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Saturday, April 30, 2011
Moonlight Towers unveil new CD tonight at Antone’s
The rock band is dead. That’s what we heard at the end of last year when not a single guitar/guitar/bass/drums album landed on Billboard’s list of the 25 best-selling albums of 2010. But James Stevens of Moonlight Towers is not buying the doom talk. “Everyone I know is into rock ’n’ roll,” said the Austin band’s singer-songwriter-guitarist-producer. Moonlight Towers’ new album “Day is the New Night” is definite proof that rock’s not even under the weather.
Two previous, critically acclaimed albums make this one the end of a trilogy, so Stevens, drummer/harmony singer Richard Galloway, guitarist/ keyboardist Jacob Schulze and bassist Jason Daniels paint their power pop in grander strokes. Occasional horns, as on steamroller opening track “Heat Lightning,” and impassioned female vocals (“Distant Wheels,” “Easy Way Out”) give the record a Memphis feel. But if the band didn’t name itself after an Austin thing, you might think they’re from New Jersey or Philadelphia. At times they sound like the Smithereens if their singer were Jon Bon Jovi. (Bet that line doesn’t make the press kit.)
The four members of Moonlight Towers — all original — have day jobs and new families, so they don’t play out as often as they want to, though a recent tour with Blind Melon (Stevens’ brother’s band) recharged their road readiness.
“Day Is the New Night” came together in bits and pieces, though it sounds like it was bashed out in a barn over a long weekend. Since Stevens co-owns the East Austin Recording studio, the Towers were able to get their ideas down during unoccupied blocks of time. “We made the record in about 10 hours, spread out over a year,” said Stevens, raised in the same small Mississippi town where Howlin’ Wolf was born. “Our enthusiasm for playing music hasn’t changed at all, even though we have other responsibilities,” Stevens said. “I felt the same way making this record as when I was 16 going to Memphis to make a demo. The whole band is like that. This is what we do.” Sales might be slow, but the love for pure danceable rock ’n’ roll will stay strong if Moonlight Towers have anything to say about it. And on the new record they do.
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Austin Psych Fest review: Crystal Stilts
When asked last week what counted as psychedelic music, Alex Maas of the Black Angels said that the category was ridiculously broad and that almost anything, including old ladies playing the banjo, was psychedelic if the listener judged it as such.
This year’s Psych Fest lineup puts that philosophy into practice, with Friday night purveyors of Brooklyn-based post-punk Crystal Stilts offering not one but several definitions of the genre, ranging from their version of traditional late ’60s style psych to darker, more contemporary fare. Whether lead singer Brad Hargett and the rest of the band like it or not, his detached, brooding vocals layered atop punchy rhythms do sound as though they borrow a bit from Joy Division. They can hardly be considered a knockoff, though, with all of the other sounds the band throws at its listeners. On “Invisible City” from the band’s 2011 release “In Love With Oblivion,” keyboardist Kyle Forester’s twisted surf rock organ added an extra layer of creepy behind Hargett’s already disturbing chorus: “we know what happened at death, but I don’t have to say why.”
On stage, Forester played the animated foil to the reserved Hargett, who stuck close to the mic stand. Elsewhere guitarist JB Townsend and bassist Andy Adler focus on their instruments and drummer Keegan Cooke. The three plotted gunshot intros, exploding into blazing, guitar-forward rock numbers that lit up the cavernous interior of the Seaholm Power Plant. At other points, they toned it down a bit, leaning more toward jangly garage pop, guitars and keys in delightfully messy conversation, but the energy remained. By the end of the set, that momentum boiled over into a wall of noise on “Prometheus at Large;” chaos lives at the heart of their psych.
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Comedy review: Craig Ferguson @ the Paramount Friday
As a stand-up comedian, “Late Late Show” host Craig Ferguson has great material and flawless delivery. Or at least his delivery was flawless at the early show at the Paramount Theater Friday night. But what makes him stand apart from other comedians is that his stage persona seems a genuine reflection of his personality: generally upbeat, self-aware and more than willing to make himself the butt of the joke.
He joked about his own accent, his clumsy attempt to do a British accent and how people in Scotland couldn’t understand what in the world James Doohan was saying on “Star Trek.” “We thought he was Pakistani,” Ferguson said. He also mused on the break he got on the “Drew Carey Show,” whose star his manager pitched as “a fat guy from Cleveland.”
“Fat is where comedy is stored!” Ferguson said.
Of course Ferguson said he was pleased to be in Texas but claimed the string of dates was mainly because he’d just had a baby and wanted to stay in hotels, watch porn and order room service.
Ferguson frequently talks about his nearly two decades as a raging alcoholic, drug user and general miscreant, but said he wasn’t as bad as some such as, well, Mel Gibson.
“I was a blackout alcoholic for 15 years but I never turned into a (bleeping) Nazi,” Ferguson said.
Take that, Mel.
