Music

Photos: Ben Folds at the Orpheum

JAMIE SPEAR — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:39:24 GMT

“You are in the elite first wave of people to hear this stuff,” Ben Folds with a smirk, possibly no longer able to be serious on stage after nearly two decades of tongue planted firmly in cheek . . . CONTINUE READING Megan Bell's review.

Ben Folds at the Orpheum Theatre, Boston, MA
September 26, 2008
Photo credit: Jamie Spear

Men from Mars(eille)

JEFFREY GANTZ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:55:08 GMT

Lo Còr de la Plana invade Boston
“Un jour ou l’autre, parlera l’Europe marseillais” — “Sooner or later, Europe will speak Marseille.”

LO CÒR DE LA PLANA: Rigaudon, bourrée, rondeau — meet techno-groove and ragamuffin.

“Un jour ou l’autre, parlera l’Europe marseillais” — “Sooner or later, Europe will speak Marseille.” That might have been just a sporting-goods-company promotion, but two million Marseillais (out of a total population of 1.5 million!) take it to heart. Founded in 600 BC by Greeks from Asia Minor and subsequently dominated by Romans, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Saracens, Franks, Aragonese, Angevins, and, now, Parisians (just remember, the national anthem is not called “La Parisienne”!), France’s second-largest city is a Mediterranean melting pot of people from Italy, North Africa, Spain, Greece, Corsica, Turkey, Armenia, Vietnam, and China, for starters. Marseille already speaks Europe, and much more, but these days, the city’s music is turning to the Occitan language of the South of France, the language of the mediæval troubadours, and finding inspiration, as well as a cultural identity, in its dense, intricate poetry. Massilia Sound System opened the door in the ’80s with their trobamuffin hip-hop, singing in both Occitan and French. Now another Marseille group, Lo Còr de la Plana, have grabbed the baton, and they’ll be bringing it to the Somerville Theatre this Friday, October 3.

Like Italian, French, and Spanish, Occitan developed from Latin, but its true sibling is Catalan, as spoken in Barcelona and Valencia. (What to call this language is a very hot potato.) In the Middle Ages, it was the lingua franca of the Western Mediterranean, the preferred language of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard the Lionheart. Dante gave some thought to writing his Commedia in Occitan, the better to be understood outside Tuscany. (Had he done so, the history of Occitan, and of Italian literature, would have been quite different.) He settled for a brief hommage (albeit in Purgatorio) to the 12th-century troubadour Arnaut Daniel, whom he called “il miglior fabbro” — “the best craftsman.” (Seven centuries later, Ezra Pound called Arnaut, who’s credited with the invention of the sestina, the best poet who ever lived.)

The rote stuff

MATT PARISH — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:06:52 GMT

The meticulous mayhem of USAISAMONSTER
A USAISAMONSTER show is all third-eye perception and muscle memory.

WORK/ETHICS: “It’s like the old jazz guys you read about: broke. Everything going into the band. Practice every day and repeat the songs again, again, again.”

A USAISAMONSTER show is all third-eye perception and muscle memory. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing them play three sets in 24 hours at a couple of dingy clubs in the Pacific Northwest, and I was struck by how each set was executed almost like a military drill. Each time through, the two-piece worked their hyper-coded music like guerrilla fighters field-stripping Kalishnikovs. Colin Langenus loosed steam-engine guitar parts while drummer Tom Hohmann multi-tasked synth bass lines on pedals with his left foot. Often in rock, a little spontaneity can go a long way; but with USAISAMONSTER it’s more ritualistic; there’s not much room in the songs for surprises.

“We’ve gotten to live a dream,” says Langenus over the phone from his Brooklyn home. “It’s like the old jazz guys you read about, or Black Flag: broke. Everything going into the band. Practice every day and repeat the songs again, again, again. That’s where the joy is for us.”

It’s been a year since the group have toured, but don’t say they’ve let up. The big news this fall is that, on top of the release of Space Programs (Load), the long-standing duo have added two to their ranks: keyboardists Max Katz and Peter Schuette, unveiled a week ago in Brooklyn for the first time ever and joining a five-week that stops at Great Scott on Wednesday.

“I’ve been working with Max and Peter on learning all about music theory this year,” says Langenus. “Max transcribed all these old songs of ours out into sheet music, and now these two can come in and sight-read through songs that took Tommy and me months and months to write and learn how to play.”

Katz and Schuette will be adding the glue to band’s epic compositions, which in recent years have developed into apocalyptic novella length; they now hurtle between swamp-metal freakouts and Close Encounters of the Third Kind–style monophonic anthems.

“We’re not letting them write anything,” laughs Langenus. “We’ll see how that goes. We’ve got new songs that are going in a new direction, for sure. I’m getting a lot more into repetition and meter, learning how to do the freaky things over that instead of being so into chaos and anti-theory. But it’s still me and Tom writing and then Max and Peter learning the songs.

Fiend footage festival

SHAULA CLARK — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:59:14 GMT

“Feast Of Flesh VII” at the Coolidge
We’ve got a formidable line-up here: Banana Zombie and Housewife Zombie are joined Bike Courier Zombie, and a mangled-shirt-and-tails zombie Cannibal dubs “Dr. Teeth.”

Going on sale: October 3, 2008

GOING ON SALE — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:55:27 GMT

Breaking news from the concert ticket trade
Low vs Diamond, MC Frontalot, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, and more

The South shall rise . . .

JEFFREY GANTZ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:44:28 GMT

France's Occitan New Wave
The singing groups of the South of France draw on everything from mediæval pilgrimage chants and troubadour poetry to contemporary rap and ragga.

Blink. | The Epidemic Of Ideas

JON GARELICK — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:36:38 GMT

Thirsty Ear (2008)
Aside from the general aggressive, post-rock, post-jazz underground feel, there’s pretty tunes here.

Replacements | Rhino Reissues

ZETH LUNDY — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:32:41 GMT

Tim + Pleased To Meet Me + Don’t Tell A Soul + All Shook Down | Rhino (2008)
Rhino’s second and concluding batch of Replacements reissues charts the Minneapolis band’s Great Descent from the heights of rock-and-roll nihilism to the pit of MOR blah.

Lenka | Lenka

MIKAEL WOOD — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:30:19 GMT

Epic (2008)
A few months ago this pint-sized diva from Down Under posted a cutesy rendition of Modest Mouse’s “Gravity Rides Everything” to her MySpace page.

Termanology | Politics As Usual

CHRIS FARAONE — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:27:51 GMT

Nature Sounds (2008)
This one should be considered a “How To” manual for regional rap stars who are poised to detonate worldwide.

Peter Bjorn and John | Seaside Rock

SAM UBL — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:13:35 GMT

Almost Gold/Star Time | 2008
It’s really pointless. And somewhat nice.

Opening pitch

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:11:11 GMT

James Levine’s gala and Brahms, Russell Sherman’s Liszt, the Bostonians’ Kurt Weill
The most moving moment of this year’s Boston Symphony Orchestra opening gala came before the concert started — the standing ovation for James Levine, who looked rested and recuperated after his kidney surgery this summer, an operation that forced him to cancel most of his Tanglewood season.

WELCOME BACK! James Levine’s return to the podium drew a standing ovation.

The most moving moment of this year’s Boston Symphony Orchestra opening gala came before the concert started — the standing ovation for James Levine, who looked rested and recuperated after his kidney surgery this summer, an operation that forced him to cancel most of his Tanglewood season. BSO galas have veered from the high-serious (Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, the Verdi Requiem) to last year’s lighter-weight Ravel program and this year’s Russian zakuski. The Overture to Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (in Ravel’s orchestration — as if we hadn’t had enough Ravel) sandwiched the “Letter Scene” from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, an opera Levine had planned to conduct at Tanglewood.

Levine led the Tchaikovsky — and the orchestra played it — with great urgency and sensitivity. The “letter” is lovestruck young Tatiana’s declaration of passion for Onegin, a self-centered sophisticate who couldn’t be less interested in this gushy innocent. Throbbing tremolos conveyed those feelings even before Latvian soprano Maija Kovalevska began to sing. Decked in diamonds (credited in the program to Shreve, Crump & Low — a BSO first?), she’s as pretty as Anna Netrebko and has a vibrant, colorful voice. (She’s a student of the beloved Italian soprano Mirella Freni, who sang this scene at a BSO gala in 1990.) She sounded awfully mature for Tatiana. I missed emotional nuances, a sense of urgency, desperation, ecstasy. John Ferrillo’s oboe captured more of Tatiana’s feelings than Kovalevska did.

The Glinka and the Mussorgsky were brilliant (outstanding work from Thomas Rolf on trumpet and Kenneth Radnovsky on alto saxophone) but more orchestral showpieces than explorations of the Russian soul. Isn’t that what people were paying a top price of $2500 (including dinner) for? I guess that’s what galas are all about — and that’s one of the things that are wrong with galas.

But there was nothing wrong with the Ein deutsches Requiem that Levine led a couple of days later at the first BSO subscription concert. There were two superlative soloists: pixyish soprano Christine Schäfer, with her pure tone, strong projection, and musical understanding, and handsome, rich-voiced, characterful German baritone Michael Volle, in his BSO debut. I’d like to hear Volle’s Don Giovanni and Eugene Onegin, roles he sings in the major European houses. John Oliver’s Tanglewood Festival Chorus was at its most full-hearted (men in the middle, sopranos on one side, altos on the other, so Brahms’s great fugues had extraordinary clarity). The orchestra played at its peak. And Levine conducted as if he were sculpting — shaping phrases into movements and movements into an all-embracing continuum.

Rate expectations

DAVID THORPE — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:03:58 GMT

The Big Hurt: World-class criticism priced to move!
Grim economic news makes me pretty nervous.

Grim economic news makes me pretty nervous. I get by as a writer, but that’s a skill that won’t be much use in the inevitable Thunderdome situations of the coming years. I can’t fight or build stuff; my tiny pink hands, unsuited as they are for labor, will doubtless wind up as gruesome baubles hanging from the neck of Lord Humungus. My best bet is to save my money now in the distant hope of buying a bunch of gold or gasoline just before the fall of civilization and propping myself up as tin-pot warlord in the savage ruins of America.

So, that means I have to use what little time is left to monetize the hell out of this little writing operation. Although it’s a disgusting affront to my own integrity and the reputation of this newspaper, I’m delighted to announce that my services are officially FOR SALE!

Musicians and publicists, take note: David Thorpe offers critical excellence at rock-bottom prices!

OPTIMISTIC REVIEW: $50 | Nothing sets the stage for success like an upward trajectory, and a hint of cautious optimism in a professional review just might be your first step toward greatness. Although this review will be overwhelmingly negative, probably citing your execrable musicianship and total lack of originality, your $50 will buy a whole lot of room for improvement: “With time, [YOUR NAME] might break free of the shackles of mediocrity and blossom into a bearable act.” In the immortal words of Bad Company, “Don’t you know that you are a shooting star/And the whole world will love you just as long as you are?”

FAINT PRAISE: $75 | In today’s oversaturated rock market, even the slightest critical notice seems beyond the reach of the average working musician. For the frugal troubadour who knows how to settle for less, I offer an assortment of modest adjectives at fantastic prices: “[YOUR NAME] combines capable songwriting with workmanlike vocals for an overall effect that is, in a word, Wallflowers-esque.”

FAVORABLE B-LIST COMPARISON: $85 | Want to see your name mentioned alongside the minor movers and shakers of the music industry? Favorable comparisons like these let you break into the mainstream without breaking the bank: “[YOUR NAME] combines the jaw-dropping originality of Jet with the guitar pyrotechnics of Ben Folds”; “[YOUR NAME] has as much talent in her little finger as Katy Perry has in her little finger.”

Groop therapy

MICHAEL BRODEUR — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:43:04 GMT

Stereolab do it again for the first time
I can say without fear of clogging next week’s Letters section that Chemical Chords (the new Stereolab album, and their first on 4AD) is right up there in the top three Stereolab albums evah.

SAME DIFFERENCE: Stereolab have moved through a series of inconspicuously varied states, each phase deepening in color with every overlap.

I can say without fear of clogging next week’s Letters section that Chemical Chords (the new Stereolab album, and their first on 4AD) is right up there in the top three Stereolab albums evah. Which I guess means it comes in third. Right behind Peng! and Emperor Tomato Ketchup, of course.

How? How can I say that with such flip assurance? Well, for one, what’s the last time you heard anybody engage in a heated defense of one Stereolab album over another? If anything, the longstanding likability of this band (they’ve been subject to only a few bouts of turbulence over dozens of releases, nine of them full-lengths) has gradually turned into their biggest liability. Even devoted fans (perhaps “committed” is better) of the Groop might have trouble listing 10 favorite tracks — a condition complicated in no small part by titles like “Puncture in the Radax Permutation” and “Lo Boob Oscillator,” but certainly having more to do with a perceived sameness that seems to pave the band’s œuvre. (Besides, any reader’s attempt to submit a personal ranking of the Lab’s discography would be way over word count by the second or third entry.)

DOWNLOAD: Stereolab, "Three Women" (from Chemical Chords) [mp3]

You’ll often, in reviews, see Stereolab treated with the same encouraging shrug one might offer a reliable furnace after it switches on each year. Dominique Leone’s Pitchfork review of 2004’s Margerine Eclipse almost collapses under the weight of its own respectful indifference, a 960-word room-temperature ehhhh. Chris Jones’s recent review of Chemical Chords for the BBC asks, “How much room can you make in your life for another of their albums, when the results are nearly always the same, no matter how clever?” Despite the band’s sustained multi-lingual adherence to socio-philosophical tenets that urge individual resistance to the myriad exploitations of modern capitalism, they can come off as mass-produced. That Snickers bar you had at lunch is not the Snickers bar of 20 years ago, but as satisfying as it is, it might as well be. That sort of thing.

Post-masters

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:43:19 GMT

47 releases in, Wire can still get it up
In the annals of rock-and-roll-origin stories, Colin Newman, singer/guitarist for the pinned-down cynical conceptualist rock band Wire, has one of the odder ones.

NEWMAN, LEWIS & GREY: “That full-on rock thing from the early part of this decade, I’m not feeling that anymore at all. I’m feeling very bored with rock music.”

Methods to the madness: How Wire songs happen. By Daniel Brockman.

In the annals of rock-and-roll-origin stories, Colin Newman, singer/guitarist for the pinned-down cynical conceptualist rock band Wire, has one of the odder ones. “At the tender age of 20, I was sitting in my bedroom in Watford deconstructing rock and roll. My mission was to take the ‘and roll’ out of ‘rock and roll.’ ” There’s a pregnant pause, and then he deadpans, “You’re supposed to laugh when I say that.” Ladies and gentlemen, if you want to know where the dry wit and brutal irony of so much modern pop music comes from, it is a defensible theory that it all began in a bedroom in Watford.

Although they were thrown into the general category of punk when they formed back in 1976, there was always something . . . different about Wire. Newman’s sardonic voice — capable of being plaintive and yearning in one song (say, the shimmering effervescence of 154’s “Map Ref. 41ºN 93ºW”) and snarkily nasty with punk vitriol in the next (the pummeling proto-hardcore of Pink Flag’s “12XU”) — always met the music at odd angles. Which makes sense, since the simple no-fills clunk-clunk of the drums and the martial rigidity of the bass and twin guitars compelled their songs to move in straight lines. They had a prickly, studied attitude, like a buzzkill at a party. Newman recalls, “When Wire first played America in 1978 at CBGB’s, we were told that we couldn’t play, because we didn’t have proper songs, that they didn’t end properly. Bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash were playing much more traditional rock songs than us. And for me, I could see them for what they were: there was great entertainment value, but it wasn’t so . . . interesting, what they were doing musically.”

Here comes the Whambulance

SHAULA CLARK — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:14:37 GMT

Mass Art hosts the Baltimore Round Robin Tour
The Baltimore loft once known as Wham City is long dead, its inhabitants evicted in 2007, but the twisted DIY art movement it housed has flourished nonetheless.

BAND OF OUTSIDERS: In every city, Deacon’s traveling sideshow will set up camp for two nights of performances, each featuring no fewer than 10 bands.

The Baltimore loft once known as Wham City is long dead, its inhabitants evicted in 2007, but the twisted DIY art movement it housed has flourished nonetheless. The uprooted Whammonites are spreading the gospel of “Future Shock” (a technology-driven ethos that duals as a sound style and a business model) as fervently as ever, and the world (a/k/a the Internet) is lapping it up. As the co-founder and self-appointed caretaker of Wham City, absurdist electronic composer Dan Deacon is a man who thrives on circumventing convention. So it’s no surprise that the Baltimore Round Robin Tour, Deacon’s newest bid to bring Baltimore’s teeming music scene to the masses, is so brilliantly bat-shit insane.

Starting this week, Deacon is packing a whopping 29 bands (that’s roughly 60 humans . . . and we hope a bottle of Febreze) into one vegetable-oil-fueled bus, plus two vans for overflow, for an eight-city tour. First stop: Boston. In every city, Deacon’s traveling sideshow will set up camp for two nights of performances, each featuring no fewer than 10 bands.

The first round, “Eyes Night” (October 2), will kick off with a showcase of dreamy indie pop, ambient droning, and improvisational works from the likes of Beach House, Lesser Gonzalez Alvarez, Jana Hunter, and Santa Dads. The follow-up, “Feet Night” (October 3), will dish out thrashier, more digitally tweaked fare courtesy of Adventure, TheDeathSet, Future Islands, Video Hippos, DJ Dog Dick, and Deacon himself, among others. Then there’s the “Weird Round” — a collection of wild cards like video artist Mark Brown and puppeteers Showbeast — sprinkled throughout both sets.

Here’s where the “Round Robin” earns its title (and more crazy credits): each night, the bands will form a circle surrounding the audience. Then each act will perform a single song, one after the other, going around and around till . . . well, till it’s over. No openers, no headliners, no hierarchies — it’s a playful set-up that mirrors Wham City’s famed chumminess.

Early on a Tuesday evening at Tufts’s Oxfam Café, I sit down with MIDI-rocker Benny Boeldt, a/k/a Adventure, and Future Islands singer Sam Herring (whose gravelly croon gives a Jack Black-meets-Joe Cocker vibe to FI’s synthpop sound) to pry the gory details out of them. In a mere two hours, I’ll witness these guys whip one very tiny crowd into an ass-waggling frenzy, but for now, they’re maintaining a near-reptilian level of chill.

Record reviewers

RYAN STEWART — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:03:04 GMT

Meat Puppets, Dinosaur Jr, and Built to Spill at the Orpheum, September 27, 2008
The problem with these “play your most revered album in full” shows that everyone from Public Enemy to Liz Phair is doing lately is that the correct answer is not always a no-brainer.

Booked solid

SUSANNA BOLLE — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:23:29 GMT

A week of deconstruction, dubstep, and drones

Photos: Built To Spill at the Orpheum

KELLY DAVIDSON — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:07:53 GMT

Built to Spill at the Orpheum Theatre, Boston, MA, September 27, 2008

Built to Spill at the Orpheum Theatre, Boston, MA, September 27, 2008
Photo by Kelly Davidson

It’s about time . . .

LLOYD SCHWARTZ — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:23:29 GMT

The Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music starts in Boston
It’s been 17 years since Boston’s last local festival of contemporary music, the New Music Harvest organized by composer Charles Fussell: 19 programs (several free), a celebration of composer Ned Rorem, an opera production performed by BU students, and the participation of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

GIL ROSE AND BMOP: Their concluding concert attracted the festival’s largest audience.

It’s been 17 years since Boston’s last local festival of contemporary music, the New Music Harvest organized by composer Charles Fussell: 19 programs (several free), a celebration of composer Ned Rorem, an opera production performed by BU students, and the participation of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It was to be a biennial event, but the funding never materialized. This year, Gil Rose, director of Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Opera Boston, supported by the Alice M. Ditson Fund (encouraging music by emerging American composers) and the Boston Musicians’ Association, organized a four-day weekend of eight concerts at the Institute of Contemporary Art’s elegant 325-seat Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, with its magical views of Boston Harbor.

Eight groups participated (Collage New Music and the Cantata Singers, both directed by David Hoose, in the same concert), with a celebrity concert by cellist Matt Haimovitz. Only one concert came close to selling out (BMOP), and there was a big problem with time management. Most of the evening programs ran over their allotments. (Was no one counting the endless stage reconfigurations for each new piece?) Try getting anything to eat or drink between the end of the 6:30 pm concert and the beginning of the 8 pm event with the planned 45-minute break cut drastically short. (People started bringing their own dinners.) Those attending both concerts on a single day had to sit through some four hours of new music. My own attention span came close to the breaking point.

Yet every concert included something memorable. We got seven world premieres and two local premieres. (A third was scratched because the cellist was attending the birth of his first child.) And the playing was phenomenal. The Barbara Lee Theater acoustics are exceptionally bright and clear, dry without being harsh, though individual voices fared less well than instruments or choruses, and the theater isn’t fully insulated from hallway noise.

Each group established its own personality and tone. The Firebird Ensemble emphasized energy and youth, so even the 3-D soundscape of elder statesman Mario Davidovsky’s Flashbacks (1995) sounded fresh-minted in its moody but titillating unpredictability. Thirty-four-year-old Curtis Hughes’s 2005-’06 danger garden was an engagingly lively trigger for the entire festival. Replacing the late Donald Martino’s Rhapsody (the piece with the father-to-be), clarinettist Rane Moore gave a gripping reading of Elliott Carter’s witty four-minute internal dialogue, Gra, which was composed for Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski’s 80th birthday — a perfect set-up for Lee Hyla’s Polish Folk Songs (2007), a brash “collision” of authentically raw folk material that included a bagpipe-like melodica.