LEON NEYFAKH

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists

LEON NEYFAKH — Tue, 01 May 2007 15:49:54 GMT

Living with the Living | Touch & Go
Ted Leo is dad-like, his tenderness enthusiastic but ultimately more of a spectacle than the infectious ball of fire it’s supposed to be.

Charlotte Hatherley

LEON NEYFAKH — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:55:39 GMT

The Deep Blue | Little Sister UK
Every once in a while an album comes along that makes you wonder whether melody really is the only thing that matters.

Ciara

LEON NEYFAKH — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 20:51:14 GMT

The Evolution | LaFace
Ciara fears obscurity, and with good reason.

Albert Hammond Jr.

LEON NEYFAKH — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 16:55:38 GMT

Yours To Keep | Rough Trade
The strong-but-silent Strokes guitarist sounds sheepish on his debut solo album, but his voice is suitably dreamy and the songs are just short enough for it to hold together.

The Raconteurs

LEON NEYFAKH — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 21:27:24 GMT

Broken Boy Soldiers | V2f
Jack White’s other band — the White Stripes — may be known for their bass-less, three-drums-and-six-strings set-up. But the truth is, he’s been using all kinds of instrumentation all along.

Young guns

LEON NEYFAKH — Tue, 02 May 2006 20:55:02 GMT

Blanks aim high and to the left
The first Blanks show was at an after-school program for 35 children suffering from ADD.

CALLING OUT BLOC PARTY FANS: Can Blanks appeal to the same audience?

The first Blanks show was at an after-school program for 35 children suffering from ADD. It included a clumsy Prince cover and a sing-along about sharks. One boy stood in the back of the gym and shouted (correctly) “That ain’t hip-hop!” over and over again. Another blew his clarinet along to the songs. Blanks struggled through four numbers. It rained all the way home. An inauspicious start for one of the year’s more promising young local bands.

But that was September 2001, when the four Blanks — singer Matt Boch, bassist Long Lekhac, guitarist Jon Carter, and drummer John Drake — had met as freshmen at Harvard. They were just figuring out what kind of band they wanted to be.

Four and a half years later, they’re garnering attention with their stormy translation of ’80s dance punk. Never mind that they’ve been together for four years; they say they feel the release of their EP Infinite Lives marks a new beginning. “I feel there was an incubation period that we’re just emerging from,” says Carter when I sit down with him and Boch and Drake at the Loeb Drama Center in Harvard Square. “So in a way, we are a new band.”

Blanks have found their neo-new-wave sound at a time when a number of like-minded bands, among them Protokoll and Wildlife and Night Rally, are bubbling up from the local underground. And they’re playing out more than ever. (This Sunday, May 7, they’re at T.T. the Bear’s.) It’s a reflection of the success they’ve had with Infinite Lives. Blanks want to be a nexus for a DIY community of disparate bands, DJs, artists, designers, and party promoters. “In Providence,” Boch says of his home town, “the same people will go see a weird symphonic klezmer band and an avant-metal band like Lightning Bolt.” Boston, he reflects, isn’t quite small enough for that kind of tight-knit community. Around here, he says, “the freaks don’t really stick together.”

But Blanks are aiming to do something about that. And now that the local label Honeypump, whose final release was Infinite Lives, is calling it quits, there’s a vacuum to be filled. “We’re trying to talk with, like, Unlocked Groove, and David Day and Erik Pearson,” Boch continues. “There are a lot of people who are doing electronic music and listening to Bloc Party remixes but haven’t paid much attention to the local rock scene. It’s like, ‘There’s this band that’s as good as Bloc Party in Boston, just down the block: why don’t you talk to each other?’ But the rock kids don’t show up at dance nights, so the dialogue is lacking on both sides.”

Rio representer

LEON NEYFAKH — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 15:37:21 GMT

Diplo brings baile funk to the US
It was 2002 when the then unknown DJ Diplo first started throwing his Hollertronix parties in Philadelphia.

It was 2002 when the then unknown DJ Diplo first started throwing his Hollertronix parties in Philadelphia. Nothing special about that really, except that he’s more than your average DJ: like any cultural curator — say, art-school instigators Andy Warhol and Tony Wilson — he created a new æsthetic in his discipline that corresponded with the advent of mash-ups. He’s become a tastemaker, a hunter of new sounds and unique combinations. In the process, he’s helped forge a universalist approach to consuming music. Everything is fair game, from Lil’ Jon to the Smiths, Missy Elliott to the Strokes, Kelly Clarkson to Daddy Yankee. Hollertronix represented a celebration of liking it all. It all came together for Diplo when he was asked to produce a track for Arular (XL/Beggars), the 2005 debut by the genre-bending London-based Sri Lankan siren M.I.A. (He also produced her breakthrough mixtape, Piracy Funds Terrorism, Volume 1.)

“It seems a lot of DJs today are taking pride in their scenes, and how far they can go and have a great party,” he writes in an e-mail regarding the impact of Hollertronix. “There wasn’t a thinking like this one year ago. But I can definitely see all these new young kids producing and working harder at DJing and moving music [forward] faster.”

Diplo isn’t exactly standing in place himself. He’s always had a talent for picking up on the newest trends. Last summer, he could be found at the Knitting Factory spinning opening sets for grime up-and-comer Kano. And this past February, he unveiled his new label, Mad Decent (a partnership with Phoenix contributor Chris Nelson), by releasing a 12-inch by the unknown Brazilian baile funk group Bonde do Role.

Bonde, as Diplo affectionately refers to them, fall in the tradition of invigorating Brazilian dance music that’s been reared in the filthy favela slums of Rio de Janeiro over the past decade. But until Diplo brought it over and threw it into the pan-cultural pastiche Arular, it was all but unknown outside South America. Its fan base in the US remains minuscule — something he hopes to change with Bonde do Role’s more accessible, more Americanized take on the form. “People say, yeah, I like baile funk, but only really nerdy kids on the Internet can name one artist!” he points out. “I thought, let’s have a fun artist, let’s produce a group proper for the world — just as an experiment.”

Blogs be damned

LEON NEYFAKH — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:08:16 GMT

Zines get pretty
Matthew Johnson couldn’t come to the Boston Zine Fair last weekend: he was locked in the Worcester County jail.

Matthew Johnson couldn’t come to the Boston Zine Fair last weekend: he was locked in the Worcester County jail. In his stead, he sent delegates to watch his booth and sell the last five issues of Poor and Forgotten, the small Xeroxed pamphlet he’s been putting out since he started serving time.

Poor and Forgotten costs a dollar per issue, but according to a sign taped to the table, Johnson “prefers trade because there isn’t much to read in prison.”

Boston’s second annual Zine Fair, organized in collaboration with the Papercut Zine Library and held this past weekend in the Massachusetts College of Art gym, brought together more than 40 zine makers from across the country. These are the young people who think blogs just aren’t enough. And while most of their work does not bear much likeness to the ferociously political, radically oriented zines of their hardcore ancestors, many are bringing something new to the table.

Because blogs have made it so cheap and so easy for people to distribute information, this new generation of zinesters has infused the medium with a keen sense of production aesthetics and elegance of form. Simply speaking, many zines are becoming beautiful — a strange development indeed for an industry once associated with cheap printing and snaggletoothed staples.

According to fair organizer Janaka Stucky, a former zine maker who now runs a small publishing firm called Black Ocean, interesting writing is no longer enough: readers can get that with a mere click of the mouse. Supporting the zine industry, on the other hand, requires a lot of effort: one must scour catalogs, order from small distributors, and wait patiently for things to arrive in the mailbox.

“People are doing smaller runs,” says Stucky. “But they’re doing, like, handsewn binding, or they’re silk-screening their covers — because what’s still important to us as a DIY culture isn’t just the information that’s held in it but the production and the handmade aspect.”

Take, for instance, Elsie Sampson, a student at Westchester Community College, who has spent the past year putting out the charmingly detailed zines Chinese Sweatshop and Chinese Kitchen. For the cover of her Philly Zinefest Diary 2005, Sampson uses gift-wrap, intricately cut cardboard, and soft yarn binding. The whole thing comes in a plastic bag filled with a random assortment of goodies (ours contained a tiny colored pencil, a wooden number nine, and ticket stubs).

Becoming Berman

LEON NEYFAKH — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 17:48:43 GMT

The Silver Jews’ coming-out party
After a weekend in NYC, the Silver Jews hit Cambridge Sunday afternoon on a tour in support of Tanglewood Numbers (Drag City), their fifth album in 12 years.

After a weekend in NYC, the Silver Jews hit Cambridge Sunday afternoon on a tour in support of Tanglewood Numbers (Drag City), their fifth album in 12 years. Frontman David Berman came to the stage downstairs at the Middle East sleepy but happy, shy but courageous. Not a bad look for a guy widely known for his struggles with stints in rehab. The sold-out show would be the eighth on the tour — not just any tour, but the first ever Silver Jews tour. Until Tanglewood, Berman had never planned to take a band on the road. He preferred staying home in Nashville, recording in private, even as he became increasingly well-known as an eccentric outsider artist with a gift for gorgeous songs sung in a lonely, broken voice. That he’d once played with the guys in Pavement and had worked in a morgue during college only secured his aura of mystery.

So after 15 years of writing songs and poetry but not touring, he’d accumulated a fierce cult of fans hungrier than he’d expected to hear him perform. “Many things are compelling me now,” he wrote in response when I emailed him about touring. “Before, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t have made it back alive. I didn’t see how I could leave this narrow way I’d found to live.”

The Middle East crowd offered a warm welcome. “I’m afraid I’ve got more in common with who I was than who I am becoming,” he sang, the band holding steady behind him as his voice shook around the notes. Old songs found room alongside new ones, pitting the uncertain, fragile, and vulnerable Berman of his early material against the one we were seeing on stage, the one singing summery up-tempo melodies and happy to be fronting a band. He looked solemn but self-assured, in love with his songs, his band, and his wife, bassist Cassie Marrett, who’s been singing in Silver Jews since before they were married. There were still panicked moments, but Berman’s new material seems to have him looking back at the storm from a safe distance for the first time instead of standing in the eye of a hurricane.

Lil' Wayne

LEON NEYFAKH — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 17:11:40 GMT

THA CARTER, VOL. 2 | Cash Money
With four solo albums to his name and no more than a meager reputation, you’d expect former Hot Boy Lil’ Wayne to have gotten tired by the time he set out to record Tha Carter, Vol. 2 .

Appeteasers

LEON NEYFAKH — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 16:54:06 GMT

On the menu: a new track Pretty Girls Make Graves, Benzino beef, and a Busta remix sampler plate
Streaming and downloading near you: tomorrow's hits today.

Bombs away

LEON NEYFAKH — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:07:47 GMT

Cam’ron takes aim at the King of New York
But will Jay-Z revoke the Killer's diplomatic immunity?

Last fall was a soft one for hip-hop beefs. Once G-Unit, D-Block, and Murder Inc tired of warring, the battlefield was largely barren, with only a few stones being thrown by small potatoes (T.I. versus Lil’ Flip, Lil’ Wayne versus. B.G. and Juvenile). It was all quiet on both Eastern and Western fronts. Then, with little obvious provocation other than a new album on the way from his Diplomat imprint, Dipset kingpin Cam’ron bit the bullet and took aim at Def Jam president Jay-Z.

The Internet ate its own hands in excitement when Cam’s “You Got It” (a/k/a "You Gotta Love It") leaked on January 18. But by the next morning, the thrill and the urgency of first blood had taken a turn toward farce as it became apparent just how little effort Cam’ron had put into his dis track. The jokes were stale: Jay-Z looks like the Camel cartoon mascot, steals lines from Biggie, and he’s, um, ugly, ugly, ugly. Even Jay-Z, who retired from rap two years ago, didn’t seem much bothered.

Yet for all its clumsiness, “You Got It” has a potentially combustible back story. The nearly eight-minute track sees Cam taking shots not only at Jay-Z’s appearance but at girlfriend Beyoncé Knowles and his age and fashion sense. (“How is the king of New York rocking sandals with jeans, when he 42 years old?”) What’s behind Cam’ron’s anger has everything to do with rumors that Jay might be involved in a recent shooting that left holes in Cam’ron’s arms and his Lamborghini, and with the business decisions Jay has made as a Def Jam CEO. Jay used to sign Cam’ron’s checks back when the Diplomats/Dipset crew were on Roc-a-Fella. That relationship ended when Jay took the Roc-a-Fella name with him to the top of Def Jam and left Cam’s closest associate, Roc-a-Fella co-founder Damon Dash, with nothing. Cam and his friends, who had had their own share of disagreements with Jay, parted ways with Roc-a-Fella, and the nastiness behind “You Got It” has been brewing ever since.

For now, the conflict seems stuck in an eerie stalemate. Maybe hip-hop feuds just aren’t what they used to be. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Cam held forth at a silly press conference; Jay talked some shit to MTV. But all Jay said was that Cam’s song is “trash,” and he suggested that as hungry as he might be to fight back, he’s now above that sort of thing. And Cam’ron? “I’m not just gonna keep beating up on an old man,” he said last Wednesday in New York. “I’m gonna wait. If he retaliates, then I’m ready.”