariah Roberson at the 2008 Urban Music Festival when the then 13-year-old stunned us with her explosive pipes. We checked in with young Mariah again before this year’s Urban Music Festival in April and she gave us the rundown on all sorts of exciting developments in her budding career including a small role in the upcoming film adaptation of the off-Broadway musical ‘Mama, I Want to Sing.’
The film stars r&b artist Ciara as an aspiring singer struggling to balance her pop aspirations with her family’s strong religious sensibilities. Mariah plays the lead character as a young girl. The film is scheduled to debut this weekend on the closing night of the 13th Annual Urbanworld Film Festival in New York City. Mariah is heading to the Big Apple for the opening.
No word yet on when (or if) the film will hit theaters nationally, but you can check out the trailer, which features our girl laying down some serious soul, here.
You can catch Mariah locally at Emo’s on October 24, when the 15-year-old Stony Point High School student opens for Sean Kingston.
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CD review: Owen ‘New Leaves’
Owen
‘New Leaves’
Polyvinyl
Grade: A-
There is a moment on Owen’s second release when Mike Kinsella, the sole force behind the Chicago-based project, raises his soothing voice over his atmospheric acoustic riffs to ask a few female strangers at a bar, “Which one of you poor souls wants to drive me home?” For “New Leaves,” his latest effort, Kinsella moved out of his home studio and employed producers with connections to Iron and Wine and Wilco to control the knobs so he could focus on singing about being “a housebroken, one-woman man.”
These changes of pace will probably have some longtime fans decrying Kinsella for going soft. And in some senses, maybe he has.
But that doesn’t mean he’s lost his edge. Even after he admits his domestic nature on “Amnesia and Me,” Kinsella blows through an electric solo that might make most metal guitarists blush. Other songs, like “Brown Hair in a Bird’s Nest,” once again show Kinsella’s ability to convey complicated emotions in short stanzas, as he simultaneously laments and jokes about his dishonest habits, singing, “I swear on my mother’s gravy/That I didn’t lie to you/I just didn’t tell the truth.” In other songs, such as “Good Friends, Bad Habits,” he subjects even his closest friends to cutting criticism.
“New Leaves” represents many things. In the lush, string-laden title track, the new leaves are the experiences a wayward love interest has chosen over relationship stability. For Kinsella, they are the feelings of fulfillment and contentment he has found in his family life. For the album as a whole, they are the abundance of intricate, orchestral flourishes tastefully worked into each track.
But more than anything, they represent a season in Kinsella’s career that no one could have guessed was to bloom, but that is welcome nonetheless.
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Puddles at Zilker caused by blocked pipe
So it’s raining like the dickens right now (the afternoon of Sept. 22) and one wonders: How is this going to affect the Austin City Limits Music Festival?
As the stages are starting to go up around Zilker, there a few giant puddles on the edges of the park.
“The large puddle is caused by a storm drain pipe that is blocked,” said Gene Faulk, the Zilker Park Enhancement project coordinator for the Austin Parks and Recreation Department. “The blocked pipe is located on the south side of Barton Springs Road, which is not within the area that was renovated. PARD staff is in the process of repairing this problem. This will allow the water to drain from the large puddle near Barton Springs Road.”
There is no drainage system installed with the new irrigation system, Faulk said. “Small puddles within the park will occur as before the renovation,” he said. “The leveling that was performed was addressing the ‘humps and bumps’ that had developed over time, not providing positive drainage for the entire site.”
The improvements to Zilker Park were made in the past year and paid for in part by a $2.5 million donation from C3 Presents, the promoters behind ACL Fest.
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Brazos to release debut full-length, tour with White Denim
‘Phosphorescent’ cover art
Long-suffering fans of ever-evolving Austin indie rock and folk act Brazos, take heart: you won’t have to content yourselves with two measly EPs for much longer. The band will release their long-awaited debut album, “Phosphorescent,” Nov. 10 on Autobus Records, according to a release from the their publicist. The album handily coincides with a North American tour supporting raucous garage rockers and fellow Austinites White Denim, which kicks off Saturday, Oct. 24 at the Mohawk. (White Denim also plays a Red Cross benefit Wednesday night at Antone’s.)
Brazos started as the solo recording project of songwriter Martin Crane, a graduate of the University of Texas’ Plan II Honors Program and member of the Tonewheel Collective, a loose gathering of Austin’s best young musicians that included such luminaries as Jared Van Fleet and Ramesh Srivastava of Voxtrot and Bill Baird of Sound Team and Sunset. The group — now settled into a trio with Crane, Paul Price and Andy Beaudoin — has seen a series of lineup changes since the 2007 release of two expansive, lyrically dense EPs, “Feeding Frenzy” and “A City Just As Tall,” with Tacks, the Boy Disaster’s Nathan Stein and White Denim’s Josh Block both being members for a time.
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CD review: Girls ‘Album’
Girls
‘Album’
(Matador)
Grade: B
Releasing the debut album by San Francisco duo Girls two weeks after Labor Day constitutes a monstrous offense of timing. With its reverb-drenched harmonies, lo-fi production, jangly guitars and simplistic pop lyrics, it’s an ideal summertime record, a sort of Beach Boys-by-way-of-Guided By Voices delight that lends itself well to hot temperatures and lazy evenings.
Vocalist Christopher Owens, belting out his lovelorn tunes in a surprisingly faithful recreation of Elvis Costello’s 1970s croon, kicks things off with pop gem “Lust for Life,” which finds him acknowledging his sins and trying to “make a brand new start.” It’s a promise he makes good on with upbeat, catchy, spare rockers like the surf guitar-inspired “Morning Light” and winning head-bopper “Darling.” He’s less successful on the slower-paced ballads, like “Headache” or six-and-half-minute epic “Hellhole Ratrace,” with its vocals that sound as though they were recorded at least 12 feet from the mic and a guitar that seems to have wandered in, lost and confused, from another song.
But most is excused thanks to the record’s pervasive low-key charm, as Owen paints a picture of a utopia of California girls and beachside relaxation, a season when, as he sings on “Summertime,” he can “grow out my hair, go anywhere, and sleep in until afternoon.”
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CD review: Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band ‘Between My Head and the Sky’
Yoko Ono/ Plastic Ono Band
‘Between My Head and the Sky’
(Chimera)
Grade: A-
At this point, the only music fans who have heard Yoko Ono’s extraordinary 40-year body of work and don’t recognize her as an innovator are pretty easily slotted into two groups: folks who are still fuzzy on women’s suffrage and Beatles loons who still blame her for their inevitable disintegration. Even if you don’t have much use for her often extreme music, Ono was there before most folks, pushing envelopes in art and sound and doing it as a woman whom, for a while there, the entire planet seemed to hate just kind of on spec.
This is the first Ono album released with the Plastic Ono name since 1973’s proto-feminist screed “Feeling the Space” and her first all-new studio effort since 1995’s alt-rock infused “Rising.” This new model Ono Band includes her son Sean Lennon, Yuka Honda from Cibo Matto, and electronic-dance savant Keigo Oyamada, a.k.a Cornelius. “Between My Head…” rolodexes 40 years of Ono’s tricks. “Waiting for the D Trains” opens the album with spikey, no wave guitar flail and wordless yells, while “The Sun is Down” would be welcome at any rave. The jazz on “Ask the Elephant” owes plenty to Ornette Coleman’s harmelodic funk, while “Memory of Footsteps” and “Unun. To” (the latter in Japanese) are meditative, small group sketches which are alternately thoughtful and distressingly Steve Allen-ish. “Calling” could be a leftover “White Album” jam from a particularly “out” afternoon or a Sonic Youth rehearsal tape. In no way is this a bad thing. In no way is almost any of this album a bad thing — it some of the most vigorous, vital rock music a 76-year-old has ever produced.
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ACL preview: The Knux
If the overflow of words on The Knux’s “Remind Me In 3 Days…” wasn’t already a tip off, here it is laid plain; eloquent rapper Krispy can talk. A lot. About anything.
In the space of 15 minutes he holds forth on his cellphone’s downfall during the previous night’s romantic rendezvouz, the merits of Texas barbecue, the continuing allure of his native New Orleans, the missteps of hip-hop musicians exploring other genres, how recent tour mate and hero Q-Tip got him out of a legal jam, why his brother and bandmate Al Millio wasn’t up for interviews on this day (hint: a drug that rhymes with “brooms”) and his group’s ongoing playful beef with modern rockers Silversun Pickups on the 2009 festival circuit. A tiff that won’t keep up when the Knux plays Austin City Limits Festival since the Pickups are, sadly, absent from the ACL bill.
Most of the talk with Krispy can’t be published here (language concerns), but here’s what made it through. (The Knux are scheduled to play at 1:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 2, on the Xbox 360 stage during ACL Fest.)
American-Statesman: You guys came to Los Angeles because Hurricane Katrina destroyed your home in New Orleans, and it seems like you’ve taken to the city. Are you an L.A. guy now?
Krispy: Of course I’m an L.A. guy. Everyone becomes an L.A. guy when you move here, you just have to. We always make everywhere we go our home, even though I still have my New Orleans accent and New Orleans way of looking at things. We’re still our own people, though, and aren’t out here kissing people’s (butts) to get things. We’re not those type of dudes. We do our own thing and stand on our own, or at least with our own team of people. What we’ve got wasn’t based on some celebrity co-signing onto anything. I’m proud my brother and I did it our own way, playing the demo for everyone at the same time and letting them make their decisions based on the music.
The record has crossed over onto quite a few modern rock stations, even though it’s very different from what else is going on the rest of those stations. How did you manage to get so many different sounds and styles into what you were doing?
You have to be a real fan of the genre to make it work. Lots of hip-hop dudes will say they’re into rock but they don’t understand it and appreciate it as music. It’s just something they want to try. I was into punk as a kid and into skateboarding, and then my mom turned us on to funk and psychedelic music because that’s what she was into her whole life. War was a big band for us, kind of a coalition type band who were doing just crazy stuff musically. I’ve still never heard a harmonica played like it is on a War record. Most times you hear it in a blues song and it sounds pretty much the same, but they made it sound like a guitar.
I really like hybrid groups like that. Music was just music and people said to hell with genres, if you can do a new jack swing record and it sounds good then go on and do it. It’s also about knowing how to produce those songs. It’s a lot easier to write a song that sounds different than it is to record it and get it to sound good, which is why a lot of those really different records don’t work.
So do you think it’s a mistake for Lil Wayne to try a rock record? Seems like he’s just doing it for the sake of trying to.
You can’t make mistakes when you’re the biggest star in the world because anything you do, people are going to follow you and at least check it out. I respect Kanye West for doing (the mostly rap-free) “808s and Heartbreaks” just because he had the balls to do it. Really that was a one-star album, but I guess I’d bump it up to two stars just because it was something so different for him. If you have a certain level of success you can do whatever you want to. Neil Young has done that his whole career, like when he did a new wave album and not caring what his fans were going to think of it.
Once you have one hit record, there’s always going to be a group of fans who come out to a show, no matter what you do after.
You can’t let fans dictate how records sound. We’re the musicians and we know how what we’re doing is supposed to sound. It’s like people who don’t have kids telling parents how to raise their children. Get out of here with that, I don’t know anything about your kids and you don’t know anything about my music.
How are you handling taking up those afternoon slots on festivals this summer?
This year it seems we’re always on at the same time as the Silversun Pickups and it’s kind of become a battle between us and we usually end up in trailers that are near each other, too. I tell them I’m going to rip them and we have fun with it. We come out to “Genesis” by Justice and if Silversun Pickups are playing one stage over, I have the DJ turn it up extra loud so they know we’re there.
The thing is, I want to see them because they’re a good band I haven’t really gotten to see them all summer. There have been like a half dozen festivals we’ve played, where they’re opening the main stage while we’re headlining a side stage and it never quite works out.
Is it hard to stick out when you’re mixed with that many bands?
Our show is so intense, we stick out even though there’s so many bands. The economy’s so bad right now and people are paying good money in a recession to see us, so you better jump up and down, sweat like hell and maybe even shoot an apple off someone’s head with an arrow if that’s what it takes to win people over. I’d probably play Russian roulette up there with my own brother if they’d let me. Of course, in 10 years attention spans will be so short you’ll pretty much have to do that to get anyone to even look at you.
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Bon Iver live for $2!
Bon Iver’s Oct. 4 show at the Paramount Theatre is technically sold out, as is his appearance at ACL Fest, but there are tickets available to his Oct. 1 show, with Megafaun opening. They’re only $2.
The catch? You have to drive eight hours to Marfa. B.I.’s show is at the Crowley Theater.
With so many acts coming to ACL from the West Coast, Marfa is prime to be a stopover site. Maybe there might even one day be a mini-ACL Fest in Marfa the week before ACL.
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