DANIEL BROCKMAN

Upstate of mind

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:18:27 GMT

Mercury Rev dig out of Buffalo
Mercury Rev dig out of Buffalo

DIGITIZED: For Mackowiak, Donahue, and Mercel, it was “kind of cool to just put down the guitar and work . . .with a beginner’s mind.”

If music is a celebration of freedom, that's especially true of psychedelic music, where the artist longs to throw off the shackles of verses and choruses and expectations and just luxuriate in the challenges and emotions of sound. So what do you do when your successful psychedelic rock band have been at it for almost 20 years and you need inspiration and you already have every effects pedal known to man?

If you are Mercury Rev, and beginning to work on what would become 2008's double-album assault of the song-based Snowflake Midnight (Yep Roc) and the instrumental-wandering Strange Attractor — well, let multi-instrumentalist Sean Mackowiak a/k/a Grasshopper explain. "The three of us all got MacBooks when we were touring for our last [in 2005] record, Secret Migration. I had gone to this conference in Miami on electronic music, and I was really intrigued by some of these programs, like FM8, Absinthe, and Reactor, and Jonathan [Donahue, vocalist] and Jeff [Mercel, drummer] also started working on it. Sure, Reactor is easy to use and anybody can make music with it, but I think the beauty of it is that it shows your individuality and creativity. Because if you work with Reactor and I work with Reactor, they're the same program but we'd probably come up with two completely different types of music. It was kind of cool, for me, to just put down the guitar and work in a totally different way, like with a beginner's mind."

This explains the overtly electronic pulse of their new album, but it also illustrates the attitude that has defined Mercury Rev since their inception in late-'80s Buffalo. Begun as a collaboration between Donahue and Mackowiak, undergrads who studied at SUNY-Buffalo under legendary minimalist composer and multimedia artist Tony Conrad (see "A different Empire," below), Mercury Rev initially existed as the soundtrack to student films. "We were definitely influenced by Conrad," says Mackowiak. "He had made these great soundtracks in the '60s with John Cale and La Monte Young for all these experimental films, and they were all sort of drone-based, a lot like Terry Riley."

Guitar heroine

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:10:38 GMT

The shreducation of Marnie Stern
The shreducation of Marnie Stern

VIDEO: Marnie Stern, "Ruler"

Marnie Stern, "Transformer" (mp3)

About that style: Great moments in two-handed finger-tapping. By Daniel Brockman.

There's Marnie Stern, the person, and then there's Marnie Stern, the rock band, and it's important to understand the difference. Marnie Stern the person is an unassuming woman who in her early 20s decided she'd start playing guitar. Marnie Stern the band, who come to Church on Monday, are the result, almost a decade later: an out-of-left-field fireball of guitar-and-drums insanity that pits the technical prowess of '70s and '80s guitar gods against the off-kilter oddness of '00s oddballs like Lightning Bolt and Deerhoof.

"I tried for a while to come up with a band name," the New Yorker tells me on the phone as she and her band comb Seattle for a parking spot, "but I just couldn't find one that I liked enough. It's like getting a tattoo, I needed to find something that I really loved. So I guess I just kind of stuck with my name."

Ms. Stern's journey of rock is an inspiring tale: while she was living in New York City, working an office job and trying to do music, a co-worker casually mentioned that she seemed to be becoming less of a musician with a day job and more of just a person with a dull office gig. Stern quit a week later and began practicing guitar eight hours a day and working up the material that would become her Kill Rock Stars debut, In Advance of the Broken Arm. (Take that, co-worker!) What was this force that altered her life?

"I don't know, there's no answer for that! Something did propel me, I just don't know what it was. I've always enjoyed music, but I think that when I was in school I just didn't think that it was an option. You know, you're told by your family that it's a hobby, but then once I graduated from school, something sort of hit me and I realized that I can do whatever I want to do, so I'm going to do this. And that's what propelled me most."

About that style . . .

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:25:26 GMT

Great moments in two-handed finger tapping
Marnie Stern's guitar style is notable for the two ways she breaks from the indie-rock-guitar rulebook.

Billy, Don't Be a Hero

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:42:08 GMT

Smashing Pumpkins at the Wang Theatre, November 15, 2008
The second of a two-night stand in Boston, with no overlap from the previous night, the Saturday show started off with a few of Corgan's better-known tunes only to drift off into la-la land at around the halfway point.

The Cure | 4:13 Dream

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:01:54 GMT

Geffen (2008)
Even with a dozen records behind him, Smith, when he puts his mind to it, remains a master at crafting concise masterpieces of bouncy pop majesty.

Top grade Angus

Daniel Brockman — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:00:05 GMT

AC/DC at TD Banknorth Garden, November 9 , 2008
At 53, Young probably has a lock right now on the title of most successful stripper in America. He spared us the full moon, but he and his band delivered an absolute powerhouse set.

Rock and rote

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:43:11 GMT

Three decades in, AC/DC’s conservatism pays off

Part I: Prologue
In my time on this charred rock I’ve met lots of people who fucking love music, and I’ve decided that the vast majority of them fit within two groups, one vastly outnumbering the other. The first group, the minority, is composed of people who really love music but don’t care where it’s from, or how they found it. They are responding to the sound, and the way it hits them, and nothing more. These people retain a certain purity of musical appreciation, and can listen to a song, or any piece of music, and immediately decide whether they like it or not, without questioning whether it is appropriate for them to like it. These people are called “infants.”

Everyone else falls in the other camp: They enjoy music that makes sense to them, and it is often just as important (if not more) for the people that make the music to also make some sense: what kind of music am I about to hear? What sort of audience is this aimed at? What style of music can I expect? What is the desired setting for enjoying this music? I think that there is definitive proof that no band of musicians in the history of the world has more successfully clarified the answers to these questions while still presenting a façade of force and a branding stamp of quality than the Australian group AC/DC.

Contradictory as it might seem for a band whose very name designates ambiguous sexuality (at least in the UK), AC/DC have managed to plow through the complicated emotional detritus of the last half of the 20th century and beyond, jackhammering minimalist anthems into the collective unconscious in a manner redolent of a mass-mind haiku. As the band once sang, in a phrase that is both tautologically retarded and Forrest Gump-ishly profound: “Rock and roll/is just rock and roll.”

AC/DC’s decision to release their new album, Black Ice (Columbia) exclusively to Wal-Mart might actually tip the scale to become the single most conservative moment of the band’s mythology (first will always be, to me, the story of US forces in 1989 getting Manuel Noriega to surrender by blasting Back in Black — although that story is somewhat more apocryphal than true, since a perusal of the actual playlist used by US forces suggests that Noriega’s breaking point could have just as easily been reached with Oingo Boingo’s “Dead Man’s Party” as the soundtrack). “Conservative”? Well, bear with me. I don’t necessarily mean it in a politically-loaded manner (although, quick: name me one band that you can guess Joe the Plumber has at least one disc of in his CD rack); but rock and roll ebbs and flows between radicalism and formalism, right? When rock fans, over the last three decades have had occasion to proclaim, “Enough with the weird stuff!”, they’ve been reliably able to retreat to the warm rocking bosom of AC/DC.

Oasis | Dig Out Your Soul

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:39:56 GMT

Reprise (2008)
No movement did more to dilute the majesty and power of rock’s first few golden ages than first-wave early-’90s Britpop.

Severed Heads

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:17:32 GMT

David Byrne at the Wang Theatre, October 31, 2008
“This ain’t no CBGB,” David Byrne sang during his late-set dive bomb into “Life During Wartime,” and a glance around the immensely classy premises of the Wang Theatre verified it.

What Should Never Be

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:53:05 GMT

The Paul Green School Of Rock Boston Presents A Tribute To Led Zeppelin at the Middle East Upstairs, October 25, 2008
On this Saturday afternoon, the legions of the School of Rock (Boston branch) were pretty much indistinguishable from the real Led Zeppelin, who were themselves teenagers when they formed in the late ’60s.

Gang Gang Dance | Saint Dymphna

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:55:07 GMT

Warp (2008)
Saint Dymphna is the sound of a band of psychedelic dabblers finally getting their shit together.

Forever young

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:37:50 GMT

At 67, Joan Baez is more diamonds than rust
When I first get Joan Baez on the phone, my burning question is what she thinks of the upcoming presidential election.

NO DIRECTION HOME: “I think the Bush administration has taken us a quantum leap away from anything civil.”

When I first get Joan Baez on the phone, my burning question is what she thinks of the upcoming presidential election. After all, she’s playing Boston this Sunday (the second of a two-night stint at the Berklee Performance Center), she has a new album called The Day After Tomorrow (a collaboration with country-folk rebel rouser Steve Earle), and on November 2, the “day after tomorrow” will be Election Day.

“Deciding to support a presidential candidate is uncomfortable for me,” she says, “because to me, the office of the presidency still has so many nasty things attached to it — like the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines. But for me, Obama is reminiscent of King — he just touches people, and you can tell that his presence is backed up with an enormous intelligence and compassion. Plus he has a big picture of Gandhi hanging in his office.”

When Baez nonchalantly mentions “King,” she of course means Martin Luther Jr. — who invited her to accompany him on many of his marches, among them the 1963 March on Washington. That she continues to be linked with those historic times has to do not just with her singular voice (a force of nature that has moved audiences for five decades) but also with the power of her convictions, and the effortless way they mix with her self-depreciating wit. She too touches people, and she backs up her enormous presence in popular culture with intelligence and a compassion that seems to know no bounds.

Baez’s local roots are well known: her first show was at Club 47 (now Club Passim) in Harvard Square in 1958, and without much delay, she became a “sort-of refugee wandering musician,” learning everything she could from everyone she met. “Singing just happened,” she explains, “and whatever would take me out of my old image of myself, which wasn’t a very happy one, being too skinny and too dark or whatever — slipping into the world of singing and music, little by little, was certainly preferable to where I had been.”

When I ask how her approach to singing has changed over the years, she demurs: “My voice is lower, a lot of it I like a whole lot, and a lot of it is just fucking difficult! When people say to me, ‘Oh, I hope you sing forever!’, I think, ‘Are you kidding?’ Your voice only lasts just so long, and then I’ll, you know, go to the Bahamas or whatever one does at that point.”

Lady Gaga | The Fame

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:05:54 GMT

Interscope (2008)
GaGa ups the ante in terms of catchy songwriting and sheer high-in-the-club-banging-to-the-beat abandon.

She’s got legs

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:40:53 GMT

Madonna at TD Banknorth Garden, October 15, 2008
Far from mellowing with age, Madonna hit us with wonderfully mean-spirited aggression wrapped up in a misleading sexual come-on.

Ragnarök and roll

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:10:34 GMT

Great moments in culturally appropriated Viking history
Amon Amarth are but the latest assault of the Viking æsthetic on our pop culture’s collective psyche.

Dethklok, from Carton Network's Metalocalypse

It takes a pillage: Amon Amarth lead the Viking death-metal pack. By Daniel Brockman.

Amon Amarth are but the latest assault of the Viking æsthetic on our pop culture’s collective psyche. And let’s not split hairs: by the time the Viking thing gets diluted enough to hit American shores, it’s not likely to be as factually accurate as a couplet from an Amon Amarth song. (What do you expect when Götterdämmerung meets good old American fire-and-brimstone Armageddon?) But here's a rough time line of the Viking invasion.

AUGUST 1962 | Marvel Comics’ Journey into Mystery #83 introduces a new character, the Mighty Thor; Superman and Captain America are trumped by an actual deity, and the Marvel Universe is forever forced to acknowledge the existence of Asgard.

OCTOBER 1969 | Led Zeppelin release “Ramble On” and make mumbo-jumbo Tolkien references mainstream: the opening line, “Leaves are falling all around,” is a paraphrase of “Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,” the opening line of J.R.R.’s poem “Galadriel’s Lament” a/k/a “Namárië”

APRIL 1974 | On Queen’s Queen II, “Ogre Battle” creates the blueprint for three subsequent decades of Viking metal: galloping drums, chugging muted riffs, screeching vocal squeals, and lyrics about armies of ogres. Not actually Viking, but you get the idea.

1978–1980 | Southern rockers Molly Hatchet release a bestselling trio of albums (Molly Hatchet, Flirtin’ with Disaster, and Beatin' the Odds) with cover art by fantasy artist extraordinaire Frank Frazetta. Who gives a fuck about the music: horse-bound warriors carrying scimitars are where it’s at. A thousand million posters in a thousand million bedrooms ensue, and an army of 20-sided dice can be heard rolling forth in the distance.

1982 | Viking/warrior culture hits its stride in pop culture a year after Heavy Metal: The Movie (which for the most part is more sci-fi than fantasy, a crucial distinction) with the release of both the Ahnohld muscle vehicle Conan the Barbarian and the somewhat lesser-known but arguably better The Beastmaster. Jacked dudes with bare chests and leather are in, baby!

1983 | Metal behemoths Manowar go Viking with Into Glory Ride, most explicitly “Gates of Valhalla,” which idealizes strength, volume, and an aversion to any sense of hipness or self-consciousness.

1987 | Jon Mikl Thor, bodybuilder, metal warrior, and Canadian, finally has his chance to shine in the film Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare a/k/a The Edge of Hell.

It takes a pillage

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:15:06 GMT

Amon Amarth lead the Viking death-metal pack
When I finally get Amon Amarth vocalist Johan Hegg on the phone, I feel as if I’d woken a giant.

CREDO: “I’m not a religious guy,” says Hegg, “but the whole idea and the whole way of thinking that Vikings had became almost a philosophy of life.”

Ragnarök and roll: Great moments in culturally appropriated Viking history. By Daniel Brockman.

When I finally get Amon Amarth vocalist Johan Hegg on the phone, I feel as if I’d woken a giant. It has taken several intrepid attempts by the band’s tour manager, Wolfgang, to summon him from slumber, but when he saunters to the phone to discuss his band’s sacking and pillaging of North America on their current tour with Ensiferum, Belphegor, and the Absence (it comes to the Palladium this Saturday), the towering and intimidatingly bearded frontman is soft-spoken and contemplative. Does he perceive a growing trend of myth-metallers in the last few years, what with bands like High on Fire and the Sword Americanizing myth-laden European truncheon metal? “In a way, yes. There’s a lot of bands out there doing this, and there’s been an increase in the last couple of years. It’s not a problem, though, for us: we know who we are and where we come from, so we’re going to continue to do what we do, and we hope people will remember that.”

You can see where Hegg gets this peace of mind: Amon Amarth have been at it for 16 years, weathering two decades of metal trends. Although they faltered slightly with their aborted first release, 1993’s Thor Arise (which included a cover of Black Sabbath’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” that is significantly less awesome than fellow Swedes the Cardigans’ 1995 version), they went on to perfect their particular brand of epic, mythically accurate chug metal over the course of eight full-lengths, crystallizing their precision and attack on this year’s presciently titled (in this time of financial and socio-political ruination) Metal Blade release Twilight of the Thunder Gods.

Deriving their name from an Elvish-language name for Lord of the Rings’ Mount Doom, Amon Amarth have always catered to a metal audience that craves, along with the bluster and aggression, big sounds and bigger myths. How crucial is the mythology to the music? “I don’t know if the myth is so crucial to it. There’s a lot of interesting subjects in mythology to bring into metal, but I think that ultimately it’s about writing good songs. I never really wanted to preach to anybody when writing our lyrics, or tell anybody what to think, so I try to write metaphorically instead, using mythology to make interesting stories so that people can get something out of it. I get inspired by this stuff; if somebody else gets inspired or gets something out of it, that’s fine. If they just think it’s a cool song, that’s fine as well.”

Ladyhawke | Ladyhawke

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:28:19 GMT

Modular (2008)
Multi-instrumentalist Ladyhawke presents us with a treasure trove of found blips, as if the 1980s had been nothing but a mirror ball to smash and paste back together

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.”

Dungen | 4

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:14:27 GMT

Kemado (2008)
The playing is looser and rougher than you might expect, with tons of drum fills that teeter on the verge of sloppy, but this adds to Dungen’s trademark unpredictability.

Interview: Amanda Palmer

DANIEL BROCKMAN — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:48:06 GMT

At home with the Dresden Doll's solo joint
So it’s the eve of the release of local sensation and Dresden Dolls vocalist/pianist Amanda Palmer’s solo debut album, and I’m sitting in her bric-a-brac-filled South End apartment drinking herbal tea.

So it’s the eve of the release of local sensation and Dresden Dolls vocalist/pianist Amanda Palmer’s solo debut album (produced by Ben Folds), and I’m sitting in her bric-a-brac-filled South End apartment drinking herbal tea. We’ve just taken a moment to notice a remarkable spider web forming in the open window of her kitchen; closer inspection reveals a spider in the center packaging up a helpless victim for a later lunch. I interrupt the moment to ask the obvious question:

Okay, so let's get the biz out of the way first: your new album is Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, and now it's like "Ooh, are the Dresden Dolls finished, what does this mean?" What do you think people will read from this?
I don't know what people want my answer to be. I think the fans probably want to hear that the band is going to go on forever and ever. And I think in some incarnation, it will. But Brian and I are also really happy doing our own projects right now, and we haven't nailed down what's going to come out after this.

Was this solo album intentional, or did it just sort of happen?
It all sort of happened, it started out as a much smaller thing, and originally this was going to take a matter of months.

When was this?
This was two years ago. I was going to record it in my apartment with a local engineer, and record it, master it, put it out, no press, no fanfare. And the collection of songs was different back then, it was this collection of piano ballads. And so that changed. Once Ben Folds got involved, it kind of morphed into this large project. Also, while that was happening, the band was evolving. Evolving and de-volving.

What do you mean "evolving"?
Well, I think that Brian and I were getting fundamentally burned on touring. We had been touring for I think pretty much five years non-stop. We were just getting burned on everything: the routine, each other. It's really, really hard to maintain a relationship like that when it's just two people.

Was there ever a turning point or an event where you thought "How can I keep doing this?"
There were a lot of those events. I mean, that's the sort of thing, when you're touring together, and you're constantly — I mean, Brian and I are very different, and —