WILL SPITZ

Fans cheer; earth weeps

WILL SPITZ — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:17:38 GMT

Radiohead at Comcast Center, August 13, 2008
It’s a bummer that the four-plus hours I spent in my car feeling guilty about barfing loads of carbon into the air is most salient in my mind, because, as always, Radiohead delivered an awe-inspiring show.

Laugh at the end of the world

WILL SPITZ — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:31:23 GMT

The grim punch lines of Clawjob
The two guys who make up Clawjob have an unnerving tendency to describe something as funny when it’s anything but.

NO, BUT SERIOUSLY For their current exploration of modern-day anxieties, Gintz and Burgess wrote
through the naive perspective of 19th-century America.

The two guys who make up Clawjob, bookish gents named Mike Gintz and Nick Burgess, have an unnerving tendency to describe something as funny when it’s anything but. As in, “There’s a funny Andrew Jackson speech where he’s explaining why Indian removal would be such a great thing for them.” The speech, says Burgess, was the inspiration for “Reservations,” the finale of Clawjob’s new EP, Manifest Destiny. “It’s horrifying to read.”

A Clawjobian description of Burgess & Gintz’s project might go something like this: “Their albums are funny concept pieces — a rock opera about a love triangle in outer space, a post-punk paean to the 19th century — that are really just veiled satires of human cruelty, environmental destruction, and the coming apocalypse.” Of course, as anyone who’s heard them can attest, Clawjob, who play at the Papercut Zine Library in Harvard Square this Friday, defy summary.

Burgess and Gintz met at BU freshman orientation in the summer of 1999 and started Clawjob as a joke during their sophomore year, recording an album of covers of mediocre ’90s songs played in the style of other bands — Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” as Limp Bizkit, Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” as “Mexican revolutionaries in the desert” — in their Warren Towers dorm rooms. Later that year, they recorded the entire soundtrack to the video game Mega Man 3 using guitars and computers — a painstaking process undertaken with limited technology. Project X, as they called it, was such a huge hit among the then-burgeoning video-game-remix community on the Internet that they decided to spend two more grueling months doing the Mega Man 2 soundtrack. Video-game-music fans (nerds) ate it up. “We knew at the time that if we ever made any non–Mega Man music, it would never be anywhere near as popular as that stuff,” Gintz recalls. Six years later, the Project X Web site still gets some 600 visitors a week.

In the fall of 2002, our heroes’ senior year, Gintz started the beloved Clickers, his first “real” band, and Clawjob/Project X fell by the wayside. After graduation, however, Gintz and Burgess got jobs at the same photography place in Newton. They began talking about old song snippets they had written in the dorms, how in their fragmented state they sounded as if they could be parts of a rock opera. Clawjob was (re)born.

A case of the Mondays

WILL SPITZ — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:54:51 GMT

Icy Demons at Great Scott, July 27, 2008
Unless you’re, say, George Michael, summer Sunday-night shows can be rough on a band.

Who brought the cool kid?

WILL SPITZ — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:10:49 GMT

Ian MacKaye visits Tufts
“For me, punk is the new idea, always the new idea, forever the new idea. That’s why punk can never die. Because as long as there are people, there will be new ideas.”

Multi-tasking

WILL SPITZ — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:36:26 GMT

Caribou at the Paradise Rock Club, March 26, 2008
Depending on your outlook, Dan Snaith is either a genius auteur or a misguided, egomaniacal control freak.

Meet the new Amys

WILL SPITZ — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:43:15 GMT

Neo-soul torture from the sub-Winehouses
Brace yourselves: we’re doomed to at least a summer of sub-Winehouse neo-soul torture.

Rock-and-roll heart

WILL SPITZ — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:53:20 GMT

Stephen Malkmus gets Jicky with it
Stephen Malkmus: expert Scrabble player, The Wire enthusiast, husband, father, indie-rock demigod.

Stephen Malkmus: expert Scrabble player, The Wire enthusiast (“It’s been a source of meaning in my life for the last eight months”), husband, father, indie-rock demigod. And — as I found out when I reached him by phone at his home in Portland, Oregon, as he was gearing up to say goodbye to his wife and two young children for the first leg of a six-week tour in support of Real Emotional Trash (Matador), his fourth album with his post-Pavement band the Jicks — still running down a rock-and-roll fantasy.

The new album is, for lack of a better word, jammier than your previous work.
I think we wanted to push the instrumental side a little more and just not be so tight and compact with everything. We were probably listening to records that had some more guitar instrumental parts.

Like . . . ?
I was just down at the store and there was an early Fleetwood Mac song playing, and I was like, “Oh, that’s almost like what we did.” It had like a tom-tom blues part at the start, and then it had this guitar outro that was no singing, just guitar — seemed like what we were doing. Guitar interplay, I like that. We’re not doing herky-jerky hi-hat post-punk. Like, get over it, you know? We don’t do that. Other people can do that — they’ve got the jeans/genes for it. Both ways, jeans/genes.

What was the recording process like? Were you guys pretty well rehearsed before you went in, or were you figuring stuff out as you went?
We were pretty rehearsed. We knew what we wanted to do. It was just a matter of doing it. A couple songs were question marks, maybe the shorter ones, actually. Like, “How do we do them, what tempo?” But we were ready. It had been a while, so to have the opportunity to record — I was really excited to go, so there was no shortage of ideas.

You recorded parts of it at Wilco’s studio.
We did some guitar overdubs at Jeff Tweedy’s studio. It’s a really wonderful place, and he is an incredibly gracious guy to let us do it. I just want to thank him publicly in the Boston Phoenix for allowing us that opportunity. I wish I had a place like that, of course, but I don’t have the foresight.

Holler

WILL SPITZ — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:59:12 GMT

Amplive's Rainydayz Remixes, approved by Thom
“We wanted to make you aware that you need to get approval before making arrangements of other writers’ work” — oops.

Tazer rock

WILL SPITZ — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:04:22 GMT

The rapid rise of Pretty & Nice
There’s a lot about Pretty & Nice that’s surprising.

HARDLY ART: Pretty & Nice are the first local band to be signed to the new Sub Pop imprint.

Pretty and Nice, "Grab Your Nets" (mp3)

On a recent Wednesday night, in a house tucked away on a side street where Lower Allston gives way to Brighton, a group of kids are listening to Neil Diamond’s Moods and assembling chicken tacos in a kitchen tidy enough to make Martha Stewart blush. Oh, and when these four chefs aren’t cooking up tacos, they’re playing in the loudest, most aggressive band signed to the new Sub Pop imprint Hardly Art. Indeed, they’re just taking a break from recording an album in the basement.

There’s a lot about Pretty & Nice that’s surprising. The band have stormed not only onto the local scene but also into national indiedom’s consciousness, getting nods from high-profile Web rags like Pitchfork and Paper Thin Walls. They’ve played a small handful of local shows since singers/guitarists Holden Lewis and Jeremy Mendicino moved to Boston from Burlington, Vermont, last May (they found bassist Andy Contois and drummer Bobby Landry through the Internet within a week of arriving in town), but they’re already gearing up for their third national tour, which kicks off upstairs at the Middle East March 5. (It was their first tour, last summer, less than two months after the current incarnation came together, that — through a serendipitous chain of events involving a show in Dayton and members of the defunct band Brainiac and their offshoot, Enon — led to the Hardly Art deal.)

Then there’s the band’s sound: spiny guitars, early-’80s-British-new-wave melodies (think Elvis Costello, the English Beat, Squeeze), spry punk-rock rhythms going head to head with fizzing analog synths and drum loops. Someone dubbed it “tazer rock,” a tag the band seem to dig. “We normally describe ourselves in the simple sense as a pop band, because we’re writing pop songs,” says Lewis. “We’re just treating them differently.”

The Pretty & Nice name dates back to 2004, when Lewis started writing music at home in Vermont between semesters at BU. He was playing with a rotating cast of musicians when he met Mendicino. “I saw a picture on the Internet of a tape machine, and Jeremy was mixing next to it. I was like, ‘Oh, he’s recording to tape. I oughtta send him an e-mail because we should do that.’ ” Mendicino engineered, produced, and played on what became P&N’s debut, Pink & Blue, which was followed by a “gay dance remix album” called Blue & Blue, a collection of commissioned remixes of four P&B songs plus two new tunes. It soon became obvious that Lewis and Mendicino were more serious about playing music than the rest of the band, and that it was time to get out of the “limiting” confines of Burlington.

Screaming Masterpiece

WILL SPITZ — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:25:51 GMT

Sort of crap
Magnússon’s film fails to illuminate what this declaration of independence meant or how it was carried out.

''Mirrorball #1: Fresh Tracks''

WILL SPITZ — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:03:35 GMT

Reality TV has not killed the video star
Reality TV has not killed the video star.

What's new is better

WILL SPITZ — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:59:13 GMT

Blonde Redhead at Paradise Rock Club, January 20, 2008
Not many bands can say their seventh album is their best.

Throwing Down Again

WILL SPITZ — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:39:47 GMT

Mighty Mighty Bosstones at Middle East Downstairs, December 26, 2007
The air was thick with nostalgia and Boston pride, not to mention the more tangible sweat that was dripping from the pipes downstairs at the Middle East.

Show and tell

WILL SPITZ — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:17:28 GMT

A whole new year of live music
After a brief late-December break from the usual boatload of good shows, the flood picks up right where it left off in early January.

ENTER THE . . . Wu-Tang Clan, who roll into the Palladium January 11.

After a brief late-December break from the usual boatload of good shows, the flood picks up right where it left off in early January. It sounds trite, but there really is something for everyone over the next few months, from blues and soul to indie-pop and art-rock, from R&B and hip-hop to metal and psych-rock. There’s all manner of world music. Mardi Gras celebrations. Comedy, folk, punk rock. You name it. Cash those Christmas checks or make friends with the door guy, and dig in.

JANUARY
Former Muddy Waters sideman LUTHER “GUITAR JUNIOR” JOHNSON gets things off to a bluesy start next Saturday, January 5, at Johnny D’s (17 Holland St, Somerville). The same night, the winter installment of baseball scribes PETER GAMMONS and Jeff Horrigan’s HOT STOVE, COOL MUSIC charity concert series kicks off with a “special preview concert” at the Paradise (967 Comm Ave, Boston). The line-up: SPOOKIE DALY PRIDE, ELI “PAPERBOY” REED & THE TRUE LOVES, and DESOL. The main event’s the following night, also at the Paradise: it features a slew of local and ex-local rock and baseball luminaries, including THEO EPSTEIN, Gammons, Dropkick Murphy KEN CASEY, Bosstones frontman DICKY BARRETT, BRONSON ARROYO, LORI MCKENNA, KAY HANLEY, DEAR LEADER, and the aforementioned Reed.

The Ozzman Cometh — to Worcester January 8. OZZY OSBOURNE plays the DCU Center (50 Foster St) with horror-film obsessive — and, now, auteur — ROB ZOMBIE. On the heels of the drama-imbued release of their Beatles–“interpolating” 8 Diagrams (Motown/Universal) — their fifth album and first in six years — the WU-TANGCLAN play the Palladium in Worcester (261 Main St) January 11; meanwhile, K Records chick MIRAH and pals SPECTRATONE INTERNATIONAL perform their multi-media show “Share This Place” — an exploration of “the tender, dramatic, sordid, tragic and triumphant lives of insects” — at the MFA’s Remis Auditorium (465 Huntington Ave, Boston). The same night is the kickoff of the two-day BOSTON CELTIC MUSIC FESTIVAL — now in its fifth year and taking place at various venues in Cambridge and Medford; visit www.bcmfest.com.

“MONSTERS OF MOCK III: THE ULTIMATE HAIRBALL” brings together APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION (“the ultimate tribute to Guns N’ Roses”) and TRAGEDY, “a metal tribute to the Bee Gees,” which has to be heard to be believed — check their MySpace page. That’s downstairs at the Middle East (480 Mass Ave, Cambridge) January 18; meanwhile next door at T.T. the Bear’s Place (10 Brookline St) it’s New Hampshire bubblegum-punk lifers the QUEERS, and just down the road a bit, mbube masters LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO of Graceland fame do their South African a cappella thing at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre (45 Quincy St).

Star teamz

WILL SPITZ — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:40:12 GMT

Ten from Boston’s 2007 pop underground
Mark it, dude: another banner year for the Boston music scene.

BREAKOUT: The blogosphere slobbered over Marissa Nadler in 2007 — and so did we.

Mark it, dude: another banner year for the Boston music scene. It saw the triumphant return of local alt-rock masters Dinosaur Jr. and Buffalo Tom. Most of our biggest exports — Dropkick Murphys, the Dresden Dolls, Killswitch Engage — continued to kick ass and take names. And pop-punk/emo/whatever-you-wanna-call-it outfits Boys Like Girls and the Receiving End of Sirens had huge albums and went on major tours.

But bubbling just beneath the surface were dozens of artists — some familiar, many new — making compelling music, throwing killer dance parties, taking chances. There isn’t space for me to go on about everyone that made me excited about Boston music this year. But, with a nod to those I didn’t include, here’s my top 10.

A.K.A.C.O.D.
Local vets Dana Colley, Monique Ortiz, and Larry Dersch (also known as Colley/Ortiz/Dersch — get it?) make for a low-rock supergroup if there ever was one. Hearing former Morphine saxophonist Colley’s beefy bari lines with Ortiz’s glassy, heavy-groove bass and low-register croon prompts comparisons with Colley’s old band. But more important is the songwriting on the trio’s 2007 debut, Happiness, particularly Ortiz’s distinctively dense lyrics and snaky melodies. Haunting stuff.

Caspian
Earlier this year, drummer Joe Vickers told the Phoenix that Caspian’s music “sounds like the Atlantic Ocean.” Pretentious? Perhaps, but it’s not a bad description of the band’s vast, climactic instrumental music. Along with buds Junius and Constants, Caspian are leading a Boston post-rock renaissance that’s garnering national notice.

Drug Rug
Born of a burgeoning romance between singers/guitarists Sarah Cronin and Tommy Allen and brought to fruition with the help of a talented group of friends from Apollo Sunshine, the Dead Trees, the Lot Six, and Tulsa, Drug Rug sideswiped the local scene with the laidback charm, retro-fied sound, and shiny pop hooks of their homonymous debut album. A few high-profile press plaudits and packed high-energy shows later, the band are a good bet for a big national breakthrough.

Major Stars
Husband-and-wife psych-guitar gods Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar have long been respected by denizens of rock’s way-underground — they’ve been at it for more than two decades, with Crystalized Movements, Vermonster, and Magic Hour, among others. But now with Major Stars’ sixth album — Mirror/Messenger, probably their most accessible, and possibly their best — and the backing of well-known indie label Drag City, Biggar, Rogers, and company seem poised to make wider inroads into indiedom’s consciousness.

Miraculous?

WILL SPITZ — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 18:30:48 GMT

"Miracle on Tremont Street," Orpheum Theatre, December 4, 2007
“Miracle on Tremont Street" offered a reminder that modern rock isn’t completely dominated by watered-down emo-pop pap and heinous post-grunge mush.

The Hives

WILL SPITZ — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:04:47 GMT

The Black and White Album | A+M/Octone
Call me crazy, but I consider Tyrannosaurus Hives to be one of the best punk-rock albums of all time

Revival Meeting

WILL SPITZ — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:28:57 GMT

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Middle East Downstairs, November 9, 2007
You can bet Amy Winehouse didn’t sweat like this.

Are we still calling these ''podcasts''?

WILL SPITZ — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:05:09 GMT

Fair Game music segment selections
Each show features a music segment — usually a live in-the-studio performance and interview.

Desert session

WILL SPITZ — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:56:07 GMT

Josh Homme’s lullabies of love
For nearly two decades, Josh Homme has had countless irons in the rock-and-roll fire.

VIDEO: Queens of the Stone Age, "3's & 7's" (live at First Act Guitar Studio)

The Phoenix's Will Spitz interviews Josh Homme (mp3)

For nearly two decades, Josh Homme has had countless irons in the rock-and-roll fire, from his early days as a stoner-rock pioneer with Kyuss and his ongoing DesertSessions series with the likes of PJ Harvey, Dean Ween, and Mark Lanegan to his lascivious sex-rock side project Eagles of Death Metal and his current bread and butter, Queens of the Stone Age, who play the Orpheum Theatre this Friday. Over the phone from “very weird” Baltimore, Homme talks about Era Vulgaris (Interscope) — Queens’ newest album and the follow-up to 2005’s Lullabies To Paralyze — plus PJ Harvey and Cee-Lo, Dave Grohl’s hair, playing in the “Fantasy Suites” at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, and his baby daughter, Camille.

Last time we spoke, about a year and a half ago, you were in the process of writing what would become Era Vulgaris, and you told me that it was going to be the gnarliest Queens of the Stone Age album ever. Is it?
Honestly, I think it’s the most out there of all the Queens records. We got it wet and rolled it in broken glass. I’m really proud of this record.

You recorded at Cherokee Studios in LA, which has a mind-boggling client list, from MCCartney and Bowie to Shaq . . .
And Nelson. Of all the records they’ve done, they proudly display the Nelson record in the hall. It was a really great place, and it had a really strange vibe to it. It’s also the place where Station to Station was done, and Bowie told them to move out of the office because he was going to put in a bed and sleep there — and that’s rad. It had a very sleazy vibe to it. It was like neon and mirrors, and that just screams, like, cocaine cramps. I think that it helped in the writing process because you were really submerged. I think it was inevitable that I would sort of write from a Hollywood observation because it’s so, you know, like the Eagles said, “lines on the mirror, lines on her face.” And it just had that bad vibe of that whole world. I mean, it was a good vibe — a good bad vibe.